I’ve added some additional art for this post beyond what was originally intended – the covers of the standard edition and the deluxe limited edition with black page edges and debossing on the cover. Collaging and shadows by Mike.

Introduction by Mike

Today, in support of a new RPG product, The Glumdark, I have a guest post by the author, Christopher Drellow.

Glumdark is a massive, fully illustrated, painstakingly constructed resource for Game Masters and players of dark fantasy tabletop roleplaying games. Recommended for the likes of Mörk Borg but totally system agnostic and compatible with D&D,Pathfinder, or any other TTRPG.

It includes Over 2,596 items and ideas to enhance your campaign, Original fiction detailing the grim reality of the Glumdark universe, a two-page map to geographically kick-start your campaign, and 55 system-agnostic tables covering everything from Bleak and Unique Quests, Clever and Deadly Traps, Surprising and Evocative Locations, Awful and Original Loot, Wild and Withering Weather, Totally Ridiculous Magical Items, Demigods, Animals, Events, Monsters, Occupations, Insanities, and much much more.

Glumdark is 140 pages, plus as needed to incorporate stretch goals. The Pledge levels are: PDF version US$10, Hardcover US$30, Deluxe Hardcover $45. Prices are subject to last-minute tweaking, of course, and there are also add-ons to consider.

NB: The cover art has been updated since the above image was assembled.

It’s at this point that I have to interrupt this introduction to tell a tale.

This post was originally intended to get published back in August 2024. But the Kickstarter campaign got put on hold when a significant backer expressed interest in supporting the product. And, of course, that meant that promotional activities in support of that fundraiser also got put on hold.

So I scheduled the post for six months down the track and sat back to let events eventuate. The author of today’s article was intending to get back in touch when a revised schedule was determined – this was simply putting publication off into the never-never until it could be finalized.

It was when I noticed that the six months was only a month away from falling due that I decided it was time to reach out and re-establish contact. But there was a problem: My ISP deletes emails after about 3 months. I no longer had contact details for Christopher.

So, I followed the link given below, expecting to be taken to the old fundraising campaign page from which I hoped to be able to extract a contact address.

I was completely surprised to discover that the Kickstarter campaign had been completed on February 22, and far more successfully than anyone was expecting (I’ll get back to that in a moment). It was immediately obvious that the pressures and distractions of the negotiations and delays and the subsequent plan revisions and fundraising campaign had distracted Christopher to the point where he had completely forgotten about this article and the promise to get back in touch when he knew what was happening.

It wasn’t the first time something like that has happened, and it probably won’t be the last. No grudges, it happens. Locating the contact information I was looking for, I reached out and we started considering what to do about this post – the decision reached should be obvious at this point.

A successful campaign

The target was a modest USD$40,000. The project raised $151,865 in pledges.

The target was so low because the creative elements of the book were complete; the funds were for production and the inclusion of add-ons. That’s always a recipe for success, only the scale varies, unless you’re really unlucky.

All ten stretch goals were achieved, and the combined total looks very impressive.

But here’s the critical thing readers have to know before this interruption comes to an end: IT’S NOT TOO LATE to back the project. For a limited time – they aren’t sure how long – late pledges are being accepted as though the campaign was still live.

So, if you find yourself intrigued by today’s guest article, run – don’t walk – to the links provided and take a closer look at whether or not this is something that you can afford. Don’t delay – the creators aren’t sure how long the late-pledge option will remain open. It’s been more than three weeks already!

You can back Glumdark – or just take a closer look – at https://glumdark.com/book, or by clicking the image above.

Okay, with the preliminaries out of the way, let’s get on with the show!

The Making of the Glumdark Book

A Guest Post by Christopher Drellow

The Glumdark Book is heavily influenced by Medieval bookmaking, but it didn’t start out that way.

When I designed the first layouts for the book, I borrowed the design language from the Mörk Borg universe as developed by Johan Nohr and adopted by many others. It’s a neat aesthetic, and there are two good reasons it’s so often utilized in compatible content for Mörk Borg:

1. It feels cohesive.
2. It is dope.

A layout found in Mörk Borg, which is terrific.

My first attempt at a Mörk Borg style layout, which is derivative and bad.

Because Glumdark is heavily influenced by the world of Mörk Borg, and because many of the players who use Glumdark come from that world, I designed the first spreads in this style. But I quickly found that it felt like wearing another guy’s shirt on a date. It didn’t feel like I was being myself.

MB design is what one might refer to as poster-style. Each page of the book would have been an entirely different composition, and one of my goals in making this book was to learn about making books. I’m a believer in learning the rules before you break them, and I wanted to learn how to make a grid (and then break it).

I found some Masterclass-type courses on book design, and read a book or five about basic typography and layout. And then I got to work on the grid.

