Not long ago, I saw a game result that bucked the established trend in outcomes, a potent reminder of the unpredictability of sports. After losing the first four games of a five-game series against Australia (T20 International Cricket), the Sri Lanka team posted a comprehensive win to salvage some pride and deflate Australian egos just a little.

It reminded me that a game consists of a number of smaller events, sub-contests within the scope of the overall game, which is itself a sub-contest within the broader totality of the series.

Win enough of these sub-contests, and you win the game. Win enough of the games, and you win the series.

So what does winning a sub-contest actually look like?

• It could be viewed as a contest between individual batsmen and individual bowlers (or pitchers if we’re talking Baseball). The bowler / pitcher has just so many deliveries / pitches to get the batsman to do something he doesn’t want to do – swing at a ball that he shouldn’t, for example, or get his timing / accuracy wrong.
• It could be the totality of that batsman’s time at bat against the entirety of the opposition team.
• It could be the totality that batsman’s attempts to resist one particular bowler (cricket has multiple players delivering the ball to the batsman, unlike baseball, which has only the one specialist pitcher and perhaps a substitute / relief pitcher or two).
• It could be the batsman’s performance in successive innings or times at bat within the game – the details are different cricket vs baseball, but the principle remains.

Each of these reveals something more about the course of the game, which is why statistical analyses of all these can be used to illuminate the course of the game.

Let’s boil all of these down into a generic category of analysis, which I’ll call a Granular Grouping.

Each granular grouping is the combined results of a group of deliveries or pitches – again, cricket and baseball aren’t quite the same in the way they do this. In baseball, this unit is an “innings” and multiple batsmen have to be overcome to signal the end of one; in cricket, it’s called an Over, and the batsmen concerned stay in the middle until removed from play. T20 cricket gets its name from the fact that each side gets a total of 20 overs in which to score (less if they do badly).

Again, let’s use a generic term, “Set Of Deliveries” for this, even more granular, breakdown of a passage of play.

And below that, we have a succession of deliveries that are the constituents of an individual Set Of Deliveries.

“Winning” one of these sub-contests depends somewhat on the context of the game at the time – it could be simply not getting out, or it could be scoring, or scoring a lot. In baseball it could be an RBI, or clearing the bases when they are loaded, or simply getting to first base. In general terms, it’s maximizing the potential benefit of the team relative to the potential gains at that point in time.

So, if we’re looking at a breakdown of the contest, it might be:

• Series
  • Game
    • Granular Grouping
      • Set Of Deliveries
        • Individual Deliveries

But things take on a new perspective if we reverse that nesting sequence:

•  
  •  
    •  
      •  
        • Individual Deliveries
      • Set of Deliveries
    • Granular Grouping
  • Game
• Series

…because, viewed in this way, each item on the list becomes an emergent property of the preceding set of contests. ‘Win’ enough of the individual deliveries, and you will ‘win’ that set of deliveries. ‘Win’ enough sets of deliveries, and you will ‘win’ any granular grouping you care to examine. ‘Win’ enough of those granular groupings, and you will win the game. Win enough of the games, and you will win the series.

What’s interesting is that each level of this hierarchy imposes it’s own context and narrative and influence over the next delivery in the game. Someone scores that on paper probably shouldn’t? Advantage to their team. Someone doesn’t score that can usually be relied on? Advantage to the bowling/pitching team. Ahead on the scoreboard? Advantage, your team. Ranked way above the opposition? Then you are expected to do well, and that can lead to overconfidence and the occasional surprise from an under-estimated underdog. Ahead in the series? Complacency is always a danger. Nothing left to lose and everything to gain? Beware the wounded opponent!

You don’t even have to actually achieve these things – a trend in that direction is quite enough to influence the outcome at the next hierarchy up (always back the underdog – they won’t win as often, but it’s so much more satisfying when they do)!

Each game consists of an individual sequence of contests between bat and ball and the players wielding them. But you can never look at these individual sequences and tell the whole story of the game – you need the next level up the hierarchy to provide context and direction.

I can perform a similar breakdown of an RPG, and that’s where things get even more interesting:

•  
  •  
    •  
      •  
        • Individual Die Rolls / Interactions
      • Individual Combats / Encounters / Narrative Passages
    • Acts or Plot Sequences within an Adventure
  • An Adventure
• A campaign

It’s not the ‘winning’ or ‘losing’ that matters so much (though that can be important, too); the style and tone of each level of the hierarchy is an emergent property of the cumulative effect of the layer below it.

Sometimes, it can be hard connecting two layers that are widely separated in the hierarchy, and so this truism can get overlooked. When you are focused on individual die rolls or game interactions, you don’t often think about the broader pictures, and if you do, your thinking probably doesn’t go beyond that combat / encounter / narrative passage.

It’s too easy to focus on the trees and miss the forest, to lose sight of the bigger picture.

While working on Assassin’s Amulet, and before that back when we were first planning Campaign Mastery (and a few other collaborative projects), Johnn complimented me on my ability to keep sight of the shape of the forest even while focusing on an individual leaf within it.

Most GMs are not so adept at this, he said, and admitted that he himself was one of them.

I’ve always had a natural aptitude in this area, and was forced to develop it by circumstances which led me to need to write multiple adventures in advance and then play them in close succession; it’s far more normal to develop adventures in rough sequence with playing them. At most, you stay one or two adventures ahead. When you’re prepping six or eight adventures at a time, it becomes easy to drop hints and continuity in one adventure that won’t pay off until two adventures later. Continuity is naturally strengthened. And that strengthens awareness of the emergent properties that compound over different layers.

The skill was further sharpened by my training and experience as a Systems Analyst – in order to understand the purpose behind a particular line of code, you often had to understand the purpose of the module as a whole, and in order to understand the purpose of the module and how it interacted with others the way it did, you usually had to understand the system as a whole, even superficially.

When you’re a computer programmer writing code, it becomes too easy to focus on each individual line of code and forget the bigger picture, especially when that line of code is not doing what you want it to do. A Systems Analyst has to be able to take the problem reported by the system owner and drill down until they find the line or lines of code that aren’t doing what the owner wants or needs them to do, then understand why that is the case. You have to continually assess the impact of small-scale changes on the bigger picture.

There was one occasion when a system owner requested a change that would have slowed the performance of their whole system to an unacceptable level; the coding changes themselves were relatively trivial, but the collective impact of them would be disastrous. Awareness of the big-picture consequences of the change enabled me to report to them that making the change they wanted would require them to purchase faster hardware – presenting them with the choice of living without the coding changes (and accompanying procedural alterations) or investing far more than they had anticipated. The manager used his ability to look at the bigger picture to determine that the improved functioning of his department would justify the expenditure, and made the request for the faster equipment – going from a 286-based PC, first to a 386-based PC, and then to a 486 and finally a Pentium.

Returning to the question of the big picture in an RPG, it’s not actually all that difficult to implement a big-picture perspective. Two steps are involved – one at the start of each individual combat, encounter, or narrative passage, and one at the end.

Before

Take a moment to remind yourself of the role this combat, encounter, or narrative passage is to have within the bigger picture. It only takes a couple of seconds.

This reminder of context allows you to shape the specifics of the individual die rolls or interactions. Every tactical choice, every roleplaying choice, is given a specific direction by this contextual appreciation. Sometimes, that can mean sacrificing a little short-term entertainment or a “brilliant idea” for broader longer-term value from the confrontation; that’s when this reminder really pays off, by letting you better assess whether or not the “brilliant idea” really is “brilliant” or would actually fall into the category of “it seemed like a good idea at the time”. It won’t stop every such misstep, but it will reduce them in frequency, and the cumulative impact of many such decisions can be profound at the campaign level.

After

Few encounters / interactions will ever go exactly according to script / expectation – so much so that you can be better off not trying to get too specific in your planning. Ideally, the fact that the encounter / interaction has happened at all will be enough to propel the plot forward towards an entertaining resolution.

It follows that at the end of each interaction / encounter, a moment of attention to the impact on the bigger picture of the way the interaction / encounter actually played out is rarely a wasted effort. Either things are on track, or they are not; and if not, now is the time to start planning some remedial action.

It might be, for example, that the PCs have emerged from an interaction with completely the wrong idea about what’s going on. When this happens, you have two choices: alter reality (what you have planned, and have used as a guide to what has been established within the adventure) to conform with the player’s interpretation, or finding a way to let them discover and correct their error before it derails the adventure / campaign.

Big-picture reviews permit you to reshape the remainder of the adventure as necessary to accommodate the twin ambitions at the heart of any RPG story: letting the characters do what their players want them to do, while advancing the plot towards a satisfactory resolution.

The perfect RPG Text Editor

This doesn’t exist, so far as I’m aware. It relies on a nested document structure and an interface to match.

Consider the following diagram:

• The left-hand column is the Campaign stream. For any given adventure, it contains notes from the previous adventure, the campaign significance of this adventure, and notes for the next adventure.
• The second column breaks down the adventure into its structural elements. In this example, Introduction, Acts I, II, and III, and an Epilogue.
• The third column breaks down Act I – labeled Phase One on the diagram – into four scenes and a conditional plot element with two choices, A and B.
• The Fourth column contains specifics for the second scene of Act I, or the specific plot consequences of each choice in the conditional.

Notice that this is exactly the same sort of adventure breakdown that we’ve been discussing.

A word processor designed to use this structure would look something like this:

• The campaign context window lets you move through the three campaign elements – notes from the previous adventure, the campaign significance of the current adventure or a plot overview, and any notes for the next adventure – something you can add to during play.
• The Adventure Structure contains space for you to give an overall breakdown of the adventure.
• The Plot breakdown is a brief synopsis of what’s supposed to be in this scene and how it relates to the overall plot.
• The main text area is where you do most of your writing. This contains the specifics of the scene – narrative, encounters, dialogue plot branches and conditionals, and so on.
• If you highlight text in the main window and drag it to one of the smaller windows, it will simple append it to the current item displayed in that smaller window. But if you highlight a list in the main window and drag-and-drop, it creates new entries – one from each bullet point in the list – and inserts them after the current selected item and before any other items that may already exist – except in the plot breakdown panel, there it simply inserts the text in the chosen position.

That means that your workflow would be like this:

• Create a ‘new adventure’.
• Import the ‘next adventure’ notes from the previous adventure. This creates a permanent connection between the two so that if those notes get updated, so do the imported notes in this adventure.
• Import from a master document / campaign plan (or copy and paste) a synopsis of what this adventure is all about and how it fits into the campaign
• Decide what the main beats of the adventure are going to be – how will the story break down? Create a bullet list spelling out this synopsis in the main text window.
• When you’re satisfied, highlight the list and drag-and-drop it into the Adventure structure panel. Entries within that level of the document are immediately created from each of the bullet points of the list.
• Look at the first item on the adventure structure. Think about how that will need to be structured and what content will be needed. Create a list in the main text area.
• Do the same for the next part of the plot, repeat until you have a list of content required for each part of the adventure. Doing it all in the main window in multiple lists means that you create a detailed breakdown of the whole adventure – letting you change one part to fit another.
• With the first part of the adventure displayed, select your first list and drag-and-drop into the plot breakdown panel.
• Move to the second part of the adventure structure and drag-and-drop your second list. Repeat for all the others, too.
• This leaves your main text area empty; your campaign context is giving you an overall summary of the adventure, your adventure structure is giving you a general summary of this part of the adventure, and the plot breakdown is a list of the component parts needed to turn this part of the adventure into something playable – which doubles as a ‘to do’ list.
• So now you set about actually writing the narrative, writing any canned dialogue, describing encounters, etc, until you have satisfied the list shown in the plot breakdown panel. Any time you need to, you can glance at one of the other panels to remind yourself of how it’s all supposed to fit together.
• Repeat for all the other items on your to-do list. Make any notes about how the next adventure will be affected and drag them into the “next adventure” panel.
• Congratulations, your adventure is complete and ready-to-run.

I’m not going to provide a full adventure as an example, but I need something to demonstrate why this is so much better. So let’s zoom in a bit, just as this word processor would do.

• Overall Purpose: Cagliostimo (villain) obtains a magic talisman that enhances his powers substantially, while the PCs smash a plot to replace the Crown Prince with an impersonator.
• Adventure Structure: The PCs discover a plot against a member of the Royal Family while hearing rumors of Cagliostimo’s minions stirring near Elvensland.
• Plot Breakdown: Missing informant ‘Wiezel’; Usual Haunts; Wiezel uncovered; what he overheard in the sewers; Ranger in the inn; rumors of Cagliostimo’s Goblin Ninjas; a hard decision.
• Narrative describing a PC noticing that Wiezel is missing.
• A listing of his usual haunts, with thumbnail descriptions. NPCs encountered at each, personality profiles, none of them have heard from Wiezel.
• A hint as to where Wiezel has gone to ground.
• Wiezel dialogue – why he’s in hiding (he’s terrified), how he came to be in the sewers at the wrong time and place, what he overheard – the plot against “the Royal target”, Wiezel discovered by the plotters, the chase, the escape.
• Meanwhile, a Ranger arrives at the Inn (Party HQ), on his way to the Elvensland. Description, Dialogue, Tells the PCs of the rumors of Cagliostimo’s Ninjas.
• PCs gather to update each other and have to decide – chase the rumors of Cagliostimo, or deal with the plot right in front of them. If the rumors were more substantial, the decision might be different, but the more immediate threat is right here, as Nessa (NPC ally) will point out.

If all this sounds a little bit like a relational database, it is. But it’s a purpose-driven database with a purpose-driven interface, and saves everything in a single plain-text file with a defined internal structure.

The available substitute

There is no program out there that is exactly like this. Some of the programs that are designed for scriptwriting come close, but none of them do it all. I doubt that it will ever be written.

So, what’s the next best thing?

Well, that’s what I use to write my adventures now – and these articles, too; a plain text file.

I start with the overall purpose of the adventure. Under that go anything carried forward from the last adventure (no automatic update, I’m afraid), which I have simply copy-and-pasted into the document. Beneath that, I list the adventure structure – broad bullet points describing how the PCs are going to get involved, what challenges they will have to overcome, and how the adventure will resolve. I then copy that list and break down each item into a summary of what’s needed for that act, just as I have above. I then copy that list and replace each item on it with the actual content.

It’s not as good as having the context information & synopsis right in front of you at all times, but it’s all there and easy to scroll to, so much better than nothing.

The Big Picture

The great advantage to this structured approach is that I can pay attention to the big picture when designing the next layer down, and this attention trickles down through the subsequent layers of the adventure. I don’t have to worry about the big picture while writing a particular piece of narrative, I just have to adhere to the ‘work order’ given by the next level up the hierarchy, which has, in turn, been constructed to deliver the requirements of the hierarchy level above it. In effect, the ‘big picture’ permeates the structure.

What’s The Downside?

There’s a price-tag attached to everything, and in this case, some of the spontaneity gets lost and replaced with deliberate direction – not to the players, but to the GM. That’s all right; if the players deviate from the prepared and expected course, you can easily retreat back to the next level up in the hierarchy and make sure that the important bits aren’t missed. So your capacity to cope with spontaneity and improvisation actually increases. But you do have to adjust your GMing style to welcome that improvisation rather than fighting it, which is often the natural instinct.

A bonus up-side

Quite often, in compensation, this approach is faster to write, and there’s much less chance of leaving something out.

There’s no such thing as a perfect solution. But this comes fairly close.

I spent most of my Sunday evening trying to put together a submission for this month’s Blog Carnival. It’s been a while since I was last inspired to create a submission – way back in June of last year, in fact.

Blind Alley I

The first thing you notice when you scroll to the bottom of the Blog Carnival archive, where dwell the oldest entries, are the number of past participants whose sites (for one reason or another) are no longer with us.

My first thought was to use the Wayback Machine to recover one of those lost submissions pages or roundup posts, to make it live again.

You see, it had occurred to me that while the anchor post or roundup may have vanished into the ether of the internet, some of the posts that were part of that carnival would still be around, now orphaned.

If a reconnection to those lost treasures could be found, that would constitute a worthwhile entry in the Carnival.

Sadly, without an exact url to the lost entry, it seems so hit-and-miss that the odds of success were vanishingly small. I tried anyway, without success.

Blind Alley II

No problem, I thought – I’ll simply pick something I liked from one of the many times Campaign Mastery has hosted the carnival to which I can add something.

Big problem: it takes way too long to go through the hundreds of links so contained in search of something that was both worth preserving, and to which I could add something.

If I’d had more time up my sleeve, it might have been possible, but I lost most of Friday afternoon collecting a new pair of eyeglasses from my Optometrist, and all of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning to accumulated exhaustion..

Reluctantly, I conceded that this was another blind alley – one that had a fire escape or trap door tantalizingly just out of reach.

Blind Alley III?

Never Mind, I thought, I’ll simply pick on of the roundup pages that are still active and find a link therein to a blog that is no longer with us according to the archive, and search the Wayback Machine for that.

I knew that this would take so much time that I would not have any opportunity to add to the subject matter, so I dropped that element of what I had intended to do. Instead, I was now searching for a lost treasure that deserved excavating.

It soon transpired that this was a lottery. Not only did the page in question have to be archived by the Wayback Machine (the chances were good), but I had to find it (the chances were so-so), and it had to be worth preserving – something that could not be assessed until after the effort of steps 1 and 2 had been made.

Even if there was a good chance of that, something that I could influence through my choice of Carnival subject, that was still a conflation of two reasonable chances and one so-so. At best, the net chance would be another so-so probability.

So that’s what I intend to do. But it’s entirely possible that this will turn out to be a third blind alley, and that time will run out before any success is achieved.

Reflecting on the bigger issue

Internet content, including blogs, comes in two flavors: the transient, and the stable.

Transient content rapidly loses its relevance. That includes things like Kickstarter reviews – which might be extremely relevant when published, but which can deteriorate with extraordinary speed once the fundraising campaign concludes, one way or another.

Some submissions to the Blog Carnival are like that, too – the links might go out of date, or the campaign they relate to come to an end. This diminishes, but may not completely extinguish, their value.

Some submissions are more stable, being about a game system; their lifespan is largely tied to that of the game system to which they refer. Each time that game system diminishes in relevance, so does the blog content that relates to it.

Take D&D 3.x -related content; while it may have been highly relevant back in the day, despite 4e having been released, that relevance will have declined with the advent of 5e. But only a small fraction, because most of it would still be relevant to Pathfinder. That value would have been again attenuated when Pathfinder moved to its second edition, however. At best, it probably holds only 1/3rd of the value that it once possessed.

And some are stable and evergreen; this is what Campaign Mastery tries to deliver (though sometimes we pander to those demanding more immediacy of value). A lot of the earliest blogs posted here are still relevant and useful, more than a decade after first publication.

The stability of RPG-related internet content

In general, RPG-related material retains more stability and value than most types of internet content. I still have internet-sourced material from AD&D and Champions First Edition filed away, and while it may be out of date, it can still be a source of reference and ideas. In 99% of cases (if not more), the source site has long ago vanished, but the material that I found to be of (potential) value then has been preserved.

That makes CM a Resource for the gaming community, something I take a lot of pride in. But it begs the question: what happens on the day I become too ill, or too destitute, to maintain it? If I die, the resource will continue to be available for a while – but eventually, it will shut down. And all those who would have one day benefited from that resource will be the poorer for it.

(Have no fear – I’m not suffering from an excess of mortality (that I know of) – but a past scare or two, and the still-raging pandemic, should remind us all that tomorrow is always a complete unknown).

This is what has befallen those lost hosts of the Blog Carnival – their owners have fallen by the wayside or migrated into other endeavors, and their contributions are now lost. Some of that content will have depreciated markedly; some will be evergreen, and undeserving of such a fate; and some will be somewhere in between.

Implications For The Blog Carnival

There has been some concern that the Blog Carnival was no longer worth preserving, worth continuing. Fewer and fewer blogs get published these days, on gaming (or on any other subject, for that matter), and it gets harder every year to find willing hosts and subjects that excite and create a willingness to participate.

This month’s subject matter grew out of such a discussion. It was hoped that digging into the past would re-energize the Blog Carnival of today. It may succeed – or it may not. If web traffic to the archive rises markedly, then even if there are no entries to celebrate (other than this one), it will still have been at least a partial success. I don’t have access to those statistics, so I can only guess.

If the Blog Carnival is lost

But it begs the question – what would be lost, were the Carnival to go away?

I have lamented, in the past, the disappearance of the bloggers who simply reviewed the material of other blogs that they found to be of interest, because these were a static connection from the now to the content of the past.

The Blog Carnival is a free-floating variation on this idea. Each roundup post indexes content for posterity. I would therefore argue, after much reflection, that even if it were to cease as an ongoing practice, it’s legacy should be secured as a window to the past. Even if most of the links cease to function, if they are there, they still hold value. It was the removal of dead links that created the first Blind Alley upon which my intentions for this post floundered.

If a monthly carnival cannot be sustained, let it be two-monthly, or quarterly; if a quarterly carnival cannot be sustained, make it twice a year, or even annual (making the subjects bigger, and allowing more time for participation). Bring Video Bloggers into the fold, and Facebook Groups of relevance.

But that’s just the opinion of someone with no responsibility for the maintenance and organization of the Carnival. Ultimately, the carnival host (Of Dice And Dragons) and that site’s owner, Scot, will have to make the call.

The Responsibility Of the RPG Blogger

And it brings me back to the question, which every site owner should contemplate – what arrangements can they put in place to preserve the content that they have created, so that it does not wither and vanish as so much already has?

I have plans in place should something happen to me. I will probably never know if those plans come to fruition, because I have no intention of abandoning ship voluntarily any time soon. But at the same time, I have to be realistic; slowly-deteriorating health has made the twice-weekly schedule, with which Campaign Mastery began, unsustainable. Eventually I will no longer be able to post weekly, and may have to shift to a fortnightly schedule, or less. That might take five years, it may take twenty. Economic factors may accelerate or delay this event. I don’t know what the future holds – I just know that I have prepared for it, to the best of my ability. Anyone reading this should do likewise.

Lost Treasure Quest I

In October of 2008, Musings of the Chatty DM offered up Super Heroes in RPGs. One of the submissions was by The Fine Art Of The TPK which is now hosted on Blogger with a redirect from the direct link. The comment accompanying the submission suggests that this was the case, even way back when. The problem is that when you open that link, you get a permission denied; the blog, it seems, is now open to invited readers only.

Wayback Machine results: failure. It has captured the Arabic version of the login page to Blogger, to which it redirects a request for the web page.

Lost Treasure Quest II

Same host, same Carnival. The Geek Emporium submitted Super Heroes of the Apocalypse: The Templars. They don’t appear to have ever hosted the Carnival, but the post comes up with a 404 these days.

Wayback Machine results: failure. The Wayback Machine has captured the same 404 page that comes up when you open the link.

Lost Treasure Quest III (I know there’s gold somewhere in them hills!)

Same Carnival, Greywolf submitted Secret IDs for D&D which now leads you to a link that offers to reset your default search engine and not to the content promised.

Wayback Machine results: Success! After an initial failure where the Wayback Machine took me to a completely unrelated page that it thought “I would enjoy more”, it kicked back with Blog Carnival Superheroes: Hero with a Secret ID, which is the actual title of the submission. Better yet, the Wayback Machine has also captured the comments that go with the post.

This is definitely worth reading for anyone who isn’t running a superhero campaign, as well as anyone who is and wants a broader take on NPCs who may be leading a secret life in a non-superheroic way or environment. Score!

But why stop there?

Lost Treasures Quest IV

Same Carnival, Reverend Mike’s The Book Of Rev submitted Superheroes? BAH! The Villains Are Where It’s At!

These days, that leads to a 404 in Indonesian!

Wayback Machine results: Hmm, that doesn’t look promising: “Saved 4 times between June 21, 2019, and February 24, 2021. I suspect that it may simply have captured the same 404. But we might get lucky – I’ll go for the earliest one and see what comes of it…

…and the answer is, a different version of the same Indonesian 404, this one mostly in English.

Never mind, one in three successes – now one in four – means that failure is going to occur more often than success, so it’s time to press on!

Lost Treasures Quest V

Same Carnival, another submission by The Geek Emporium, which leads to exactly the same 404 page as the last. Maybe we’ll have better luck with the Wayback Machine this time…

Wayback Machine results: DOUBLE PLAY, Baby! Not only did I find a copy of the submission, but discovered that the Wayback Machine captures and archives a lot of the linked articles – which gave me a link to the earlier lost article on the Templars that works!

Super Heroes Of The Apocalypse: The Templars

Supervillains of the Apocalypse

The first offers a view of what heroism might look like in a post-apocalyptic world (Mad max, anyone? How about Barb Wire?); the second creates a post-apocalyptic villain. And that could be adapted to many campaigns simply by employing the plot mechanism of a villain who has fled an apocalyptic wasteland, but cannot leave behind the things that living there have done to him.

Lost Treasures Quest VI

Same Carnival, another submission by The Geek Emporium…

Wayback Machine results: Immediate success!

Pulp Hero of the Apocalypse

This offers up a character concept that could be for a PC or it could be for an NPC with the potential to ally with the PCs in that environment. But, in light of the comments I made above, perhaps the greatest potential would be as an NPC pursuing the villain and so alerting the PCs to the danger. The character’s background is such that he would want to return to his desolate wasteland ASAP, and not stick around. He might seek to then emigrate with what remains of his family, but this would open the floodgates as others sought to follow him. Hundreds, thousands, potentially millions of refugees appearing out of nowhere, desperate to find a better life – that sounds like a full-blown campaign to me!

It hasn’t escaped my attention that all my successes have come from the one site. So I’m going to ignore any other links from The Geek Emporium and look for someone else’s lost offering.

Lost Treasures Quest VII

The next submission is from a site that is definitely gone, The Dice Bag. I know because their hosting of the November 2008 Carnival (on Religion in RPGs) was the one that I tried searching for by keyword, without success – that was Blind Alley I. But this time I have that exact URL that I did not have for their blog carnival hosting duties a month later, so let’s give it a whirl….

Wayback Machine results: Oh dear, this does not look promising. “Saved 1 time February 25, 2021″… still, we might get lucky!

And suddenly, there’s a second link, one dating back to December 2008. The original capture simply tells us that GoDaddy had parked the site by 2021, which doesn’t help us at all.

…Aaaand, Hey Presto! The Things That Should Not Be

The submission, when I actually look at it, is rather disappointing, but I wasn’t expecting much, having been forewarned by the comments accompanying it. It’s more of an announcement that Bob has been inspired by Tom (the Dice Bag) and has a lot of good stuff coming as a result, just not yet.

But serendipity – digging for worms and striking gold – yields a link at the bottom to where the Wayback Machine has archived the lost blog roundup page!

ROUNDUP – RPG Bloggers Network Carnival – Religion

Not only that, but it appears that every one of the submissions has also been captured – at least, they all have links to elsewhere within the Internet Archive that is the Wayback Machine!

One of which is from another site that has long been gone (and is still missed by those who read it), Uncle Bear, who made two submissions to the Lost Carnival, and so would make the perfect test of this theory:

And… Touchdown! Religion and Fantasy, Opinion and Belief

In this post, Berin Kinsman (the first person to encourage me to write about RPGs!) offers an overview of the interactions between Gods and Mortals in an RPG environment and some of the implications and consequences. It made me immediately want to hit the “comment” button to add the worship of Pantheons to the discussion, but even without that, it is still a good read for anyone who has religion in their RPGs, and everyone who doesn’t – which should be just about everyone!

The Process – YOU can do this, too!

I don’t use the Wayback Machine very often, so I can never remember the url. So I started with a Google search.

That led me to The Wayback Machine Internet Archive .

Next, put a copy of the exact URL you want into the search field. Right-click, Copy-link and paste is the easiest and most accurate technique. Using Key Words does NOT find what you are looking for very often, even if the content in question is somewhere within the archive, at least not in my experience!

If you are lucky, that will take you to a calendar page, which is divided into two parts. The top part lists years, the bottom part dates within the chosen year. Here’s a snapshot of what comes up for Campaign Mastery in the top section:

Select the year that you are interested in by clicking on the calendar within the year you want, or the next one with a black bar to indicate that the Wayback Machine has an entry for the page you have requested captured at that time. As a general rule, go as early as possible! I have to admit that I’m curious about that spike in 2019, so I’ll pick that year.

The March result is what you would typically see when hunting for a specific post. The reason for the 2019 spike is clearly a bunch of saves in July.

You’ll notice that there are some results in Green, and others in Blue. The size of the dot indicates how many results took place on a given day.

if you hover your pointer over one of the days, a popup gives you details, as shown to the right.

On July 17, Campaign Mastery’s home page was saved three times – the first is a link in Green, the other two are in blue. The first blue link appears to have been taken just one second after the green.

If I right-click one of those dates, I can open the snapshot of the site as it appeared at that exact moment in a new tab; if you left-click, that will happen in the same tab as the Wayback Machine, which means that if the link doesn’t work or doesn’t lead to what you wanted, you are stuck; going back won’t take you to where you were.

I have to admit that I can’t see the difference between a green and a blue capture! But take it as read that there might be one.

Clicking on the bubbled dates does nothing,, you have to get the pop-up and click on the specific time. But if you right-click on a small bubble (indicating a single entry), you can open that result in a new tab without waiting for the pop-up. Right-clicking on a larger bubble without going through the pop-up takes you to the LAST entry – again, this might not be the one that you want!

Limitations of the Wayback Machine

There are some limitations to the Wayback Machine that you should definitely be aware of.

• It can be hard-to-impossible to find what you are looking for without an exact URL.
• It will capture 404s (page not found pages) and other non-results and treat them as results.
• Despite their best attempts, they don’t have everything!
• In the very early days, they did not save text formatting or images. In the slightly later days, they did not save images, but did preserve the formatting. In the modern era, they present a near-perfect snapshot of the site as it appeared.
• FILES are usually not saved. So if the website offers a PDF or whatever, you usually can’t retrieve it. That means, for example, that I can open this page listing the music that I had composed as of June 2003, but the songs themselves remain lost.

So it’s not perfect. But it is still a gateway to the lost treasures of yesterday, and that’s what this post is all about!

In the first part of this series, I detailed the compositing modes that I use most frequently, along with a few other hints and techniques.

The second part showed project number 1, taking a black and white photograph (grayscale) and adding unconventional colors to transform the image into a blue-skinned alien on some strange other world.

In last time’s third part, I took images that were in color and showed how carefully stripping the color out permitted you to replace the original colors with your own, completely transforming the associated context of an image (a similar approach gets used to render objects underwater, FYI).

In this fourth part, I’m going to tackle a more challenging proposition, that of turning a monkey blue. This project has several things in common with the first two, but adds some new wrinkles to the technique.

WARNING:
This is a comparatively lengthy post – the equal, in terms of text, of all three of the parts that preceded it put together, approaching 15,000 words, and with 80-odd illustrations. Get yourself a beverage before you start, and settle back, we’ll be here a while…

Project 3: A Blue Monkey

The base image chosen is

– and when this project is complete, it’s anticipated that it will actually get used in the next Adventurer’s Club adventure.

Here’s the worksheet for today’s exercise:

• Turn the monkey blue while keeping the fur realistic
• Preserve the branch / tree that he is sitting in and maintain it’s integrity within the image
• Extend that tree branch to widen the total photograph
• Replace the background with something more aggressively and suggestively “jungle” using other images and clip art (hence the difficulty maintaining the tree limb’s integrity while the context of everything around it is changed.
• Said replacement background to consist of multiple layers – a distant background, a middle-distance midground, and several layers of foreground.

Rule Zero is always to have a purpose when you start working on an image, and it’s been demonstrated a couple of times already. Rule One of photo editing is to use the purpose as a guide to needs and planning.

Since I had a clear idea of what I wanted to achieve with this image, I went looking for what I would need to ‘pull it off’.

The distant background will be this image:

but when I originally planned the image, because I wasn’t using the right search term, this was what I had found:

This had the color that I was looking for, but there is a reason why this image is so widely used in St Patrick’s Day -related pages – it’s all clover. So I was worried that it might look inappropriate. Nevertheless, there may still a role for this image in the planned composite.

In the midground is going to be this piece of clip art:

which was sourced from https://www.clipartkey.com/.

For the foreground, behind the extended tree limb, I have these Elephant’s Ear plants, also courtesy of clipartkey.

I note that the image is watermarked, which is usually a big no-no, but in this case, the watermark seems to be behind the plant stems so hopefully it won’t cause too much of a problem – I just have to make sure that the tree-limb covers the watermark if it intrudes.

I also have these, similar, plants: to go even further in front:

To the extreme left of the image, we will have this:

It was supposed to have a transparent background; it didn’t, instead it had the checkerboard that is used to indicate transparency. It also had a shadow as though it were a cardboard cut-out hovering a little in front of the page! So both of those had to go, leaving me with a transparent png. It’s way too soon to tell if everything from freepik will suffer from the same problem – which would be enough for me to dump them from my resources list – but it’s something that I’ll be keeping an eye on.

