Campaign Website

It has been a while. Work and graduate school have kept me rather busy. This post is to briefly go over something new I tried to do for a Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) campaign I am running. I created a website for the campaign using Wix.com.

My website: Broke D&D

URL: https://iisbroke.wixsite.com/dungeonsanddragons

I have had a D&D campaign going on for two months now, yet the group only managed to meet twice. It was decided to switch to an online setting. I found myself still having to either flip through my notebook or juggle computer document every time a player asked a question on my homebrew [custom] world.

There is a preexisting website [World Anvil] I know of that allows dungeon masters [D&D game officiators] to archive information rather than make their own website. I however have experience in web design and wanted more control over the layout.

I was already using WordPress for both a course project and my current job as a graduate assistant for my university. Using Wix.com was honestly me experimenting with other options; I liked it. For a free account, it was more intuitive, so I decided to publish the website.

My players so far seem impressed by it. I'm still working on webpages that can be lore and history of the world that any of the players can find on their own. There is some more behind the scenes infrastructure I need to make: surplus quests, roll tables, regional monster compendiums, et cetera.

For now, I am quite happy with this D&D website I made. Most importantly my players are happy with it. Doing things that make the game run smoother for the players is valuable to me; having the dungeon master not stumble through notes all the time is one way of accomplishing that goal.

New Dungeons and Dragons Session

Been a long time since I posted, graduate school make one busy. I'm updating to state that I finally got a team together to play Dungeons and Dragons (D&D). We played last night [08 September 2018] at a local venue from 18:00 to 22:00. One player was a veteran of the game and two were new but everyone had fun.

Figure 1: Quest Board I made for party.

I created a thematic way for the players to pick their first quest, they selected the one from the old knight. The party consisted of a Human male doing a homebrew class called "Gunslinger," A Gnome female playing a Bard, and a Fire Genasi female Druid. All of them started at level 3 too.

The quest involved a lot of roleplaying to figure out more of what was going on at the old knight's manor. The party split up and talked to the various staff members. I managed to get them invested in the story of what was going on.

The last hour of play involved the party fighting a cursed adventurer who was forced to kill the knight. The party managed to defeat their opponent but the knight was killed too. We ended the session with the party in the woods next to the dead knight.

We are all trying to figure out when we can meet and play again now. Hopefully next week or the one after that.

Caravan: New Prototype

It has taken time, but a new prototype of Caravan has been made. It has a 'board' to play on and updated cards. The cards took me considerable time as they needed to be printed, cut out, glued onto notecards, and then trimmed to size. I developed a bruising on my fingers from having the use scissors for several hours straight.

Fig 1: Prototype

The board just has large paper with sections of the game map tapped to it. It is not anything special and will require more graphical work in the future. I can say though that with this new version of everything a much more severe focus on testing mechanics can begin again. For now, I will be researching heuristics for cards game to see if that helps me come up with a way to balance things.

Fig 2: Action Cards

Fig 3: Barter Cards

Redesigning Cards

Been redesigning cards for my board game. Initially the cards were meant to be laid out in front of the players, so they had a horizontal layout, figure 1. There were both Barter Cards and Action Cards, one is for getting points toward winning the game and the other toward enhancing or disrupting barter cards.

fig. 1

The greatest issue with the Action Cards were their text. My testers indicated confusion at what part of the text was for flavor/theme and what parts were to describe what the card did. The other issue was how players preferred to hide their cards, so a new vertical layout was needed to make holding the cards easier.

fig. 2

The first redesign went with minimal changes. The card was made vertical and the non flavor text was bolded. The card comes off as rather clunky in design. Just a big rectangle with a dividing line and text scrunched together. It does not read smoothly.

fig. 3

The next redesign option removed flavor text and centered all the text. The card name was placed just above the text to keep things together. The blocky style remains, but there is less text that is also larger and easier to read.

fig. 4

The final design is what was decided upon. The blocky design layout was removed. The title 'Action Card' was reduced down to a single 'A' in the corner. The text is still centered but flavor text was both reduced in size and italicized. This design for Action Cards allows the eye to travel freely across the card, while the previous blocky design tended to make people stop scanning the card due to the dividing line on it.

