Things are moving along fairly briskly here at Ytherra HQ. There are maps in progress, a select number of other people are involved, and articles are being written; I have about half a dozen in the pipeline right now.

One thing I did notice while going through some data is that one of the very early articles on this blog is incorrect in stating the number of days in the Ytherrean year: it’s 372 days rather than 272. This error managed to propagate to several different documents before I caught it… despite my having painstakingly worked out the data, orbits, etc. of every body in Ytherra’s star system long ago (had I ever taken Physics this would have been a trivial effort,) long with multiple calendar systems in use in various regions. Digging out the original spreadsheet with this information took a little while.

So anyway, the error’s now been corrected… but the article here is not getting updated, because this blog will likely be going away sometime in the next couple of months, to be replaced by a dedicated development journal over at www.ytherra.com. I will of course post a notice when this occurs, and the material here will not be deleted. Meanwhile, stay tuned.

Items currently in preparation: World of Ytherra, City of Thal, Cosomology, Gods of Ytherra, Timekeeping.

The very small number of readers here may be interested to find out that the World of Ytherra website is seeing some heavy work at the moment. I’m completely retooling it with the aim of fleshing out the setting to the point of usability.

Some time in the next week or so, the first article should go up: the “world overview” of Ytherra, containing material that’s been more or less finished for quite a long time, but which has never before been seen on the web. I’ve more or less abandoned the wiki idea due to security concerns, so it’s all going to be straight web pages – and as a side benefit, I’m learning some more HTML along with the project.

The front page is done and the first article is about 40% finished – most of the rest of the material is created but needs to be gone through and reworked. And the article will contain at least one map, possibly more. This may not sound like much but it’s actually kind of a big step.

The new Ytherra Games Studio is going to be an “amateur professional” effort, in that I will eventually be offering products for sale along with free content on the site. The idea right now (and this could change) is to release Tales of Might & Glory as a PDF or print-on-demand item (or both) for a nominal price, while leaving the Ytherra world material free on the website, fully hyperlinked for ease of use at the table.

The new logo was prepared to my specifications by the very talented Joe Freistuhler, whose spectacular maps can be seen HERE and at the Cartographer’s Guild.

I’m going to like living in Columbus.

So my RPG design project is on the front burner again. The working title is Silverlands – but it’s the same project that’s been called ALAT/TMG and whatever else before, not the same project as the old Silverlands, which may end up as some kind of addenda to the game. I just don’t want to bother working on or thinking about setting just yet, so I picked the nice neutral and evocative one I had laying around.

For the time being, I’m adopting an article-based format similar to the one used by Columbia Games’ Hârn. Progress reports to come, along with draft articles at the Ytherra website – I have the ability to port directly to PDF these days.

In the end, there can be only one.

While working of Tales of Might & Glory, I found myself working in Ytherrean concepts to such an extent that there seems to me to be little sense separating them. Silverlands had already merged, after a fashion, with TMG, and now I find myself merging the latter with Ytherra as well. This was probably my unplanned intention all along.

This’ll mean a redesign and repurposing of the ongoing Wiki project, of course, but little of the content will need to be rewritten, aside from the rules stuff that’ll need rewiting anyway (as the rules themselves arre in flux.)

Work on the system is trundling along, driving in the direction of greater simplicity.

Work continues on the Ytherra Wiki, although access (long story) is hindering my progress.

Right now I’m writing a fairly substantial article on the city of Thal, which will be one of the centerpieces of the material on the Selurean Kingdoms. I think it’s a great place to set an urban campaign; much better than Dravá, which is much less freebooter-friendly. The article on Dravá is in incomplete early draft. A rather rough draft on Arál Draván already exists, and I continue to work on it.

The much-revised Arashálinu Enáthaga is now in a state of partial completion. That is to say that it’s chronologically complete: fully populated with names and dates. The fuller history of 179 Emperors over 38 centuries will not be complete any time soon, although the first twenty or so and a scattered handful from the rest of Dravánu history might be considered more or less done.

A similar chronology of the Selurean Kings (2947-3523) is also in the works, but it’s in a much sketchier state; aside from a brief period, all of the Kings descend from the same line, or from branches of that line, which actually makes it more difficult to develop.

The Zeresi Reckoning is now the default calendar for all Ytherra material. The Dravánu aren’t happy about it, but aside from articles dealing with the specifics of the different dating systems all dates will be provided in ZR. The current year remains 9118 ZR.