Finally, to go in front of everything and help tie the whole image together, I have this:

– images of a pair of coconut leaves that DO have a genuinely transparent background. I may well use these twice – once coming in from the left, and once just overlapping the tree on the right, modified slightly in shape and definitely in scale and massively blurred because they are ‘so close to the camera’, i.e. the observer.

Here’s the plan of attack:

1. Disassemble the primary source into three parts: monkey, tree, and background.
2. Expand the canvas width to about 250% of what it already is, and use copies of the tree branch with suitable edits to extend the branch outward into the enlarged space.
3. Design and implement the Monkey color-change.
4. Position the distant background.
5. Position and assemble the midground.
6. Resize the distant background.
7. Assemble the foreground. Use the size of the distant background to dictate the new left-hand side limit of the image.
8. Further Resize and possibly blur the distant background.
9. Ghost Leaves to fill any voids
10. Coconut leaves left.
11. Coconut leaves right.
12. Final review of the composited image.

A twelve-step plan – with some of the steps being a lot more involved than others.

Step 1 – Disassemble the primary source into three parts: monkey, tree, and background.

There are a couple of tricks that I use when disassembling images that I should tell you about.

• Work with images that are 2, 3, 4, or 5 times the scale that you eventually want the image to display at, with preference to 2 or 4 times. In extreme cases, you may need to go to 8x or even 10x scale.
• When the images are grayscale, you can often get away with simply selecting the parts that you want and it will all come together in the end.
• Things get a little trickier with color, because at the edges of the image, there will often be a transition from one color to another, from the object that we want to the part of the image that we don’t. Where that unwanted part of the image has a very different lightness or color to what we want to include and what we want to put in place of the material removed, you will often get a halo – and one that won’t completely go away using the copy-of-layer-underneath-and-blur technique. It needs help. The basic approach is to 1. select the area to keep; 2. shrink the selection by 1 or 2 pixels; 3. feather the selection by the same number of pixels as you shrank the image; 4. copy or cut the desired image and then paste (creating a new layer).
• But, there are complications that result at the edges of the image overall – you often need to insert a step 3a, manually select the parts you want to keep that are at the edges
• Where the color values between what you want to remove and what you want to replace it with are not too dissimilar, you can often get away with feathering out by an extra pixel or two. You may need to use soft erase in spots.

‘Feathering’ is a really hard concept to explain clearly – you either understand it all at once (usually from using it a time or two) or you simply don’t ‘get’ it. But I’ll try.

Usually, when you select a rectangular area, it will be a ‘hard select’ (there are exceptions, and they can be a pain to deal with). As soon as you add an angle, that goes out the window; if your selection line runs diagonally from one corner of a pixel to the opposite corner, it gets copied or cut at 50% opacity. If more of the pixel is “in”, the opacity goes up; if less, then it goes down. And complicated shapes are inevitably full of ‘partial pixels’. That’s a problem when the pixel content is largely unwanted.

The image to the right illustrates the situation – in theory, this depicts a 9-pixel block within a larger image. When you zoom out, it looks like part of a round object or red spot set against a sky-blue background. You can see the three fully-red pixels at the bottom left, and the fully-blue top right. Every other pixel is a blending of the two, from the mostly red to the mostly blue. Along comes our image editor, who wants to replace the blue with a deep green. So he starts by selecting what he wants to keep, doing his best to follow the shape of the object as her perceives it. (1)

He then copies and pastes what he wants to keep into a new layer. With the source turned off, everything looks perfect (2)

But, in reality, there’s some blue mixed in with those pale red in the pixels top left to bottom right, and when you drop a deep green in behind, that suddenly shows up as a ‘halo’ of sky blue of limited opacity. (3)

What we wanted to achieve is shown in figure 4. The green is compromised by red in the pixels around the edge, but there’s none of the blue (or very little of it).

Feathering The Selection

Feathering the selection selects an additional ring around the selection already made, at a reduced opacity.

Now, you either understood that completely, or quite probably, not at all.

If you feather by 1, the selected area grows by 1, but the outermost edge of the selected area is at an opacity midway between 100% and 0% – i.e. 50%. If you hit the delete key, the feathered selection is only reduced in opacity by 50%. If you copy the selection, those pixels are only sampled at 50% opacity.

If you feather by 2, the selected area grows by 2. Now you have a 1-pixel ring around your original selection (100%) at 2/3 opacity (66.6%), and an additional 1-pixel ring around that at 1/3 opacity (33.3%).

If you feather by 3, you get rings of 75% opacity, 50% opacity, and 25% opacity.

If you feather by 4, you get rings of 80%, 60%, 40%, and 20% opacity.

Now, if you shrink the original selection before feathering, the effect is of fading out the very edge of the part of the image that you want to keep in order to reduce the amount of the ‘contamination’ from the parts that you don’t want that get copied.

Feather is obtained from the “Select” menu at the top of Krita’s screen, down near the bottom. That’s also where you find shrink, grow, and other selection controls.

The problems with shrinking and feathering

There are two problems to this technique.

First, there’s a problem with fine details like hair or fur or blades of grass, or any selection that’s long and thin. These are areas where contamination is especially likely to occur. You can very carefully select each and every hair as best you can, but those finely-detailed selections are shrunken to the point of not being there when you shrink the selection. The larger the image (in number of pixels), the larger these fine details are, and the less you suffer from this problem. But some reconstruction of the edges of such materials is often necessary.

The other problem is that the software can’t understand that the image that you want to keep extends beyond the edge of the page, so it treats the edge of the page as the limit of selection. When you shrink that selection, it shrinks back from the edge of the page as well as the parts of the image that you have deliberately selected. And that means that when you feather the selection, you also fade out the edge of the image even though the object you are selecting continues beyond that edge.

That’s most easily solved using the Polygonal or Outline selection tools (a) with the addition-to-selection option (b). The latter comes up on the right-hand side of the editor when you select one of the selection tools on the left.

Anything that you select in this way after feathering, including parts already selected at partial opacity, gets re-selected at 100% opacity. So the edges of the image are quickly restored – at the price of losing the benefits of the feathering right at the edge of the image. So it’s a compromise, but one that lets you get on with the job.

The four modes of selection (and some other selection notes)

It’s probably worth spending a moment describing the settings for these tools. Mastering them is one of the most involved tasks in photo editing, and I’m still learning (even though I knew enough to do image editing and restoration as a professional thirteen or fourteen years ago). It takes years of practice to be even passable at this particular skill and you’re more than skilled enough to make a living doing such work long before even reaching that standard.

There are four main modes of selection: Replace, Intersect, Addition, and Subtract, called Actions by Krita because they are using mode for something else, as the enlarged screenshot above makes clear. These selections are all about how a new selection will relate to a selection that is already present on

• Replace means exactly what it says – as soon as you make another selection action, any existing selection gets forgotten and replaced with the new.
• Intersect means that no matter what you select now, only those parts of that selection that overlap a pre-existing selection will stay selected. It took me a long time to find this useful, and even now it’s the mode that I use least often.
• Addition adds whatever you select to any already-existing selection, even if the two never intersect. That can be incredibly useful, because it means that you don’t have to do your whole selection job with a single set of inputs using your mouse (or other graphic interface tool, such a graphics tablet).
• Subtract means that whatever you select now doesn’t stay selected, while anything that’s left untouched of a previous selection remains.

Replace is the default, and therefore the first one that you learn. Addition and Subtraction follow soon after. Intersect is the last one to be mastered.

In between, you will get to know the “select” menu options very well, because they can interact and modify existing selections, which in turn interact with new selections via these four modes. Again, I’m still learning what some of these do, so what follows will be incomplete at best. To start with, unless you already have part of the image selected, not all these will be available – in fact, most of them will be grayed out.

I should also add, right of the bat, that I have used a number of paint programs over the years, and almost all of them have selection tools that work in a very similar way, so this skill tends to be highly transferable.

• Select All – selects the entire image. Which means that addition is meaningless, but subtract becomes very powerful.
• Deselect – removes all existing selections. This is incredibly important because Krita won’t let you do anything to any part of the image that isn’t selected if any part of the image is selected – you can’t paint on it, you can’t draw on it, “move” and “edit” only affect the selected part of the image, and so on. This will forever catch you out.
• Invert Selection Any part of the image that was selected, is no longer selected, and vice-versa. In combination with add and subtract, this can be very powerful – and quite useful.
• Convert to Vector Selection – This is part of Krita that I have not yet explored. I note that the “mode” selection (above the four “action” sections) offers two modes, with bitmap being the default, and “vector selection” being the alternative, so I suspect that the two are related.
• Convert Shapes to Vector Selection …ditto.
• Convert to Shape… Shape is a vector graphic terms, as is Object. So, once again, I think this relates to the same unexplored part of the software.
• Display Selection turns the dashed line that surrounds the selection on and off – though why you would want to turn it off has escaped me. The default is ‘on’.
• Show Global Selection Mask

– I know nothing about this menu option.

• Scale… I think this lets you keep the same shape within your selection but make it bigger or smaller. How that is different from growing or shrinking the selection, I’m not sure – but there have been times when that hasn’t quite done what I want, and the next time that’s the case, I intend to play around with this a little.
• Select From Color Range… – This could be wonderfully useful or a total waste of time, I don’t know. It’s something else that I have to explore.
• Select Opaque Ditto.
• Feather Selection… – in many ways, “feather selection” is one of the recurring theme of today’s article, and how this project differs from the last two. The “…” on the menu item usually means that it opens a dialogue box in which various parameters can be set. In the case of feather, you select the scale of the feathering, from a low of 1 pixel to a high of whatever.
• Shrink Selection…Makes a selection smaller. If, as a result, the selection is less than one pixel wide, that part of the image stops being selected.
• Border Selection…I’m still learning about this, even though I’ve now used it a few times. I don’t know if the border is outside the selection boundary, inside the selection boundary, or centered on the selection boundary; I have a suspicion (unverified) that it’s the latter. I also suspect that choosing ‘1 pixel’ creates a border that is from one pixel outside the selection to one pixel inside the selection – i.e. two pixels wide. Because of these uncertainties, I will often use an alternate method of selecting a border.
• Smooth I’ve played with this a time or two but, while I think I know in theory what it does, in terms of practical functionality and problems, I’m not so sure.

It probably doesn’t help that I’m a single lone user of this software, entirely self-taught. Being able to explore tips and tricks with someone else on a collaborative basis would be incredibly educational! The assumption, of course, being that they have mastered parts of the program that I haven’t touched, while I’ve mastered things that would never have occurred to them. Be that as it may…

An alternate method of selecting a border

Here’s a slightly complicated shape (1):

• If I want to select a two pixel border outside the shape (which includes the text), I use the similar color tool to select the white in subtract mode, grow the selection by two pixels, and then select the black while still in subtract mode using the same tool. If I fill that with red, the second image shows the result. Note that because I’ve drawn a block box around the image, I also get a red box! (2)
• An alternative method (and the one that I would usually use) is to select the black and put it into a separate layer, select the black, grow the selection by two, create a new layer underneath the black, and then fill the selection. Using blue this time, the second image shows how that works out.(3)
• The third image zooms in on the third. Notice the jagged edges of the border? This is where I think ‘smooth’ might help. (4)
• So I’ll do exactly the same thing in the fifth image right up to the point of having grown the selection. Then I’ll hit it with the smooth menu item and see what happens. This time, I’ll fill it with green….(5)
• A closeup shows some improvement. But it’s still not completely satisfactory, and I don’t like the way the bottom tail of the “S” looks. (6)
• There are a couple of possible causes, and perhaps several of them are ganging up on me. So this time, I will use the Similar Color tool to select the white, then invert the selection; that should mean that more light gray is part of the resulting selection. I’ll then cut-and-paste the selection into a new layer, grow the selection, fill it in a new layer below the pasted one with the black, in a pale blue this time, deselect, and blur the layer with a 2-pixel value. Finally, I’ll multiply by the base image, which means that all those pale grays in the text get merged with the blue fill instead of being obliterated, smoothing the text significantly. (7) This is what I hoped to achieve, as you can see from the close-up (8)!

Problems with the Contiguous (color) selection tool and the similar color selection tool

While I’m in the vicinity, so to speak, I should mention a couple of issues with these tools that can arise when dealing with colors that are close but not quite similar enough.

For example, let’s say we have a blue sky with some clouds, and that’s what you want to select. So you choose one of these tools and click to get the blue part of the sky. And then you switch to selection addition mode and add in the parts that haven’t already been selected.

Here’s the trap: not all of those colors will have been precise matches to the reference color of the exact pixel you clicked on. And those colors that were only a 50% match within the limits you’ve specified only get selected at 50% opacity – and there is absolutely no way to tell from looking at the image.

Here’s a cloudy landscape that I threw together in literally less than t0 minutes. It’s complicated by the rain, but anyway…

So, if I select the sky and the clouds using the color pickers instead of manually tracing out the edges of the land, I end up with this selection – not perfect but it looks like everything that matters is covered:

But if I cut the selection out, ready to post it into a new layer, I’m left with a very obvious remainder that has been left behind!

If I throw a black panel behind everything, the problem is shown to be even worse.

And, if I paste the cut layer back in, instead of restoring exactly what was there originally, I get this:

….Which isn’t bad, but now carries a hidden flaw, one that is revealed if I turn on the black panel again:

Now, if that effect was what you wanted to achieve, then congratulations! I’ve done oil slicks using a similar technique in the past. But most of the time, that’s not what’s wanted.

Here’s the correct way of dealing with the problem, starting back right after we’ve made the selection. I then create a new layer and fill it with a spot color – any spot color – not once, but several times. The first time I do so, I can see immediately that it was necessary, because the image now looks like the black-panel image above. The opacity of the fill is dictated by the opacity of the selection.

As you dump your spot color in, however, even those somewhat translucent areas get filled.

Next, i invert the selection, and with a paintbrush, correct the obvious flaws in the selection.

What I have just created is called a Mask, or – more specifically – a Selection Mask.

It defines the area that I want to select. Which enables me to turn off every other layer (so as not to contaminate the selection) and then select the mask – then turn the other layers back on (and the mask layer off) and hey-presto: a perfect cut, and a perfect paste.

Back to the project

So, with all that technique explained, I can now get on with dissecting the primary source image. I have one or two other tricks up my sleeve that I’ll show along the way.

As stated earlier, I want to separate a copy of the image into three constituent layers – the tree, the monkey, and the background – and then get rid of the background completely.

The tree can be handled as a straightforward selection, shrink, and feather, then cut and paste, with one refinement: I’ll create a version to be blurred (as explained in The Power Of Blur) from the initial selection, and after the second paste, grow the selection one pixel, invert the selection, and delete anything selected from the layer-to-be-blurred.

It should be noted that I am working with a version of the image that is 2224×1483 in size.

Step-by-step:

• Initial selection with the Polygonal Selection tool.

As expected, this proved to be more challenging than it initially appeared, because of very fine fur over the top of the tree, as this closeup shows:

The bottom frame also gives you some idea of the scale to which I had to zoom to handle these fine hairs.

• Create a selection mask

Notice the bottom left, where – in the real image – the branch of what appears to be another tree crosses the tree that I am preserving.

I don’t want to preserve that intruding tree-limb, and so have not included it in the selection mask.

• Select area using the selection mask, then Copy-and-paste a copy of the tree into a new layer.

Note that if you get this wrong, you will end up pasting a copy of the selection mask into a new layer – you have to choose the layer that you want to copy from after defining the selection with the mask!

• Deselect the selection. Duplicate the new layer so that I can control the opacity of the blur.
• Blur the lower layer 2 pixels.
• Adjust the opacity of the upper layer until the desired level of blur is achieved.

• Go to the selection mask layer. Turn on the mask’s visibility.
• Select the mask. Turn off the selection mask layer’s visibility.
• Select the working copy of the primary source.
• Shrink the selection by two pixels.

As explained earlier, this creates a problem at the edges of the image, because the software doesn’t realize that the object continues beyond the part that is visible. You can see both the effect of shrinking the mask, and the problem, in this closeup:

So I need to add a new step to the process:

• Correct the selection using the Polygonal Selection tool.

This shows the result:

Also notice the image corruption in the green as a result of the original image having been saved in jpg format! Every time the image is loaded and saved, this damage would grow worse as more and more of the image information gets discarded by the process of saving the image. You should ALWAYS work in a non-destructive image format, no matter what file format you ultimately intend to use. The best one for single layers is a .png ; the best one for a project-in-progress is Krita’s own default format, .kra because it also preserves the layers and their settings.

• Feather the selection by two pixels
• Cut and paste the selection into a new layer above the blurred layer.

With the core image of the tree removed, this is what is left. Notice that you can clearly see the edge of the tree that has been left behind. The image below shows a zoom of the new layer with the pasted tree in it.

The effect of the shrinking and feathering is that the edge of the tree just fades away.

• Grow the selection by 1 pixel.

It’s because I knew this step was coming up that I didn’t deselect – and that’s why you can see the selection line (“marquis” is the technical term) in both the previous images.

• Invert the selection.
• Go to the blurred layer and hit the delete key.

A trio of images here: the selection marquis after growing the selection, the selection marquis after inverting the selection, both against the blurred layer, and finally, after partially deleting the edge of the blurred image.

Notice how the edge of the tree is both blurred, and at the same time, more sharply delineated than it was!

• Deselect the selection.
• Remove the selection mask layer.
• Turn on all the layers of image that you have created using the selection mask.
• If there’s no further manipulation of those layers of image, merge them together. Start with the layer on top of the first pasted layer, and hit Control-E. Wait a moment; a new layer will be created that combines the layer you chose with the one below it. Repeat until done.

Here’s the combination of all the pasted tree layers:

Next, it’s time to turn my attention to the monkey.

This takes all the problems of the tree and doubles or triples them. The difficulty comes from the back-lit fur along the back and chest, through which hints of the existing background are visible. We need those to become “hints of the new background are visible”, but that’s going to take some doing.

The best approach to this problem is to deal with it in two parts – the body and fur of the monkey that aren’t back-lit, and then the parts that are. For convenience, let’s call the first part the “body” and the second part, the “fringe”.

One of the ways this complicates is that I can’t cut the body from the working image, I need to copy-and-paste, so that the fringe is not disturbed.

The actual process is very similar to that described above; the one difference is that because this part of the image has to “marry” the tree properly, I can’t shrink and feather (that would create a gap), I have to simply feather by 1.

As before, I start by selecting the body and creating a mask.

The “body” is any part of the monkey that is certain to be opaque to the background, less a tiny bit for confidence in that certainty.

I then deselect and ensure a perfect selection using the mask, then copy and paste from the working image into a new layer. Then I feather the mask by one and copy-and-paste a second new layer on top of the first.

Next, I make a duplicate the first layer, and then blur the bottom-most of the layers – the non-feathered one that was just duplicated – by 2 pixels. Finally, I play with the opacity of the non-blurred version until the amount of blur looks right. The opacity will be something very similar to that used for the tree.

Then comes the clever bit. I turn the selection layer back on and (temporarily) give it a composite mode of “erase”. This leaves the merest hint of an outline, thanks to the blur. The inside of my selection for the fringe has to be inside of that line.

Here’s the way the ‘line” looks:

On a new layer, and using a different mask color (preferably one that isn’t in the original image and will stand out), I simply draw over the top of the line, having turned the working image back on. Then, I can start to get creative.

Using brush sizes as appropriate, I draw everything that’s going to be 100% opaque in the fringe. I then set the opacity of the brush to about 60% and draw everything that’s going to be about 50% opaque; A third pass with 30% brush opacity for the parts that are going to be only 25% opaque, and the fringe mask will be complete.

Note the ‘spots’ of color placed somewhere out of the way so that I can use the Similar Color Selection tool.

A few tips:
Zoom is your friend – you want smooth steady strokes with your brush. Most people can do this for a certain distance and then their brushstroke veers off in a strange direction, just by a little bit. Zoom the image so that the length of the stroke required is within your range.

Undo is also your friend – if it’s not right, undo it right away and do it again.

The goal isn’t to get it perfect, it’s to get it good enough that you can get away with it. Never forget this vital distinction. Maybe it’s not quite right but is close enough, after all. This is not a technique that’s designed to be perfect, only good enough..

Practice at speed – not only does the job go faster, but your brush strokes are much smoother at speed than slow and not-so-steady.

If it sometimes feels like you are hand-painting each individual hair, it’s because sometimes you are, as the zoomed-in image of the mask makes clear.

Finally, don’t be afraid to use your select similar colors tool and delete button to tweak the final result (after copy-and-pasting).

I can then use the similar color selection tool to take advantage of the ‘flaw’ in the way it works so that the opacity of the copied image matches the opacity desired – I just select a part that I know to be 100% opaque color. I will sometimes add a ‘spot’ in the center of the mask for that very purpose.

Using the selection mask in this way, I copy the fringe from the working image into a new layer, then shrink and feather by 2, and copy and paste a second layer below the first. I then drop the opacity of the top layer to about 50%.

It’s possible to go one step further, using the two masks, and the select similar colors tool in intersect mode, to grab just the extreme highlights, since one of the defining characteristics of back-lit hair is that it is near-white, but I’ll save that for when I’m working on making the monkey blue.

Here’s the completed monkey extracted from the source image, posed against a dark green background.

Step 2 – Expand the canvas width to about 250% of what it already is, and use copies of parts of the tree with suitable edits to extend the branch outward into the enlarged space.

Sidebar: Extending images, Focal Point, and visual flow

Extending images is never as easy as I make it seem in this section. Not only do you need to have the capacity to fill the expanded area with content, you need that content to match the rest of the image in detail, contrast, and color, which means that you need a source for the additional content. That’s the second primary requirement (I’ll cover the first shortly).

Thirdly, you need the edges to match – it’s really hard to have part of the image derived from a light background and part from a dark background. It’s not impossible to overcome this problem, but it doubles or triples the workload.

Fourthly, you need to consider the focal point of the image. There are two basic structures to most images:

I’ve boiled everything you need to know down into the five figures in this diagram.

Figure 1 shows a square image. The focal point, unsurprisingly, is in the center.

Figure 2 shows the second major layout used in good image composition, again on a square ‘canvas’, with the focal point located 2/3 of the way across the image, but stretching back toward the middle of the image. Figures 2a, 2b, and 2c show that any mirroring or rotation of this arrangement is also valid, something that is true of every subsequent figure (even though they aren’t shown explicitly).

Figure 3 takes us to a rectangular image for the first time, and brings up the “golden ratio”. No-one knows exactly why it works, but postcard relative dimensions are naturally pleasing to the eye (if that’s all there was to it, it could be written off as a function of human psychology, but the same ratio keeps showing up in strange places in mathematics, which should be objectively independent of human perceptions). Figure 3 itself shows the same focal point positioning as figure 1, but note that the circular focal region is slightly stretched by the longer axis. Again, it doesn’t matter if the image is landscape as shown, or in portrait orientation – that’s just a rotation of the layout. I’ve exaggerated the dimensions of the image a little for clarity.

Figure 4 contains a slight error, for which I apologize – the yellow “egg” is not quite vertically centered the way it should be. It shows the application of the 2/3-1/3 ratio to a rectangular shape. This particular arrangement is important because such layouts usually deal with the relationship between the primary focus (in pink) and a secondary focus (the yellow zone). This is the layout that I’m going to employ for the Blue Monkey composition, which will make the image not just about the primary focus (the monkey) but about the environment in which the monkey can be found (the secondary focus).

Figure 5 is an afterthought. It may have occurred to people that the many screen resolutions around these days are usually NOT in the golden ratio, and wondered about what happens in such cases. The answer is that the short axis dominates; dividing it by 3 and multiplying by 4 defines a part of the image about which all the usual design and layout rules still apply. Anything outside that zone is considered a ‘fringe’ that contains no content of relevance – and which is usually ignored unless a deliberate effort is made. The zone can be positioned to the right of the overall image, or in the center, or to the left; it can even shift, depending on what we are paying attention to, for example if there’s an icon of attention on the top left of the screen, the zone of attention will include that icon, and the natural tendency will be to have less awareness of the right-hand-side of the screen. The focal point will then relate to our perception of the wallpaper image. (Game designers take advantage of these phenomena all the time).

The fifth factor to take into consideration is the composition of the final image, which relates to the dark-vs-light areas of the image as much as anything else (you can do this stuff with color but that’s a lot harder). For those who read left-to-right, the natural tendency is for the eyes to enter an image at the top left and proceed to the right until something is encountered that redirects attention. When that happens, we follow the line of contrast down until meeting another. If we don’t find such an area of contrast, the eye tends to fall off the image – which can be useful in a comic book panel, but is otherwise undesirable. The goal is more commonly to direct the gaze continually back to the focal point, preferably by way of the secondary focal point, if any. Of course, if your language reads right-to-left, that is the way your eyes enter an image – producing something satisfactory to both groups of cultures is incredibly difficult, but it can be done. To analyze any image, squint at it, and you will find it blurring, losing detail but permitting the broad shapes – and the visual clues they provide – to become more readily apparent. There’s a lot more to this subject, but this gives you a basic grounding.

But by far the most important consideration is always “why?” Rule Zero applies not just to the editing of the image overall, but also to each major edit performed. This should always be your first consideration – defining a specific objective or reason for making this particular change.

In the case of “Blue Monkey”, I looked at the composition. The face of the monkey is the primary focus, because we’re naturally programmed to pay more attention to the identification of individuals. The original image works because the monkey’s face is pointed at the tree and that leads the eye to the tree-branch*, which leads us to where the monkey is sitting, which leads us back up his body to the face. Our attention is thus focused on the middle and right-hand side of the image, and the left is largely irrelevant.

* Okay, technically, the texture of the tree tries to pull the eye down out of the image – but notice the area of darker wood on the right? The eye gets pushed away by that until it encounters the horizontal rows of knots, which point the eye at the tree limb.

All that changes when an attention-getting change like blue fur is introduced. That becomes the focal point, because it’s unusual, and that pulls the eye downward to the tree limb, and then left – and out the bottom of the picture. To combat this, I need to make the background more important so that I can use it to lead the eye back to the focal point. I need room to make that happen, so I want to shift the layout from that of Figure 3 to that of figure 4. I will need a visual barrier to push the eye upwards past the tree limb, and horizontal layering within the background to pull the eye back to the right afterwards.

There’s a little more to this step than this indicates. Careful use of the palette knife and smudge soft brushes will be needed to ‘connect’ the two, and I’ll use these brushes to sketch out a general impression of the desired shape of the limb extension – from a copy of the tree layer. Use select to prevent disturbing anything you want to keep.

Before I can do that, I need to flatten the tree layers into a single layer. Start from the bottom layer, go up one layer and merge down until the process is complete. You may be tempted to simply group them together and then flatten the group – this way lies trouble, because not all composition modes are respected within a group.

The next part of the process is to copy and past parts of the real tree that can be distorted, twisted, rotated, or shaped to fit.

To start with, the results don’t look all that impressive – there are obvious transitions where one part of the Frankenstein’s monster has been stitched to another:

These problems stem from three sources:

• The textures are at different scales because of the distortions;
• Lighter sections are abutting darker sections with no transition;
• There are no transitions between sections.

To solve this, following the approximate grain of the wood, I will copy and paste the endpoints of each section, move them, rotate them, but not resize them, deleting anything that doesn’t fit, then fade them out. I will also select dark areas and light areas and copy-and-paste those specifically into other sections of the tree-limb.

About 90 minutes later, I have this:

The tree limb was too long to show at anything close to full-size in a single screen-capture – I’ve had to use three.

Step 3 – Design and implement the Monkey color-change.

This is the most important part of the process, because this is what the image is supposed to be all about.

I have several different methods in mind; when that happens, I usually try one and see what the results are, then try the next one only if the previous one was unsatisfactory.

• Method 1: select the body AND fringe masks, fill in a new layer with a mid-toned blue, set composition mode to color.
• Method 2: select the whitest parts of the body + fringe, copy and paste into a new layer, then fill with a pale powder blue in a layer below the pasted highlights, set composition mode to multiply, adjust opacity.
• Method 3: color adjustment curve to increase the blue content of the dark and mid-tones, especially the latter.

There are also obviously a number of combinations; I might like the look of Method 1 with a highlights layer as per method 2, for example. I might combine all three at different opacities and in different orders.

One thing that I will be doing in all methods is fading out the modified version to preserve the original pink of the muzzle, because I don’t think the creature will look realistic enough without that.

Method 1 turned out to need a darker blue than I originally thought I would need. Unfortunately, it looks like someone has died the hair of the poor ape a shade of electric blue.

This didn’t have as much effect as I was hoping it would. It’s just not quite blue enough.

The lighter-toned sections of this version are very good, especially when combined with the highlights from version 2.

I think that I will use a blend of all three methods. Highlights from Method 2, then the light tones from Method 3, then the middle tones from Method 1 (probably reduced in opacity), all over the top of Method 2. I want the blueness but not the garishness of Method 1, in other words!

I’m not sure of the best composite mode for these different layers, or the opacity. I may end up with several copies of the extract from method 3, one a low-opacity addition and one a middle-to-high opacity in normal mode or perhaps Alanon, or even multiply and addition in combination!

As per rule zero, I have a clear objective in mind, and so I can play around, keeping anything that takes me closer to that goal and ignoring anything that doesn’t.

Hair and Fur Headaches

It’s relevant to the business end of this part of the process, so it’s time to talk in a little more depth about making hair and fur look realistic.

Have you ever looked closely at hair that is going gray? If you have, you will have noticed that the hair is not consistent in color. Some hairs are still dark, some are light / white, some have dark roots or light roots, and no two hairs are precisely the same in color.

Once you’ve noticed that, you will soon discover (if you didn’t know it already) that monochrome hair always looks fake. That’s why the commercials for hair-coloring products try to emphasize ‘natural color,’ and what the mean by the phrase – they mean that hair colored with their product will look natural, with realistic highlights and variations in shade and tone.

Beyond that consideration, some hairs will cast shadows onto others, producing still more natural variation. It’s almost impossible for an artist to spend too much time on getting hair right.

As a general rule of thumb, any body of hair should have a dark element, and a light element, and a mid-tone element, and natural highlights and shadows in each.

Which of these is dominant depends on what is supposedly behind the hair or fur. The fringe in the case of the monkey is against a darker background than the fur, so it’s all about the light hairs, with the others fading into the background. But in some parts, the background is lighter even than the fur – which causes the darker hairs to stand out more.

This, of course, explains what is wrong with the “blue monkey’ transformation that resulted from Method 1.

In order to separate out the pieces I want from each of the transformations, I need to use the Similar Color selection tool, then copy-and-paste. This can be trickier than it seems, because you have two variables to contend with: the color range selected, and the base color on which you pick.

The first is controlled by a slider in the upper right labeled “Fuzziness”. The smaller the value, the more closely a color has to match the base color in order to be selected.

Too low a value, or too extreme a base selection, and not enough of the similar colors will be selected (though you can always add to your selection, you can’t determine how strongly an individual color has been selected – remember the demonstration with the clouds, earlier? The solution is to make the color ‘fudge’ as large as you can get away with, often with a bit of trial and error and educated guesswork. You can make life easier by having a low-opacity version of the modified base image underneath the selected components. Using a single-pixel feather and then shrinking the selection by a pixel can also solve a number of problems.

I frequently work with a fudge of 5 when using the similar color selector. I will sometimes use 3, or 7, or 10, and – in certain circumstances – 0 or 1.

But there’s a complication. Remember the image damage caused by the saving of the file as a jpg? Those are variations in color that aren’t there and aren’t wanted – but I don’t want them appearing as holes in the selection, either. The best answer is to choose a fudge high enough to include them, then manually edit the image to repair the damage. The selection mask prevents your edits from extending beyond the part of the image you are actually working on.

But a color range that broad can also pick up all sorts of unwanted colors as well. So you have mutually contradictory imperatives to satisfy. My practice is to go for a color range that is just a little too small, and use the addition tool to compound multiple selections. If I have to, when I look at a first attempt, I will then go to a color mask to achieve complete capture of the desired parts of the image.

It’s now 20 minutes later, and I’m satisfied. Below, I’ve curated the layers, viewed three different ways: In isolation, in closeup, and against a dark green background (because you saw earlier how illuminating that could be).

From bottom to top:

Layer 0: Base Image (for reference purposes) 100% opacity, Normal mode. Notice that the fur consists of light over mid-tones over dark over more mid-tones – no matter how simple it looks in the image on the left, the detail is incredibly important in achieving plausibility.

Layer 1: A copy of Method 2, 100% opacity, Normal mode – this is the actual base image being used, leaving Layer 0 as redundant.

The lightest shades are a sort of sky blue, the mid-tones are a slightly purplish-slightly grayish slightly dark blue. A lot of the detail and nuance have been washed out.

Layer 2: A copy of Method 1, 41% opacity, Normal mode – this shifts the base image slightly bluer – the darker the tone, the more it gets shifted.

Layer 3: Mid-tones from Method 1, 45% opacity, Normal mode, selected with Fuzziness 5 and feathered 1 pixel – this shifts the mid-tones even more toward the royal blue.