fig. 5

Next comes the barter card redesigned layout. The initial barter card design. figure 5, was relatively simplistic. It was just meant to convey the item and points received from selling it. The main change required was to allow the card to be easy to read in hand but also on the board, whether when deciding to draw the card from the open market or disrupt another playing selling a card.

fig. 6

The title text 'Barter Card' was removed as the back of the cards will have an indicator of what card type they are. The vertical layout of the card reads the same as the above Action Cards, except there is no text beyond the item name. This change allows for the symbol of the item to be larger and easier to see. The horizontal layout is simply a triangle in the corner showing the value of the card '1 point'. Also, the font for the cards overall were changed from Lancelot to Almendra because the former's font made '1's look like 'r's.

That is all for this update. Eventually I will put more work into my table-top game [Asteria Rising] or make a post involving Dungeons & Dragons again, but for now I am placing my energy into the board game while I have plenty of time.

Farewell, enjoy your day.

Caravan Map Progress

I have gone back to doing work on my board game Caravan. To recap, it is light economic game where the players are all in the same trading caravan. The goal is to win by getting the most profit by the end of the game. The below image is the most up to date version of the new map.

The map was initially drawn on four different pieces of paper one had to put together before being able to play. This new digital version in Paint.Net will be printed out on 11'x22' poster/card stock once it is completed. That is more of a polishing act for the game, having an actual board for the board game.

The main difference between the new map and the old one is the reduction of 'trade spots,' where players stop to go through a round of selling and buying before. There used to be approximately 31 spots on the map; it now only has 16. The 'trade routes' are also easier to manage as each one only take size rounds of play when getting from the top part of the map to the next, making game time more consistent than before.

The idea of the map is to segment it into distinct regions. The southern end is a general temperate region, the northern is a coastal arid region, the western corner is woodland, the eastern corner is desert, there is a body of water, snowy mountains, hills, and transitioning plains separating the corner regions.

Outside the map is a scene meant to imply the map itself is a board being played. The trade spots are tokens/figurines to be placed, but for a surrealism the map also bleeds onto the table as if it was real terrain. It is to overall create a visually pleasing and easy to follow piece for players.

That is all I have for now, enjoy your day.

Combat Engagements

A few weeks ago I promised to post some of my Asteria Rising work. The below is a snippet from my Game Master (GM) section dealing with how to build combat engagements. One of the few people I've gotten to do playtests with me on the game told me I needed to "bottle myself." What she meant was apparently capturing my GM style as both her and her husband were impressed and engaged by it.

This act of capturing a playstyle for others to use has always been an issue within table-top games. A GM has a lot of power and responsibility within a game. They must encourage the party, challenge them, reward them, aid them, create content, remove content, referee rules, and so forth. These items create a rather personalized and situational playstyle for anyone who GMs.

I cannot feasibly create a rules section that dictates how one must run a game. To compromise with reality and what my friend suggested, I have decided to make guidelines to consider. The main concept to look into are engagements: combat, exploration, and social. Most people look at combat as it has the clearest use of conflict, engagement, and the most rules in the majority of tabletops.

The below is the section on Combat Engagements, these guidelines don't involve hard coded mechanics for building a fight though. One thing I noticed playing Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) was that its method of building encounters [Challenge Rating (CR)] was arbitrary. There are just too many variables to assume a party of five low level people could easily handle a CR of 2.

Asteria Rising does not have anything like CR; the players are in a new environment and do not know how dangerous anything is. They simply need to have successful rolls to determine threat and remember what happened last time they fought a particular creature. This lack of CR for my game means that all three engagements work similarly by being a list of guidelines.

The engagement sections are all in early drafts yet I hope the Combat one should give you all an idea of how I am constructing the GM Section of the overarching document, and how I myself create combat engagements for players in all my games.

Combat

Building combat encounters is difficult as one never knows what the party will do nor what the dice will roll. Honestly, there is no hard-mathematical formula or well-planned method to create the perfect encounter. There are some general guidelines to follow though.