The Grid

I developed a fluid, flexible grid which allowed me to work in single, double and triple columns while also combining column widths when I wanted the page to be more or less symmetrical. Here are some of the basic vertical forms which emerge from the grid:

Single and double column pages.

Asymmetric and triple column pages.

Different asymmetry, different triple column widths.

Using The grid

Of course, once the grid is established, you want to go about breaking it in various ways. This is a bit like holding down the beat with the rhythm section of a band and then playing polyrhythms on top. Visual consistency is maintained, but play becomes possible:

Negative space forms a cross, which the illustrator forms into mine shafts.

Text alignment forms the fundamental shapes of a house, which the illustrator expands upon.

The examples above are included to illustrate the union between the two primary layout constraints of the book. That is, working within the established grid, and then carving out space within that framework which promotes the creativity of our illustrator. Working in this direction is a little backwards, and I’ll discuss how I arrived at that workflow in the next section.

In the first image above, the chambers of a mine were imagined in the negative space between the text. In the second, the text became an under-girding for the house.

Early Book Design

What I really wanted to sample, borrow, and steal from, was the design language of medieval Europe when the first printed books were being mass produced.

This requires a couple of caveats.

First, that the notion of ?mass? production was obviously on a different scale than we think of now. The first print run of the Gutenberg Bible was under 200 copies.

Second, that I’m speaking of book printing as it arose in the west. Wood block printing came about in China in the 9th century with metal set printing following in the 14th century, about a hundred years before the Gutenberg Bible. I sought early examples of western (as opposed to eastern) bookmaking mostly because what we think of as fantasy roleplaying generally exists in a sort of alternate history medieval era. Dragons, knights, you get it.

Researching The History of Bookmaking

In any case, I stumbled into the world of early bookmaking rather naively. I walked into the San Francisco Public Library and asked about ?very old books.? I was immediately directed upstairs and given the name of a librarian who was profoundly well suited to my ignorant quest. She patiently listened to my rambling about seeking layout and design techniques from early bookmaking and had me sit down while she searched the stacks for a ceaseless train of absolutely perfect reference material. I took many, many pictures. But I also learned very quickly which eras were useful, and which were not.

I took a lot of photos for reference, a habit which I fanatically encourage.

Mike here, interrupting for just long enough to tell you that you can examine this image in it’s full 1420 × 1065 glory by clicking on this link or on the “thumbnail” above (3 Mb)…

A Sea-change in layout design

You can always very clearly tell when publications were made after the 1700s. In the following century, with the rise of advertising, printed publications began to adopt giant mastheads and hero text. Giant blocky fonts begin to appear. Everything starts to look like a Wanted poster from a western film.

What I discovered almost immediately is that pages which inspired most came a couple centuries before this. The era just after the invention (in Europe) of movable type coincides with a fascinating development in design language and technology. Previous to the printing press was the era hand-written manuscripts, which look, unerringly, like this:

But it seemed to me that upon receiving access to the technology of movable type, bookmakers began experiment immediately:

Notice the playing with the layout.

The design of early books

This play with type design became foundational to the book. But the thing that influenced me the most in this very first visit was a small aside in a book on early bookmaking practices. The era where books were filled with fantastic woodcuts would not come along for quite a while. What preceded it was an era where books were printed with large empty spaces on the pages. The publisher would denote what was meant to go in that area. You, then, as the first owner of this book, would find an illustrator to illustrate your own copy. Thus, each book was a family heirloom and a work of art in its own right.

Beyond that, having the illustrations drawn after the book had been typeset was this reversal of expectations that fascinated me. In the modern era, you’re likely to receive images and place them in text, designing the text to work around those images. Mörk Borg-style books take this to an extreme degree, treating both art and text as artistic elements to shift and play on the page.

Delayed Impact

When I read about this, it made no impact on me. But as I was sitting at home later looking at all of the images I’d gathered, I realized that that one anecdote was in fact the key to the project. I contacted Vil, an artist who we had commissioned several times previously for work on the Glumdark website. And I asked him to meet with me over Zoom, something we’d never done before. He kindly agreed to hear me out and I gave him the pitch: I’ll design the layouts and then provide them as canvases to be drawn upon. Rather than setting my text around his illustrations, he could use each spread as his canvas once the text had been placed. To my great (and ongoing) delight, he eagerly agreed.

Now that I had a grid, a direction, and an illustrator, I was ready to begin stealing from the past.

Stealing From the Past

The flourishes in the designs were more directly stolen from books made hundreds of years ago. Both because it was fun and because they belong to a design language which felt appropriate to the content.

Early manuscripts contained colorful illustrations which danced through and around the margins, here replicated by a grim alchemist and his red-roughed assistant.