Layer 4: Light tones from Method 3, 100% opacity, Normal mode, selected with Fuzziness 5 and feathered 1 pixel. The opacities of Layers 2 and 3 were adjusted so that the results would blend well with this layer, color-wise.

Notice that against the transparent background, it just looks like a mess, but as soon as the dark background is deployed, it becomes a lot more coherent.

Layer 5: Highlights from Method 2, 68% opacity, Alanon mode, selected with Fuzziness 5 and feathered 1 pixel. This lightens and brightens the highlighted sections while permitting the blended color of the earlier layers to show through – just a little.

Because the color is slightly darker (because of the feathering), it’s easy to overestimate the opacity. The dark background shows the truth.

Layer 6: Another copy of Method 1, Opacity 60% Grain Merge mode – a little tweak of the colors, harmonizing and blending the layers beneath.

Layer 7: Dark tones from Method 2, Opacity 63%, Multiply mode, selected with Fuzziness 9 and feathered 1 pixel. Part of the effect of all the preceding layers was to wash the contrast out a little; this layer not only intensifies the blue color of the darker areas, it restores that contrast (and maybe even enhances it a little).

Because multiply makes things darker, I’ve deliberately lightened up the background so that the shadows can be seen clearly in the third panel. Most people, when they look at this, will assume that it’s light paint over a darker base color; in reality, the base color is the brighter green and the shadows are the contribution of this layer.

Layer 8: Yet another copy of Method 1, Opacity 33%, Alanon mode. A color tweak post contrast-enhancement, softening the harshness of the shadows created by Layer 7 just a little while shifting the non-dark areas just a little more to the blue.

Again, the image on the left makes this look like a more dramatic adjustment than it really is. The dark-background panel gives a more accurate perspective.

Layer 9: This is the original highlights layer selected from the base image, as described earlier. 100% opacity, Normal mode. Remember that I was very restrictive in choosing color similarity for this layer – it’s almost white.

You may notice the rather obvious darker stripes that appear to be running vertically though the image in the left two panels – these are actually optical illusions, as the dark-background panel makes clear. They also vanish when the overall image is composited. When I first observed this effect, I spent quite a bit of time investigating it, and discovered that this is another example of the human eye detecting patterns that don’t actually exist.

Layer 10: The last layer is a copy of Layer 9 that I have blurred 1 pixel, 39% opacity, Addition mode. The highlights from Layer 9 looked too stark, too severe, and didn’t quite blend. After trying various combinations of Opacity and Compositing Mode with layer 9 (and finding none of them satisfactory), this was my solution – a means of blending those highlights with the underlying image.

Looking at the first two panels, you could be forgiven for thinking they were empty, devoid of content; but the dark background reveals all.

So, let’s put it all together. Below are a series of screenshots as the layers are turned on, one after another – again, a whole-of-monkey impression and a zoom panel. This is a BIG image file, it will take a while to load!

Something that you should always do before considering a step complete is to review the compiled image. Doing so in this case showed that the efforts to save the fringe had produced an unwanted side-effect where monkey met tree image: a bright blue halo:

Fortunately, this is easily corrected, because I was very careful in working the tree (and had no such problems). It was a two-step process:

1. Move the tree layer to be in front of the monkey; and then,
2. Create a copy of the tree layer behind the original and blur it 1 pixel.

This covers the unwanted halo with tree and blends the pixels at the boundary together to unite the monkey and the tree seamlessly.

Step 4 – Position the distant background.

Steps four to 11 may comprise 2/3 of the list of steps, but they are far less involved, and so should go much quicker.

The one big decision remaining is to decide where the horizon line is going to be. This only has to be rough, because it will be covered over with midground vegetation.

If I position the horizon line in the middle of the image, it says that the monkey is roughly at eye height. If I raise it up, say in line with the monkey’s eyes, it suggests that we are looking up at the unusual creature; if I lower it, the impression is that we are looking down on it, which doesn’t seem right at all.

But I want the top of the midground to fall at about the 2/3 mark up the page because that will make for good composition, as discussed earlier – and that means that the horizon line has to be below that, so that the midground can cover it! So that means that it has to fall somewhere in between 1/3 from the top and half way down the page.

There’s a tuft of fur on the monkey’s back – it would be astonishing to the point of improbability if the horizon line just happened to perfectly line up with it. A tiny bit higher up or lower down is far more visually plausible; most people won’t notice the difference, but will find the image more credible without knowing why.

Taking everything into account, one consideration at a time, has narrowed the boundaries within which the horizon line should occur to a very small range. It doesn’t matter too much where in that zone it actually falls, because the intention is to cover it up, anyway.

The dimensions of the distant background are such that almost half the image are off the top of the canvas if I position the bottom near that horizon line – and it won’t go anywhere near all the way across the area to be filled. So I break it up into two parts, then duplicate the one that was the original bottom of the image and mirror it horizontally, then move it across to the right-hand side of the canvas, where it will mostly be covered by the tree-trunk. I also increased the original bottom a little in size. That gives me this:

If you look closely, though – there’s a problem: the three parts are not very seamless. The right-hand boundary isn’t bad, but the left-hand one needs some work. Using the Outline Selection Tool, I copied and pasted three patches of background – two from what is now the central panel, and one from the left-hand panel.

The topmost of these was set to a Multiply composition mode and the opacity adjusted so that the result matched fairly closely to the corresponding part of the left-hand panel. The lower-right one received the same treatment, but also needed to be darkened a fair amount to match. Finally, the bottom left patch was partially covered by the middle panel – there was some overlap because of the way I positioned them (not by accident); this now covers the seam between the panels.

As you can see from this closeup of the central panel, these quick tweaks have made a tremendous difference:

It’s still not quite perfect, but it’s close enough for some manual editing – a little brushwork and some Smudge is that’s needed.

Once that’s done, I merge the layers down, duplicate the resulting layer, reflect it both horizontally and vertically, and apply a lot of lens blue. This is background that’s supposed to be below the horizon line, but it’s only there in case there’s a hole in the midground. It’s essentially ‘noise’ that matches the color profile of the actual distant background:

Step 5 – Position and assemble the midground.

It was always anticipated that the midground would not be large enough horizontally to fill the canvas space. To fill it, I used the Outline selection tool to copy a portion of it, then resized that copy, mirrored and resized a second copy, and added a fourth copy somewhat smaller in size, positioned behind the others.

It took about five minutes to get this:

With the distant background turned on:

Notice the hole right in the middle of the image! Fortunately, I had created the blurred mirror image of the far background. Turning that on:

Step 6 – Resize the distant background.

Sometimes, though, you can anticipate problems that don’t arise. Compared to the midground, the background suddenly seems slightly out-of-focus, creating an impression of depth; I had anticipated the need to shrink the background and blur it to create this effect, but it wasn’t necessary.

It is also worth noting that the distant background is a little darker than the midground; this adds to that impression of distance. To emphasize it a little more, I slightly darken the distant background.

Step 7 – Assemble the foreground. Use the size of the distant background to dictate the new left-hand side limit of the image.

The midground doesn’t look quite realistic at the bottom of the image on the left for some reason – probably a slight difference in perspective and consequent misalignment of the horizon lines between the pieces of midground. That’s fine, that’s what the various foreground pieces are intended to overcome.

While positioning these, I’ve made a couple of changes to the original plan. In particular, the elephant’s ears have been moved to be in front of the tree, and one of the other tropical plants has been cropped out. It’s now very clear from the positioning just where the left-hand edge of the finished image will be.

That means that the next step is to crop the image.

The positioning of foreground elements makes the layout approach that I always had in mind fairly clear – they form a definite frame around the focal point of the image.

Step 8 – Further Resize and possibly blur the distant background.

Time for some fine tuning. The tree and the mid-ground are at similar levels of detail, and that doesn’t work – it forces the two to appear as though they were in the same plane, i.e. the same distance from the viewer.

So the midground needs to be blurred and possibly darkened – without impacting on the highlights too much. That calls for a duplicate layer with a Multiply composite mode, and tweaking the saturation, lightness, contrast, and opacity of that multiply layer. In addition, I don’t want all of the detail to be lost – so that means duplicating the layer, dropping it underneath its parent layer and then blurring it, then controlling the opacity of the sharper image.

How much blur? The image is now 5028×1483 pixels – right at the limit of what my computer can handle. With width the defining feature, for in-game use, that would drop to 1400 wide, or 27.84% of the current scale. CM use is limited to 556 wide, which is just 39.7% of that reduced-scale image. Put those two numbers together, and to make one pixel of difference, my blur radius needs to be 9 pixels. One and a half pixels would therefore be a radius of 13 or 14, and two pixels would be 18. (1 / 11% gives 9).

If the larger scale is the goal – and that’s the approach that I’m using for all these images, to generate them as if they were for one of my own campaigns – I don’t need to be so severe. 1 / 27.84 % = 3.6 pixels, so a blur radius of 4 would be one pixel of difference, 1.5 would be 6, and 2 would be 8.

It’s very likely that if I blur and adjust the midground this way, that I will have to be even more extreme with the background. So I need to leave scope for that, too.

The best technique when you aren’t sure is to do one at each, then play around with the opacities.

There’s a trick, or perhaps describe it as a technique, when it comes to doing this sort of thing. Get the highlights right first, then use the contrast and brightness curve controls to get the shadows and mid-tones right. It’s also worth remembering that distant objects a slightly bluer than those close at hand, so a slight adjustment of the color curve or the color setting in the Filter > Adjust > HSV Adjustment can also enhance the effect that you want to achieve.

As usual with this sort of operation, you adjust one thing and find that something else needs modification as a result. What you see above is the end result of considerable filtering. I ended up using blur 12 for the midground and blur 8, twice, for the distant background. Both parts got Multiplication layers, darkening, saturation, contrast and brightness, and an adjustment to the blue curve. I also decided to apply a lens blur to the vegetation in front of the tree, so that only the tree and the monkey are in perfect focus.

Step 9 – Ghost Leaves to fill any voids

Having verified that there are no voids, this step can be ignored.

Step 10 – Coconut leaves left.

I did this as part of the foreground image, so there’s no need to do it now.

Step 11 – Coconut leaves right.

And I decided against doing this.

Step 12 – Final review of the composited image.

I skipped ahead a little (it’s hard to stop when you get on a roll) and made a couple of final adjustments before saving the image above – little adjustments to the shape of the tree near the monkey’s head, mostly. They were made because the fringe at the top of his head was just a little too prominent and attention-getting; I wanted to tone that back just a little.

The final steps, as usual, are to resize the image to the desired scale (1400 wide, in this case), flatten it, copy the result, sharpen it, and reduce the opacity of the sharpened layer until the right balance is achieved.

Here’s the finished image (it won’t look very different to what you’ve already seen); click on this small version to open the full-sized result in another tab.

Extra Topic: Star-field Trickery

Before I sign off from this post, though, there are a couple of side-issues to bring up.

Here’s a 100%-scaled extract of a gloriously-detailed night sky:

If I reduce the zoom to 50%, the results are still usable.

At 25%, detail is being lost. Each of the pixels that was once a bright point in the sky has been averaged with darkness from all four sides

And if I reduce the entire star-field image from it’s starting size of 3840×2160 to fit the available space here at CM, the loss of detail is profound.

What looks brilliant during compositing can become a flat black bereft of detail when an image is resized to its intended resolution.

Because of this effect, it’s often better to create your own star-field, using zoom to compensate for extra scale on the canvas – If you are working at 200% canvas size relative to your intended finished image, zoom to 50% so that you will see the image as it will be when compositing is complete.

If you really need to, you can use a duplicate layer and addition composite mode to restore some of the lost contrast:

Alternatively, you can sharpen the image:

If you do, then multiplying with an un-sharpened version and controlling the opacity will give you some control over the depth of the star-field. At 100% opacity:

At 50% opacity:

And at 23% opacity:

Actual Starfields

Nevertheless, there will be times when you may need to use an actual star-field because it contains some object of interest that you can’t simply composite in. This could be the crab nebula or a planet Earth or the rings of Saturn or the international space station or a black hole – there are numerous possibilities. Your immediate problem is that getting that object to the correct visual size also renders the stars a particular size and density, and you have to then match that for any part of the image that this doesn’t cover.

The best solution that I have found is to

1. Start with an image that is already at something close to the correct scale.
2. create a temporary copy of that image and expand it to the working scale that you are using. This shows you the stars and their density – in other words, what you have to match.
3. Either use an existing star-field or create one of your own if you aren’t worried about the constellations being recognizable. You may need several at different scales before you find one that’s anywhere close to being a correct match. For this reason, I keep several on file that I pull out as necessary.
4. Do all the rest of your compositing.
5. Reduce your image size to your intended size.
6. Replace the temporary copy of the star-field with the real thing. You will usually notice that the two aren’t quite the same – the process of expansion and then contraction does funny things to the sharpness and clarity

One of the most common mistakes that I see (often because I’ve made the mistake myself, I must admit) is stars that look to big or too small, too many or too few. These all have an impact on the ultimate composition and what the visual is telling the viewer about the point-of-view of the viewer. It takes a surprising amount of effort to get this right, and sometimes (when you’re in a hurry) you will have to live with imperfections. That’s a problem that can be minimized with the process described above.

Manufacturing Starfields

It’s incredibly tempting to start with black and add colored stars – red, yellow, greenish, blue-white, and so on. No, no, no!

1. Start by designing the composition of the image – what is going to be where, and how it will visually flow from one element to another.
2. Then create a black background – and fill it with any illuminated dust clouds and anything else that is to go behind the stars.
3. Think about the shape of the stellar neighborhood – is it a galactic arm? Where will the stars be thickest?
4. In a fresh (transparent) layer, create you star-field. I DON’T recommend using the “SFX star-field” brush for this because the results are too light and too small – if you follow the usual technique of working large-scale to shrink your mistakes, you will also shrink the stars into non-existence. Instead, use the splat brush, and vary the brush size until you get the star-field populated. Keep an eye on the size of the splats and how they will look when the image is reduced in size. Do these in red, yellow, blue-white, etc, and do them to a greater stellar density than you want by about 200%.
5. Make a copy of the star-field layer and blur it just enough that the blur will be visible when the image is shrunken in size. Then move it to behind the original star-field.
6. Select your original star-field and turn up the lightness close to all the way using the HSV adjustment. You want the color to be just a hint at the fringe of the stars.
7. In a new layer, use various sponge brushes to create clouds of very dark blue and black to obscure the stars you don’t want. Use multiple layers if you have to. Adjust the opacity of each individual layer so that some stars just barely show through. I will often have some of these layers set to multiply and occasionally will use white ‘dust clouds’ set to subtract. Sometimes, the airbrush tools can also be useful in this regard, and I’ve had some success with using the Soft Smudge and Palette Knife to create swirls and textures within the clouds.
8. Any planets or objects usually go in layers on top of this star-field – but if that doesn’t work, you can always set them behind and use an erase brush to ‘reveal’ them. This can help enormously in achieving star-size parity throughout the image. Don’t forget the dark side of the planet or object – it will still be there, obscuring stars!
9. Most of the tools that you have used will put paint beyond the edges of your canvas. This can be incredibly inconvenient for any number of reasons, including that only those parts on the canvas are affected by any menu transformation effects. So crop your image to its full size to get rid of these extras.
10. That creates your artificial stellar background – everything else goes into the foreground/midground layers, which go on top of the star-field.

Starfields can be lots of fun, and incredibly creative activities. You can literally spend hours fiddling around with them simply because you’re enjoying yourself so much. It feels more ‘creative’ than most of the image compositing activities on offer. But losing yourself in this way can also mean losing sight of Rule Zero of image compositing, and ending up with something that just doesn’t work. The process above is a starting point for avoiding that problem.

Extra Topic: Matte Vs Glossy

Matte

Early comic books were colored in a very similar way to how a child fills in a coloring book, areas of flat color. Where depth was to be suggested, that was the job of the inker and his treatment of black.

Over several years, this began to change. Colorists would add splashes of a slight color variation to suggest a more three-dimensional image.

It doesn’t take too much effort to achieve this effect, but it still doesn’t look quite realistic. Comics got away with this because the mind’s eye was quite capable of treating the image on the page as a kind of visual shorthand and filling in the blanks.

Going further required an understanding of the differences in the way surfaces look depending on how glossy or matte they are.

Here’s a simple strip of color, which has some additional layers (shown separately underneath the composite image):

If I were to play around with the text, making the letters at the edge progressively just a little narrower, the effect would be even more strongly reinforced – but even without that, it’s easy to see this as a stubby cylinder seen edge-on. I could enhance it even more by creating even the narrowest of ellipses, filling it with base color, and then distorting the edge-image composite to match the edge of the ellipse – so that it was no longer seen perfectly side-on. But that’s not the point of this exercise.

The sequence in which these layers were created is strictly bottom-to-top. That’s why the shadow layers appear to be out of sequence – I did the first two and decided that I needed the third.

You will notice that I only needed one highlight layer. The color used is almost exactly the same as the base color, but lightened a little and increased in saturation just a touch.

There are a couple of lessons that you should take away from this image – the first is that realistic shadows are a lot more work than realistic highlights; when working on faces, a common mistake is to use the highlight color as their base tone and then attempt to add shadows, but this doubles or triples the complexity of the job because they are now asking the shadow layers to do two jobs instead of just one.

The second is that the highlights and shadows extend all the way to the edge of the colored area. That defines matte – there is no ‘shine’.

Gloss

A gloss finish requires a process that is both similar and yet not very similar at all.

There are still five layers, but three of them are now Highlights layers – two of them manipulations of the same highlights layer from the Matt Image and one new one. There’s only one shadow layer, but it actually consists of two copies of the old light shadow layer, edited, and two copies of the old medium layer, edited, and merged together. All of which sounds rather more complicated than it is.

(I forgot to add the checkerboard pattern that signifies transparency on this diagram, sorry – take it as read!)

The lowermost highlights layer uses the first of three different composite modes than can be used to apply a highlight, grain merge. Between atmospheric distortions, light source imperfections, and imperfections in the surface texture of the glossy surface, these always ripple, and while it’s possible to do too much in that respect, it’s quite often the case that more yields a better result (up to a certain threshold when an invisible line gets crossed). As usual, this is a variation on the base color – lighter and a little more saturated (saturation means ‘intensity of color’).

The second highlights layer is a 180-degree rotation of the first. Duplicate, Layer > Transform > Rotate 180°, and position it, and it’s done. Note that it has a different opacity and a different composite mode, producing a far more intense effect on the glossy composite image.

The Shadows layer is next. To create it, I reduced the horizontal scale of the light gray shadow layer to about 75%, duplicated and mirrored the result horizontally, reduced the horizontal scale part that faded to the right to about 2/3 of the one to the left, and positioned them so that they touched but did not overlap. I then did something similar with the middle-gray shadows layer, but I shrunk this even more horizontally, and left the two sides symmetrical. These were positioned so that there was no overlap with the light but no gap between them, either. All four of these layers were then merged and the oblique transformation option used to angle them toward the top right.

To look at the isolated shadows layer, you would think that the darkness of the two dark streaks at the heart of the shadows are fairly close in intensity, with the lighter one simply spread out a little more, but this isn’t actually the case, as you can see in the glossy composite image – but this is not a case of your eyes deceiving you! As with most shadow layers, multiply mode has been used so that the results are another variation on the base color.

Next, I created a third highlights layer from the original matte highlights layer in exactly the same way as the medium gray technique described above. This was squeezed still more, horizontally, and the oblique tool used to get an angle that matched that of the shadows layer. This was positioned so that it lay just to the right of the middle of the light-gray shadows layer. When I use addition mode, it puts a highlight streak through the middle of the bands of shadow, and it’s this that ‘compromises’ the light shadow just a little more than the medium-gray shadow in the composite image.

This technique works really well for creating silk curtains!

Extra Topic: Shiny, Shiny Metal

Polished metal is even more reflective than a gloss finish. The edges of the metal are even more strongly affected than in the gloss example, and this sometimes means compromising the base color towards a lighter, brighter, tone, and then using a colored ‘shadow’ in the actual base color to darken it.

Bur can be very useful for creating the halo around the surface edges.

In addition, a shiny metal finish will reflect shadows and direct light sources. The latter will consist of a very faded outline in the color of the light source and a very bright, almost white, area inside.

In general, the techniques for creating shiny surfaces and glossy surfaces are the same- there’s just more of everything, with the additional layers serving specific purposes..

Additional Bonus Topic: Curved surfaces

I threw the diagram to the right together at the last minute to amplify on a couple of points hinted at, but not stated explicitly, in the preceding explanations. It shows how artists construct the ‘edges’ of curved objects.

As you can see from the circle, each ‘panel’ in the edge-on view is the same size. You would think that this means that they would reflect less light toward the viewer, causing them to darken, but that never looks quite right in practice. The reason for this is that the light reflected may be less, but it’s even more concentrated, so the edges get brighter than the base color.

It can sometimes be effective to inset these brighter areas – moving them slightly toward the center of the ‘rim’; this reinforces the impression that it’s a reflection.

Here’s a very crudely-drawn image (blue and yellow in sympathy for Ukraine) that illustrates these points. Outside of the original ellipse for the head and some guidelines for proportions plus neck and shoulders, this is completely hand-drawn.

The shirt is semi-glossy matte; the body is glossy to the point of being semi-metallic (but with that color, it’s probably plastic).

I used a texture built into Krita for the background, with a dark green layer over the top set to Color and a lighter blue layer on top of that set to Multiply. That particular combination uses the combination of the colors of the two layers for the dark parts of the texture and the lighter color for the highlights (and it’s no coincidence that those are basically the colors of Campaign Mastery, variations on blue and a sort of sea-green, either).

I deliberately chose a very detailed texture to contrast with the smoothness of the figure. It took 15-20 minutes.

Surfaces – concluding thoughts & Post wrap-up

This all barely scratches the surface of these topics – it’s barely enough to get you started. Representing the surfaces of objects in a composition is one of the hardest things to do well – far more complicated than the simple compositions I have demonstrated thus far. It’s also worth noting that the remaining projects avoid fancy object finishes, simply because they are so hard!

In the next part of this series, I will tackle a project that is even more complex than the relatively simple Blue Monkey – because this will require the creation of layers of shadow from elements being composited. And, as I’ve pointed out above, shadows are a lot more complicated than most people realize.

For a long time, I’ve been working on a Lifestyle / Wealth system for my superhero game system, which is loosely based on the Hero System (4th ed).

The rules needed to be simpler than the official rules, less able to offer benefits to PCs and NPCs beyond the value that would normally be associated with the cost of purchasing a given lifestyle, and both more abstract and simpler to translate into practical benefits and impacts on the game. On top of that, it needed to be able to cope with individuals from everything from Low Fantasy to High Space Opera – from Conan or Middle-earth to the ruler of an interstellar, interdimensional Empire.

That’s a pretty tall order, which is why it has taken me many years to find a satisfactory solution. But the delay has been worth it, as I have finally come up with a system that is truly universal in scope, and both practical in application and intuitive.

Socio-Economic Level (SEL)

This is a concept from old-school Traveler, where it was often called Social Level or Tech Level or Cultural level, but the definition has been streamlined quite a bit.

An increase in SEL is defined as occurring when the general personal resources previously reserved for a broad social class become available to a lower broad social class.

The implementation of that definition will be demonstrated later in the article, for now a simple example will suffice.

At the base SEL, having personal transport is defined as Lifestyle 6 (and what that actually means is also something to be covered later). That, in turn, is an upper middle class or lower upper class lifestyle. What we are talking about here is not just a horse, but horses and a carriage or something similar – an actual vehicle.

SEL base+1 therefore occurs when members of the middle-class can afford and obtain a personal vehicle and generally do so. That’s Victorian-era, in my book, though some might argue the early 20th century and rise of the automobile.

I think that the automobile brought the motor vehicle into reach of the lower class over a twenty or thirty-year per period. So that would define SEL base+2 as 1910-1940.

The next stage of socioeconomic development is for it to become common to have more than one personal vehicle – two-plus car families – and for the possession of at least one personal vehicle to be almost ubiquitous. That’s 1970s or 80s until now. But that’s a big step, possibly even +2 SEL (allowing an intervening transition period). SEL base+3 would thus be 1941-1975, and SEL base +4 would be 1976-2022 (and beyond).

Personal Vehicle ownership is not the only yardstick; this is just one example that I can offer with limited explanation without getting too far ahead of myself.

Suggested SELs

Most fantasy campaigns will only need 1 or two SELs but High Fantasy might need a third.

Modern-campaigns:

• SEL 1 = Medieval
• SEL 2 = Victorian
• SEL 3 = 1910-1940 (The Pulp Era)
• SEL 4 = 1941-1975 (The Atomic Age / Age Of Spaceflight)
• SEL 5 = 1976-X (The Digital Age)

Sci-Fi campaigns need to extend this list further:

• SEL 6 = Commercialization Of Space Travel
• SEL 7 = Industrialization Of Space / Interplanetary Colonization
• SEL 8 = Interstellar Travel / Colonization
• SEL 9 = Fast Interstellar Travel / Galactic Civilization
• SEL 10 = Superfast Interstellar Travel, Intergalactic / Interdimensional Societies

SELs work as a concept by abstracting just what resources the ordinary citizen can possess and correlating that with an unstated multitude of social, economic, and technical factors. By defining an increase in the SEL as the achievement of a certain level of increase in the lifestyle of the Middle Class, such that they can now obtain the more-modern equivalents of lifestyle perqs that were previously only available to the Rich, i.e. using a relative value, it greatly simplifies the definition of subsequent SELs.

We aren’t quite at the level of Space Hotels yet – commercial visits to Low Earth Orbit have only just become possible – so we are at the cusp of SEL 6 but aren’t quite there yet, on the scale above. GMs are free to tweak or refine these suggestions as they deem appropriate for their campaign settings.

Some might want to define intermediate points within a specific SEL to provide greater nuance and precision. SEL 5.8 is probably where we are now; SEL 5.9 will be achieved when true space flight is a commercial reality, indicating that the transition to SEL 6 is underway.

Other GMs might feel that the Industrialization of space – Asteroid mining and colonies on the planets – are a fairly short leap from what’s been defined as SEL 6, and “fold” what was SEL 7 into SEL 6 as a result. This, of course, bumps the higher SELs – 8, 9, 10 – down by one.

Space is a lot bigger than this geometric expansion suggests; there could be several stages inserted in between SEL 8 and SEL 9, increasing the latter. But it’s very hard to define such without getting into the politics of an interstellar civilization, which has too many permutations to be easily classified in general terms. So this is something that can only be done at an individual, campaign-by-campaign, level.

Lifestyle (L)

Each SEL contains 13 levels of Lifestyle.

These are defined, within that SEL, as:

0. Destitute
1. Shelter
2. Personal Possessions
3. Furniture
4. Tiny / Poor Dwelling
5. Personal Infrastructure
6. Personal Transport
7. Moderate Dwelling
8. Personal Services
9. Large Dwelling / Small Estate
10. Commercial Transport
11. Epic Dwelling / Large Estate
12. Mega-rich

It will be noted that each of these is a fairly generic label that means little without the context of the SEL.

• If you are “at” a given Lifestyle within an SEL, that means that you can afford one of whatever the defining trait of that Lifestyle is.
• It means that you can purchase something from Lifestyle +1 with some sort of Multi-year commitment.
• It means that you can make one purchase per year from the next Lifestyle level down, possibly with a short-term (1-5 years) financial commitment.
• It means that you can make up to five purchases per year from two lifestyle levels down from disposable income / personal wealth.
• It means that you have effectively unlimited ability to purchase from the category three lifestyle levels down, subject to GM approval and NOT sufficient for commercial trade.
• It means that you can operate a personal business manufacturing or trading in objects from four lifestyle levels down without external economic support.

I’ll get into “external economic support” under organizations, a little later. Right now, this is all focused at the personal level.

Documenting SEL-L combinations

There are two ways of documenting SEL-L combinations. The first is “SEL – L”, in which the Base SEL of the game system is defined as “1”. So “3 – 6” is “Lifestyle 6” in “Base SEL +2”.

The second is to write L# (SEL) – again with a base SEL of 1 or 0 (GM’s choice, but make sure everyone knows it). The advantage to this is that you can use a non-mathematical description of SEL instead, and the meaning becomes immediately clear. “L 6 (1940-1970)” means “Lifestyle 6 within the SEL defined as 1940-1970.”

Knowing what “Lifestyle 6” means within that SEL, according to the descriptions given above, this defines in one short line exactly what resources the character has, what they can purchase, and what their economic discretion is.

“Lifestyle 5”, for example, means that you can:

• Buy a personal vehicle with a multi-year financial commitment.
• Buy one piece of personal infrastructure per year – a major appliance, for example.
• Buy five tiny / poor dwellings per year, or their equivalent (matching furniture, for example, or structural repairs to a dwelling). Most likely, you would own one and be able to afford 4 acts of enhancement / maintenance, annually. “Enhancement” would include one piece of high-quality furniture.
• Buy as much low-quality furniture as you want, for personal use.

Base Lifestyle (L=2)

Unless characters alter their lifestyle, they are assumed to have a Lifestyle level of 2 as default. That’s a homeless person with a shopping trolley, a handful of personal possessions and a tent, sleeping bag, or cardboard box. If they are lucky, they may be able to obtain a piece of new furniture every few years, or find secure but low-quality accommodations that they can rent.

Obviously, expectations and interpretations will need to vary with location. What may be unaffordable in a state capital can be readily affordable in a small rural community.

About 15 years ago, for example, I calculated what it would cost to buy a 3-bedroom dwelling in my home town with a 20-year mortgage (assuming that I had the deposit), and found that I could not only afford such a purchase, but that I would have enough left over to fly to- and from- Sydney each week to run RPGs, while otherwise maintaining my existing lifestyle. I would need to stay with friends while here of course, and I didn’t have the deposit – but it was theoretically possible with even a relatively modest lottery win. A substantial lottery win, of course, would fund the purchase of a similar dwelling here in the state Capital.

The GM is therefore required to make allowances for context in his interpretations of what the lifestyle permits or doesn’t permit.

Cost of Base Lifestyle

Like the Hero System, the Zenith-3 rules framework is a point-based system.

• Standard Hero System: 4+SEL points buys Lifestyle 2 within the SEL.
• Zenith-3 Rules: (2+SEL) x 2 points buys Lifestyle 2 within the SEL.
• GMs should ensure that the SEL is appropriate to the society that the character will have access to, in-game. It doesn’t matter if the character is the prince of an intergalactic empire unless they can access those resources reliably and regularly – if they can’t, their SEL is whatever is appropriate to the culture they are living (and adventuring) in.
• If appropriate in-game, the GM can temporarily restrict access to normal Lifestyle. Adventures in which this is a factor (not just a feature) should be rewarded with an extra experience point.

A little later, I have an adaption of the system to suit non-points systems like D&D / Pathfinder.

Improving Lifestyle

This is also done by spending character points and should reflect a character’s changing circumstances in-game. If those circumstances are intended to be only temporary, no adjustment is necessary but the character will get extra XP for adventures / game sessions in which this constitutes a handicap or benefit, as described above.

The following tables describe how much it will cost to go from the default (L=2) to a different Lifestyle level:

Standard Hero System
SEL		1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10	+1
Δ L	– 2	– 2	– 4	– 5	– 7	– 8	– 10	– 12	– 14	– 16	– 18	– 2
	– 1	– 1	– 2	– 3	– 4	– 5	– 6	– 7	– 8	– 9	– 10	– 1
	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0
	1	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10	+1
	2	2	4	7	8	12	15	17	20	22	25	+5
	3	3	6	10	12	18	22	25	30	33	40	+5
	4	4	9	14	16	24	29	34	39	44	49	+5
	5	5	10	15	20	25	30	35	40	45	50	+5
	6	6	11	16	21	26	31	36	41	46	51	+5
	7	7	12	17	22	27	32	37	42	47	52	+5
	8	8	13	18	23	28	33	38	43	48	53	+5
	9	9	14	19	24	29	34	39	44	49	54	+5
	10	10	15	20	25	30	35	40	45	50	55	+5

Zenith-3 Rules:
SEL		1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10	+1
Δ L	– 2	– 3	– 6	– 8	– 10	– 12	– 15	– 18	– 20	– 24	– 27	– 3
	– 1	– 2	– 3	– 5	– 6	– 8	– 10	– 11	– 12	– 14	– 15	– 1
	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0
	1	1	3	5	6	7	9	10	12	15	25	+5
	2	3	6	10	15	20	25	30	35	40	50	+10
	3	4	10	20	25	30	35	40	45	50	60	+10
	4	6	15	25	32	36	45	50	60	65	70	+10
	5	7	20	30	35	38	49	53	63	68	75	+10
	6	9	21	31	37	40	51	57	66	72	80	+10
	7	10	22	32	39	44	53	61	70	75	85	+10
	8	12	23	33	41	47	55	65	75	80	90	+10
	9	13	24	34	43	50	60	70	80	85	95	+10
	10	15	25	35	45	55	65	75	85	90	100	+15

For an SEL of 4, going from an L of 2 to 4 (a difference of +2) will cost 8 points within the standard Hero System and 15 points in the Zenith-3 rules. If the character later wants to increase this to 6, and the GM agrees that this is reasonable, he should subtract the amount spent so far (getting to 4) and apply that to a δL of +4 to determine how much extra he needs to pay. Standard Hero System: 16-8=8, so an additional 8 character points. Zenith-3 system: 32-15=17, so an additional 17 character points.