• Previous player behavior
• Action Economy
• Total hitpoints of party and opponents
• Likeliness for the party to be hit by opponents
• Total damage the party and opponents can deal to each other
• Terrain and Tactics
•  Balancing

The most important trait to consider is how your players have behaved in the past. If players prefer to fight in melee, then you know an engagement with enemies very proficient in melee or with anti-melee abilities would be more difficult.

Next is Action Economy, which refers to the number of actions the player parties and their opponents can take in a round. E.g. a four-player party can attack up to five times a round in an engagement. The more actions their opposition has in a round, the more difficult the combat will be.

Next comes total hitpoints of each side in the combat. You don’t have to have exact numbers but internally gauge what side has the most hitpoints. Typically, combat ends when the opponent losses all its hitpoints. The more hitpoints involved in a combat, the longer that side can last.

Next is the likelihood the opponents can hit the player party. If the opponents have a low chance of hitting, then the combat is easier for the players. High Combat Prowess for enemies increases difficulty.

Next comes total damage done by either side. Four players against one opponent can be made difficult by that opponent being able to cause large amounts of damage with its limited Action Economy. Higher damage increase difficulty for the players.

Next is Terrain, which is the layout of where the fight will be. Particularly weak enemies could thrive in a combat engagement by being out of reach from players. Tactics are the actions taken by opponents in a fight. Due the opponents attack as a single unit or separately? Do they try flanking or attacking the party directly? Terrain and Tactics can give the opponents serious advantages against the player party.

Finally comes Balancing, which is how these various methods are combined to be fair and engaging. You could make the player party fight a hundred opponents that do 1d20 damage each attach, with 5 attacks a round and a thousand hitpoints each. Or, you could try to keep things evened out.

E.g. have the players fight twelve opponents that does little damage, with little hitpoints, but use terrain and tactics to hit and run from the players. Or, have the players fight one enemy with a lot of hitpoints and high damage, but low chance of hitting them.

Do what you can to keep fights relatively fair and even, so the players always feel engaged. Don’t worry too much on the intricacies of it of course, but always keep the guidelines in mind when building an engagement.

I Made a Thing

This post is gonna be a little brief, but it'll show one of the projects that have been taken up so much time. I was in a class called Software Documentation that taught how to make manuals. The final project was to use a software called RoboHelp 2015 to create one such manual.

I formed into a group of two other people, and we created a system about using three Facebook features: Crisis Response, Fundraiser, and Marketplace. There are two versions of the site, the first is optimized for normal internet browsers. The second is optimized for Google Chrome and mobile devices.

I created the Marketplace tasks, took the all the screen shots (except for fundraiser), did photo editing, did actual editing, did html coding for buttons in each webpage (someone else made the actual Cascading Style Sheet that prefabricated the buttons), I tested the hyperlinks between pages, and chose the layout designs (Robohelp dose not let one customize much, so I picked the most appropriate themes for each optimization system).

Facebook Crisis Survivors
Full Link: http://ualr.edu/kmkuralt/facebookcrisissurvivors/facebookcrisissurvivors.htm

Facebook Crisis Survivors Mobile
Full Link: http://ualr.edu/kmkuralt/facebookcrisissurvivorsmobile/index.htm#t=welcome.htm

Been Busy

Been busy with my final semester of university. There has been progress on my game Asteria Rising though. The main work that has been done so far is tweaking the various items in the game, the abilities, the character creation, and creating guidelines in the Game Master Section for engagements (combat, exploration, and social).

Once finals are over there should be a complete draft of the engagement section in the game document. I will post it so people can see what guidelines I have. The guidelines at the moment are for general table-top engagements, so feel free to use them as much as possible when posted.

See you in a few weeks.

Playtest Done

I finally got to playtest Asteria Rising. Feedback seemed overall positive from the two players. Mechanics are what all my notes were on. I'm going to use the character names the players picked for anonymity, Rutabaga & Q. Not all these notes will make sense as there have been changes to the game since the last update on this blog. I haven't posted for some time though and thought you all could use something to read.

I’ve deduced a couple things from the play test. First, character creation by rolling or using the set up standard array is quick. I am quite pleased to know that despite how involved character creation can be for a table-top mine is able to be done in 30-45 minutes for people who are not familiar with the game.