Rather than illustrations, hand-cut block prints made for meaningful iconography. Here represented by our own hand-cut dice icons.

A rather brazen theft of roughly bordered illustration with Latin title.

This narrowing of text to a point is seen very frequently of texts of the era. Also, brazenly stolen for our own nefarious purposes.

And on & on?

Research is a compelling phase of any worthwhile project. It invigorates, deepens and steers early design decisions. My research in early bookmaking ultimately took me to the explore public libraries in San Francisco, New York, and Eastern Europe. I toured old castles for inspiration and wandered around museums of ancient weaponry and artifacts. I bought a heap of books on type design and medieval calligraphy and book design. And I combined that with the vast set of online resources available to any aspiring designer. I wound up just deeply grateful for the unending wellspring of creativity that we have access to. And I’m hoping at least a bit of that gratitude comes across in the final product.

About The Author:

Christopher Drellow (CTRO, CY_OPS, TABLEMÖNGER, Glumdark) is a writer, artist and programmer living in Brooklyn, New York. Christopher has built an uncomfortable number of fabrication projects involving skulls, but he draws and writes about them too.

Postscript/Addendum by Mike

I have to say that I quite enjoyed reading the above for the first time, and if you did too, then you should definitely at least think about backing the Glumdark. Here’s that link again, https://glumdark.com/book, or click on the image below (extracted from the image at the start of the article).

There is also a Facebook page (may not be official): Glumdark

Applied Inspiration; Spellbooks

But this wouldn’t be Campaign Mastery without throwing a little extra content your way.

Too many modern players seem to think that spell books are like exercise books, you write a spell down on the page and employ a little magical Ju-ju and you’re done. But books back then weren’t done like that; a closer analogy would be the preparation of an old-style illuminated manuscript (by hand, of course).

Most of the text would simply get written in, just like the exercise book, but there would be more. Lavish drop capitals, illustrations, working notes, related side-comments ? and that’s if the spellcaster is an absolute stick in the mud. Anyone with even a hint of looseness might add a doodle, or some ribald poetry, or a shopping list, or conceptual notes regarding a possible spell variation or even a recipe for soup ? why not, the real writing is magical and won’t be damaged by the additions ? and the rest of the book is just paper / parchment, so why not use it for notes, treating it the way most students treat their high school textbooks?

Plus, they would be likely to throw in the occasional trap for the unwary, just in case the spellbook gets stolen (which reminds me of the time when a Gnoll forced a PC Wizard to throw his spellbooks on the camp bonfire. The player assumed that because they contained magical writing, the spellbooks wouldn’t burn…)

Anyway, beyond all that, GMs should want their players to think about the page of text looking like an illustrated manuscript, and the amount of work that is implied. Text should be in some flowing script (fewer words to the page, more white space). Even if everything is monochrome, it should take one or more hours to inscribe a spell ? and employing that magical Ju-ju takes only as long as it takes to cast the spell, effectively seconds in most cases. What is the spellcaster doing, the rest of the time?

I look at the layouts and examples that Christopher has so lavishly provided in his post, and that’s what comes to mind. A useful reminder to incorporate a little genre-related flavor into your game mechanics whenever the opportunity presents itself!

One more idea from Mike – Applied Inspiration: Tomes Of Skill

Oh, all right, one more tidbit that occurred to me.

Why not give out, as loot, a reference book that confers +2 on a specific skill subject provided that the book is consulted for at least (difficulty/4) hours? And that gives a +1 on related subjects within the scope of the primary function? [EG: “Tome Of Elvish History” might also give +1 to answer questions about Orcs and Dwarves because Elves have had extensive… dealings… with both].

Make it heavy enough and large enough to be inconvenient, so that no-one will be tempted to carry more than one or two around with them, but not so big as to be unwieldy or impractical. Ten inches x 6 inches x 2 inches and 25 lb should be about right.

But if you want to make sure of it, have the books grow heavier by 5 or 10 lb each if another is within 10′ of it, per book after the first. Why? It’s magical, dude. So a set of ten would make each one weigh 75 or 125 lbs. It won’t take much of a library to completely consume a character’s carrying capacity at that rate. The big trick is to balance the benefit with the inconvenience.

But Bags Of Holding and Portable Holes and the like would still present a problem. But wait one – what if the books were self-updating, linked to a privileged position of Omniscience?

Stick one of those in a Bag / Hole, and the book, the bag / hole, and everything else within goes Kerblooey! I forget what damage the rules suggest, but I’d be inclined to make it 1 HP per pound of contents, +1d6 for the book and 2d6 for the container. What, you had 5,000GP stashed away in there? Gold is very heavy….

What would such a book be worth? 500 GP? 1,000? More?