Beyond 12

What lies beyond Lifestyle 12? Well, there are two answers to that, depending on who’s asking and why.

A GM is free to expand the Lifestyle list beyond 12 entries, though this should not be necessary. Any such expansion is most likely to occur at the upper end of the scale, pushing the Mega-rich higher up the scale.

In order for a character to advance his lifestyle beyond 12, the GM needs to give serious thought as to what that means, in terms of game impact. Except in unusual cases (anything’s possible), though, it should be impossible. Instead, the character needs to bring about the social, economic and technical infrastructure necessary to advance the SEL of the world around them. This, in turn, reduces their lifestyle to a lower value within the new SEL, enabling them to once again begin climbing the ladder to the “new 12”. This will become clearer in subsequent sections.

Depreciating Lifestyle and SEL

If a life of vagabondage is appropriate for a character, they can depreciate or reduce their lifestyle. This returns character construction points to the character. The more advanced the SEL, the more the character is giving up, so the payment received in compensation also rises. Lifestyle cannot be reduced below the minimum level save by relocating to a different environment in which their former destitute state corresponds to a higher lifestyle score in a lower SEL.

In theory, more primitive societies than “medieval” can be assigned SEL scores below base. This may be appropriate for some campaigns or even specific societies within a campaign.

The Wealth Table

The heart of the system is detailed in the table below, which covers SELs from 1 to 6.

SEL:	1	2	3	4	5	6
L:	0	0	0	0	0	0
	1	1	1	1	1	1
	2
	3	2
	4
	5	3	2
	6
	7	4
	8
	9	5	3	2
	10
	11
	12	6
		7	4
		8
		9	5	3	2
		10
		11
		12	6
			7	4
			8
			9	5	3	2
			10
			11
			12	6
				7	4
				8
				9	5	3
				10
				11
				12	6
					7	4
					8
					9	5
					10
					11
					12	6
						7
						8
						9
						10
						11
						12

The table can be summed up rather more briefly. When the SEL rises,

• Lifestyle 1 or 2 becomes Lifestyle 1 at the new SEL
• Lifestyle 3 or 4 becomes Lifestyle 2 at the new SEL
• Lifestyle 5 or 6 becomes Lifestyle 3 at the new SEL
• Lifestyle 7 or 8 becomes Lifestyle 4 at the new SEL
• Lifestyle 9, 10 or 11 becomes Lifestyle 5 at the new SEL
• Lifestyle 12 becomes Lifestyle 6 at the new SEL.

These reflect the basic definition of an SEL, in which what was expensive and rare becomes one step more commonplace and available.

The Generic Wealth Table

The table above becomes inordinately lengthy and hard to read with increasing SEL, and there isn’t a lot of point to it; it’s so rare to need to compare a lifestyle within one SEL with one that is more than one SEL removed that the whole thing is far better represented with a more general form.

SEL:	N	+1
L:	0
	1	1
	2
	3	2
	4
	5	3
	6
	7	4
	8
	9	5
	10
	11
	12	6

In fact, the only thing the larger table is good for (aside from comparing very different combinations of Lifestyle and SEL are explaining the whole thing – which is the virtue that made it worth presenting here.

Income & Expenses

A key benefit of the abstraction used by this system is that it completely junks questions of income and expenses and instead couches the whole question in terms of what the character can do in-game. Every previous attempt at creating workable Lifestyle rules has foundered on this problem, one way or another, so this is a Big Deal in my book.

Just remember that every Lifestyle comes with the assumptions, income, expenses, benefits, and responsibilities, that are implied by having the spending ability defined for that Lifestyle. What that actually means to the character is up to the owner, with guidance from the GM; there could be many combinations of income, obligations, debts, and expenses that boil down to the same bottom line.

Tracking Income & Expenses

The restrictions on what a character can do with a given lifestyle focus on major purchases; as soon as the purchases reach the relatively trivial, the system blatantly ignores any restrictions beyond “No commercial quantities”.

What does “no commercial quantities” mean, anyway?

In practical terms, it means that you can’t buy as many of an item as it would take to use them as the stock for a successful retail business.

That doesn’t prohibit a business from doing so, as I describe in Organizations, below. This is all about what an individual can do.

Back to the question of tracking those significant purchases. In general, unless the character abuses the requirements, the GM should simply hand-wave such purchases, or better yet (because of their significance) make them a plot point or even a whole subplot for the character.

If that sounds boring, (and some would find it so), use the resulting subplot as a plot vehicle to deliver something more interesting. “You’re out looking at French Cabinets, when you happen to spot Count Despicable across the street…”

If it becomes necessary to track acquisitions, treat it the way most people do in real life when something like this happens. “You find that you can’t afford a replacement X. You have three choices: try to fix the old one well enough that it will limp along for a while longer, find a way to do without one for a while, or borrow against next year’s money – remembering that interest means that this will ultimately cost you more than the value of the X.”

This puts the hard decision back onto the character’s owner, injects a little realism into the situation, and warns the character that they are at the limits of their purchasing power for the time being.

It’s important to realize that these are not calendar schedules, no matter how much it might seem so from what has been described earlier; “5 purchases in a year” doesn’t mean that those five can’t all happen in a short period of time, or that on some calendar date the capacity magically resets. It doesn’t mean that if you don’t use all five in a year, that you can make more than five purchases the following year, either. Such limits are guidelines for when the purchasing limits should become story-relevant, as described.

Practical Tracking

Let’s say that the limits are 5 Item-X’s in a year. The practical way to track this is to break the term ‘year’ down into smaller units – you want something that is larger than “5”. There are three choices, and they all mean roughly the same thing:

• 12 months = 1 year. So 12/5 = 1 item every 2½ months, roughly.
• 52 weeks = approx 1 year. So 52/5 = 1 item every 10 weeks or so.
• 365 days = approx 1 year (most of the time). So 365/5 = 1 item every 73 days.

I don’t like the third choice – it’s too precise. either of the first two are fine.

When the character decides to purchase an item-X, that’s a 2½-month or 10 week commitment. That’s when the item will be paid for. Depending on the social and economic infrastructure around them, and their Lifestyle level, the character may have some means whereby they get to use the item immediately, or they may have to wait.

If, a week later, they decide they need a second item-X, no problem; that simply extends their commitment out another 2½ months to 5 months (technically, less one week, but that’s inconvenient, so ignore it).

The character can continue to shop until they reach their limit (5 items), or a commitment of a year – then comes the conversation above. If they can hold off making another purchase for about 2½ months, their capacity expands by one, so they can buy another item-X, no problem at all.

It’s a rolling limit – “No more than 5 in any one-year period without financial impact” would be a more accurate statement.

Because these are considered to be significant purchases, the GM should make a plot point of them, inserting reference to the purchase into his adventure, either on the day, or within the next game session. And that’s all the tracking that he should need.

From time to time, a stroke of fortune may permit a purchase that doesn’t count against these limits. This automatically makes that stroke of fortune a plot point.

Organizations

Organizations come in two varieties: businesses and non-businesses. Both are handled in the same way by this system.

Organizations are created by characters investing character points into them. This permits the organization to purchase a given lifestyle, which reflects what the organization can purchase. Because multiple characters combine investments in an organization, that lifestyle can and will be, in many cases, larger than the lifestyles of the donors. Some wealthy characters may have fingers in many different pies.

The relationship of an individual to an organization is used to justify that character’s purchase of a personal lifestyle. The organization doesn’t contribute to that lifestyle. So, why should a character invest in an organization?

First, “Membership in X” or “Stockholder in X” or “Owner of X” or any variation, can justify the purchase of certain perqs that come with the relationship between the character and the organization.

“Employee of X” is often a 0-point or -1-point purchase – the latter indicating that the obligations and inconveniences outweigh the benefits.

The size of the organization matters – every power of ten is a “free” +1 to the business’ lifestyle.

• 1-9 employees/members: +0
• 10-99 employees/members: +1
• 100-999 employees/members: +2
• 1,000-9,999 employees/members: +3
• 10,000-99,999 employees/members: +4
• 100,000-999,999 employees/members: +5
• 1,000,000-9,999,999 employees/members: +6
• 10,000,000-99,999,999 employees/members: +7

This doesn’t permit an organization to exceed the L=12 limit. But it can make it cheaper to get there – a LOT cheaper.

But such organizations don’t spring into life from thin air – there has to be a justifiable growth pattern, and one that the GM considers reasonable.

A character starts a business – and invests enough points in it that they will have 10,000 employees. Since that’s a “+4” rating above, that means that the initial lifestyle of the organization has to be L=4. And that, in turn, qualifies for up to +4 to the Lifestyle of the organization. The more of this bonus that the organization uses for increasing it’s power and prosperity, the less is left for growing the business. This follows a 1, 2, 3, 5, 8 pattern, cumulative from year to year.

Diverting +1 of the potential +4 into growth means that the organization will grow one step in the next year, another step 2 years after that, a third step 3 years later again, and so on.

Diverting +2 of the potential +4 into growth means that the organization will grow one step in the next year (after the 1-point is subtracted from the 2 allocated, there isn’t enough for the next step in growth). In their second year, they grow a second step, and in their third year, they grow a third. Three years later, they can grow to a fourth step up in size. And so on.

Diverting +3 of the potential +4 into growth means that the organization will grow two steps in their first year (1 point and 2 points), one step in their second (3 points), but will have to wait until their fourth year to grow again (with one point left over toward the next stage of growth).

In practice, these diversions are varied from year to year; investors will only be patient for so long before demanding a return on their investment.

Infrastructure and setup needs either have to be accommodated within the purchases available from the corporate lifestyle or have to be achieved with a temporary reduction in corporate lifestyle – so if you grow too fast, the organization becomes vulnerable.

In addition, each year, the GM should roll 4-d6 and add the result to get the “effective” lifestyle of the organization – and use the net result as a plot point, too. A business that is destitute is going to close its doors. A business reduced to a lifestyle of “1” will be vulnerable to hostile takeover. A business with a lifestyle of “2” is stagnating, and will shrink by one point of lifestyle in the following year (on top of the annual adjustment).

Ultimately, though, none of this matters – what you are buying with the organization is a something to occupy a role within your story, and the GM should treat it that way.

D&D / Pathfinder

Adapting these rules to suit a non-points-buy system like D&D is not particularly difficult. It’s a problem that comes in two parts: Initial Personal Lifestyle and Progressive Lifestyle Improvement (i.e. you accumulate spending power as the game continues).

There are five sources of “character points” to be spent on a lifestyle.

1. Initial Lifestyle Allocation

All characters start with Lifestyle 2 within the appropriate SEL for free. The character can choose to increase or reduce this, but increases have to be paid for in ‘build points’ obtained as below. Decreases can be redeemed for substitute benefits. Purchases should be made using the Standard Hero System scale.

2. Reduced Stats

For every reduction of 1 in a primary stat for the character class, an individual gets 2 additional build points.

For every reduction of 1 in another stat, an individual gets 1 additional build point. This includes taking a permanent reduction in initial hit points.

This suggests that characters used to an opulent lifestyle will be weaker or spoiled – not as hardened as those who have had to scramble for a living, which seems appropriate to me.

3. Foregone Attack Bonus / Reduced saving throws

Taking -1 on your attack bonus is worth 2 build points. Reducing one of your saving throws by 1 is worth 1 build point.

In terms of a character’s starting Lifestyle, that’s it. A generous GM may permit some other reduction for specific characters, but these should not be automatically assumed; they need to be justified by the character that the owner intends to run..

In particular, taking on some form of obligation should be rewarded with lifestyle points – the more onerous the obligations, the more points it should be worth. However, the value of obligations should be reduced for every benefit that the character receives – so a Prince might have 10 points in obligations but 4 points in benefits. The exact scale of these values depends too substantially on game setting, so beyond the general principle, no real guidance can be given.

The remaining sources of Build Points are for use in-game to reflect the purchasing power that successful characters will acquire from successful adventuring.

4. In-Game Rewards

From time to time, when the GM feels it is warranted for some reason other than earned wealth, the GM may gift a character with a bonus to lifestyle. These may be temporary or more-or-less permanent, and will often come with ‘strings’ attached (usually obligations accepted by the character).

5. Earned Wealth

But, most of the time, the lifestyle value should simply be adjusted to reflect the earned wealth of the character.

This implies that a major outlay of some kind will reduce a character’s Lifestyle.

Lifestyle that comes from earned wealth also usually has strings attached, in the form of Social Expectations. These are restrictions on the behavior that is considered socially acceptable; failure to satisfy these expectations will often result in penalties or sanctions of some kind, which can effectively lower lifestyle.

Major outlays may reduce lifestyle, as stated, but this does NOT reduce the social expectations; depending on the circumstances, it can increase them.

Make the lifestyle an indication of the character’s in-game circumstances, and reflect it in the story-lines of the campaign. NPCs will react and respond differently to characters with an increasing Lifestyle.

GMs may also choose to permit a different ‘apparent lifestyle’ to that genuinely appropriate for the character’s circumstances. NPCs will react to the former and not the latter – but if the gap is significant, there can be complications from actually claiming the privileges of a higher or lower true lifestyle. If someone who looks lower middle-class suddenly flashes a large bankroll for a purchase that should be beyond such an individual, there is sure to be gossip and possibly suspicion. “Where’d you get that money, Johnny? Who’d you steal it from?”

Other Game Systems

Almost every game system will map onto one of the two options provided – either with some translation mechanism to exchange character points for ‘character points’ as used for the Lifestyle system, or some equivalent of the D&D system.

There may even be times when the GM considers the latter more appropriate than the former, even if the game is built on a points-buy system. So think about the mode of implementation.

In-game expectations should also be taken into account – for Traveler, or Star Wars, a higher SEL (free) might be appropriate.

Above all – this system is not intended to bind GMs or Campaigns or Characters; it’s intended to help define them. Use it as a tool to that end.

In the first part of this series, I detailed the compositing modes that I use most frequently, along with a few other hints and techniques. The second part detailed project number 1, taking a black and white photograph (grayscale) and adding unconventional colors to transform the image into a blue-skinned alien on some strange other world. As originally conceived, that post would in fact have contained no less than five projects, but it takes so much longer when you stop and explain every step (and any false starts), and explore any relevant side-issues (such as how to build up realistic skin, or how to do eyes), that I was only half-way through that project when I realized that time would not permit that approach.

The revised plan is:

• Part 1: Fundamentals
• Part 2:
  • Project 1, An Alien Woman
  • Extra Topic: Skin
  • Extra Topic: Eyes
  • Extra Topic: Resizing Images
  • Extra Topic: The Sharpening Trick
• Part 3 (this post):
  • Project 2, Aging an image
  • Extra Topic: Desaturation Options
  • Extra Topic: Four Adventurer’s Club Examples
• Part 4 (still to come)
  • Project 3, A Blue Monkey
  • Extra Topic: Image Extension
  • Extra Topic: Hair and Fur Headaches
  • Extra Topic: Starfield Trickery
  • Extra Topic: Matt Vs Glossy
  • Extra Topic: Shiny, Shiny Metal
• Part 5 (still to come):
  • Project 4, A Sci-Fi Buddhist
  • Extra Topic: Making and Moving Shadows
  • Extra Topic: My Krita Layout
  • Extra Topic: Working with textures
  • Extra Topic: A little color theory
• Part 6 (still to come):
  • Project 5, A Fantasy Citadel
  • Extra Topic: Working with fonts
  • Extra Topic: Tools and Tricks
  • Extra Topic: Brush Tips (for Krita)
• Part 7 (still to come):
  • Project 6: A Sci-Fi variant Citadel
  • Extra Topic: The Layer Menu
  • Extra Topic: The Filters Menu
  • Extra Topic: Simple Image Transforms
• Part 8 (still to come):
  • Project 7: Maps 101
  • Project 8: Map Composite
  • Extra Topic: Advanced Masking
  • Extra Topic: The “Image” Menu
  • Extra Topic: Complicated Image Transforms
  • Extra Topic: Noisy Image Cleanups
  • Project 9: Original Maps using a fantastic Compositing trick

As you can see, I’ve put a lot more thought into this than I had when preparing part 2 of the series – I was scrambling a bit just to get that finished. And thinking about the many extra topics that I wanted to cover along the way and the most logical way to structure them also served to inform the structure; to avoid overloading any one part of the series, I ended up adding a couple of projects that I was tossing up about for copyright reasons to the list.

As always, all this is subject to change without notice – this is a statement of intent, not a guarantee of delivery!

There’s a lot to cover in each remaining part of the series, so let’s get busy!

A Preamble

As a bit of a preamble, I want to start by sharing four images from the Adventurer’s Club campaign with you. All three are heavily edited from their original sources.

This is a composite of a great many different images and parts of images.

• The base image wasn’t quite this cream-colored but is otherwise genuine.
• The stamps are genuine but were separate images.
• The different postmarks are also genuine but from separate files.
• The “Registered Mail” mark is also genuine but from an eighth file.
• The typewritten name and address was created and added. A careful use of blur was added and faded to create the impression that someone had typed the address and then gone over it a second time with the same typewriter because it wasn’t dark enough the first time. Look at this closeup:

• The shadow was also created and added.
• If you look very closely, you’ll see texture within the paper of the envelope that gives the impression that it has been handled. This was done with a very subtle shadow addition and an equally-subtle lightening of the paper to one side of the shadow. You can see it more clearly in this closeup:

• Finally, there was more lightness added to the bottom edge of the envelope – it’s subtle, but it gives a far stronger sense that this is a three-dimensional object.

Next, I want to draw your attention to this rather more distressed padded envelope.

• The padded envelope image is real and is the base image. It was slightly color-shifted and contrast-enhanced. It was also rotated in three different dimensions so that it was no longer seen as being ‘flat’ against the screen but against a table surface.
• The dark blue background was added to make the envelope color “pop” a little more. It fades to black toward the top of the image, suggesting an increase in distance between that part of the background and the light source. This accords with the apparent light source of the envelope.
• There is a very subtle shadow underneath the envelope. It was shaped and distorted to give the impression that it was lying flat on a surface.

Water stains and grease stains were added.

• Three separate coffee stains were added. These are actually “ink spot” clip art that was color adjusted, rotated in 3D to match the envelope, and split into two duplicate layers – one very transparent and one for the edges of the stains. This permitted them to overlap.
• In the same “coffee” color, two or three individual coffee-cup stains were added after rotation to match.
• The top edge was lightened even though that doesn’t match indicated light because it permitted a deeper shadow on the part of the bag right next to it, making the bag look like it held content.
• The bottom edge was lightened slightly and desaturated to give the impression that it was at a different angle relative to the light source, again giving the impression that the bag held content of some thickness.

As before, closeups show these edits in detail. Before I started, the envelope was pristine, though it showed the texture we were looking for (bands and dimples), even though the cause of such texture (bubble-wrap) would not be invented for many years – a plain envelope simply didn’t scream “protective envelope” on casual inspection, and that was what the plot called for. This was a case of needing to yield historical accuracy in order to better communicated with the 20th-century players.
.

Third, I offer up this image of the George Medal. The objective here was to make them look ‘as new’, i.e. as issued, because that was only a short time ago in the pulp campaign.

In many ways, this was quite straightforward; in others, it was quite complicated. There were none of the tricks with Composite Modes; this was all masks and dismembering the source images.

There were two sources, both of different scales. One of them had a clear image of the faces of the medals but was too dark; the other had clear highlights but the faces of the medal were quite worn and the medal was quite battered and misshapen. On source had a single side of the ribbon in good condition, the rest was badly frayed; the other had another side in good condition but the rest was badly faded and discolored.

So half of one side of the ribbon came from source 1, the other side came from source two, and after compositing them I did a mirror image and shaded the image slightly so that it looked just a little different from the first combined ribbon. The front face of the medal was a composite of the too-dark image, with brightness and contrast enhanced, and highlights from the second source; this was reversed with respect to the rear side of the medal.

The results, so far as I am concerned, are a seamless composite. You literally could not tell without a forensic examination of the image data that these were not a real par of photographs of pristinely-preserved military decorations.

Last is this distressed, torn, and faded clothing label with laundry mark (I’m especially proud of it).

• The base image was the texture of the cloth. It was slightly distorted to give the impression that it was being viewed at a slight angle and not perfectly flat to the “camera”.
• The shadowed warp was added to the texture by using four layers – two partial texture layers and an airbrushed shadow running at an angle. There was also a pale lightening layer to improve the contrast; different sizes of airbrush at different opacity settings meant that the lightness came on more gradually on the bottom part of the cloth, emphasizing the shape in the z dimension..
• A mask was created with a ragged edge – I forget from what – and used to erase the part of the cloth that was not wanted. Until it was applied, the cloth texture filled the image.
• A different mask was created (based on the first) and applied to a copy of the base image to yield the threads around the edges.
• These were then merged and similar warping was used to suggest parts of the edge were hanging loosely from the main body of the cloth.
• The text was created and distorted to match the warping of the cloth. I wanted to create the impression that there was a fold in the cloth when the watermark was applied.
• A symbol was created and the same technique applied.
• A copy of the base image was used to ensure that the watermark was only visible on those parts of the texture that were supposed raised, creating the texture within the text.
• The letters were then faded because this was supposed to be a temporary laundry mark according to the plot. “Ontario” is clearly visible, but the smaller text below it is very hard to make out. This was very intentional!
• A blurred background (brown) was created, and a stiff black cardboard panel added in front of it – this is the only part of the image that wasn’t quite satisfactory.
• A black shadow was added and carefully shaped to suggest that the scrap of cloth was not perfectly flat on the cardboard. That background is so dark that it’s very hard to actually see it, but it is – and it creates a subconscious impression, even though you aren’t sure why it feels three-dimensional.

.

Viewing it reduced in size to fit Campaign Mastery’s display footprint doesn’t do the image justice. Here’s a closeup:

If you look really closely at the closeup, you can also see the occasional thread from the dark gray-brown inner lining of the cheap brown suit from which the watermark was inadvertently torn.

These examples show how much can be done with the simple techniques demonstrated thus far.

So now it’s time to up the ante and tackle a project that takes things a step or two further. This project wasn’t originally part of the plan, but it should have been!

Project 2, Aging an image

This is basically six sets of layers that total more than 18 layers. From bottom to top:

• 1: Background
• 2 & 3: Desaturated Main Image, possibly erased at the edges to create tears in the paper. Copies of the same erase layer will be needed for each of the layers above as well, letting the background show through. Advanced technique: “tear” one corner from the image and position it, offset and slightly rotated, close to where it came from. Don’t forget a border of very pale gray.
• 4 & 5:. A color layer in a slightly-gray very pale yellow, erased as above, in Color mode.
• 6 & 7: Non-desaturated Main Image, erased as above, and faded to an opacity of a handful of percent – 5% or less. You want the slightest hint of color tweak, nothing more.
• 8-11: A copy of the desaturated Main Image, erased as above, in Multiply mode, merged with a copy of the desaturated Main Image erased as above, in Addition mode. The Multiply mode will be set to a low opacity, the addition mode layer may have any opacity that looks right. It may be necessary to treat different areas of the image separately, with different opacity levels for both layers, using masks to split them up – and don’t forget to then apply a blur layer underneath! The background within the ‘photograph’ should generally be lighter than the foreground.
• 12-17: An extract from a copy of the main image removing the lightest 1/3 of the original and splitting the rest into dark areas and moderate levels (this is done with the Similar Color selection tool and the delete button on your keyboard. Erase as above. You may need to blur the result slightly. This then gets merged with a darker yellow-brown Color layer, and is then set to Multiply mode and the opacity adjusted.
• 18+: A set of ‘distress’ layers which add crease / fold marks in a slightly desaturated version of the pale yellow color used earlier. A copy, offset a pixel or two, above this layer in a suitable merge mode, and a desaturated and slightly darkened version offset a couple of pixels in the other direction and blurred very slightly, can give these “wrinkles” a subtle 3-D effect. Control this with opacity of the different layers. As a bonus, add stains, scratches, etc, with additional layers.

The result should be a photo that looks like one of those very old ones from the Wild West, all yellowed with age.

I thought about illustrating this structure with the end product of project 1 but at the last minute decided to use a more appropriate image.

I’ve created this base image by combining the foreground of

with

as a backdrop.

This is the resulting base image:

Desaturation Options

Next, I need to work out which Desaturation Mode I’m going to use. There are seven options – six of them through the Modify > Desaturate dialogue, and one that results from the Modify > HSV panel, sliding the ‘saturation’ all the way to the left. The results can be quite different as the set of images below shows:

I’ve used the technical names for the two Luminosity Desaturation Modes, but I never think of them that way – I simply consider them “Luminosity 1” and “Luminosity 2”.

At first glance, there’s not a lot of difference between them, with a couple of obvious exceptions. But look closely at the face. Look at how easily you can distinguish between sky and mountain. Look at the contrast in the name of the tavern. If you need to, click on the image above to open a much larger version of the image.

Typically, I have different favorites for different parts of the image.

• For the mountains, I like the Lightness result. That is also my preference for the smaller sign below the walkway of the Yellow Rose.
• For the buildings, I mostly like the Saturation Slider. But for the lettering of the “The Yellow Rose” and a few other highlight areas, I want the brightness of the Average desaturation mode.
• For the face, I can make a case for Minimum mode (the shading makes him look angrier and more villainous); for Maximum mode (the washed-out loss of detail in the face gives the impression that the photographer has just set off a colossal photo flash of the explosive-powder type that was in use back then; and for the HSV Slider (most realistic skin tones) by a narrow margin. I decide to go with the HSV
• A quirk of the process and the original colors has the sky turn out darker than the ground. That’s obviously technically accurate, but it looks wrong. I like the way that you can see texture in the ground in the Minimum-mode desaturation; so that gives me a minimum acceptable darkness for the sky if it is to be lighter. The sky is completely washed out in the Average-mode desaturation; the next lightest is the Maximum mode which is definitely lighter and only just distinguishable from the white of the border. It is, perhaps, just a little too light. The optimum answer would seem to be a composite between the Maximum mode and a reduced-opacity version of the HSV-Slider desaturation.

So my first step is to break the image up. In fact, I break it up into 8 pieces (including two copies of the sky), each in a separate layer. And, of course, I still have the original base image safely set aside:

When I apply the individual desaturation models that I have selected, and add a white frame, I end up with this image;

This preserves the best aspects of all the composition modes. But note that most of the time, one desaturation mode will be satisfactory, though which one will vary from image to image.

Anyway, with this desaturated base layer in place, it’s time to implement the process that I described earlier.

• 1: Background

I initially thought about using a wood-grain texture, but with the photograph becoming principally yellow, I thought that might not stand out the way I would want. So I’ve chosen instead a tablecloth pattern that seems era-appropriate, provided by Gaby Stein via Pixabay

But I’m going to rotate it slightly and then enlarge it to fit the size so that the photograph and the tablecloth have different alignments.

What you can see to the right is the result (reduced dramatically in size). I intend to leave incorporating this until the very last step, as it would complicate processing the photograph.

Eventually, I’m going to give the photograph a slight rotation in the opposite direction, leaving one torn-off corner correctly oriented.

• 2 & 3: Desaturated Main Image, possibly erased at the edges to create tears in the paper. Copies of the same erase layer will be needed for each of the layers above as well, letting the background show through. Advanced technique: “tear” one corner from the image and position it, offset and slightly rotated, close to where it came from. Don’t forget a border of very pale gray.

The photograph is clearly wider than it is tall. That means that the greatest stress will be on the top and bottom, and folds are most likely to occur vertically.

I drew the erase layer in blue so that I could see it over the top of the black-and-white image. As you can see, i tore away one side of the photograph, added one large crack in the top and a smaller one at the bottom, and tore away the top right corner. There is evidence that this tearing did not happen all at once, hence the tears both above and below the main tear; it seems likely that there were two tears that eventually joined up to excise one corner. I also wanted to be sure that this was a large enough piece of the photograph that it could conceivably not have been lost in the intervening years.

• 4 & 5:. A color layer in a slightly-gray very pale yellow, erased as above, in Color mode.

Actually, this oversimplifies the process. After this was done, I used the noisy airbrush and large bristles to ‘dress up’ the texture a little.

And, when I apply this color layer to the image, i get:

The intensity of the effect is too small, so I decided to add a duplicate of the color layer set to Multiply mode. The results are exactly what I had hoped:

• 6 & 7: Non-desaturated Main Image, erased as above, and faded to an opacity of a handful of percent – 5% or less. You want the slightest hint of color tweak, nothing more.

I ended up going with 10% opacity because the colors blended well, something that doesn’t always happen – if blue is too dominant in the color layer, it will turn to green very quickly.

I note that I failed to specify the Composite Mode. I’ve used Grain Merge this time, though I always check to see if Multiply or Alanon give me better results. The effect is subtle but definitely present.

• 8-11: A copy of the desaturated Main Image, erased as above, in Multiply mode, merged with a copy of the desaturated Main Image erased as above, in Addition mode. The Multiply mode will be set to a low opacity, the addition mode layer may have any opacity that looks right. It may be necessary to treat different areas of the image separately, with different opacity levels for both layers, using masks to split them up – and don’t forget to then apply a blur layer underneath! The background within the ‘photograph’ should generally be lighter than the foreground.

The Multiply Mode layer ended up working best at rather greater opacity than I was expecting, mostly because the Addition layer was so effective. The Multiply mode layer has an opacity of 66%, and the addition layer above it is at 35%.

But the result is rather more desaturated than I intended, so I have added an extra copy of the color layer in multiply mode.

Much of this stage is just fine tuning to get the color right in the lightest parts.

• 12-17: An extract from a copy of the main image removing the lightest 1/3 of the original and splitting the rest into dark areas and moderate levels (this is done with the Similar Color selection tool and the delete button on your keyboard. Erase as above. You may need to blur the result slightly. This then gets merged with a darker yellow-brown Color layer, and is then set to Multiply mode and the opacity adjusted.

As you can see, the lightest grays have been extracted into a layer, shown at the top of the image; the middle grays are in the middle layer, and the darkest grays are in the layer at the bottom.

The next trick is to turn off all the layers except the one desired, select it, and use the similar color selection tool to choose everything except the transparent parts where there is no longer any image.

Then I can create a new layer and fill just the relevant parts of the image with the dark brown. It may also be necessary to add a brown layer set to addition, and then darken the multiply. The goal is to take the blacks and turn them into browns.

With an addition layer at 100% opacity and the multiply layer at 36% opacity, this is what the dark layer now looks like:

Next, using a slightly lighter brown, I repeat this for the middle browns. This time, the opacity of both Addition and Multiply layers get set to 75%.

For completion, I then repeat this for the lightest grays using a slightly lighter brown again.

It doesn’t matter if the color is a little off, that can always be tweaked, as can the brightness and contrast of each brown layer.

You can often get an early check on that question simply by examining all three sets of layers at the same time

They all look fine to me, but they reveal something I already knew: some detail has been lost. That missing detail has to come from the image as we left it before beginning this stage.

First, I have to consolidate each set of three layers into a single layer, then turn all the other layers back on. I then switch the Composition Mode of the darkest brown layer to “Lighten” and play with the opacity until it looks right. That happens at 67%.

Next, the middle browns. I use Alanon as the Composition mode and 100% opacity.

Finally, the lightest brown. I use Soft Light as the Composition mode and 64% opacity.

• 18+: A set of ‘distress’ layers which add crease / fold marks in a slightly desaturated version of the pale yellow color used earlier. A copy, offset a pixel or two, above this layer in a suitable merge mode, and a desaturated and slightly darkened version offset a couple of pixels in the other direction and blurred very slightly, can give these “wrinkles” a subtle 3-D effect. Control this with opacity of the different layers. As a bonus, add stains, scratches, etc, with additional layers.

I have to admit that I didn’t spend as much time on this step as I probably should. Using various brushes I laded parts of the image. A couple of scratches put in with the bezier curve and then distorted using the palette knife, and some more with the large brush, some spots that might be mud, or might be blood, and then some quick-and-dirty creases where the photo had been folder roughly in half.

Finally, consolidate the entire image, then remove the corner into a separate layer, and I’m ready to drop in the background and apply the promised rotation. I then add just a hint of shadow.

It sounds like a lot of work, but really, it isn’t. I could easily have knocked out this image in just an hour or two – it’s taking the time to document each step in the process and explain them that caused this to take all day.

Next time, I’ll finally get to what was originally going to be the second project of this series, the Blue Monkey.

But Before I Go…

A couple of projects of a different sort have come to my attention in the last week or so that I thought readers might find of interest..