Second, I found that the playtesters would pick Combat Prowess, Skills, and Character Traits based solely off of the name. Most are descriptive enough in their names to where not knowing their exact role in game mechanics doesn’t cause issues for the players. I.e. athletics deals with physical feats not directly related to combat; intrigue deals with something related to deviousness or politics; hacking is clearly computer stuff; so on.

Third, Rutabaga enjoyed that with class bonuses to Combat Prowess or Skills she could go above the maximum level of 20. I had debated with myself a fair amount if that should be allowed or not. I decided that if someone like Rutabaga wanted a 24 in Mechanics and 25 in Hacking rather than spread those points out for versatility I should let them. It also clearly hindered Rutabaga in areas were she could not use those highly specialized skills, as her character was outside of their element. Rutabaga didn’t feel punished, but anxious to find creative ways to use those abilities.

Fourth, they had some regrets in where they allocated their numbers, but only when they got bad rolls. When they succeeded on really difficult rolls, Rutabaga succeeding on a 1/20 chance roll, they didn’t regret where they placed numbers at all. Rutabaga and Q were also very pleased when they succeeded those difficult rolls as it felt like a true accomplishment.

Fifth, the players seemed really pleased with how firearms allowed combat to be spread over a larger area, yet also how melee weapons did a lot more damage. It’s balance measure I implemented. The more range a weapon has the less damage it does. However, a sniper rifle will do more damage over time than an arming-sword because there can be up to 700 yards of space where the sniper rifle can attack, while the arming-sword needs to reach an opponent first.

Sixth, the players seemed neutral to how armor worked. They liked that Armor Class (A.C.) absorbed damage, when it was them taking damage. They didn’t seem to get the point of armor types giving resistances [half damage] and weakness [double damage] to certain weapon types.

Seventh, they liked that they had a pool of abilities to pick from regardless of the class they picked. One person opted for an extra attack and another a stun effect.

Eighth, I’ve determined that the Engineer is the most difficult class for beginners. The class features are very powerful; however, the player did not keep track of the utilities. They rarely used their weapon feature [allowed them to switch damage types] nor drone [allowed them to scout and do skill rolls even during combat]. It is a powerful class but also the most involved.

Ninth, it took players a couple rolls to get used to the dice system. The rolls use a twenty-sided dice, yet it success is not determined the same way as in Dungeons & Dragons, which they were more accustomed to. One player figured it out after three rolls; the other took twelve to adjust.

The playtest was successful. The players really did enjoy themselves and want to play again. That desire is the most useful information, as table-tops are expected to have replayability. True, there are one-shots [one time sessions], but people do play campaigns [a series of play sessions] or multiple one-shots.

Asteria Rising: Update 11

Usability testing is important for a game like Asteria Rising. There are numerous interconnecting parts at play. Testing on the current Alpha [v0.17] began a few weeks ago. There has been a play test of combat and a test of character creation.

The character creation was tested by posting both a survey and the character creation portions of my the game. I will be posting those here just to show everyone a big behind the scenes look. Honestly, I have not gotten much feedback. The big reason is most likely the size of the document; because definitions for Skills and Combat Prowess needed to be included, the document is 71 pages and very involved.

Those who did test character creation found the process easier than other table-top role-playing-games. Luckily, one only needs 3-5 users to test before data variations on usability decrease exponentially. Well, I guess it would technically be logarithmically. I do not have that textbook on hand to cite this information; however, just know for general usability testing one only needs a handful of people form the target demographic. Large bodies of testers is only useful when compiling data for scientific research.

Tester found the way I laid out tasks for character creation rather helpful; my main reason for the prototype test did well. Testers enjoyed how the Character Traits aspect functioned, so it was good of me reverse engineer that from Greg Stafford's King Arthur Pendragon game. The change in the character sheet layout was appreciated as well, now role-play and combat elements are more evenly consolidated.

The most notable suggestions I received where: make the Skills portion of character creation like the Character Traits one; expand the Combat Prowess to have more specific items; make the rolls for character creation less swingy.

Moving on to Alpha v0.18 will result in me changing the class system greatly, yet the layout of the character sheets and most of character creation will be unchanged. The alterations to player classes will be to what actions they perform and how they level.