A year ago yesterday Gary Gygax departed this world. Though some partisans have attempted to do so over the years, it would be difficult to overstate his accomplishments within our hobby. On top of that, as I myself was fortunate to learn, he was a heck of a great guy. A lot of people who have never heard his name owe their hobbies to him – not just tabletop gamers, but computer game players as well, and people who read fantasy novels.

At the same time, there’s been a movement which began even before Gary’s death but which seems even more pronounced today to try to somehow take the very earliest set of RPG rules, brown box D&D or OD&D, and try to derive some measure of Gary’s (and Dave Arneson’s, I suppose, although Arneson seems less in the minds of gamers,) original intent, and build campaigns (theoretical ones, at least) therefrom.

As an intellectual exercise, I think this is valuable, because it cuts at the very reasons RPGs are fun in the first place. It’s one of a couple of alternate ways floating around right now of answering the same questions that what would become Forge-style RPG theory was developed to try to answer – and if you ask me, the world of RPG Theory desperately needs approaches other than the Forge Big Model.

But at the same time, it seems to me that some of the proponents of this historicist approach are succumbing to a mindset wherein the practice of RPGs (that is, actual play,) was somehow superior to that to later eras. This has gone far enough now that the pre-AD&D period is being referred to as a “Golden Age,” implicitly indicting play in later years as somehow lessened in value against that of the early years. This is, of course, utter nonsense, a never-never land impossible to construct without plastering over a whole host of issues and problems with nostalgia. You remember the good times you had with friends, not beating your head against those impenetrable rulebooks or the incessant arguments they generated.

To try to dissect OD&D rules to divine Gary’s intent is of limited value in understanding the history of RPGs as they developed through play – i. e. the way they actually developed. Gary knew that no two groups would play D&D exactly the same way, and he wasn’t sitting at your table back in 1976 explaining the game and how it was supposed to be run to you. You played it as best you knew, took what was fun and did more of that, maybe added some Ardruin or Judges’ Guild stuff on top of it, and gradually something like a mean playstyle emerged from the chaotic sea of different groups doing their own thing. Expectations were gradually established, and gradually evolved from the point where D&D was a dungeon-based wargame into something where the character you played was as important as the numbers on the sheet.

Especially in the pre-internet era, when communication between groups was accomplished largely through conventions or in magazine letter columns, sharing of ideas between different groups was far more sporadic. There were clubs, of course, but those were local or at best regional, and those who met more than sporadically were the exception rather than the rule.

The lesson here, and I think Gary would have recognized this, is that he might have been one of the people who set down the rules by which RPG were played, but that it was us that worked out the methods by which those rules were actually employed at the table. Gary set the broad paradigm, but we determined how that paradigm would work in practice.

AD&D, misorganized and baroque as it was, was a far more coherent example of an RPG than OD&D was, because by the time Gary wrote it, we had worked out exactly how the rules would be employed in practice. At the very least, we knew a whole lot more about it by 1977 than we did in 1974. My use of we here is intentional – Gary gave the rules to us, and we showed him the practical conventions by which those rules would be applied, at his own table, and by passed anecdote, at those of others. Once AD&D was complete it very quickly became the standard by which D&D was played. The people playing OD&D didn’t necessarily abandon it or switch to AD&D, but virtually everybody coming into the hobby after 1978 or 1979 – quickly the majority – saw D&D as the beginner’s version of the game and AD&D as the real thing. The “controversy surge,” when D&D grew by far the fastest, occurred well into the AD&D era.

Theoretical OD&D reconstructionism, while possibly interesting, seems to ignore the fact that the people doing it are seeing it through the lens of 30+ years of development within the hobby, a lens now tinted with the rosy hue of nostalgia. And again the question becomes whether play – you know, the thing you’re actually doing – was really better in the days when the rules were unintelligible (Ken St. Andre famously designed Tunnels & Trolls after recognizing the OD&D rules as gibberish.) Maybe you think it was, and if so, that’s totally fair, but why?

Because the rules were less structured? I have to call BS on that – there are a ton of unstructured RPGs released in the last decade that nobody is even playing, much less bothering to blog about. Some of them are so unstructured that they’re practically systemless, but there’s a whole spectrum running from the ultra-light to brain-crushers like D&D3.5. Because the experience was “purer”? If so, why are you trying to reconstruct that purity from the written rules, which were only one part (and possibly not the most important part) of the experience? RPGs are played by people, not by rules.