Everyday heroes

The first is from Evil Genius Games and it’s an updating of d20 Modern to operate with a foundation of D&D 5e.

It’s a measure of the complexity of the modern world that no RPG or game supplement contains all the reference material that you really need, no matter how complete they might seem at first glance. The more resources you have at your disposal, the better prepared you are for everything that actual play will throw at you.

Although d20 Modern isn’t in the first tier of references for either the Adventurer’s Club or Zenith-3 campaigns, it is second-tier – one of the first places I look when the first tier lets me down. In part, that’s a genre impact; the game system is not quite on point for neither of those campaigns as they are Pulp and Superheroes, respectively. For the Zener Gate campaign, though, it graduates to a top-level reference at times. But it’s a couple of decades out of date, so a fresh update definitely gets my attention.

The original d20 Modern was written by Bill Slavisek, Jeff Grubb, Rich Redman, and Charles Ryan, and Grubb has returned to be part of the new design team, giving this product instant credibility. Grubb himself is quite enthusiastic about the update, saying “It’s exciting to revisit the d20 system I helped design 20 years ago. How we think about game design has evolved significantly so this is a great opportunity to bring concepts of the ‘d20 Modern’ game into the fifth edition era.”

Everyday Hero builds on the basic classes of d20 Modern with several new subclasses, a new wealth system, and a fully revamped chase mechanic. Now, those last two are some of the most difficult game subsystems to implement smoothly or in a satisfactory way – though I have some ideas of my own for the former, which will make their way into a post here at CM sometime in the near future, maybe even next week – so I’m always interested in those subsystems.

The design team also includes two additional veterans Stan! Brown and Steve Miller, and two emerging game designers, Chris Ramsay and Sigfried Trent. Evil Genius Games is preparing for a Kickstarter Campaign “in the Spring of 2022”, and I’m really looking forward to this one!

Bookmark this link and check it regularly: Kickstarter!

Space Age: Voyages

The other project that has leaped out at me is a little closer to production. From Thunderegg Productions, Space Age: Voyages” is a Standalone expansion for Space Aces TNG (The New Guidebook), subtitled “Voyages In Infinite Space”.

This is a slightly lighthearted family-friendly sci-fi sandbox setting book with over 160 pages of planets, locations, and adventures, along with a galactic-sized modular hex map.

I can’t do better in describing what appeals about this product than to quote the “What’s Inside” section of the Kickstarter:

What’s Inside?

• EXPANSIVE & CUSTOMIZABLE GALAXY: 47 sectors on modular hex cards for creating your own one-of-a-kind galaxy.
• VISIT NEAT PLACES: Over 120 unique planets, anomalies, space stations & other locations to discover and explore.
• EXPLORE COOL STUFF: Each location features its own page of information, features of interest, hazards, encounters, dungeons to delve, beings to meet, rich illustrations, and more!
• MEET NEW PEEPS: Dozens of species to botch first contact with (Aristo-crab spice moguls, Space Otter salvagers, Beauro-Cat bounty hunters, oh my!).
• ADVENTURES IN SPAAaaace: Hundreds of randomly rolled deep space encounters to survive that ensure the journey is as much fun as the destination.
• MULTITUDINOUS MISSIONS: Tons of missions and quests to pull off so your crew can pay the bills and fend off the debt collectors.
• SPACE LOOT: Hundreds of pieces of weird gear, rare resources, starship upgrades that go “ding” when there’s stuff, and more to find.
• A TOWEL GENERATOR: Because every space adventurer needs a towel.
• CHUCKLES GALORE: More inside jokes, nerdy references, bad puns, and heartfelt homages than you can shake a non-copyright-infringing light sword at.
• ADVENTURE AWAITS: An infinite amount of amazing adventures to be had on-the-fly with zero prep work!

I use space stuff extensively in the Zenith-3, Warcry, and Doctor Who campaigns, and occasionally in the Zener Gate campaign, and you can never have too many sources of ideas!

The Kickstarter campaign has about two weeks left to run, and has already raised more than 260% of its target budget.

And, if you want it, you can even include a copy of the original game system as an add-on – though it’s not necessary to use this product.

This is a product that’s definitely on my Radar, and it’s as safe a bet as a Kickstarter campaign can get.

The Lazy DM’s Companion

Finally, something for all you Fantasy gamers out there! “The Lazy DM’s companion” by SlyFlourish is a 64-page PDF available through DrivethruRPG. There’s entirely too much good stuff to try listing it all, so I’ll just advise you all to check out the product page for yourself: The Lazy DM’s Companion

Something for everyone, I hope! Until next time, have fun :)

I recently came across a system for magical weapons that both opens up availability of high-level magical bonuses while also restricting them. This enables a campaign setting to be quite low-magic while still providing an avenue for those who absolutely must have a +5 weapon or better.

I’m proposing, in this article, to adapt the basic concepts into a game system suitable for pathfinder or D&D, because those can then be readily adapted to work with other game systems.

The basic principles are easily stated:

• N + [N-X] = N+2-X, -1 if both N and × are zero
• T (hrs) = 5 × [N+1] × [N-X+1] × R^2
• $/hr = (5 + N + [N-X] + R)^2
• Like-for-like.

These are formulae for establishing the parameters for combining two magic items to create a single, more powerful magic item. Explaining them, and the concepts that underlie them, will take a bit more work.

Masterwork Quality

Let’s start at the very beginning. A craftsman creates an object of his craft which meets a simple criteria: the total of his roll to craft the item exceeds the difficulty by more than ten. The result is a Masterwork Quality object, a more perfect example of the object than most, and one that can be enchanted.

Actually using a Masterwork item for it’s intended purpose without enchanting it risks damaging it to the point that it loses that exceptional quality, and can no longer be enchanted.

Taking A Twenty or other such rules emphasize reliability of production over the risks and challenges of producing a work of exceptional quality – the results are never a masterwork item, no matter how skilled the craftsman and how low the target number is.

Because these are comparatively rare, they cost 10x as much as the conventional piece of equipment.

The Magical Artisan’s Toolkit

Fusing two such items together, with or without enchantments, is a task for which mages are trained. They have, in their spell-books, a number of ‘utility’ spells for the purpose; these aren’t generally listed as ‘available spells’ because they have no other application.

This includes the spells that imbue a magic item with a special capability, such as “Frostbrand” or “Vorpal” or whatever – one for each. The level of these spells is one higher than the plus of weapon required to accommodate them. This means that a mage must achieve a certain character level before they can work with a given enchantment.

Optional Rules The GM might choose to write up such spells explicitly, enabling the mage to add them to their spellcasting repertoire. This enables the mage to cast the spell at a higher caster level to temporarily imbue an enchantment to a weapon that can’t be permanently enchanted.

At the base caster level for the spell, the temporary enchantment lasts 1d6 rounds for every 2 character levels of the mage.

At one spell level higher, and appropriate caster level for that level of spell, the temporary enchantment lasts 1d6 minutes for every 3 character levels of the mage.

At two spell levels higher, and appropriate caster level for that level of spell, the temporary enchantment lasts 1d6 hours for every 4 character levels of the mage.

At three spell levels higher, and appropriate caster level for that level of spell, the temporary enchantment lasts 1d6 days for ever 5 character levels of the mage.

When the temporary enchantment ends, there is a risk that the weapon that was temporarily enchanted will be destroyed. The mage rolls a d6. At the base level of the enchantment spell, he must get 3 or higher for the weapon to survive. If he cast it as a spell one level higher, he must get 4 or higher, if two levels, he must get 5 or higher, and at three levels higher, he must roll a six.

Each time a weapon is temporarily enchanted, this target number is raised by 1.

Optional Rules If the GM chooses to permit the temporary enchantment of weapons described above, he may also permit the temporary addition of a magical enchantment effect to a weapon that is already enchanted. The risk is that the spells holding the existing enchantment may unravel as a result; add the plus of the weapon to the end-of-enchantment target. If the result is more than six, the character may roll a second d6-1 if, and only if, his first yields a six.

EG. adding a temporary enchantment to an existing +3 weapon can be done, and can get the party out of tight corners. But the risk is at the end of the enchantment. At the base level of the spell, the mage needs to roll 3+3=6 ‘or better’ on d6 for the weapon to survive.

At one level higher, he needs to roll a 7. That means he needs to roll a six on his first d6, and, if he succeeds, he can then roll an additional d6-1 and add it to the existing 6 in an attempt to reach the target. If he does so, the weapon survives.

At two levels higher, he needs to roll an 8. If his 1st d6 doesn’t come up with a six, the weapon is destroyed. If he rolls a six, he can add d6-1 in an effort to reach the 8 or more required – which gives him a 50-50 chance of the weapon surviving.

And so on.

Commentary on the optional rules: Some GMs may be shocked at the notion of arbitrarily destroying high-plus weapons in such a cavalier way. But it’s an inherent attitude adjustment that I contend would result from the capacity to replace them relatively easily – which is what this set of rules is all about.

And the risk of finding yourself in the middle of a dungeon suddenly bereft of your favorite weapon ensures that this is not done in a cavalier fashion, anyway.

Finally, this gives mages another weapon to employ in melee – they can cast some trivial enchantment on the enemy’s weapon or armor in hopes of destroying them, making the enemy more vulnerable. I’ll talk more about this in “unbinding”, later in the article.

Initial Enchantment

So, you have a masterwork item capable of being enchanted? Congratulations. All you need is a cooperative mage and a second such masterwork item, and you’re on your way!

Result

N + [N-X] = N+2-X, -1 if both N and × are zero.
So, N = 0 for the first item (it currently has +0 in magical bonuses) and since the same is also true of the second, both N and × are zero.

0 + 0 = 0 + 2 – 0, -1 because both N and × are zero. So the result is a +1 weapon.

Time Required

T (hrs) = 5 × [N+1] × [N-X+1] × R^2

N is zero, we already know that. So is X. R is 1, we just determined that. So the time required to complete the process of enchanting the +1 weapon is 5 × [0+1] × [0-0+1] × 1 squared = 5 × 1 × 1 × 1 × 1, or 5 hours.

Cost

$/hr = (5 + N + [N-X] + R)^2.
It’s now easy to fill in the values.
(5 + 0 + [0-0] + 1)^2 = 6^2 = 36 gp per hour. Since 5 hours is the time, that means that 180gp is the cost of turning two masterwork +0 items into a single item with a magical +1.

A note about the vocabulary: The general term ‘combining’ has been used through most of the text, but this is rather flavorless. I would encourage GMs to find their own, more evocative, term for the process. “Coalescing” for example, or “Consolidating” or “Blending” or “Melding” all come to mind – and there are several more options.

If a base sword costs 2gp, the value of a masterworked example would be 200gp. So the creation of a +1 weapon would cost 200gp + 200gp + 180 gp = 580 gp, plus whatever the mage demanded for his services – call it another 120gp, for a total bill of 700gp. (If the base cost is higher, it only amplifies the cost of the creation).

The expense alone ensures that the majority of people will be armed with +0 weapons. +1 weapons would be rarer than in most dungeons and modules. To reflect the reality, subtract 1 from every plus shown. So a +4 mace (according to the source material) should be treated as a +3 mace, and a +1 spear becomes a +0 spear – masterworked but unenchanted.

This creates a new imperative within combat – characters trying to preserve the weaponry being wielded by the other side because the weapon is what they need to get a +1 weapon forged.

This imperative will only grow stronger with higher-level items. If you already have a +3 weapon, an NPC with another one, or even a +4, offers the tantalizing possibility of merging the two to form a +6 item! But that won’t be easy, and it won’t be cheap…

Exotic Materials

Some exotic materials carry extra benefits that don’t count against an enchantment limit. Mythril blades are lighter and faster in many campaigns, for example (a tribute, no doubt, to the contributions of JRR Tolkien). Adamantine makes weapons heavier, slower, but tougher and possibly adds an extra plus to the weapon. Dragonscale of different breeds is often incorporated into armors and shields to add resistance to whatever said dragon is associated with, and so on.

There’s a couple of downsides.

First, these materials are notoriously difficult to work with, adding significantly to the target needed to forge an item incorporating them. That means that you need a more skilled artisan to work with them, and they charge a lot more.

Secondly, these materials are expensive or dangerous to obtain.

And thirdly, the last rule – like for like – poses a problem. I’ll come back to that, shortly – it’s so significant that I’ve given the subject it’s own section, below.

Special Capabilities

Every +1 in a weapon or item creates an opportunity for it to contain a special capability. These can only be incorporated when two items are merged to create or increase an enchantment.

It should be noted that N + [N-2] = N+2-2 = N. That means that by sacrificing an item of two pluses less, the enchantments in an item can be replaced or reconfigured – or an untapped potential can be utilized.

Like For Like

This is the fourth principle listed, and it’s a whopper! It restricts combining two items in three ways – Structure, Exotic Materials, and Enchantments.

Structure

You can’t weld a spear to a longsword – they are structurally different. For that matter, a shortsword and a longsword would also be incompatible. You have to be able to use the same specific terminology to specify the structure of the items to be merged. A ‘wish’ spell or equivalent can be used to restructure a magic item into a compatible form.

Exotic Materials

If one item uses an exotic material, so must the other. If one doesn’t contain the exotic material, neither will the blended object.

Optional Rules: The GM may decide to permit the recovery of the exotic material, in part or in whole, in this case. This should be a non-trivial process, but there are many ways of implementing that importance / difficulty. Perhaps the process of doing so is itself difficult, or perhaps the resulting ‘dross’ is contaminated and needs to be combined with another rare material to draw off that contamination.

Implementing this rule, in other words, simply adds a minor quest to the party’s agenda.

Enchantments

If one weapon is a Frostblade, so must the other one be a Frostblade – and the resulting weapon will automatically also be a Frostblade.

This can result in complex procedures in which a lower-level item is used to reconfigure the enchantments in one object so that they match those of a second, enabling them to be blended successfully.

Some equipment has legendary status; this generally means that the item is unique. This automatically prohibits the blending of such items in general.

Adventure idea: Which immediately suggests a plot based around “The One” (the movie). The PCs are sent into a parallel world to obtain their Spear Of Destiny so that it can be merged with the one Odin uses in the PCs world. Or you could work it in the other direction, and have a group of NPCs show up trying to steal the local Spear Of Destiny.

Things get more complicated when there’s a threat big enough to warrant such an uber-legendary item being created. So, if the PCs do prevent the theft, it only sets them up to be dragooned into the last line of defense against this cosmic threat…

Binding Energies

Technically, each increase in plus increases the capacity for enchantments by three, but one of these three is reserved for the magical attack bonus, and one is used to bind the resulting object together in a stable configuration. Ultimately, magical weapons are inherently unnatural, and that makes them unstable. Failure to successfully merge two objects releases this binding energy in one or both objects, producing an explosion with the mage at ground zero.

We’re talking 3d6 times the square of the pluses, in concussive force.

so, two +4 items would be 3 × 4 × 4 = 48d6 – each.

Very few mages would survive. Heck, most towers and castles would struggle.

Optional Rules: The GM may rule that ‘temporary enchantments’ that result in the destruction of the temporarily-enchanted object result in a 3d6 explosion, just to make the end of the enchantment more dramatic – and traumatic. However, the ‘existing plus’ of any temporarily-enchanted weapon should not be taken into account as it can easily be an adventure-wrecker if not a campaign-wrecker.

Additional Capacity for Capabilities

Obviously, increasing the magical plus also increases the capacity for extra abilities as part of the enchantment.

Those abilities are usually thematically connected to any existing abilities – protection from cold for a Frostbrand weapon, for example, or +2 to a cold/snow/ice-related skill or two.

One option that rarely gets considered (but should be more common) is to enhance the primary ability. For example, in 3.x, a weapon with the Frost ability does an additional d6 of cold damage on a successful hit.

• This could be increased one step by offering an additional dice on a critical hit.
• It could be increased two steps by making that additional dice happen on any hit that succeeds by 5 or more.
• It can be increased three steps by making that additional dice happen with every hit.
• It can be increased four steps by doing 1d6 Cold Damage simply by being in melee with the wielder, no hit necessary – the weapon is literally radiating cold (to which the wielder is immune). In addition, it will still do the extra 1d6 cold damage on a successful hit.
• Which means that additional increases can follow the exact same pattern described above, with the ‘radiating cold’ simply tacked on.

To some extent, this is up to the wielder of the blade, especially if he is a PC. To some extent, it derives from the personality of the mage doing the enchantment, and is therefore subject to roleplayed negotiation with the first party. To some extent, it’s what the GM considers both fair and balanced.

When deciding such questions, it should be remembered that this system permits magical attack bonuses to proceed much farther than the limits offered in most of the rulebooks. The GM can place whatever cap he feels is appropriate, but the default assumption is that you can go as far as you want to go – or can afford to go.

Unbinding

An appropriate skill roll, with a difficulty of 10+the sum of all three magical pluses, plus one for each level of a special ability emplaced within the enchanted object, is needed to unify the two. Fail, and one or both objects is unbound, as described earlier.

This essentially means that the magic that has been holding the weapon together despite its natural tendency to explode gets momentarily disrupted – and on such moment is all it takes.

The power of spells like Mordenkainen’s Disjunction isn’t that it destroys magical equipment, it’s that it does so relatively safely.

A series of mini-quests

In essence, this transforms the search for a better magic item into a series of mini-quests, taking what was a handout reward and making it a source of adventure. This structure means that not even the power-gamer can complain about finding nothing but +1 and +2 weapons except on rare occasions, because those can be the pathway to enhancing their own equipment.

If the character has a +4 weapon already:

0 + 0 = +1
1 + 1 = +3
3 + 4 = +5

So 2 unenchanted weapons, and one +1 weapon, is enough to take a +4 weapon and enhance it to a +5.

or:

0 + 0 = +1
1 + 1 = +3
3 + 2 = +4
4 + 4 = +6

This adds a +2 weapon to the mix, and an additional blending step. Knowing that this was a possibility, would not a character start searching high and low for a doubly-enchanted weapon of the right structure.

Of course, each step up the ladder is more difficult and more expensive.

It is sometimes said that such arms don’t come with a label, but this mechanism translates the game mechanics of a +2 into something that’s meaningful in-game.

Of course, if you have to, you could make a +2 weapon for the purpose:

0 + 0 = +1
1 + 0 = +2

Commissioning three matching weapons from a skilled artisan becomes just the first step along the long road to better equipment.

Inverse Geometric Populations

If this is the only mechanism for the creation of higher-plus non-legendary magic items, a simple population model becomes possible to determine. Such a model then provides a simple way of measuring the probability of encountering an item with a given bonus.

• It takes two +0 items to make a +1. So there should be two +0 items for every +1.
• It takes a +0 and a +1 item to make a +2. So there should be a +0 item for every +1 in addition to the population above.
• It takes a +1 and a +2 item to make a +3. So there should be additional +1 and +2 items equal to the number of +3 weapons.
• You can also make a +3 with two +1 items. That increases the population of +1 items for every +3, but some of those +1 items will already be included in the previous entry, so the increase is by the number of +3 items.
• It takes two +2 items to create a +4. So we should add double the population of +4 weapons to the number of +2 weapons.
• You can also use a +2 and a +3 to make a +4 item.
• Two +3 items make a +5.
• You can also use a +3 and a +4.
• Two +4 items make a +6.
• You can also use a +4 and a +5.
• Two +5 items make a +7.
• You can also use a +5 and a +6.

And so on.

So, once you have the cap, you can make a determination as to how many examples of that cap you have in any given area, and work backwards to get populations of lesser items. When you get all the way down to +0, the population totals can be converted into a table.

All technically correct, but there’s a much faster way by ignoring the n+[n-1] options, with one exception: A +1 and +0 combination to make +2’s.

• Two +0 items for every +1.
• Two +1 items for every +3.
• Two +2 items for every +4.
• Two +3 items for every +5.
• Two +4 items for every +6.
• Two +5 items for every +7.
• Two +6 items for every +8.
• Two +7 items for every +9.
• Two +8 items for every +10.

So, if there’s 1 item of +10, there will be 2 +8s, 4 +6’s, 8 +4’s, 16 +2’s, 16 +1’s and 16 +0’s.

16+1’s also means that there will be 32 additional +0’s.

16 +1’s means 8 +3’s, 4 +5’s, 2 +7’s, and one +9.

Add all these up, and we’re talking about 110 weapons. That’s close enough that we can use a simple percentile table.

But the results are counter-intuitive, and hard to actually relate to – as many +5 weapons as there are +6’s? It’s only when you realize that this is a minimum population that it starts to make sense.

You don’t usually create a +1 item with the intent that it will eventually become a +2 or +3. You create a +1 because you happen to have two +0s that are compatible.

It therefore makes sense to increase each descending generation by a geometric ratio. The minimum populations get respected if you use 1.414m or the square root of two – but up to 1/3 of each population would exist for its own sake, in addition.

So each generation, going from +10 or +12 or whatever the cap value chosen by the GM is, increases in number x1.414 x1.3333, or 1.884862. Call it 1.885 for convenience.

For the benefit of sight-impaired readers, rather than a pretty table like the one above, here are the results in text form:

1. Table 1:
   • 01-48: +0
   • 49-73: +1
   • 74-86: +2
   • 87-93: +3
   • 94-97: +4
   • 98-99: +5
   • 00: roll on table 2
2. Table 2:
   • 01-50: +6
   • 51-75: +7
   • 76-90: +8
   • 91-97: +9
   • 98-00: +10

That’s with a cap of +10. If the cap is +12, the cool thing about this approach is that Table 1 doesn’t have to change; the relative population of lower-plus weapons remains fixed relative to the number of higher-plus weapons.

1. Table 2 for a cap of +12:
   • 01-48: +6
   • 49-72: +7
   • 73-86: +8
   • 87-93: +9
   • 94-97: +10
   • 98-99: +11
   • 00: +12

These results become interesting when viewed through a sociological prism. You have to bear in mind the expense of creating these higher-plus weapons and the arcane skill requirements; if a population can’t sustain either of these, they can’t create the higher-plus item.

• Two +10 items to make a +12.
• Two +8 items to make each +10.
• Two +6 items to make each +8.
• Two +4 items to make each +6.
• Two +2 items to make each +4.
• A +1 and a +0 item to make each +2.
• Two +0 items to make each +1.
  
• Base cost of a longsword in Pathfinder 2.0 is 1gp. So the base cost of a +0 item is 10x this, or 10gp.
• So 20gp in +0 swords is the starting point for fusing them into a +1.
• The time required to do so is 5 × [0+1] × [0-0+1] × 1^2 = 5 hrs.
• The cost of the process is (5 + 0 + [0-0] + 1)^(1+1) gp per hour = 6^2 = 36 gp / hr. 36 × 5 = 180gp. So the gp subtotal is 200gp.
• A +1 and a +0 is required to make a +2. The base cost of these are 200 and 10gp, respectively.
• The time required is 5 × [1+1] × [1-1+1] × 2^2 = 5 × 2 × 1 × 4 = 40 hrs. So the cumulative time required is 45 hrs.
• The cost is (5 + 1 + [1-1] + 2)^2 = 8^2 = 64 gp/hr, x40 hrs = 2560gp. Add the 200 and the 10, and we get a total cost of each +2 of 2,770 gp.
  
• Two of them are needed to make each +4. So that’s another 2,770gp and another 45 hours to get the second one, for a total of 90 hrs and 5540gp.
• The time required to fuse these two +2 items into a +4 is 5 × [2+1] × [2-0+1] × 4^2 = 5 × 3 × 3 × 16 = 720 hours (90 days at 8 hours a day – more if you take Sundays off).
• The cost per hour is (5 + 2 + [2-0] + 4)^2 = 13^2 = 169 gp per hour. × 720 hours, we get 121,680 gp for the process.
• The total time to get a +4 item is therefore 720+90×2=900 hours. The total cost is 121,680 + 5540 × 2 = 132,760 gp.
  
• To make a +6 item requires two +4’s, so that’s another 900 hrs and 132,700gp, for a new subtotal set of 265,520 gp and 1800 hrs.
• The time required for this fusion is 5 × [4+1] × [4-0+1] × 6^2 = 5 × 5 × 5 × 36 = 4500 hrs (93.75 6-day weeks of 8-hour days). More than 18 months, less than 2 years.
• The cost per hour is (5 + 4 + [4-0] + 6)^2 = 19^2 = 361 gp/hr. Multiply that by 4500 hours and you get 1,624,500 gp.
  
• Again, we’re going to need two of these to make a +8. So the subtotals are 1800+4500×2 = 10,800 hrs, at a cost of 1,624,500×2 + 265,520 = 3,514,520 gp.
• The time required to fuse two +6’s into a +8 is 5 × [6+1] × [6-0+1] × 8^2 = 5 × 7 × 7 × 64 = 15,680 hrs. That’s a serious time commitment, probably too much for one mage. 5 mages working 10 hour days, 7 days a week, gets you 44.8 weeks – a little less than a year.
• The cost per hour is (5 + 6 + [6-0] + 8)^2 = 25^2 = 125 gp / hour. For 15,680 hrs – a total of 1,960,000 gp.
• Adding these results to the time already involved gets us to 10,800 + 15,680 = 26,480 hrs and 1960000 + 3514520 = 5,474,520 gp.
  
• We need two of them to create our ultimate weapon, a +10. So that’s 52,960 hrs and 10,949,040 gp.
• The time required to fuse two +8’s into a +10 is 5 × [8+1] × [8-0+1] × 10^2 = 5 × 9 × 9 × 100 = 40,500 hours.
• The cost per hour is (5 + 8 + [8-0] + 10)^2 = 31^2 = 961 gp/hr. Multiplied by 40,500 hours, we get a cost of 38,920,500 gp.
• So the total cost of a +10 weapon (from scratch) is 49,869,540 gp. Call it 50 million. Construction will take 93,460 hours. Five mages, 10 hour days, 6 days a week, 50 weeks in a year – that’s about 6 1/4 years.
• 50 million gp / (93460/5/10) = 26749.4 gp a day – call it 26,750 gp. A prosperous kingdom might be able to afford that – if this were the only drain on the public purse. An Empire is more likely to have that amount of capital to invest.
• Weapon, Armor, Shield and Helm – that’s a 25 year commitment, unless you do them simultaniously – something that any decent-sized Empire should be able to manage.
  
• Take a moment to appreciate how great a shortcut it can be to obtain (through spoils of war or other means) an existing item that already embodies a lot of the effort required. Now appreciate the diminishing scale of those savings as the plus of the looted item reduces. Obtaining a ‘free’ +8 item is worth a multi-year campaign. Obtaining a ‘free’ +6 or two is worth several months of effort.

In conclusion:

The great thing about this approach is that everything scales geometrically – the effort required, the expense, and the campaign significance.

Think about it from a campaign perspective.

• Getting a +8 = 4 adventures, a mini-campaign. Maybe more.
• Getting a +6 = 2 adventures or one large adventure. You need two of them.
• Getting two +4’s might be done in one adventure or two. And you need to allow for the possibility of failure, so let’s add an extra adventure for that.
• Getting eight +2’s might take two to four adventures.
• Getting +1’s is relatively quick and easy – but a little on the expensive side. And you need 16 of them. Two adventures, maybe four.
• Adding these up: 4+1-2+1-2+1-2+1+2-4+2-4 = 12-19 adventures.
• The campaign probably won’t focus on the one character; it’s usually a team thing. But this is about what that one character gets to take out of their adventures.
• Double-digit million gp. You might get that from a large Dragon Hoard. Maybe. But your share of such a hoard will be considerably less.

The difficulty and expense involved means that this system looks unbalanced, looks like the perfect game mechanic to satisfy the power-gamer in your midst – but the system is actually very well balanced. Cults cam spend decades creating a terror item, a +10 weapon, while training one of their number to be the wielder – but campaigns are largely low-magic in nature.

I was originally going to post a collection of mini-articles, as I did a while back in Typo Inzpiration and other mini-posts – but, just before actually starting work, I changed my mind.

Separating the three into distinct posts not only gives each room to grow (the way this one did), which may be important (given the planned content of the three), it gives me content for several weeks that (hopefully) won’t take too long to write, freeing up more time for the ongoing Image Project articles, which will take longer than usual to write.

Mark Clover, host of the Okay Grognard Show (a Twitch stream / podcast), and it’s Facebook page, recently asked a question – the YouTube channel which archives the streams had 188 subscribers, which led him to write,

“in the grand scheme of things, 200 subscribers seems like it should be easy to do. What say you?

This touched on a thought that I offered to Johnn when we were first planning what would become Campaign Mastery, about the Marketing of e-books. It’s also relevant to web page subscriptions, attracting Twitter followers, and all sorts of other activities, and I don’t think that I’ve ever explained it here.

(Before I go any further, I should point out that a day or two later, the YouTube channel reached that 200 subscribers mark, so it was in fact fairly easy to achieve).

The Drake Equation

My thinking on such marketing and projected sales / subscribers / website visitors is all built around a formula inspired by the famous Drake equation for predicting the number of civilizations that are potentially ‘out there’. I discussed that equation extensively in A Game Of Drakes and Detectives: Where’s ET? in 2019 – almost exactly 2 years ago.

The Drake Of Marketing

Because the text in the image is a little hard to read, it’s so small, and for the benefit of ‘readers’ with impaired vision, here it is again in a more user-friendly format:

N = T × I × G × Sy × Su × K × W × R × C × D × A, where:

• N: Number Of Sales / Subscriptions / Readers / Followers
• T: Total population
• I: Percent with internet access
• G: Percent interested in the general subject
• Sy: Percent interested in the game system
• Su: Percent interested in the specific subject
• K: Percent who learn of the product within the availability window
• W: Percent who subscribe / purchase / read products of this type
• R: Percent who are not turned off by price, reputation, product description, etc
• C: Percent who have the capacity to subscribe / purchase / read
• D: Percent who do not disapprove of the product / author / publisher, etc
• A: Percent who actually do subscribe / purchase / read if given the opportunity

Let’s take a (fairly brief) look at each of these ten factors.

N: Number Of Sales / Subscriptions / Readers / Followers

This number is the object of the exercise – how many copies of my ebook cam I expect to sell? How many of my new paperback? How many twitter followers can U attract? How many people will read or subscribe to my blog or YouTube channel? But all is not what it seems with this number – I’ll get back to that in a little while.

T: Total population

The obvious starting point – if you could sell a copy of X to everyone on Earth, by definition, you have captured 100% of the theoretically possible market. The current population, despite Covid, is believed to be 7,900,000,000 – or 7.9 billion.

I: Percent with internet access

Most of the products that we’re talking about are to be sold over the internet, which requires that the individual has internet access to be a potential customer. This was last determined in January 2021 as being 59.5%, or 595/1000.

If you are offering a physical product through bricks-and-mortar outlets, this should be replaced with the percentage with access to the product – which may be a much smaller number.

This also doesn’t take into account the language of the product – only 25.9% of internet users speak English. So that 595/1000 suddenly shrinks to 154.105 / 1000. If the product is in some other language, that number will shrink even further – 19.4% of internet users speak a Chinese language, 7.9% speak Spanish, 5.2% speak Arabic, and the other languages of the world have even smaller numbers.

G: Percent interested in the general subject

What proportion of these people will have an interest in the general subject – in this case, we’re talking about TTRPGs, in others it might be Music or Movies or well, you name it. My experience suggests that this number is going to be somewhere in between 0.01 and 0.2 percent, but it could easily be smaller. If we include a more general meaning of ‘interested’, the number might go up.

There are cultural factors at work that I don’t have the knowledge to take into account. Most of the population of India will speak English, but I would not be at all surprised if the level of interest in TTRPGs within that population is just one one-hundredth of what it is in the US or Europe.

The best-selling TTRPG of all time is D&D in its many incarnations. In 2017, there were 12-to-15 million copies sold in the US alone. 2019 was even bigger, with sales of the starter set quadrupling. By the time we factor in people who bought a prior edition at some point in the past but didn’t update, it would be easy to double this number again. So, 4 × 13.5 (mid-way between 12 and 15 million) × 2 (midway between triple and quadruple) gives an estimate of 108 million in the US – out of a population of 332,403,650 – or about 32.5%.

That’s the high water mark – while some markets may be comparable (Canada, UK), most will be smaller, often by a huge factor.

Just like the real Drake equation, some numbers just have to be educated guesses. Because we’ve already taken language into account, we’ve excluded major population groups like China – but not others, like India.

As a conservative rough number, I would use 3%.

But some of those people will have dropped out of the hobby – my personal experience says only 1/3 of these people are still active in the hobby, and perhaps only 1/6 or 1/10. A conservative middle-of-road guesstimate would be 0.4% (that’s midway between 1/6 and 1/10th of 3%).

But that leaves a vast number potential market that might just be reachable with the right product and marketing.

This also neglects the casual observer or participant – there are all sorts of potential degrees of engagement with the hobby that are less than full participation. These add to the potential customer base, but at a depreciated amount. But these are, by definition, unexpected sales conversions and we’re after expected conversions. This simply adds a compensating factor to our low-ball estimates.