Feel free to test character creation and take the 5 question survey. I probably should have posted it here, but I forgot. . . My negligence aside, even with the changes I'm making any commentary is still appreciated.

Enjoy your day.

(Files have been removed)

Hello

Giving this small post to let people know progress on Asteria Rising. This post is not an update on game mechanics, but those have been worked on. A test of the combat system was done 27 February 2018. The test revealed an issue with the combat, which has been fixed.

The game has also expanded character creation to have visual examples. Each subsection in character creation gives the basic information one needs on how to make a character, followed by detailed tasks with examples.

My plan has been to employ software documentation techniques, like those seen in instruction manuals for computer software. The character creation has been tested by one person, and the tasks worked very well. The only issue the person had was not knowing how valuable the skills they were rolling for were; thus, they were not sure what skills should be prioritized.

I am in a game designer group on Facebook. I plan to release the character creation information to them with a form to fill out. This will give me much needed data on the character creation section. I want character creation to be easy on users because it will be the first thing players encounter with the game. If the character creation is difficult, people will not want to give the game a chance.

My desire, is for the next true update on Asteria Rising to state the data I collect on my character creation section. That is all I have for the blog for now; I'm rather busy with school and continual revisions of Asteria Rising.

Thanks for reading.

Was Bored

Was bored yesterday and did some doodles for a joke anime/webcomic idea me and a friend had. The joke was simply that she would be the heroine, but win through dumb luck with a shield called Plot (Plot Armor). I would have a character based off me as a bumbling villain.

All the drawings were done in pen, no construction lines. It was mainly practice for human figures; I need more practice. Still, the general concepts are there. Lo is the savior of Writeland, a pun of how we both are Technical Writers. Her shield Plot is made to look like an art palette, and her spear to look like a paint brush. I image she has meta powers, like painting new things onto the comic page.

Our savior's best friend would be based off her real life best friend. Mo's inspiration loves playing elven mages, especially in Dragon Age Inquisition. She would always be around to help Lo, but would act as a good emotional rock and friend when around. Mo is probably a part of some Mage Guild or other organization.

Using the nick name my buddy gives me, the villain would be G. The Dark Lord would actually just be doing it as an internship that got out of hand quick. The outfit is made to be someone in a business suit with some armor pieces placed on top of it. The power of the Dark Lord would also be meta, rolling dice to alter events. Essentially, the power of randomness.

The pizza clan is a joke because both are based off people with almost a decade of experience in pizza chains. Quen is based off my buddy's husband, bug burly gentle giant. Mat-kun's inspiration is an anime enthusiast. His ninja character probably talks about nerdy things with Mo when they meet.

Nate is based off a boyfriend Mo's inspiration has. His inspiration knows a fair bit about computers, so I made him have electric base powers. Nate and Mo would both be in the Mage Guild, but Nate is more hermit like and wouldn't show up much.

That's the silliness I've gotten up to. Next post should be an updates on Asteria Rising. I've started working on it more.

Asteria Rising: Update 10

Asteria Rising has work being done on it again. I ran it by my local game designer group, Little Rock Game Designers (L.R.G.D.). The main issue I found was people thinking the game needed to either incentivize the narrative elements of the game, alter the wording of the attributes, or completely remove them.

Attributes

The attributes are leftovers from when Asteria Rising was a science-fiction homebrew [custom] setting for Dungeons and Dragons (D&D). As rules changed over time, so did the amount and importance of these attributes. At the last biweekly game design meeting (07 February 2018), I was given suggestions on my game. The people suggesting could only judge based off what I explained and the character sheet for Asteria Rising.

Person	Suggestion
B	Remove attributes
R	Incentivize using narrative
J	Use different attributes

To make people focus more on creating fun narratives and less on numbers for combat, power players/ murder hobo antics in D&D, the attributes were focused on. The person who suggested to remove the attributes entirely [B.] had been playing D&D since he was a child. He disliked the attribute system because he had seen all problems with people playing the table-top-game purely for numbers start with the attributes.

R. simply believed the narrative aspects of the game should be incentivized some how. Either by moving the attributes to another portion of the character sheet, making them less prominent, or to increase the incentive to focus on narrative based games for the Game Master (G.M.).