Gary was the father of our hobby, and we owe him a lot – and not just us. Maybe we didn’t recognize that before he died. Maybe the fact that his death was so widely reported (Forbes magazine ran a whole article on it,) clued us in to the impact on what gets cavalierly called “pop culture” by a guy we had always seen as one of us – part of our little niche hobby. But while Gary gave us the game, we – us and Gary together – built the hobby around it. It was a collaboration. That’s why trying to reconstruct “intent” by dissecting the text of OD&D is valueless – because those written rules were less than half of the picture. Even in the “Golden Age”.

I’ve been getting rather a lot done behind the scenes, as it were; some work on Ytherra, some work on The Kingdoms of Seoland, some work on Silverlands and some work on A Long-Awaited Tale, the last of which has been effectively merged into an existing project called Tales of Might & Glory, which has been cooking in the pot for many years and which is now being rebuilt through the lens of what was once a couple of other projects.

See, part of my essential problem is that I have too many freaking projects. It’s no wonder I can’t seem to get a game going for anything but Ars Magica, which has been an ongoing project in its own right for some years now, to the point where I’m so prepared that I can run a new game with relatively little effort.

Some months ago, our groups started Mythic Europe, an Ars Magica Wiki, to organize and present the material which we’ve developed over the years, which we think would be valuable to anyone who wants to run Ars Magica, and as a place to host pages for our current campaign. Much of the content has come from me, to the point that I feel very comfortable working in Wikicode. So I got to thinking about replacing or supplementing this blog with something along the lines of a Wiki.

There are a couple of advantages to this; It allows me to keep things organized and to have a clear “primary” draft going – the one that’s posted at the time. It allows me to work modularly, on whatever it is I want to do at the time, without losing track of exactly where I am on other projects. And it’ll encourage me to pick a small number of projects as “main” projects and concentrate on those.

The Wiki concept as intended works to promote collaboration, which is not really a high priority at this stage of the game, although it will be desirable in the future. And there are some technical hurdles to overcome, and I’m not exactly Mr. Tech Expert. Exactly.

At any rate, I’ve decided to push forward with this new format, and a lot of work has gotten done on that, although the new site is not yet ready to be launched. I want to say, though, that this should happen within a month or so. Meanwhile I’ve been working on it and polishing it, developing policies for it, adapting existing content to the format, and writing new material. It’s a big job, and a lot yet remains to be done before I’m ready to unveil it.

But that’s not too far off. This blog will not go away – but it’ll probably metamorphose into more of a news and general RPG commentary space, rather than as a place to post actual Ytherra et al. material.

There are three primary projects the Wiki is going to focus on: Ytherra, of course, along with Tales of Might & Glory and Silverlands. The Kingdoms of Seoland remain within the scope of the overall effort as a loose, generic setting usable with TMG or Silverlands, as an alternative to Ytherra. But all of these are really parts of the same project: TMG is designed around Ytherra’s metaphysics, and Silverlands can be viewed as an RPG in its own right or as an Adjunct to TMG. The Kingdoms of Seoland will likely see some development down the road, but for now it remains as I originally envisioned it: a loose framework much simpler than Ytherra usable as a loose setting in its own right or as a tstbed for Silverlands.

Over the weekend I spotted the first five original Dragonlance modules at Half Price Books, all in reasonable (not stellar, mind, but reasonable,) shape and apparently complete, for $4.95 each. I snapped them up. While I was never a tremendous fan of Dragonlance as a vehicle for actual gaming, I did enjoy the novels back in the day, and retain a certain fondness for the material.

Aside from that, I’m pretty much decided to start accumulating ADX&D 1st Edition stuff again. I purged my collection a few years ago and got rid of a near-complete run of the original modules, which pains me. This time the stuff will only be pried from my cold, dead fingers, but I’ve got a long way to go. I do have most of the hardcovers already, thankfully. I’m also picking up select AD&D2 and 3.0/3.5 stuff, but there I don’t feel the need to collect everything, which would be more than a little impractical.

Here’s a snapshot of the map of one of my current projects, the Kingdoms of Seoland. It’s not all that close to being done, as you can see from the empty infoboxes at the edges of the map and the somewhat terra incognita look of parts of the map. But it’s getting there.

The map is a small section of a world map generated in Fractal Terrains Pro, and exported into Campaign Cartographer 2 Pro and modified from there. I wanted it to evoke the flavor of the old Greyhawk and Known World maps, but look more naturalistic. I think that’s working out so far.

The scale is 12 miles to the hex, optimal for Fields of Blood should I go that route with it.