Sy: Percent interested in the game system

If your product is for D&D, there will be markedly less interest shown by those who never play that particular game. Not no interest – some people collect rules systems the way others collect stamps. But there is going to be a core market.

There will be some people who have no interest in whatever rules system your product uses, and some who have a high interest.

You might think that labeling something “Universal” might be the answer – but the fact is that there are some people who only want material dedicated to their particular game system, and who regard “Universal” as a dirty word.

There are also other ways of slicing this particular onion – “old-school gaming” as a label will attract some people regardless of game system, while turning others off.

So the numbers will vary by game system. In the absence of specific data, the only safe number is 50%. But it’s better to be conservative, so I would argue in favor of 25%, or 20%, or 10%, or even 5%.

Su: Percent interested in the specific subject

Some products are broad in scope – Campaign Mastery covers a very diverse range of topics, for example. In such cases, this will be quite high – 80 or 90%. When it comes to a specific product like Assassin’s Amulet, 5 or 10% is more appropriate.

Again, in looking for a generic ‘safe” answer, I would set this to 25% – but you can usually get more specific in specific cases.

K: Percent who learn of the product within the availability window

This is an important number. I’m aware of (conservatively) less than 1% of the RPG products that get released each year, and I’m reasonably well-informed on the subject. On top of that, most products aren’t available for an unlimited time period – what will happen to Campaign Mastery after I shuffle off this mortal coil?

Nor does the cause have to be anything so melodramatic – how many copies of D&D 2nd Ed are available for purchase right now?

So there is an availability window, and most of your potential customers will never have any idea that you even exist.

That’s why, even though the game systems for which it was designed and written are now depreciated, a few copies of Assassin’s Amulet get bought every year. But it’s not like the first year, when hundreds of copies were sold.

You can also define this ‘availability window’ in terms of proportion of sales peak. If I pick one of the more popular posts here at Campaign Mastery from the last few years for illustrative purposes – Let’s Talk About Containers: 22 Wondrous Items:

I’ve enhanced the contrast a little to make things more visible even at the reduced size of this graphic. Looking at this, you can see that traffic to this article can be divided up into four phases. I’ve marked them on this annotated version:

• Phase 1 is the first few days to a week of the article. For a little while, it’s a hot property.
• Phase 2 follows, with just the occasional reader. Phases 1 and 2 are typical behavior.
• Phase 3 is atypical and shows what happens when someone drops a permanent link to the article on a moderately popular web page.
• Phase 4 is even more atypical, and shows what happens when someone discovers the article and posts a permanent link in a highly popular web page, like a WOTC article.

Let’s put some numbers on those graphs:

This table shows the total number of visitors to the article every month for as long as this plug-in has been monitoring site stats or since the article was first published, whichever comes later. I deliberately chose this example because it does show the entire lifetime of the article.

• So in the first month (May 2017), it had 149 views. In June, that dropped to 43 views.
• Most months up until March 2018, it averaged 11-14 visitors a month (one month had just 4, I wonder what happened that month?).
• April 2018, it had 25 views, then 34, then 54. Most months were 34-60 odd views through to March 2020; the occasional month was exceptional (Feb 2019 – 82, April 2019 – 72, Jan 2020 – 71).
• Phase 4 commenced in April 2020 – the numbers for the rest of that year were 95, 75, 69, 75, 68, 102, 102, 104, and 126. Most of 2021 saw it even more popular: 179, 206 (the all-time high for the article), 198, 159, 142, 172, 142, 165, 152, 121, 97, 114. Notice that the low mark for that year was substantially higher even than the ‘exceptionally high’ marks for the previous phase.
• The annual numbers tell a similar story – 253 in 2017, 431, 675, 1026, and 1850. Jan 2022 isn’t yet finished as I write this, and it’s already had 121 views for the month.

I also have a more detailed breakdown of the last few weeks, and it shows that the article has been receiving a steady stream of 3-4 views a day – all except for the week of New Years Day (average 3) and last week (average 5). Jan 28th, 9 people looked at it.

Here, for comparison purposes, is a more typical pattern, this time for ‘Every Shadow Has A Vanishing Point‘.

There’s the typical peak when it was first published (19 views on day 1) but by the end of the first week, it was 0 or 1 view a day. Most weeks, there would be one day that had two views. Every now and then, either through chance or because someone mentioned it in a volatile form like Twitter and it would leap up to 5 or 6 views – and then drop back again. That happens every 7 or 8 months or so.

Campaign Mastery’s traffic is the accumulation of more than 1300 such small trickles and a few handfuls of more popular posts.

It’s largely the same for any product. There’s a start and rapid acceleration as word spreads. This is largely over in the first week, month, 6 months, or year – depending on the product and the promotional platform you have for getting the word out. With a typical sales pattern, it will fall almost as fast as it climbed, with a popular product that tail-off will be even slower. But eventually, all things being equal, it will enter a stable state. Where that ‘floor’ is will depend on the popularity of the product.

Various things can ‘gee up’ market performance – bloggers writing about it regularly, for example. Free samples, demonstrations, advertising, and new additions and supplements, for example. And sometimes, a product is a sleeper, and it takes off some time after it’s initial burst of popularity.

Absent such stimulus, though, you can use (in hindsight) the attainment of that “floor’ as a signal that the product has ended its availability window, and it is now a ‘legacy product’.

The key point is this: everything new has a surge of popularity of unknown size.

In order to buy a product (whether it’s with dollars or simply with someone’s time), they have to know that it exists. Depending on how successful your initial marketing is, that will be a greater or lesser percentage of the people who might buy it if they know it exists. In most cases, that will be 5% or less.

W: Percent who subscribe / purchase / read products of this type

Some people don’t read blogs. Some people don’t listen to podcasts or stream video files. Some people won’t buy digital books. Others find them to be better value for money than physical media. A certain percentage of your market will not be served by any given format. The more strings you can add to your bow in this department, the better your product will sell.

As usual, context and expectations are everything – appear to fall short in any way, and your sales will plunge like a rock. Appear to exceed expectations, and word of mouth / publicity will follow, leading to popularity. Since I can’t be specific, 10-20% is the base expectation. The high-water mark might be 80%, a poor result would be 5% or less.

R: Percent who are not turned off by price, reputation, product description, etc

Even if someone is interested in a general sort of way, there are all sorts of resistances that have to be overcome. Price, for example – I argued very strongly that $15 or $18 were better price points for Assassin’s Amulet, but was overruled.

When it comes to price, the usual pattern is this:

As price goes up, sales go down. Marketing and promotion pushes the sales for a given price toward the upper right, but there are diminishing returns after a given point (actually, at several points). Negative expectations and reputation push sales for a given price toward the upper left. No matter what the combination, there is a ‘sweet spot’ that maximizes sales x price, i.e. profit (excluding marketing and promotion spending). Since the price of doubling the effectiveness of a given level of marketing and promotion rises more quickly than profit once those diminishing returns seriously kick in, there is also a sweet spot in terms of Marketing spend. The higher the negative expectations / damaged reputation that have to be overcome, the higher this sweet spot is, because part of the value lies in countering that negative perception.

Promotional expenditure doesn’t have to be money; it can be time, it can be promotional copies and other freebies, it can be making excerpts publicly available, it can be philanthropic or public activities while wearing a promotional T-shirt!

Different promotional activities target different variables in the ‘Drake Marketing’ formula – raising awareness, raising desirability, raising awareness of the product’s attributes. Even a 1% gain in 4 or 5 of them can be an extra 5% sales – 2%, more than 10%, 4%, more than 21% increase. What’s more likely is that you will have some quite high increases in performance metrics and some modest ones, for any given type of marketing or promotional campaign. +50%, +20%, +120%, +10%, +5% would not be at all unusual – and that yields a 357% sales increase!

Negative perceptions, warranted or otherwise, are a millstone around the neck of your sales. But the effect can be overcome. This variable measures the impact of those negatives that are not overcome – and predicting that ahead of time can be extremely difficult.

C: Percent who have the capacity to subscribe / purchase / read

You can have someone liking a product, and willing to purchase it – but still not close the sale, because the potential customer doesn’t have the wherewithal to make the purchase immediately. Discounts and sales and bonuses all push this metric (and several others) up in value.

But absent such promotional activities, this is another reflection of the relationship described regarding price earlier – you could say that this is the mechanism that couples the two factors (sales and price) together.

Depending on the price, this may be anywhere from 100% (free) to a tiny percentage of the potential marketplace.

You should also recognize that there is a reluctance to spend that has to be overcome even if the price is not unreasonable. I’ve lost count of the number of comments made here and elsewhere that shows that the person making the comment had read only the first and last couple of paragraphs, reacted to those, and put that reaction in writing.

D: Percent who do not disapprove of the product / author / publisher, etc

There are people out there who don’t like my writing style, just as there are those who do. There will be people out there who don’t like having PC Assassins in their campaigns. There are people who consider WOTC (and Wizards before them) to be next-door neighbors to the Antichrist. These are all potential sales that are almost certainly lost to you. This is a measure of the people who have NOT formed a negative opinion about one or more of these attributes. That, by definition, includes those who have formed a positive impression, and those who have never heard of you before.

A: Percent who actually do subscribe / purchase / read if given the opportunity

Finally, there’s a given percentage of potential customers who will simply get cold feet at the last minute. An overly lengthy, complex, invasive, or irritating sales process can send this percentage crashing down. The more painless that you can make implementing the decision to buy on, the better.

The cumulative effect

Let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that each step reduces the potential market to 10% of what it was. With 10 percentages, that’s 0.1 to the 10th power – or 0.000,000,01%. A drop by 1% in each of the metrics lowers this to 0.000,000,003,486,784,401%. Multiplying those two values by the population base, I get 0.79 people and 0.275 people, respectively. Fortunately, as discussed, several of the factors are much higher, and that makes a big difference.

If one was 59%, and one was 30%, and the other eight were just 10%, that yields an altogether more impressive number of 0.000,000,177%, or 13.983 sales. If those eight others were 15%, 0.000,004,536% and 358 sales are the outcome. At 20%, 0.000,045,312% and 3579.6 sales.

This is the power of a geometric expansion – the consequences of multiple factors improving, in aggregate, far outweigh the size of the individual change.

Getting back to the Okay Grognard

Ultimately, the YouTube channel had 188 subscribers and wanted to increase this by just 12 to 200. That’s only a 6.4% increase. Mark’s post calling attention to the potential milestone was largely going to be preaching to the choir, but it was a promotional effort that may have finally persuaded some who were wavering, or who simply hadn’t committed yet. On top of that, there may well have been promotional posts by others who wanted to see the target achieved. It would not have taken much for those twelve additional subscribers to have been found, and so it was that the target was achieved inside a couple of days of the announcement.

The same is true of every other form of sale that you might want to make – whether it’s acquiring twitter followers or blog readers, or actual for-money sales of a product.

Trying to assess the potential benefits of a marketing plan, that will cost X amount, can be very tricky. A step-by-step analysis, one factor at a time, can yield a vague but useful measuring stick. Achieve this much increase in sales, and the campaign is a success; achieve less, and it will nor.

And all this is relevant to GMs in general. We all have to ‘sell’ our campaign proposals to potential players; we all have to sell the players that we do have on the credibility of our plots and characters. When the wheels come off these purchases, the impact can be disastrous. If you have an acquired Resistance, you too may have to work that much harder just to be credible.

The Drake Equation For Marketing is, in the final analysis, less important than the factors that it contains, describes, and represents. Some of these are fixed and invariable; others can be influenced by you. Understanding them will help you find the sweet spot for your circumstances to optimize your outcomes – whatever you’re trying to sell.

Finally, congrats on making the target, Mark!

Last time, in part 1 of what has now become a series (more on that in a moment), I demonstrated the composite modes that I use most frequently, and some of what I can do with them.

But the rule zero of image editing is to always have an objective, a purpose, in mind – a need that the resulting image satisfies for you.

The specific projects that I have in mind are (mostly) inspired by what I found on the Pixabay home page. For some of them, I sought out additional images to add to the composition. The intent is to show (and explain), step by step, what I’m doing.

I will try not to repeat anything from Part 1, or from the earlier post on this subject in which I constructed an image that was half invention and half reality – The Power Of Blur went into detail about how I create masks and composite images from different sources without leaving a tell-tale ‘Halo’ around them.

I also talk about darkening and color-manipulating images (with examples) in Stalking Fear: The Creepy In Non-Creepy Genres – but I’ll be updating that advice in this post. Still, you might find it worth checking out for additional hints and tips after we’re done.

On to business! Today’s post will offer (compressed) step-by-step instructions for the construction and assembly of five different images:

• An alien woman
• A Blue Monkey
• A Sci-Fi Buddhist
• A Fantasy Citadel
• Using the same foundations and different dressings, a Sci-Fi City

In general, these are arranged from the most simple to the most complex, and several use techniques that will be described in earlier sections.

Rule Zero of image editing may be to always have a purpose, but rule zero of blogging is to beware of over-promising. By the time I was finished writing up and illustrating the first project on my list, it was clear that I would not get all five done in time. That meant either taking a couple of them off the list – something I didn’t want to do as they each have a purpose – or further breaking this up into a formal series.

The next image will be rather quicker than the one described below – enough that it probably wouldn’t deserve a full post on its own. Project 5 will reuse a lot of project 4, so those two form a natural partnership. Project 3 will probably need a post all of its own. So that leaves project 2 up in the air; it will reuse a lot of the techniques demonstrated in this post, and a full description of the process probably won’t be necessary; I will want to focus on the novel parts of the procedure. But there wasn’t time to add it to this post, and it probably doesn’t deserve a full post of its own.

So it has been relegated to part 3 of the new series. The undecided question right now is what I will do to fill that post out. Right now, I don’t have an answer that I’m happy with. So we’ll all have to wait and see!

Let’s get started!

Project 1: An Alien Woman

I wanted a black and white image to demonstrate an updated colorization process. The first one that I spotted was the image below. So be it :)

There are two basic approaches to colorizing a black and white image like this. You can multiply the black-and-white image by a color layer, or you can create a color layer and multiply it by the black-and-white image.

The problem is that multiplication also darkens the image, and we don’t want that. So you either do a lot of fussing around with lightness and contrast of the two layers, or you use a controlled-opacity addition layer. Adding dark to dark doesn’t make much difference, adding medium to medium makes light, and adding light to light makes very light.

That then leaves three options to consider: adding a copy of the color mask, or adding a copy of the grayscale image, or adding a combination of both. The latter gives you a lot more control but it’s easy to get confused. My normal practice is to pick one to be the dominant choice, doing most of the work, and use the other to tweak the effect just a little. And I have been known, from time to time, to use a copy of the base layer and a Multiply over the top of the addition just to give a little nuance of further control.

There’s one more trick that occasionally comes in useful – making a copy of the black-and-white image, creating a mask from the lightest tones and then deleting them from the image, and doing the same thing for the darkest tones. This permits even more granular control over the tones and color of the final image by permitting tweaks using other compositional modes like Saturation. But I always regard this as a failure, because it means that I didn’t get the colors quite right in the color layer.

Which takes me back to those three options.

If you multiply the grayscale by the color layer, most of the colors have to be a lot lighter than they will appear in the final picture, almost pastel. Back in the days of the Stalking Fear post, I made a point of that. If you multiply the color layer by the grayscale, simply by using the various controls and layers that I’ve mentioned, you can actually use colors that are a lot closer to the ones that you will end up with, and that makes projects a lot quicker and easier to complete.

So, to the project that is going to demonstrate all this using the image above. I want to use unusual colors in the background, to make the location look alien; and I want to give the girl blue skin, but a more realistic skin tone than is often used even in movies and TV.

So, before I start work, I should remind myself (and tell you) all about skin tones.

On Skin

Most people start with pink skin when coloring a Caucasian, brown skin for a black man or woman, yellow for an Asian or Inuit, and maybe a slightly redder skin for American Indians, and are inevitably disappointed by the result.

Skin should start as more of a peach color. You layer pink over the top in a texture layer, especially in mid-tones and highlights. Over that, you layer a very fine low-opacity texture in red for arteries and blue for veins. Over that, you add more peach around the edges of the highlights and fade it considerably, then a slightly grayish light brown in the same texture as the pink. Next, you use the same color in a layer for skin tan, or chocolate brown, or a golden yellow, or a slight reddish tone for non-Caucasion race (do it with white for a more anemic look). Finally, a darker version of the color around the edges and a much lighter version for highlights and shadows. Throw in combining and blending the layers (except the vein & artery layers) and you end up with a skin tone that looks fairly realistic

Sounds like a lot of work, doesn’t it? And it is – but probably less than this makes it seem, because you can use a mask to avoid worrying about edges. Most of this will be done with the airbrush tool, but for the veins and arteries there’s a sponge texture that works, and for the texture layers, a fine speckle. And, of course, the blend tools.

One point that should be noted is that with Krita, you can specify the opacity of the brush you want to use, and it will do so – there’s a convenient slider for the purpose. This doesn’t change the layer opacity, just the opacity of that particular brush-stroke – the “master control” of the layer stays at 100% until you change it.

Oh yes, and then there are wrinkles and fine lines…

On Eyes

Eyes are a little more complicated. You need to outline them a little using a darker brownish-red, a copy of which is blurred a little, and then delete the actual whites of the eyes. Don’t forget the eyelashes – these are often the hardest part to get right! You need arteries as per skin, more prominent if the eyes are to be bloodshot, almost (but not quite) invisible otherwise, you need to shade the eyeball to make it 3D, you need to make the eye ‘wet and shiny’ and do the same for the lens. The iris consists of radial streaks with color variations, usually darker on the outside, and often requires several layers. The pupil is a very VERY dark red (unless you want to create a red-eye candid look to the image), and don’t forget to make the lens shiny, and to shade the skin above and below the eye..

It’s really helpful if you have a closeup photo or other reference image to help you get the anatomy right, like this one:



Human Eye illustration by salam6490 courtesy FavPNG.com, free for personal use only.

I chose this illustration because it also shows the texture of the skin quite clearly- study it closely!

The eyes (and the ears) is often as complicated as the rest of the skin. Hands are easy by comparison! It’s so easy to make the eye too elongated (too feminine), to get the angles wrong, or to make the person look cross-eyed. Take extra care!

On Backgrounds

One of the biggest mistakes you can make is making the background too monochrome. There will be all sorts of variations and tones.

Almost as big a mistake is to have the edges too sharp – the amount of blur should match that of the black-and-white background, but that can be very hard to judge, and you have a lot of variations and options in the blur settings. Use them cautiously, then cut away the overlap with the head/body or other foreground elements, then apply one-pixel of blur.

On working scale

You’ll find life a lot easier if you use a factor of two relative to the size of the end image. 200% or 400% of the intended size tends to work well, but I will sometimes use 800% to get the eyes right, then shrink back down to the 200% or 400% scale.

Always remember what happens to the size of your brush strokes when you do this.

• At 200%, 6 pixels becomes 3, 4 pixels becomes 2, 2 pixels becomes 1, and 1 pixel becomes 0.5. The latter can be highly problematic if you’re unlucky, or highly successful if you aren’t.
• At 400%, 12 pixels becomes 3, 8 pixels becomes 2, 4 pixels becomes 1, and 2 pixels becomes 0.5. Fine lines drawn 1 pixel wide will simply seem to blend into the composition – but will still tint the color, just as the arteries have in the eyeball illustration above.
• At 800%, 24 pixels becomes 3, 16 pixels becomes 2, 8 pixels becomes 1, and 4 pixels becomes 0.5. Fine lines drawn 1 pixel wide will simply seem to blend into the composition even more faintly, but you also have the option of 2-, 3-, or 5-pixel-wide lines, which can be very useful. They will all blend in, but to a lesser extent as the size goes up.
• Not sure how big two pixels is? The borderline on all the images in this article are two pixels thick. 1 pixel is often described as a ‘hairline’.

The Project

So the notion is to make the background look alien with color, and to give the woman Blue Skin. I’m leaning toward blue and purple for the eyes, too, but I may try some yellow in there too. So the technique for assembling the color layer will be the same as described above, but the colors will be very different.

As a guide to what I’m aiming to achieve, here’s the same eye picture simply color-shifted into blue – it’s not quite right, but it’s a good start.

Preliminaries & Initial decisions

I’m going to use the color-multiplied-by-grayscale technique until I see it isn’t working. My first step is to resize the image to 2224 pixels wide, 400% of the width of full-column images here at Campaign Mastery.

That naturally blurs the image a little, but fixing that at this stage can introduce halos that are a pain to get rid of. That’s literally the last step!

Of course, all the examples I’m going to show here have to be reduced back to 556-wide in order to fit on the page. And, of course, I use a lot of variation in zoom levels while I’m working – there are times when 1600x zoom is called for! Where it’s important to illustrate what I’m doing, I’ll do a screen capture at either 100% zoom, or at the zoom level I’m actually using.

Phase one: the background

Looking at the background, I can’t tell where the horizon is. There’s a ground area in middle- and darker-gray which slopes down from right to left through the body. On the left, there’s a lighter gray area with still-lighter texture, and there might be just a hint of that to the right – but I can’t be certain. Then there’s a lighter patch on the left, and then another light-medium patch, which ends at the character’s eye-line. Above that is a sky. I suspect that this is actually a beach scene – sand, then surf, then sky (as you go from bottom to the top), so I’ll use that thought as a guideline, at least until I have a reason to change it.

Let’s talk about the horizon line relative to the eye-height of the person in the image, just for a moment. The horizon line is always relative to the eye height of the viewer/photographer unless they are looking (or have the camera tilted) up or down. And there’s no indication of that. Which means the apparent horizon line tells you something about the height of the person being photographed – if their eye-line is below the perceived horizon, they are shorter; if above, they are taller. Which means that my color choices for the background, which will give a far more substantial clue as to where the horizon line is, will matter in the final composition.

I have three choices:

• Choice #1 uses the darker area on the right-hand-side as the indicator. This feels too extreme to me. You would expect to see the camera tilted up, even a little, and to see the underside of the nose as a result. The perspective would be all wrong – and while the image could be edited to correct the problem, that isn’t what this project is all about. Besides that, having an intersection between horizon and background right at the edge of the image is a bad composition technique – the eye tends to follow the horizon through the image of the woman and then fall off the edge of the image.
• Choice #3 feels like the ‘real’ answer, because it’s roughly 2/3 of the way up the image, and dividing into thirds is a natural (and very traditional) compositional technique.
• But choice #2 is my choice. It’s not quite 1/2 way up the image (which is another traditional compositional technique), but it’s close enough, and it implies a physically larger subject. This may require a little editing of the base grayscale image, we’ll see how it works, first. What it means is that my sky contains clouds at the horizon.

For the ground, I’m going to pick a base color of white where the dark gray is, and a grainy golden yellow where the lighter part is. For the sky, I’m going to do some swirling yellowish clouds and a green sky color.

To achieve this, I need to make that dark area a lot lighter, so I start with an addition layer. Playing around with the opacity slider, 80% look about right.

But I don’t want this for the whole image, so that means an erase layer:

I created this layer with a square block of solid black to the horizon line, some airbrushed black to fade the effect gradually, and a couple of pens – one about 100 pixels in size and one about 30 pixels in size, both to mask out the clothes, hair, and figure.

When I combine the erase layer with the addition layer, this is all that’s left:

…and when I apply the addition to the base image, here’s what I get:

What I find most interesting about this image is that already you can see my chosen horizon line emerging. It’s faint, but it’s there, as this 100% zoom shows:

Time to start coloring! White first, and a bit of peach in the shadows, and a slightly yellower shade of the peach in between, all layered to build up a smooth transition:

Next, the water, a deep blue with horizontal dark green streaks. At the land-side edge, more streaks in a lighter blue and green with a slight left-and-right back-and-forth motion, angled slightly up. All except the initial blue were painted at 29% opacity so that the color underneath would show through fairly strongly. More angled streaks in a much lighter hue of the same color at a 70% opacity right at the bottom edge. A bit of careful almost horizontal smudge, and then some white streaks on top (with some more smudge at the complimentary angle relative to the horizon).

This close-up shows the effect the way it looked at the zoom level I used for most of the work:

If I turn on the base image, you can see that I was not bothered with respecting the edges of the foreground figure. I’ve been careful not to go over the horizon line, but wasn’t particularly bothered with the land-sea boundary, either.

So the next step is to clean both of those up. I do that by setting the paint layer to 50% opacity (so that I can see the base image below, then erasing the bits that shouldn’t be there. I use the hard eraser over the figure, and the soft erase along the coastline, the latter at 33% opacity so that I can control the erase precisely. Finally, a very low-opacity soft erase along the coastline. I didn’t respect the boundaries in working on the land, either, so I’ll take the time to clean that up while I’m at it.

In the image below, I’ve turned on both the sea and the land layers as well as the base image..

Except that everything gets lighter near the horizon, or it’s supposed to. If you don’t do that, it looks like a cartoon – and that’s not the effect I’m going for!.So I’m going to simply draw a horizontal line using the same middle and lighter greens that I used in the sea and position them at the horizon. This won’t be all that visible when the full image is reduced to fir Campaign Mastery size, but it’s there, and it matters. I’ll also do a few 20% opacity lines with the airbrush in a new layer and then fade them. Again, the effect will be subtle, but you’d notice if it wasn’t there.

Next, it’s back to the land – using splatter thin, at about 50 pixels size, and in another new layer, I’ll add some golden yellow in various shades along the shaded parts of the land. Then, using FX_Splat_Starfield, I’ll put a little tan color underneath the speckle in still another layer. Combining them and applying a little motion blur and then some careful smudge at 70% opacity will create texture within the land.

It was while doing all of the above that I made my first mistake of the project (mistakes happen all the time). I did initial splatter effects, and the motion blur, and the smudge all on the main land layer. So I had to bring the starfield layer on top. Fortunately, it all looked good, so I didn’t have to undo or revert to a saved copy.

But that brings me to an important tip that I neglected because I was so busy explaining what it was that I was doing – save your images regularly, in the native format of whatever image editor you’re using. In the case of Krita, that’s the KRA file format. Why? Because it preserves the layer information – every other format puts the image together as though you were doing final compositing. If you’ve saved every layer, and done too much work to undo it all, the worst case scenario doesn’t have you starting from scratch – it’s deleting a layer and redoing that part of the work, nothing more.

Anyway, this view at 200% zoom shows you the texture that results, over the base image.

And, if I put everything I’ve done so far together over the top of the base image, here’s what it looks like:

With that, it’s time to turn my attention to the sky. Base color, a darkening fade as it gets higher, lighter near the horizon, and then some swirling clouds in another layer. This all gets done in pretty much the same way as what I’ve already shown, so let’s skip ahead to the finished product:

Next, I take all those color layers and merge them together into a single color layer. This step sometimes doesn’t work properly, so I’m careful to save before and after. Results are more often exactly what was wanted when the merge is done one layer at a time.

In this case, it works perfectly, so that’s good.

One reason for the merging is that it leaves me with the perfect outline of the parts of the image that are considered foreground and background, so that I can copy and paste these into separate layers that can be independently controlled.

That also lets me merge the addition layer created earlier with the grayscale background file. Because the original was very blurred, putting the grayscale atop the color layer and applying the multiply, then tweaking the opacity until it looks right – I settled on 56% – won’t make a huge amount of difference.

One final point: you’ll notice that I did NOT forget to do the part of the sky visible through the sunglasses! This sort of thing is surprisingly easy to do, it happened in the example offered in The Power Of Blur, for example.

Phase two: the skin

The first thing that I notice when comparing the photograph to the quick eye demo that I showed earlier is how gray and flat the photo in the project is, in terms of skin tone. I mean, there are some shadows, but no real highlights – at least until you look really closely. To give myself a guide to follow, the first thing I do is make a copy of the foreground layer, brighten it a bit and then apply greater contrast, especially darkening the shadows and mid-tones. This should exaggerate the tonal differences within the skin, giving me something to work from. The results are below:

That’s more like it – there are clear highlights on the hands, and on the right cheek, and even a hint of highlight on the right forehead.

With that as my painting guide, it’s time to get busy.

I outlined my process for realistic skin tones earlier. Here it is again, in list form – but remember that I want to make this lady into an obvious alien, so I’m doing the skin in blue. So I’ve put the chosen colors for this image in [square brackets] after each item on the list.

• Skin base color is peach [light blue].
• Pink texture layer on mid-tones and highlights [slightly lighter blue].
• Low opacity texture for arteries in red [dark purple].
• Low opacity texture for veins in dark blue [white].
• More peach over the edges of the highlights, faded considerably [light blue].

A slightly grayish light brown in the same texture as the pink over the shadows [darker blue].

• Tan & Skin tone layer [darker blue again].
• Darker brown around the edges and deep shadows [very dark blue]
• Much lighter version of the same color on highlights [very light, slightly grayish blue]
• Combine everything below the artery layers into a single color layer. Combine everything above the veins into a single color layer.
• Blend those layers as necessary to get rid of any banding – smooth color transitions are the goal.
• Set the opacity of the top layer and the vein & artery layers so that these only just show through. You only want to hint at these except in unusual situations.
• When satisfied, combine skin layers into a single color layer.

To this, I’m going to add a second-last step:

• Test The Multiply by Grayscale! Tweak the contrast and brightness as necessary.

So, let’s get busy.

Skin base color is peach [light blue].

Having taken a fair amount of care with this, I can then do a neat trick: using the similar color selection tool, I can restrict the working area to just the skin, even when I go to work on a new layer.

In terms of that care: having dark clothing made it a lot easier, so most of what I had to worry about was hair and the glasses. In terms of the hair, anywhere that skin might show through (including the eyebrows) was painted in the base layer. I’ll fix it with greater care when I do the hair.

Pink texture layer on mid-tones and highlights [slightly lighter blue].

I’ve actually done two layers of highlights here, a light one and an almost white one. Even at 100% opacity, the shape of the face and hands are clearly starting to come through.

Low opacity texture for arteries in red [dark purple].

Arteries get done with the sponge texture. If you click on the paintbrush icon at the top after selecting the brush and in paint mode (the brush on the left), it opens up a panel of dozens of additional textures and settings. The texture I want is in the sixth row and is called reptile skin.

You heard me.

Here’s the result at full opacity:

But I’m nowhere near done with them yet. The next step is to apply the sharpen filter (listed under enhance). And then I’m going to use my airbrush erase at about 30% to fade these massively except in the areas around the shadowed parts of the face. And, once that’s done, I’ll drop the layer opacity down to about 8%. Finally, I’ll set the size of my erase brush to about the size of the cells of the texture and trace meandering routes through them, leaving only the ‘lightning bolt’ shapes more familiar to us as arteries. You want the blood vessels to (generally) follow the shape of the physical features like fingers.

The results are, as you can see, far more subtle.

Of course, I’ll do the same thing with the hands.

Low opacity texture for veins in dark blue [white].

I do the veins the same way as the arteries, but I reduce the opacity in the mid-tones and shadows, not the mid-tones and highlights, and I won’t drop the opacity as low – somewhere around the 30 to 35% mark is usually right.

More peach over the edges of the highlights, faded considerably [light blue].

This is a job for the airbrush tool. While I can fade it using the layer opacity slider, I don’t want to make it too opaque to start with – 25% is about right, and using multiple strokes to blend. This, of course, further fades the veins and arteries.

A slightly grayish light brown in the same texture as the pink over the shadows [darker blue].

Airbrush again, starting at 70% and stepping down so as to fade the effect. This is also when I will do the lips.

Tan & Skin tone layer [a darker blue again].

Airbrush, but at a fairly low opacity. I used 5% and 170-odd pixels.

Darker brown around the edges and deep shadows [very dark blue]

Same method as above.

Much lighter version of the same color on highlights [very light, slightly grayish blue]

And the same again.

Here’s where we’re at after doing all that:

Combine everything below the artery layers into a single color layer. Combine everything above the veins into a single color layer.

Again, no problems on this occasion.

Blend those layers as necessary to get rid of any banding – smooth color transitions are the goal.

No real problems in this regard. There usually aren’t, but this provides a last chance to find and fix any trouble.

Set the opacity of the top layer and the vein & artery layers so that these only just show through. You only want to hint at these except in unusual situations.

I ended up setting arteries to 13%, veins to 50%, and the shadows layer on top to 85%.

Test The Multiply by Grayscale! Tweak the contrast and brightness as necessary.

When I tried this with the original person image, it became just a little too dark and too flat. So I tried the version where I had enhanced the skin tones and it looks perfect:

When satisfied, combine skin layers into a single color layer.

Quite satisfied, so let’s move on, having done that housekeeping!

Phase three: the hair

What color hair should this woman have? Brown? No. Red? No. Blonde/yellow? No. None of those would look right. Green? too much like the sky. Blue? Ummm -maybe. Purple? Ummm, not so sure, but maybe.

Here’s a new tip: if I place the hair color layer beneath those of the background and the skin, the only place that the effects will be visible are where there’s no color already set. So this can be done fairly quick and sloppy.

I try the blue – with a second darker shade away from the brightly-lit edge, it works.