Character Sheet 1 for Asteria Rising v0.15

Now, J. thought it might be better to change what the attributes are. Nothing specific, but to simply offer something new for players to work with. Say strength, constitution, and dexterity were combined into a single attribute, Body; something related to a character's mental abilities, Psyche; so on.

Moving forward I want to try removing attributes. The reason for this is that none of the skills, even those for combat, are tied to attributes. Within the current version [0.15] of Asteria Rising the attributes have little use. Constitution lost its usefulness once poison resistance, fatigue resistance, and disease resistance were placed into combat skills. Strength mainly affects carrying capacity, which could be a passive based on class instead. Dexterity is used for avoiding attacks, yet something else could take its place.

Removing these attributes will require me reworking both the classes and equipment sections of the Asteria Rising document. I'll save the current version [0.15] incase I need to revert back to using attributes. I'm hoping that their removal will simplify the game further, without taking away from its depth. Once I've made progress on this I'll post again.

Have a great week.

Apus: Global Game Jam 2018

Over the course of 48 hours, I worked on a team to create a digital game [Apus] for Micro Soft Windows. The game was created in the Unity software. There were three artists on the team: Jzak, lmsnow, and me. I also did sound for the game. Our coder was marchov, who had experience in C++ but not Unity. Erica Roy was an initial team member and contributed to the game idea, but was ill and had to leave the event.

Here are more specifics on the art. Jzak made icons, found the sun image, and space background. lmsnow made two asteroids, two planets, and  the title screen. I made the initial form of the figure of Apus (our title screen character), two planets, two asteroids, the browser icon, and the win screen.

Left: lmsnow's title screen. Right: The initial character I made.

Our most difficult thing to figure out was how to incorporate sound into the Unity engine, and tie it to a system of triggers. The music could easily be made by placing a single Audio Source gameobject in Unity, and attaching an audio clip to it. We had to type in the code itself to allow an array of audio clips to be attached to the Audio Source.

Beyond placing the title screen audio, most of my sound work involved watching videos of coding sound in Unity and combing through free audio clips online. Originally I had played on my Viola and made random sounds in the event space for the game. Eventually though I wasn't sleep deprived and thought to look for free audio clips online. From personal experience, I suggest using FreeSound.org.

How to Play screen

The game itself is simple, when planets charge up, send asteroids from them to another planet in need of that element. For instance, a planet that is too cold needs fire. There are also randomized events, such as a plague occurring on a life planet. We tested the game by playing it with various difficulties by changing the speed planets charged and the speed War and Plague events happened.

Spreading Life around the solar system.

Oh no, with technology war broke out.

I stopped the war with cold, but not the ice planet has plague.

Download the executable and play. Try to figure out all the ways you can save planets and win the game.

Global Game Jam 2018

Global Game Jam is an event to bring talented individuals within a community together to create a game based on an announced theme within 48 hours. I'm making this post while on a break, yet I've joined a team attempting to incorporate the theme [Transmission] into changing the states of planets in a solar system.

I'll post what the team managed to complete at the end of the jam. For now, here are some art assets I've made. For more information on the Global Game Jam, visit their website.

 
 

Making a Spellbook part 2

The first thing I did was begin writing on one of the back pages. That was a mistakes as I soon found out that it's much harder to clean up graphite lines on the lokta plant pages. The upper layer of fibers are scrapped away by the act of erasing, meaning clean ink lines aren't possible. With a 2H pencil it does not require much erasing, yet the lines will look poor anyway.

First drawing attempt in the book.

I rifled through the trash and found a piece of lokta paper that came with the journal. I took out several of my writing utensils and began scribbling marks on it. I found that a basic sharpie bled through too much. A sharpie pen however did not. My graphite pencils wrote, but shading looked blotchy from the paper's fibers. The same effect was caused by charcoal. Water bled through the paper easily, so water based painting would not work well. My V5 ink pen seemed to mark the best.
A break from art was needed, so I began to free write ideas for the page content. If erasing was so difficult, I would be using pens to turn the journal into a spellbook. Some sense of forethought and planning was needed. First I asked a Facebook D&D 5E community if they had any experiences or suggestions on making spellbooks. While waiting on response, I used Microsoft Word to write down a general outline and slowly filled in some basic content.