Phase four: the clothes

Clothes comprise three things in this picture: jacket, sunglasses frame, and sunglasses lenses.

I’ll do these separately.

I noted while setting the enhanced skin tones that with a little lightening, a lot more detail could be seen in the jacket. I liked the way it looked. So I’m going to start by copying and pasting just that part of the base image, and adjusting it. I will need to compensate for the comparative lack of shadows that results by adding some airbrushed darker color, but otherwise, this can be done almost as quickly and easily as the hair was.

With everything that’s not jacket removed, here’s what I end up with:

So, to colors: I think that a middle-dark red should come up very nicely. A lighter red with a little yellow tint for the edges of the jacket, and a slightly purple dark red for the shadows. Here’s how that works out:

Next, the sunglasses. I don’t think there’s any need to do anything with the lenses, on reflection (not intended as a joke); the original image already darkens them. Maybe a slight color shift to the skin visible through them.

To try that, I go to my skin layer, and copy the lenses, then paste them into a new layer. But then I remembered that part of the view through the sunglasses was sky, so I turned that layer on as well, corrected my selection, and then ‘copy merged’ from the edit menu.

I darkened the color a little, desaturated it a little, and shifted the tone a little further away from yellow. It looked fine, and a definite improvement, especially after I specified “Grain Merge” compositing mode for the layer.

Last, there’s the sunglasses frame. For the most part, this is just black – it’s what color to do the highlights in. I think that an apple green is worth trying. Once again, I can use the “bottom of the layer stack” trick to make this a quick and easy test.

The green didn’t work, so I tried a gold. That didn’t work either, so I tried the same red that I had used in the jacket. That was closer but not quite right. A dark grape purple worked perfectly.

Phase four: final compositing

Working at x-hundred percent size means that when the final image is rendered, mistakes shrink. That’s a good thing. It also means that the final image will be a little blurred – four pixels (at 200%), or more, will suddenly become one that’s a compromise between all of them.

Step one is to make copies of all the layers and put them underneath all the visible layers, then apply Blur as described in The Power Of Blur. This fills any gaps and makes the colors look smooth. The easiest way to do this is to select the bottom-most layer, then shift-select the uppermost one, control-G to quickly put them into a group (which overrides any individual composite modes set). I can then select the group, collapse its contents list with the little downward arrow, duplicate the ‘group layer’, move the duplicate down, then quick-ungroup each group with Control-Alt-G. Foreground elements get blurred by (0.5 x scale%) pixels, background elements by (2 x scale%) pixels, and midground elements (there aren’t any in this image) by (1xscale%) pixels.

Step two is to Flatten The Image. That takes all the layers and combines them.

Step three is to resize the image to it’s final intended size. I use 1300 wide or 800 high for my in-campaign illustrations, whichever is the most constrained – 1300×650 would be acceptable, or 1100×800. That’s all about the available display space on my screen, so your choices might well be different.

For Campaign Mastery, I use two basic sizes: 390 wide or 556 wide. The latter is what all the illustrations in this post have been.

Not all of these will have visible consequences, so I won’t demonstrate them individually. Here’s the end product:

Phase five: sharpening

Time to fix that blurring problem.

I make a copy of the image and apply sharpen to the copy. This is what happens:

You can see the effect of sharpening. Notice the halo around the hands and at the top of the jacket collar, and the against-sky part of the sunglasses. The horizon also suddenly looks unnaturally bright – that’s another halo! And there’s one more on the shoulder to the right of the image, and yet another in the ground at the bottom of the image. Lots of halos to clear up!

The solution is to reduce the opacity of the sharpened copy until it looks right – no halos around objects, etc, but the content still sharpened a little. This is usually around the 20% opacity mark, but I’ve used everything from 40% to 10% in the past. Sometimes I’ve also had to use a low-opacity blurred copy of the image in order to soften the sharpening.

In this case, 17% looks good to me.

Once I’m happy with the end result, I again flatten the image, combining the sharpened and sharpened images. Then it’s time for a final review: is the resulting image too light? Too dark? Too much contrast, or too little? This is the last chance for any final tweaks!

In this case, I note that the lightness of the midground has accentuated a darkness of skin tone compared to the ‘quick guide’ example that I created early on, but the somewhat gloomy and mournful tone works for the image, though hinting that this is either early in the morning or at twilight. Or perhaps this is set on a world with a smaller, cooler star than our sun. I also note that the cheekbones have become even more accentuated, adding to the slightly alien physiognomy. Regardless, I’m reasonably happy with the image with no further need for tweaking.

Here’s the finished image:

Project one completed. Click on the image to open a for-use-in-an-RPG sized version.

Let’s Sum Up;

There have been a number of techniques demonstrated in this article, and I’ll be referring to several of them in future parts of this series, so it’s worth taking a moment to highlight them.

1. Multiply Grayscale by Color or Color by Grayscale – it matters!
2. Skin (human)
3. Eyes (human)
4. Horizon Line significance
5. Using erase to separate image elements
6. Adding original image elements – constructing Sea
7. Adding Texture
8. Skin Color process demonstrated and adapted to alien skin
9. Hair Color
10. Clothing Color
11. Using sharpen to correct blur from reduction in scale

That’s quite a lot for one article!

PS:

Some people may be wondering about the dashed line that appears in some of the images. That’s how Krita indicates a Mask – a dashed line that “marches” around the edge, i.e. is not a still image. Obviously, screen capture picked it up – showing absolutely that these images were grabbed “live” as I was working on the project.

PS2:

There’s been some interest in Krita itself. I find the approach very intuitive for the most part, but I’m not using the latest version (due to laziness on my part more than anything else). I’m using version 4.4.3 of the 64-bit version, pretty much as it comes out of the box (I have expanded some tool areas and added a couple of quick buttons to the top for convenience). I’ve also downloaded (but not yet installed) a whole bunch of extra brushes and textures. You can investigate further, and grab the program (free) for yourself at https://krita.org.

Next week, I’ll write on some other subject to give those who aren’t so into illustration something to think about, but then I’ll be back with Part 3, in which I’ll tackle A Blue Monkey!

A picture, it is said, is worth 1,000 words. Sometimes, it’s worth more than that. In an earlier post, I posited that the GM should make darned sure that he gets a full thousand-words-worth out of an image if he is going to spend serious time editing it.

Past posts on image construction and editing have proven quite popular, so I thought I’d do another one.

Because of the number of images to download, this post might be a little slow to load – my apologies for that, but I think it will be worth it.

The Fundamental Principle

Whenever you edit an image, you should always have a firm purpose in mind. In so many cases, the basic technique is to manipulate the image and decide whether or not the manipulation takes it closer to serving that purpose. If it does, fine – move on to thinking about how to get it even closer; if not, try something else.

Layers

I work a LOT with layers. For one thing, “undo” doesn’t always work seamlessly, and for another, sometimes you need to do something else with the base image. So for a start, never manipulate the base image; always work with a copy which is, essentially, a second layer.

In addition, you can take parts of an image and manipulate them in different ways by putting each part in a different layer; and you can specify how much each layer contributes to the final effect. That’s controlled by something called Opacity.

Compositing Modes

There are several ways that different layers can interact to create an image. There are seven that I use regularly – addition, multiply, darken, burn, color, alanon, erase, and grain merge. There are dozens of others in Krita, the image editing software that I do most of my work in these days, but those are the most common.

Let’s start by illustrating the different compositing modes, and some of the things that you can do with them.

To do this, I’ll be working with this image:

This is a US city skyline; the image information doesn’t tell me which city, but that doesn’t matter.

Opacity

First, against a white background, here’s a demonstration of opacity:

100% is exactly the same as shown above.

70%:

See how the white background is showing through?

50%:

20%:

The image is almost completely faded away.

If I change the background color to a medium-dark, slightly gray, yellowish brown:

100% – still the same as the original image

70%:

50%:

20%:

If I wanted to make a sepia-toned version of the image, I would usually base it around a desaturated copy, with the original reduced to almost complete zero opacity, and probably with a multiply composition mode for both, and a lighter background – but that’s getting ahead of myself. The point would be to leave just the merest vestage of the original colors – I’ve learned from experience that this looks more “real” than using pure color. You can judge the color of background to use by remembering that this is what the lightest color will be – the parts of the image that are white on the original.

Okay, so that’s opacity.

Addition

So, making a copy of the image and applying Addition as the composition mode produces this, with both layers at 100% opacity.

100%:

To understand composition modes, you have to be aware of how colors are understood by the software. This depends on something called the color space, and there are several different ones, but the one I use most often (because it’s the same one used for web pages) is RGB, or Red-Green-Blue. Each of these colors is described by a number from 0 to 255. If all of them are at maximum, you get white (255,255,255); if all of them are minimum, you get black (0,0,0).

If the Red channel is 255 and the others are 0, what you get is pure red (255,0,0). Similarly, Green from the Green channel (0,255,0) and Blue from the Blue channel (0,0,255): I think of these as the Primary Colors of RGB mode.

Each of these colors also has it’s opposite:

Cyan (0,255,255) has no red in it; Violet (255,0,255) has no green in it (and always looks very pink to my eyes); and Yellow (255,255,0) has no blue in it.

In combination, these numbers permit 1,6777,216 separate colors, variations so subtle that you can’t distinguish one from another. It’s estimated that the human eye can see about 1,000,000 colors, so this permits faithful photography. The intermediate values are necessary, though, to permit the smooth transition from one color to another.

So, the composition mode basically takes the value for each channel from both images and performs that mathematical function on them. Anything less than zero yields a zero, and anything more than 255 yields 255.

Addition, then, doesn’t change the dark areas much, but increases the brightness of the light areas.

The opacity of the layer being added to the base image controls how much of an adjustment takes place.

At 70%, 128 + 128 becomes 128 + (70% x 128) = 217.6 (I’m not sure how the program deals with the 0.6, it might round up or down, but the difference wouldn’t be noticeable anyway).

At 50%, 128 + 128 becomes 128 + (50% x 128) = 192, and so on.

The results are thus:

100% – as shown above.

70%:

50%:

20%:

Where this gets interesting is where two images are being added that have very different colors and shades.

For example, if I take this image:..

…and Add it to the base city image, this is what happens (shown at different opacities):

100%:

70%:

50%:

20%:

The main purpose for which I use addition is to make room for multiplication effects. I’ll talk about that a bit later – but, for a long time, I didn’t use this compositional mode at all, and relied on tweaking the brightness and contrast of a multiplied image. Putting an addition layer in between gives me a little more control over the creation of the image.

Multiply

Multiply is a little trickier to understand, because (technically) it’s misnamed. If you multiply an image color by white (255,255,255), it’s unchanged. If you multiply it by black (0,0,0), it becomes black. More interesting things happen at in between values.

Here’s the city image, multiplied by itself:

Right away, you can see the utility of this mode – the contrast of the image is enhanced. The foreground buildings are now too dark, but the skyline buildings are suddenly crisp and sharp.

By altering the opacity of the multiplied image, you can control the effect.

70% opacity:

50% opacity:

20% opacity:

By breaking an image up into multiple layers, each one multiplying the base image, and varying the opacity of each layer independently, you can control the contrast of each part of the image. If you carefully fade the edges of the different areas, the effect can be seamless.

If I were working this up for use in an RPG, higher contrast is important because optimum viewing angle hardly every occurs, the image is usually too light, especially when viewed from any distance (like, the far end of the table). So I would leave the foreground buildings un-multiplied, or with a very low percentage like 3% or something; I would use 20% for the mid-ground buildings; and I would use 100% for the skyline buildings. Which only leaves the question: what about the sky? For a gray, overcast day, I would use 20% or maybe 50%, because it makes the cloud formations stand out a little more. For a stormy day, I would not only use 100% for the clouds, I would use another multiply trick (that I’ll cover later) to tint them. And for more clement weather, I would use addition to brighten the sky and remove some of the cloud detail and then the same multiply trick to make it a blue sky.

Once again, with different colors from a second image, things become more interesting.

Here’s city multiplied by lake 100%:

And here’s lake multiplied by city at 100% opacity:

Don’t see any difference? That’s because there isn’t any! But if there was a third, different, layer in between, the effect would be marked.

Here, for example, I’ve added a yellow ring beneath the lake multiply layer:

….and lake and yellow ring multiplied by city 100%:

And, if I take away the part of the city image that’s outside the yellow ring, make the ring blue, and decrease it’s opacity to 23%, I get:

This is good but not quite right – I want to fade (i.e. reduce the opacity) of the lake part inside the ring so that the city is more apparent. Using the slider, I settle on an opacity of 65%, and make sure that there’s a white foundation underneath. Here’s the result:

That’s not bad. If I were doing it for real, I would have worked harder on the ring, blurring the inner edge, maybe filling the inner part with a halo of even less opaque blue, multiplying the skyline section of the city by itself, and maybe adding a second ring. I would also have moved the ring(s) and city section so that both images had the same vanishing point. These small touches would all enhance the image. But this is good enough to demonstrate the basics of using Multiply.

Darken

If you darken a copy of an image, you see absolutely no difference – which is completely different to what happens when you use multiply.

To see any effects, the darken layer has to be different in some way to the layer being darkened.

Here’s City Darkened by Lake at 70% opacity:

And 30% opacity:

Darken doesn’t change the color values in the same way that multiply does. That’s occasionally useful for shadows and special effects.

If you create a copy of the image and convert it to grayscale (i.e. Black and White), and then invert that image (so that black becomes white and vice-versa), you can use Darken on colored areas to deepen those colors – sometimes a useful trick. But you can achieve the same effect with Multiply. So I don’t often use this compositing mode – but every now and then, it does exactly what I want, when multiply won’t.

Burn

Burn introduces another concept, another way of looking at the colors of an image: Saturation. When a copy of city is used to Burn the base image at 100%:

As you can see, not only are the darks much darker, the same as multiply, but what colors were present are also much richer and deeper. That can be useful when combined with an intermediate addition layer, or a compositing mode that I haven’t mentioned (and rarely use), Lighten.

Here’s a multilayered composite:

• At the bottom is the base image.
• Above that is an addition layer at 64% opacity.
• Then there is a burn layer at 79%.
• Then there’s a multiply layer at 30%.
• And then another copy of the base image at 42%.

The net effect is that colors are more saturated, but not garishly so, and the skyline is accentuated, but the darkening effects on the foreground buildings are far less pronounced. The image is, basically, clearer.

Color

This compositional mode replaces the colors in the base image by the colors in the Color layer. The lighter the area of the base image, the less it is affected. But black is unaffected.

The results are often counter-intuitive. Here, for example, is City colored by lake 100%:

Whatever I was expecting from the combination, it wasn’t that!

You can see the effect more clearly in this image, in which I’ve simply done a red scribble across the image (in a separate layer, of course):

And here’s a closeup, which shows it even more clearly:

Doesn’t look like black is unaffected, does it? But it is: take a good hard look at this closeup of the Lake image colored by the same scribble:

You might think that there’s no value in such an unpredictable composition mode, but I find myself using it regularly to make subtle changes to the colors in an image, especially if I’ve used other compositional modes to make large-scale changes to an image’s color profile.

It’s not the only tool that I’ve got in my toolkit for that. For example, here’s a different view of the lake image – I’ve removed the sky blue into a separate layer and then played around with the red and blue color spaces a little:

The effect is basically remapping the green to become bright red then adding layers of yellow, green, and brown texture which is then used to provide a color map, giving the impression that individual leaves are something other than the reddish brown. Note that I literally spent just a few minutes on this as a demonstration; I would take far more care if doing this for real!.

Using color, addition, and multiplication shifts the lake scene from summer to mid-autumn, and demonstrates how useful this composition mode can be.

Alanon

Alanon is a mode that I had never noticed until I started playing around with Krita. I’m not sure of what it does in technical terms, but fundamentally, it averages the color values between the base layer and the Alanon layer. This “fades” one image into another.

Used properly, this can be quite potent. If you’re just playing around, however, you’re more likely to end up with a mess.

Below is City Alanon Lake 100%:

Things get more interesting when I add a second Alanon layer at 30%:

Grain Merge

Grain Merge is similar to Alanon, but it takes into account the lightness and darkness of the images, effectively using the Grain image to ‘texture’ the base image.

If I use the City as a grain for itself, the results should look familiar:

It looks remarkably like the multi-layered image that I presented earlier, doesn’t it? But look more closely: the clouds are all but gone. The street looks like it’s been raining and is now reflecting the sky. A lot of other light-colored areas are also washed out but bright – the contrast has been boosted significantly. That means that I could replace the streets in the composite image with this ‘rain-slicked’ version, keeping the clouds visible, but using the ‘flare lightening’ effect.

Grain Merge is rarely the top layer of an image, rarely the final step. Instead, it can often be useful for providing foundations for later layers to work on.

It’s also most useful in small doses (without a high opacity in other words). For example, here’s our Lake Image in a multilayered form:

• At the bottom is the base layer, as always.
• Above that, addition at 73% opacity.
• Then Grain Merge at 28%, darkening and enriching the colors, especially the darker ones and shadows.
• And then Alanon at 50%, which also darkens the resulting image (because of the addition layer), but impacting especially the lighter areas.

The result is still lighter and brighter than the original image, but not (quite) garishly so:

Like all compositing modes, Grain Merge is a tool – sometimes it’s useful, other times, you don’t need it.

Erase

Erase reduces the opacity of an image according to the opacity of the erase layer. Doesn’t sound like much, does it? But it can be incredibly useful.

Erase as I use it always involves Three Layers: The base image, the target layer, and the erase layer. That’s because when I combine the erase layer and the target layer, only the target layer gets erased, permitting the base image to show through.

Here’s an erase layer that I’ve put together (with a blueish background). It’s basically small spots of black in various opacities, selected more or less at random: Note that the background is a completely separate layer so that I can turn it off – but because Campaign Mastery’s page color is white, it wouldn’t show up very well.

Next, I apply motion blur with a long blur length – 400 pixels in this case – at an angle of about 65 degrees to the horizontal:

That’s close but not quite the effect that I want. So I repeat the blur:

Much better!

Now, with a base layer of white, and a target layer of the city image, I get:

If I go from a white background to a bluesih one, the effect becomes more visible:

Also, notice that around the edges, the erase effect fades. I don’t want that. The solution is to enlarge the erase layer. 125% is about right:

Because I haven’t yet combined the erase and target layers, everything is being erased. As soon as I combine the two, change the background back to white, and enhance the effect a little with multiply, I get

Still doesn’t look like all that much – it could be the city viewed through a reflecting glass window, or something. But when I add some more layers with blur – blue-white spots, smaller ones, this time, and some that aren’t blurred at all:

I get a rainy city.

And, if I add still more particles of white, and enhance the contrast a bit, I get a snowy one:

In Part 2:

I stated at the start that you should always have a clear purpose in mind before you start altering an image. That purpose could be nothing more significant than “what does this do?” – but most of the time it will be, or should be, more directed.

So, in the next part, I will use these basic tools to complete a number of specific projects:

• An alien woman
• A Blue Monkey
• A Sci-Fi Buddhist
• A Fantasy Citadel
• Using the same foundations and different dressings, a Sci-Fi City

That’s what you have to look forward to in part two!

Information Dumps, better known as Infodumps, are a necessary evil in every RPG from time to time. Creating and delivering one is a little like trying to feed vegetables to a child – you get the occasional good experience but it’s more often an uphill struggle.

I describe them as a necessary evil because they trap the GM between giving the players all the information their characters might know and use as the basis of a decision while cloaking that information in massive amounts of info that they don’t use and therefore don’t need – but it’s impossible to know what the status of any given fact will be in advance, so you have to deliver them all. And that can make them incredibly boring, as the GM drones on and on and on and…

Creating them represents a massive effort on the part of the GM in deciding what the facts and the story actually are, but this is a task that can’t be avoided – or, more accurately, it shouldn’t be.

The reason is that it’s a lot easier to be consistent, and to avoid accidentally repeating yourself, if you do most of the work at the same time. You may be able to defer some of the final polishing, but more than that is unwise.

“May you be cursed to deliver regular infodumps” doesn’t sound like much, but it’s actually one of the nastiest things you can wish on another GM.

Having said that, there are ways to take the sting out of the Infodump. 15 of them, in fact. And then a 16th technique to be the icing on this particular cake. No one of these techniques will completely solve the problem, and there are times when none of them are appropriate, so they are not a panacea – but in eighty or ninety percent of cases, in combination, they can relieve 80 to 90 per cent of the difficulties.

As usual, I like to present a table of contents, a road-map to the content to come, so let’s do that first:

1. Change & Uncertainty
2. An infodump is only as good as its source
3. Personality & Interaction, not a lecture
4. Non-Critical Flashbacks
5. Descriptive Narrative Inserts
6. Infodump Deferred
7. Regional Festivals
8. Visions & Memorials
9. Relics Of Yesteryear
10. Legacies In Culture
11. Legacies In Architecture
12. Sneaky Advances
13. Talkative Villains
14. A Little Light Reading
15. Actual Infodumps
16. Put Back Some Of What You Take

That’s quite a long list, so I can’t afford to spend too much time on any one of them. Ironically, this particular infodump suffers from the same problems as any other!

So let’s get busy.

1. Change & Uncertainty

Change and Uncertainty transform an infodump into discovery and adventure. There is, after all, no value in spending time reciting information if it has been rendered irrelevant.

The worst possible situation is one in which the PCs are in no position to know that a situation has changed, because that necessitates your spending time creating, and delivering, a substantial tract of text that you know will be completely irrelevant – but you can’t let the players know that because it could influence their decisions in an unrealistic way.

Better by far to find some reason to tell them that the available information is out of date and unreliable than to waste many times as much time in creating that irrelevant information.

2. An infodump is only as good as its source

Where did the person presenting the infodump in-game get his information? if it’s unreliable, it’s far better from a gaming perspective to simply tell the players “X tells you his sources are so unreliable that telling you what he thinks he knows is more likely to mislead than be worthwhile.” This doesn’t have to be applied to the whole briefing – it can apply to a small but important part, a large part, a couple of large parts, or to the whole.

The key objective is to avoid repetition – and that includes repetition in terms of gathering intelligence ‘in the field’. So present the part that’s going to be the most boring to learn ‘the hard way’ as an infodump, and present the parts that can be made interesting, in some other form.

3. Personality & Interaction, not a lecture

Presentation is important in any public address, but perhaps even more important when reciting dry facts. To convince you of that, here’s a string of events that occurred in a random time frame – try reading it aloud.

1973, January: Israeli fighters shoot down 13 Syrian MIG-21s, triggering hostilities.
1973, January: Fighting erupts along the Suez Canal between Egypt and Israel.
1973, January 1: The UK, Ireland, and Denmark enter the EEC.
1973, January 1: CBS sells the New York Yankees for 3.2 million less than they paid to purchase the team.
1973, January 2: Eleazor Lopez Contrares, 45th President of Venezuela, dies.
1973, January 14: The worldwide Telecast of a concert in Hawaii by Elvis Presley becomes the first TV program to be watched by more people than the Moon Landing.
1973, January 14: The Miami Dolphins become the first and only team in NFL history to record a perfect season.
1973, January 15: Nixon announces the suspension of offensive actions in Vietnam.
1973, January 17: Ferdinand Marcos becomes President For Life of the Philippines.

I could continue, but that should be ample demonstration. When reading to yourself, you can skim over or abbreviate the dates, and any events that don’t seem relevant; reading aloud, you have much less scope for doing so. The result is a dreary tedium only partially relieved by interest in any specific content. And, if it’s boring to read, consider how much more boring it would be to listen to it! Now picture yourself reciting multiple pages of such material!

The ideal roleplaying is between an NPC, imparting the information, and a PC, receiving it – personal interactions overlaying and overlapping the content may slow the delivery (but you can compensate by deliberately compressing and editing the information into a narrative). But you often can’t rely on that because one of the two parties is not under the control of the GM.

Certainly, you can provoke some interactions with personal commentary by deliberately playing to the PC’s personality / interests, but these are often brief, even terse.

No, if you want depth of interaction, NPC-to-NPC with one or more PCs as interested onlookers being dragged into the situation (in the middle of what is supposed to be the PCs briefing) is a far better way to go. And that permits you to interrupt the briefing with stimulating events that make the infodump process more interesting.

Rivalries, personal contests, personalities, secrets, surprises, antagonisms, side-conversations, interruptions, and revelations – I used all of these and more to keep the players entertained during the big infodump described in Synopsis, Session 2 (from Session 3) in A Long Road Pt 1 last year. I stopped short of dancing girls, but if you can find a way to work them in, go for it!

Because the more you can pad an infodump with interactions, the more interesting it will be – even though it will take longer to get through in terms of playing time.

Dress up your infodumps with interactions!

4. Non-Critical Flashbacks

A lot of information contained within infodumps is not relevant until later. The temptation is to present that at the start, as described earlier, but there’s a lot to be said for extracting all of that information and providing it in flashback form when it’s about to become relevant. This can be achieved simply by replacing the content in the infodump with a general phrase from the third person perspective: “Nathora describes the route and what he thinks you will encounter in long and tedious detail, working from prepared notes. When he’s finished, he hands over the notes for you to take with you as a reminder. He then continues,….”

This does not work well when there’s a major decision or planning of some sort required, though that can also be deferred until the branch point is reached, so it’s only if the decision has immediate impact that this approach doesn’t apply.

An infodump in small doses is a lot more tolerable than a huge one that won’t be relevant for many game sessions.

In fact, an awful lot of content in an infodump can often be extracted and delivered in a different manner. Rather than a solid wall of text, treat it as a jigsaw puzzle, in which some pieces don’t even have to be revealed until later in the adventure. That principle underpins many of the techniques that I am offering in this article.

5. Descriptive Narrative Inserts

This is possibly the hardest technique to employ, because of its limited utility, but some information can be extracted from an infodump and inserted into a narrative description at the point where it’s going to be relevant.

For example,

“Climbing the hill, the valley of Sanichio is revealed before you. This place is notorious throughout the three Kingdoms as a place of lawlessness and banditry…” and you then launch into a pocket history of the place.

This not only gives you a vector for the injection of information that “everyone knows” but that has never been mentioned to the players before, it gives you a tool for imparting additional content and depth within your narrative – a win-win, if used correctly!

6. Infodump Deferred

Instead of telling them everything in the infodump, the NPC giving the briefing directs the PCs to look up a particular NPC in a particular place en route who will have more recent / better information to impart. This extracts part of the infodump and turns it, at least partially, into a roleplaying encounter.

This can be enhanced by thinking of the NPC to whom the PCs have been directed as something more than a parrot for the information extracted from the infodump. Treat them as a character with their own circumstances, foibles, and problems, into which the PCs are injecting themselves. They may be cooperative or may need to be coerced. They may be neck-deep in trouble and need to be rescued before they can spare the time to tell the PCs what they want to know.

This takes the infodump and turns it into a vehicle for side-plots and adventure and roleplaying. Talk about transforming a liability into an asset!

7. Regional Festivals

Consider this:

“As you ride into Xahavin, banners are being erected and doors and windows decorated, mostly with red balls – some woolen, some glass, some ceramic. The banner tells you that this weekend is the 214th annual Fire Festival. On one side of the central plaza, a stage is being erected for a puppet-show, and benches positioned to serve as seating. Either the village is a lot larger than it appears, or practically the entire population is expected to be in attendance…”

With a buildup like that, it’s only natural to ask a bystander – just some random stranger – what the Fire Festival is all about.

“Why, that commemorates the day the ball of fire came down from the heavens and threatened to incinerate the town, only to be driven off by the great hero Name-drop,” comes the answer. “There are re-enactments of the battles, religious services, and it culminates in a feast followed by a drunken celebration of life itself.”

A regional festival or day of commemoration or anything along those lines can be used as a vector for local history. And that’s extremely preferable to simply telling the story in an infodump – it transforms that piece of infodump into an experience with interaction. Local History brought to life!

Of course, the person whose name gets dropped has to be relevant to the current adventure.

But the benefits of this approach don’t end there – you also get to distinguish a community and it’s social practices and make it all more than just a place on the map.

8. Visions & Memorials

I don’t know how many readers watched Star Trek: Voyager. In one episode, the crew are affected by a memorial to a past conflict that is malfunctioning, imparting the experience of living through the conflict – the personalities of the participants, the mistakes made, and so on. At first, when they figure out what is going on and why several of the crew have been traumatized, they contemplate shutting it down – but decide instead that the experience was so profound that they should repair it and place a buoy in orbit to forewarn visitors of what to expect.

Why not take that idea and adapt it? “Some deeds are so dark and terrible that the memory of them lingers on in the places where they took place as Visions of the past, visions with which the participants can interact – not as themselves, but in the role of one of the key characters in the story.”

If that’s a little too extreme for you, simply erect a memorial with a brief notation on a brass plaque. In the next community they come to, the specifics on the plaque give the players a specific incident to ask the locals about. The infodump becomes a source of interaction between the locals and the PCs.

9. Relics Of Yesteryear

“Legend has it that a great battle was fought in the vicinity of Thizzelwood long ago, as an army of light confronted a patrol of Evil, but I’ve never investigated the specifics.”

This is just a bit of color in the infodump, but it becomes significant when the PCs approach Thizzelwood and one finds a rusty old blade marked with High Devorica runes in some underbrush. As a weapon, the find is worthless, but as a tangible clue to the (potentially relevant) history of the area, priceless.

It’s yet another technique for taking history out of the infodump and placing it in the PCs path.

10. Legacies In Culture

Of course, almost anything can serve the same purpose. You can hide key parts of the history in Tapestries, Paintings, Folk Art, Folk Songs, and Local Legends. At their simplest, these can simply trigger a piece of deferred infodump – at their most complex, they can shed fresh light on past events and even throw plot twists into a story.

Of course, the locals won’t have it right every time, so those plot twists may just be the result of misinterpretations of events – but even a short-lived episode of thinking that they may have signed up to the wrong side in a conflict can drop the bottom out of PC complacency.

How much soup to make out of the bones presented in 9 and 10 is up to you. Don’t do the same thing every time!

11. Legacies In Architecture

“The lintel of the great stone gate catches your attention, [name of party member with high Architecture knowledge] Only the Elves of Deeping Down used that particular technique, but they vanished without trace centuries ago – and there’s never been any mention of Elves in these lands.”

This small snippet not only intrigues, it tells the players (if they are paying attention) that knowledge skills have practical value in the campaign, and that various cultures in this game world have architectural distinctiveness that can sometimes provide a useful clue. There’s not only a mini-mystery dropped into the players’ laps by this inclusion, but if their main adventure should happen to involve Elves in some fashion….

12. Sneaky Advances

If you are sufficiently ahead of the game with your prep, you can sometimes sneak some of your future infodump into an earlier adventure. You run the risk that the information will be forgotten by the time you actually need for the PCs to remember it, but it generally takes a lot less to remind them of things already learned than to impart the education in the first place.

It’s even more likely to stick if you can somehow make the excerpt from your planned infodump relevant to the earlier adventure somehow. For example, making it part of the ‘reward’ earned tells the players that this is going to be important, even if the PCs don’t appreciate the significance at the time.

A variation on this technique is to actually create an encounter or an adventure for the express purpose of delivering, in an interesting and adventure-relevant way, information that you would otherwise have to dump on the PCs at some later point. But that takes a LOT of careful planning – you actually need to plan out the adventure that is supposed to contain the infodump AND write the infodump itself, before you start work on the “extra” adventure or encounter.

13. Talkative Villains

One of the problems with infodumps can be that they let the cat out of the bag too early. Saving a revelation or two for the monologuing of an over-talkative villain eliminates that. If there’s anything in the adventure that could be anticlimactic because of an infodump, seriously consider this approach, or some variation. You can even arrange for the villain to win a first battle with the PCs, leading to them being captured and thrown into the villain’s dungeon, where a fellow prisoner gives them the last piece of the puzzle of how to defeat the villain!

14. A Little Light Reading

I’ve done this on a grand scale with the Elves And Orcs series here at Campaign Mastery. In essence, it gives the players a handout (real or virtual) to read in advance, comprising part or all of the infodump.

Telling the players the significance at the time makes it more likely that the document will be read. Refusing point-blank to revisit it in game-time further reinforces that likelihood.

The utility of this technique depends on the personalities of your players. But it can be a useful tool to have in your pocket.

15. Actual Infodumps

If you take everything that you can present in some other form out of the infodump and insert it elsewhere in the adventure, you will naturally be left with a residuum that cannot be delivered in any other way, and that is critical to immediate decisions by the party. You can’t fully avoid infodumps; there are times where they are the best choice. That’s where the tips on restructuring the infodump to make it more appealing have maximum value.

16. Put Back Some Of What You Take

My “bonus tip” is this: put back some of what you have taken out – but twist it, layer in some doubt or uncertainty or absolute falsehood (unintended or deliberate). Distort things a bit – then let the players discover the true story through one of the alternative techniques. The game world immediately becomes richer and more complex as a result, and your ‘expert’ NPCs gain a little tarnish and realism – never a bad thing.