Testing calligraphy.

The person is just getting into D&D, so a book to narrow down early level spells could also have a practical use for them. The journal had about 92 pages but D&D had almost 79 (much larger) pages of spells. I decided it would be a beginner's spell book, and burrow cantrips and first level spells from the Dungeons and Dragons 5th Edition Player's Hand Book. To help narrow the information down, I found a website called D&D-Spells.

Left: Concept Sketches Right: Practice page.

I used their best friend (they've had since middle school) as my insider to figure out what the recipient would like. My friend likes to make jokes, so they will most likely comment on the "wiki-how" type diagrams in the spells first. I still took the time to give a healthy amount of lore to tie in to both D&D and our real world, to keep the book versatile.

A magic language I invented.

 Part of the work came with creating a magic language to give a unique feel. I asked questions on a Facebook D&D community and go good answers. I had already made for a forum game a unique phonetic group, and decided to use that as the base. The phonetics were made with a mixture of Pictish, Ogham, Asomtavruli, and Attican Greek symbols as references. The alphabet was based off Welsh, yet random sounds like rh and ar were left out to keep it unique.

The numbers were made up specifically for this spellbook gift. I played with a few ideas, but settled on each number up to 5, having an equal number of lines in their symbol. Once I reached 5, the symbols were too cluttered, so I flipped 2 to make it 6 and continued the process from there. I used a dot for zero because unlike the whole numbers in the sequence, it has no line. One cannot draw zero lines. The grammatical structure was initially meant to be like Basque, for it is the most unique make ups of the European languages. I only kept the articles being suffixes for the sentence subject; I made up rules for everything else.

I slowly pieced together information after the fact, not the most efficient manner to be honest, on what lore could support this magical language existing. I got lucky, when I saw that many the language mixed came into contact on Anatolia. The Celtic (pictich/ ogham) borrowings could have come from Galatia, the Asomtavruli possibly from Armenia or Georgia, and the Greek style from anywhere. They weren't perfect copies, so it could simply have been mixed before or over time. For the weird grammar, I found that one of the groups that could have used this fictitious language [the Lukka] were part of the mysterious Sea People.

A spell page for Fire Mote.

To finalize the language for later spell names, I put what I want their name in English was into two translators: Google Translate's Finnish, and FreeLang's Nahuatl translator. I would get as close to a translate as possible, then mix the words, and match the phonetics with the alphabet I created. For spells I would then type into my search engine various words for their International Phonetic Alphabet, so my friend would know how to pronounce the crazy word I made up.

I only used the cantrips, due to a lack of pages, but each of the 27 level 0 spells in the Dungeons and Dragons Player's Hand Book, averaged at two pages within the journal. The reason is because they had a definition, some flavor text, and elaborated with diagrams on the spell components: verbal, somatic, material.

Lore pages on the power of magic words.

21/71 of the pages were my made up lore. The majority of it expanded on the Player's Hand Book about where magic comes from and how it is manipulated. I kept the idea of the Weave of magic, and even measuring spell durations in terms of rounds to help give synergy between spell flavor text and game mechanics. Each spell has considerable thought put in. As an example, somatic components for Conjuration spells require hand gestures, Evocation more powerful full body movements, and Abjuration simple sigil tracing in the air.

It has been a worthwhile project for me to undertake. The book has a unique feel in terms of content and material. I also spent a large amount of time creating it and am anxious to see their reaction. Remember, this whole ordeal started when they joked I should get them a spell book for their birthday.

They'll appreciate this.

Making a Spellbook

I'm going to start working on a special present for a friend. They joked that I should give them a spell book for their birthday. By January 22, 2017 I want to have a book full of spells and other such things in it. The journal itself was bought at Barnes and Noble for 10 USD. The books is apparently handcrafted in Nepal and made of lokta plant, with a hemp cover. I got it because the pages have a unique look and feel to them, which will help give the aged tome effect. I'm still working out how best to format the book, but I will give an update on my progress next week.