Parting Wisdom

The subtitle of Campaign Mastery stems from my decades of experience as a GM, but that doesn’t mean that I get infodumps right every time. It does mean that I’ve learned from those experiences, however. See, for example My greatest mistakes: Information Overload In The Z3 Campaign.

It can be enlightening to review the massive 3-part article referred to earlier, A Long Road, to see several of these techniques in action. As much as possible, information has not been provided until just before it becomes relevant (or even just after, in the case of the Rheezok). What infodump remained was critical to decisions being made in advance of the action. A local guide was provided to give the PCs additional information when it became relevant. Key parts of the adventure related to establishing his credibility in the eyes of the PCs. He went from ‘hired expert’ to ‘road companion’ to ‘trusted guide’ to ‘friend and ally’ over the course of the adventure.

I build campaign elements for the long haul. Always have, always will (even if I haven’t decided how they will fit in at the time). That’s both a blessing and a curse when it comes to infodumps – it makes them bigger and more complex, and more essential. There are large parts of The Tangled Web that could have been hand-waved – the entire trip through Brazil, for example – but if you cut everything out except what’s immediately relevant, you also cut out a lot of the fun and life. At this point, with the PCs deep into the road trip phase of the Adventure, they have had enough options presented that at any moment the players could decide to pull the plug and make The Big Choice. So while the search for a new Base Of Operations remains the theoretical objective, from this point on, the real significance is putting additional pieces of the game world on display. Fun encounters are planned, so I hope the players don’t pull that plug. But the original purpose of what they are doing has been achieved, and what remains simply uses that as a framing device.

But it’s all about presenting the players with information – in the most entertaining ways possible.

The Key to success with infodumps is to turn them into something else as much as possible – get as much content OUT of that info-dump as you possibly can, then use it to your advantage. Who knows? Get successful enough at it, and infosumps might even become your favorite campaign tool. Stranger things have happened (just don’t ask me when)!

Few campaigns make any attempt to match real-time with game-time, and mine certainly don’t. I’m quite capable of hand-waving days, weeks, or even months of time if nothing of interest is happening. I’m equally capable of spreading a single game-day over 3 or 4 game sessions if there’s a lot going on. And I don’t think I’m anywhere close to being unique in this respect.

Nevertheless, eventually, the in-game calendar will approach December 25, or its local equivalent, or a PC’s birthday, or any of a number of other dates of social significance in our real lives.

In my superhero campaign, for example, the 4th of July factors centrally into the current adventure – so much so that the players have opted to time-travel into the past just to give themselves more lead time, as explained in recent posts.

In the past, I have written about the opportunity for seasonal adventures, and even offered a few myself. This year, I found myself reflecting on the reality of gift-giving in real life.

Most seasonal adventures in ongoing campaigns simply use the season as a backdrop with some social elements (even if out of place). Where the social narrative does play a role, the focus is generally on the giving of gifts, simple because that’s where the primary PC interaction takes place.

Exchanging gifts with my players this year took perhaps half-an-hour. When the current superhero campaign started, a week or two before Christmas game time, it took a similar amount of game time (though it took more like 90 minutes to play, because things that normally happen simultaniously in real life were spread out to occur sequentially, permitting each to be its own point of spotlight focus).

Giving a gift is the tip, the focal point, of a very large iceberg, and that iceberg is often overlooked, compressed, or hand-waved unnecessarily – which neglects a rather large opportunity for GMs.

An Anatomy of Christmas Shopping

I know some people who make a list of recipients and then just “go shopping” – I’ve done that a time or two, myself. I know others who spend the whole year looking for ‘the perfect gift’, essentially spreading the Christmas process over the entire year. Someone I used to know did 90% of their Christmas shopping at the Boxing Day Sales (December 26, for those who don’t know what ‘Boxing Day’ is). This year, I did 90% of my Christmas shopping with a single purchase on a single site. In the past, I have also done the bulk of it online but at multiple sites and in the form of many distinct transactions.

I know some people who leave their shopping until the last minute. Others distribute it throughout the year, or the second half of the year, or even do most of it very early, as I mentioned.

Because the last time that my players all expect to get together is the first Saturday in December, I have to plan to have my gifts ready by then. Because I shop online, I have to allow 4-6 weeks for delivery, sometimes 4-8 from sites known to be a little slow. That means that I normally do most of my Christmas shopping in or before the first week of October. Over the last couple of years, I’ve allowed an extra 4 weeks for Covid-related delays – I haven’t needed all of it, but have certainly needed all of that and more on occasion for gifts that I bought myself. And I normally do all of it at once – family as well as friends.

I start organizing my Christmas in September, in other words. As a result, I am well-known within my family for being the most organized family member in this respect.

This litany isn’t to big-note myself or laud my organizational skills (though the skills that I bring to the game table as GM definitely help in my real life); it’s to show the massive diversity in approaches that are possible.

But, when you boil it down, we all go through a fairly similar process.

• List of recipients
• For each person on the list:
  • Assess them – likes, dislikes, known possessions, known desires, etc
  • Consider any restrictions or incapacities
  • Vague gift ideas

  (in practice, you tend to do each step for all people on the list and then move on to the next step).

• Allocate the budget
• Select and Purchase Gifts for each person on the list
• Start hunting for gifts for the hard-to-shop-for and anyone you’ve accidentally left off your list
• Select packaging
• Gift-wrapping (some people don’t do this, considering it wasted money that could be used to add another dollar or two to the gift budget)
• Gift-giving and receiving

Each step in this process is an opportunity for Roleplay and adventure. And that’s the subject of today’s article – looking at the 9-tenths of that 10-step process that isn’t gift-giving in terms of RPG opportunities.

A Reflection of Character

There are so many combinations of gift-purchasing alternatives – I don’t doubt that my earlier list leaves some out – that the choice of how you do your Christmas Shopping is a reflection of your character as it really is. This is a good starting point for New Year’s Resolutions for those who are so inclined – that’s a subject for another day!

Now think about that in the context of the PC. How you behave, in normal play, is a result of the intersection between personality, capability, and conditions/events external to the character. The parts of a player’s character’s personality that you get to display depend on the opportunities presented to them, and are always going to be colored by the circumstances and the immediate goal of the character(s).

Gift-shopping is a way to express the totality of a character’s personality.

Factoring into that is the social context. The way we do gifts here in Australia is not that dissimilar to the way they are done in most western societies – the US, the UK, Canada. I have no doubt that the approaches of 100, 120 years ago – around the turn of the 19th century – were somewhat more individualized in those societies. And gift-giving is still quite different in other places.

Christmas In General

The first two links are good references for many countries. Later links focus on just a few. In most cases, none of the pages tells the complete story of how Christmas is celebrated, you need to actually compile your research from multiple sources.

• Wikipedia: Observations Of Christmas by Country
• Why Christmas dot com: Christmas Traditions and how Christmas is celebrated in lots of different countries
• Country Living: 20 Christmas Traditions Around The World That May Surprise You
• How Stuff Works: Christmas Traditions Around the World
• Stacker: How Christmas is celebrated around the world
• Holiday Extras: Unusual Christmas Traditions From Around The World
• Contiki: 15 weird and wonderful Christmas traditions around the world
• YHA Australia: The Eight Strangest Christmas Traditions On Earth

Christmas Gifting specifically

Information on gifting practices around the world is a lot less cohesive than the general Christmas links shared above, and the few sites below that mention Australia (the only nation I know well enough to judge) vary from the ‘incomplete’ to the ‘wildly inaccurate’. I’ll try to put these results into context as I go. There is no cohesive overall page on the list that treats the subject comprehensively, I’m afraid.

• Trip Trivia: 20 Unique Gift-Giving Traditions Around The World – this site seems reliable in its content – for the 20 countries highlighted.
• Western Union: Christmas Day Around The World – more comprehensive than most, but very very superficial, too. Christmas Trees are far more common in Australia (usually pine trees) than suggested, and everyone has access to plastic substitutes. Aside from that, everything that’s actually said about here is accurate but incomplete. Which makes this better than many.
• Meet’n’Greet Me: Christmas Around the World: Christmas Gifts and Traditions – The headline sounds promising, and I can’t point at any inaccuracies – because not every country is represented (and specifically, Australia isn’t covered). Still, that puts it ahead of several other sites.
• Xperience Days: 40 Unique Gift-giving Traditions – More comprehensive than most, and accurate so far as it goes. The Australian entry talks exclusively about Christmas In July and is correct in its description – but this variation is not universally practiced here. But that’s the only reason this isn’t at the head of the list.
• Globesmart: Guide To Gift Giving Around The World – this site starts out in a promising manner but soon seems to shift gears without warning to focus on business gifts – and not necessarily for Christmas, either. But what is here has so much plot color potential – a gift of six carnations from a Russian could be interpreted as a very mafia-like death threat, or as a deliberate insult, for example – that I had to list it anyway. And I have no doubt that what information is included is accurate.
• Truly Experiences: 10 Countries With Curious Gifting Traditions – appears accurate but superficial and many of the entries don’t add much to the other sites listed already. Included in case they have a country that hasn’t already appeared.
• Culture Trip: Christmas Gifting Traditions Around The World – The headline sounded so promising that this was the first link considered for this section. But then I read the entry on Christmas In Australia. The first half of the entry is an accurate description of the environment here at this time of year; the second half invents a tradition out of whole cloth surrounding food-themed hampers. Yes, you can get these and give them, just as you can any other gift you care to nominate – but they are hardly what I would consider a tradition. I’ve received two in my 57 years, three if you count the coffee sampler pack that I got one year from my sister and her family. And that inaccuracy makes me question the accuracy of everything else on the page.
• Remitly: Holiday Gift Giving Traditions Around The World – Another promising headline. But the focus of this page isn’t about Christmas gift-giving, it’s about when gift-giving takes place (including Christmas). There are snippets of useful information, but you have to dig for them – and most of the discussion is superficial, good for telling you what subject you need to research.

As always, there are (at least) two schools of thought regarding such international traditions in your campaigns.

• Option 1 is to accurately represent the traditions of the characters, based on their nationality.
• Option 2 is to accurately represent the traditions of the players, as a point of common reference.
• Option 3 is to invent something out of whole cloth – if the society in which your game is set is sufficiently different from modern-day practices. In which case, the links above offer inspiration.

I tend to use a blend of the first two options in my modern-day games and a blend of the second two options in my other campaigns. The dominant and common theme is the second option, which is treated as a ‘universal common denominator’, and which is varied or modified according to the nation in which the PCs find themselves; but I also allow the PCs to pay Character Service to the traditions native to wherever they come from, and to try and integrate the two.

As a general rule, I always try and relate the situation to the real world. If you have a multinational team of characters, who happen to be all together in country X for a long period of time, what would their Christmas practices be? The equivalent situation would be a small company with employees from many different nations all under the one roof, living and working together – their dominant Christmas culture would derive from the host nation, with their individual traditions shoe-horned into that context.

This is a golden opportunity to amplify the cultural differences and distinctiveness of the characters and their respective backgrounds.

But, on top of all that, there are enough variations on offer to individualize each PCs approach according to their personality, exposing elements of their natures that don’t often get an airing – if you make room for those expressions of personality.

An opportunity to layer depth

That’s just the start of the opportunities that the holiday season has to offer. The player may decide that this is a chance to show a vulnerability in the character – for example, someone who is normally incredibly organized, but who always seems to leave their Christmas Shopping to the last minute.

Few characteristics extend to every facet of a person’s life, and the same can be true of characters. Someone who is broadly generous may have a completely different and distinctive focus to their gift choices, one that is superficially miserly – not because they are a skinflint, but because the choice of gifts reflects a particular philosophy of the character, one that relates exclusively to Christmas.

Such individuality won’t be appropriate for all characters, and you certainly don’t want every PC to decide to be completely different to their usual personality when it comes to Christmas Gift selection! I would prioritize PCs who don’t get the opportunity to individualize themselves and stand out from the generic crowd of characters of similar ‘profession’ (character class) and ‘background’ (race). I would also de-emphasize anyone whose national background (race?) gives them a distinctive or unusual practices around this time of year.

But I would also work with the players of anyone who didn’t make that list to give their character a share of the spotlight through another part of the process.

The Christmas List

This is possibly the most difficult phase of the process to squeeze any meat out of – until you ask the player two simple questions:

1. Is there anyone unusual that you are putting on your list?
2. Is there anyone who has ticked you off enough to leave off your list – or to influence your choice of gift?

Suddenly, this isn’t a dull list of characters – it’s all about personalities and interactions. The villain who has a soft spot for puppies and children, who sets aside his ambitions just long enough to help the PCs rescue some lost kids. The politician who put his own interests ahead of those of his constituents in a personal interaction with the PC. The jerk who cuts the PC off every morning during his daily commute. The NPC who gave the PC a sympathy card when they seemed down, one morning. The don’t-wanna-be Villain who is entirely a victim of circumstance.

This is an opportunity to foster and enhance relationships, and to review the last game year’s play.

The Christmas Budget

How extravagant is the character going to be, and to whom? I generally try to be even handed in my shopping – I count up the number of individuals and divide my budget up accordingly. If I then see something suitable for a couple, their budgets get merged. Others do it differently.

How much is the character willing to spend? How sensible are they with their money? Is the character the type to over-commit themselves (I once had a character who did so and had to go to a loan shark to pay their immediate debts – which was out of the frying pan and into the fire, of course! – with the full cooperation of the GM).

In real life, I knew someone who pawned their wedding ring to buy Christmas gifts for their kids. My gift to them that year was to pay off half the debt (I couldn’t afford the whole amount).

I know someone who lists charities amongst those for whom they Christmas shop, then donate their share of the ‘gift’ budget to the cause.

There’s lots of scope here for personality expression and for individuality, as well as for social and cultural exposition. There was one character in one of my campaigns who came from a very poor background, and even though they were now reasonably affluent, their gifting budget was very tight, as an expression of that element of their background – because the player felt that it was often overlooked by the other players, and generally not evident enough.

The Character Mirror

Another point that is often overlooked is this: every gift that you receive is a mirror to how you are perceived by those giving the gift. Individual variations will occur from one gift-giver to another, but if you put them all together, the gift-givers are holding up a mirror to each PC as they perceive them to be.

It can be a worthwhile exercise, especially for characters who are a bit self-conscious, to think about what they think the gifts they have received say about them – a tool to help the player get deeper inside their character’s head.

This often won’t happen without some prodding from the GM, or at the very least, without the GM making room for such introspection in his planning.

Going Shopping

The opportunities are a lot more obvious when it comes to a shopping expedition or two. This generally means exposing yourself to the local environment (even online shopping exposes you to the internet, which is the equivalent) – and the local environment is the breeding ground and hiding place of all sorts of unsavory characters.

It’s worth remembering that there’s been at least one movie entirely about Christmas shopping – in this case, trying to get the last toy of its kind (and so keep a promise). You could stumble across anything from muggings to fraudulent or drunken Santas to road rage incidents following an accident in which both parties were trying to complete their Christmas shopping, having left it to the last minute. Of course, by the time you’ve sorted that mess out, some of the stores may have closed…

Heck, you could find yourself kidnapped by aliens, or attacked by crazed fans who have mistaken you for someone else!

And it’s all because a shopping expedition takes you places you wouldn’t normally go, doing something you wouldn’t normally do, and the GM is able to then use that as a vehicle for encounters and adventure. Perhaps with a comedic bent, perhaps not – though it definitely lends itself as a platform for that, especially if that’s not the usual campaign style!

Long-Distance Traumas

You’re always exposed to long-distance traumas if you order anything that has to be delivered, or if there’s anyone on your list that lives at a location remote to your own. There are three groups that I buy for – I get to see two of them, the last I usually have to mail. That’s one reason why it’s convenient to do all my shopping at the same time, aimed at being ready for the first week in December – it means that I have time to get that gift into the mail. That also often entails a scramble to ensure that I have the correct mailing address!

Normally, I would advocate all these things happening as a continuing subplot – character orders something at the right time, as an event in one game session, and for the next game session (or two or three or four), the GM simply makes a point of telling the player that the product that he ordered has not yet arrived.

In modern times, there is (of course) parcel tracking, but that’s often (not always, but often) so generalized that it doesn’t tell you anything useful – “en route” doesn’t tell you much.

And then there’s the potential for a complete failure of the system. Let me tell you a story…

I ordered a book. I was advised when the order was processed, and when the order was dispatched, and when the order was en route, and when the order was delivered. Except that no book arrived.

There was one line in the delivery notification that offered a clue – it referred to delivery being made to Belmore River, which is a location 440 km (about 275 miles) north of my suburb, Belmore.

I immediately engaged the vendor about the potential mis-delivery; they confirmed that the address they had on file was the correct one, so someone in the firm contracted to do their deliveries had clearly stuffed it up. A couple of days later, they reported that the firm in question, being unable to locate the correct street address in the wrong place, had returned the order to them.

They gave me a refund, less a money handling fee. They did not offer to resend the order to the correct location. So the net effect is that I’m poorer, with nothing to show for it. That’s why I will NEVER shop with that vendor again – not because of the nondelivery (those things happen and it was outside their control) but because they made NO effort to fairly resolve the problem.

Well, not quite ‘nothing’ to show for it – I at least have this anecdote.

…and it’s an anecdote that is directly relevant to the subject of discussion. This sort of thing doesn’t happen all the time, but it does happen every now and then – maybe one order in forty goes astray. And, on at least one occasion, it was entirely my fault (and I offered to wear the cost of that mistake) – I mistakenly gave the wrong street number. That package eventually found its way back to the vendor, by which time I had ordered a replacement.

Anyway, as I was saying, I would normally advocate splitting this phase of the Christmas Story up – but in this case, I would employ flashbacks on the day of the Christmas Adventure to keep everything coherent, and build narrative momentum within the story. I would, however, anticipate and leave a ‘gap’ in events in which the ‘shopping’ could take place.

Long-distance traumas happen regularly and without warning. Why should it be any different in an RPG?

The first (and only?) gift-giving

Gift-giving and related occasions tend to come in waves. The first one is with friends who you won’t get to see for the rest of the month – that’s the one that I have with my players, for example.

The second one is with co-workers and is often much smaller in scale, though it is usually accompanied by something more of a party.

The third one is with family visited before the critical date (December 25), if any. The fourth is Christmas Day itself, and the fifth is with any family and friends that you catch up with after the critical day.

That sounds like a lot – because it is!

When I was a kid, we would have family Christmas at home (usually starting around 5 or 6 or 7 AM); after breakfast, we would then travel to second Christmas (aunts, uncles, and one set of grandparents). We would have Christmas Lunch with them, but either before that or in the afternoon we would head off to the other set of grandparents for a third Christmas. So multiple Christmases are not unusual – either that, or my family is unusual!

Unless you have something very specific in mind for one of these events, or their in-game equivalent, I would run all of these into one “event” within a game. There is too great a similarity between these different events, better to make them one continuous blur rather than dig into minutia trying to distinguish one from another.

There are two primary sources of gameplay within a Christmas party – Gift-giving and social interaction.

Gift-giving, as already stated, is as significant as you want to make it; it can hold a mirror up to the recipient, but it can also say just as much about the giver. And, if you do it right, there will be some sort of interaction between giver and recipient (in character, of course). This is best handled with some sort of randomization technique and a regular rotation around the table.

The method I would use would be for everyone to roll a die (high decides who, other than themselves, goes first). They would then roll a die to select who receives the gift from them, skipping over anyone who has already received a gift from them. I would then use another die to select someone other than the giver and recipient to become the next giver. This spreads the spotlight around and keeps it moving unpredictably. I would also use a copy of the list of gifts and how they have been wrapped (prepared in advance in consultation with each player) to give vague descriptions of the shape, but leave the actual description of the gift to the player doing the gifting (unless they were hopeless at it, in which case I would ask if they wanted me to step in and provide appropriate narrative).

But the untapped potential is with the social engagement aspect of a Christmas Party. Strangers, friends, enemies, people of importance and people of no importance, people of interest, celebrities both famous and infamous, all rubbing shoulders. You can have multiple plotlines running simultaneously. Some might begin and end within the Christmas adventure, some might be nothing more than a single exchange of dialogue, while others might extend far beyond the Christmas ‘episode’. Some may culminate at the Christmas Party, as things long stewing come to a head; others may have their beginnings at the event, and color relationships into the New in-game year.

Don’t neglect the opportunities that come from NPCs interacting with other NPCs – all you need to do to make these relevant is to connect a PC to one end or the other of the interaction. For example, PC says something to NPC, who then interacts with the other NPC – perhaps an outcome that the PC wasn’t expecting to result. Or, the other end – NPC and NPC interact, with the PC either caught in the middle or trying to act as peacemaker or otherwise somehow affected by the conversation.

Going The Distance

Sometimes, to get to the party, you have to travel. Some people just drop everything and go somewhere on the drop of a hat at regular intervals; others have to plan a myriad of details in advance. I’m somewhere in between – but have commitments 4 days a week, sometimes 5. There’s very little that can’t be put off or called off with nothing more than a phone call or two – posting to Campaign Mastery being the main exception.

So most of my planning revolves around that, or would do except for one other fact: I don’t have a car or driver’s license, and that means that I can only get part of the way before needing to be met. That engages other people’s schedules and adds extra complication.

Even without that, there’s the packing and preparation. Going away is a Big Deal for me.

And so it should be for any PCs who have to travel. Various scenes from the West Wing are coming to mind at this point – airline routing through Pittsburgh (and why it’s desirable to avoid it), CJ Craig’s School Reunion, and the very secret meeting between Josh Lyman and the deaf pollster (whose name momentarily escapes me) at an airport come to mind.

On top of that memory are layers of memories from various Airport movies (including, of course, the classic Flying High), and any number of other movies and TV shows in which people travel by air, such as the classic Twilight Zone episode, “Nightmare at 20,000 feet“, which was remade as a segment of Twilight Zone: The Movie, and then again remade in the third reboot of the series as “Nightmare at 30,000 Feet”.

That’s all grist for the mill; if you can’t get a couple of encounters or incidents out of them, you aren’t trying hard enough.

The Traditions

Every family also has its own traditions, completely divorced from those of the wider culture around them. One of the most memorable later-season episodes of MASH – “Death Takes A Holiday” – dealt with Winchester’s family traditions, for example

I seem to recall an episode of the original MacGuyver series that dealt with his family’s traditions (with an appearance by his father, ‘Harry’), and there have no doubt been other shows with episodes framed along similar lines.

These can be deeply personal and introspective moments for characters, and – if used as reference for Christmas events within the adventure – can serve as the perfect denouement to the adventure.

A Season Of Goodwill

The most common Christmas adventures, of course, revolve around this being the “Season Of Goodwill”. I’ve written before (in the 2018 Christmas article) about the Christmas Miracle.

But you don’t need to do anything so extravagant – I can conceive of a “Christmas adventure” which simply has a recurring theme of ordinary individuals simply performing an act of generosity for others, almost incidentally to whatever the main action is. This doesn’t have to be a PC – it can simply be a recurring theme to events in the background for most of the adventure, though it should end with someone doing something for the PCs that can also be characterized in this way.

The PCs are notified that an evil scientist / wizard, one of their arch-enemies, has just shown up at a local hospital / orphanage. They, of course, suspect that he or she is up to something nefarious, and so rush to the scene, to find all quiet. One of the administrators tells them that the villain gave them a cure for a very rare illness one of the children was dying / suffering from and left peacefully. Oh, and they also left this envelope for you. Inside is a Christmas card, which reads, ‘Tomorrow we are enemies, and I will seek to annihilate you and everything you stand for. But until then, have a Happy Christmas.”

Some Christmas Wishes

And in that same vein, I wish a very Merry Christmas to all of Campaign Mastery’s readers, some of whom date all the way back to our beginnings, thirteen years ago. Year 14 starts now!

Unfortunately, it’s been a very sad end to the year for a great many people. The destruction in the US; the building fire in Osaka; the fuel tanker explosion in Haiti; and the gas explosions in Pakistan and Sicily. Here in Australia, we had a freak wind burst that lifted a jumping castle 10m into the air at a school’s Christmas party; six children have been killed, two remain in critical condition fighting for life, and one survivor is lucky enough to be recovering at home, and today a sudden storm and possible mini-tornado has left one dead and two critical. And, of course, Covid is again raging, destroying the Christmas plans of many in Europe. Such tragedies always seem to wound more deeply at this time of year because of the contrast between the prevalent spirit of the season and the events.

I extend my sincere condolences to the family and friends of everyone caught up in these tragic events, and hope that 2022 can be a year of healing for all of us.

There will (probably) be no post next week, as I’ll be traveling between family engagements. Assuming that plans pan out as expected, I’ll see everyone in 2022! Until then,

It doesn’t happen to me very often that I have to create an encounter or an adventure on the spot out of whole cloth with no design prep.

In fact, many of the processes, practices, and habits that I have formulated and inculcated over the years are explicitly designed to ensure (as much as humanly possible) that this doesn’t happen.

Nevertheless, it can’t always be avoided. The players may have Zigged when I anticipated a Zag, or for some reason whatever I had planned has to be abandoned or delayed. Nevertheless, the players are all gathered around the table and looking at me expectantly.

When this happens, I have a very limited range of options.

1. I can fall back on some fill-in that I had prepared for just such an eventuality.
2. I can admit to be unprepared for this turn of events, and ask that we do something else for the day.
3. Or I can come up with something off the cuff – with and optional warning to the players to lower expectations.

While the focus of today’s article is principally on the last of these choices, the others deserve at least some analysis. Part of the remit for this article is an analysis of how I choose between them, after all.

The Fill-in

This concept comes from mainstream comics in which the publishing deadline has to be respected above all else. To guard against the regular production team being late – real life happens! – publishers like Marvel and DC had two choices: they could turn the problem over to another production team, assembled of their ‘gun’ people, who could scramble something together at the eleventh hour; or they could have something kept on file for just such an emergency.

The latter means no panic, everyone can be quickly informed what the score is, and content can be delivered as scheduled and promised. There may be some effort to hide the reasons under a euphemism – ‘a special issue’ or whatever – or dirty laundry may be aired with reference to the “Dreaded Deadline Doom” (as Marvel used to call it – shades of Stan Lee!) or there may be no explanation whatsoever.

As a comics fan, the first used to irritate me, the second generated a level of sympathy and softened expectations, and the last could elicit either response – but with no allowance for lowered expectations. Often, these choices reflected the degree to which the plot ignored or advanced ongoing plotlines, which was often a reflection of a partial breakdown in the schedule – if the writer had turned in his script / story in time, but the art-team could not, for example. More than with DC, Marvel made a big deal out of trying to keep the same creative team on a series for long periods of time, and made a big deal out of changes to that team, and over time, the practice spread to DC. There’s been a lot of internal social change to such business practices since those early days, and much water has flowed under the bridge, but this is largely unchanged – if anything, the trend is even stronger these days.

The first requirement of a fill-in is that there be a ‘window’ found within the regular continuity, and the second is that an adventure be generated that will fit within that window. You can’t make major changes to the protagonists or their circumstances; no matter how strong your regular continuity, the fill-in (generally) has to be highly episodic.

Another key is that the prep time required has to be a LOT less than usual, and is often performed to a lower standard, squeezed into whatever gap in your usual prep time you can find.

But within those constraints you can be as creative and experimental as you like. The result is a more avaunt-garde adventure produced to lower standards than usual – but better than nothing.

In particular, we liked to develop fill-in ideas that could be thrown up when a regular player was, for whatever reason, unable to attend – assuming that we had sufficient notice, of course.

The problems with this concept are that fill-in adventures can grow out of developmental bounds, can date badly, and can steal prep time from the ‘real’ campaign.

It’s been some years since the last fill-in in my Superhero campaign. I am months ahead of the campaign in game prep at the current time.

The Adventurer’s Club is a different story. We started working on a fill-in called “The Benediction Interdiction” but when that threatened to get in the way of the main adventure we were working on, we shelved it. We then started working on another, called “Stalking Into Mystery”, which we almost got to a playable state – it needed just one map to come together – but then Covid shutdown happened, and the player whose character is at the heart of the adventure has not returned to the campaign. So it needs radical surgery if not a near-complete rewrite before it can be played, and there will be some lessening of the impact.

So, when we needed a fill-in after “#31 Zombies Over Manhattan” in order to get ‘#32 The Hidden City” ready to go (it still isn’t, I should add), we put together a fill-in as “#31a The Black Geese” (a dreadfully obscure title) – an Orient Express tale of International Intrigue and unlikely bit players interacting. One episode in, and it seems to be going well – and by the time we reassemble in January to resume it, we should have #32 ready to go. Which means that by the time we actually start playing it, we should be well-developed on #33. {You can get some indication of how much work has gone into “Stalking Into Mystery” by the fact that it was originally supposed to be a fill-in between Adventure #30 and Adventure #31).

I should interrupt myself to mention three series of fill-in plotlines that we have come up with (and in some cases, played).

Elsewhen ideas are another steal from the comics, basically “What If…” stories / Parallel Campaign stories. We’ve played “Fine Upstanding Time-Traveling Rascals” and “The Beastie Of San Francisco”, and we have an idea for another entitled “The Green Revolution” that has received virtually zero development as yet.

Tales From The Silver Room are adventures in which none or more of our players get to play characters who are NPCs in the usual campaign. The “Silver Room” is a protected environment for containing artifacts and books that are too dangerous to be openly available – the concept is that each “Tale” would tell the tale of how one particular item (usually created for the purpose) wound up in the Silver Room. “The Benediction Interdiction”, mentioned earlier, is the first.

Tell Me A Story has had only one outing so far, “The Elevator Of Doom” – which had the PCs trapped in an elevator and telling tall tales on the spur of the moment to entertain each other. A number of variations on this basic theme are possible and will get pulled out of our back pocket under the most extreme of circumstances.

All three are significant because they violate the ‘ground rules’ laid down earlier for Fill-in adventures, showing the more casual and experimental approach that can be taken when you don’t need the outcome to be Canonical within the campaign.

The Fill-In Bottom Line:

If you have one on tap, ready enough to go, that fits the criteria of available players and available (real) time, this is a go-to solution. If you don’t…

The GM’s Day Off

This is usually my last resort. Every player who is present has made some effort to get there, and I consider it unfair not to have something for them to do. If there is enough (real) time notice, I am more likely to call off the whole game session and let people stay home, instead. But thirteenth-hour notifications that someone can’t make it can happen for all sorts of legitimate reasons.

It was for that very reason that the whole idea of “fill-in” adventures was devised in the first place.

My memory may be faulty, but in fact I can only think of one instance in which this was the option resorted to – but I am aware of it happening at other gaming tables, too. So maybe I’ve just been lucky.

The No-Game-Today Bottom Line

An option of last resort, and something that I am more tolerant of early in a campaign compared with late in the campaign – even though late in a campaign, when fill-ins are harder to come by (the best ideas have already been used), is when this option is more likely to be needed.

Graffiti On The Tabula Rasa

Which brings me to the primary thrust of this article, the ad-hoc adventure. This is my preferred choice when I have no fill-in, or the campaign structure precludes there even being one.

Restrictions

There are important restrictions and differences to fill-in adventures. These are normally considered campaign Canon (though they can be conveniently ignored after the fact if they turn into a train-wreck). All the other choices can be viewed as structured attempts to avoid these. At the same time, because plot-thread continuity cannot be maintained, these tend to take place outside the regular continuity, something that might not happen with a fill-in – much depends on the level of internal continuity within the campaign, for example, and whether or not you’re in mid-adventure when one of these is needed.

The “graffiti” metaphor is a good one, I think, because graffiti tends to be hastily sprayed on – there’s no time for carefully consideration, you need to come up with something on the spot.

Scope

Scope is another important issue – fill-ins are normally single-session but can be longer, especially if they are designed to integrate into normal campaign continuity at some point. “The Black Geese” is a fill-in, in that it was not a plot we originally intended to be part of the continuity at this point; but it is nevertheless part of that ongoing narrative (or could be seen as such). Off-the-cuff adventures are even more strongly single-session in nature, largely because of the question of scope. Either

1. the off-the-cuff adventure lacks the depth and scope to be sustained for longer than that; or,
2. the off-the-cuff adventure is very likely to be so half-baked that it can actually ruin a campaign.

Think about that for a moment. If you expand your off-the-cuff idea beyond a single session, you so increase it’s scope that it begins to flirt with making half=baked ad-hoc changes within the campaign that the campaign itself can be imperiled.

That’s a worst-case outcome, not something that will happen every time – but it’s a danger each and every time, and something that is to be avoided for obvious reasons!

The implication is that some ideas – perhaps the ones that come most naturally – can and should be censored. If you aren’t sure, make a note of the idea and spend a bit of time creating a formal fill-in from it. Only use it now if you are sure of it.

Environment

My gaming room is full of sources of inspiration (aside from two of the corners, which are full of cardboard boxes). There are bookshelves of fiction, and bookshelves with non-fiction, and boxes full of computer games, and stacks of videotapes in storage, and stacks of audio cassettes in storage, and bits of electronics (cables and video cards and PC power supplies, and so on). Most of my gaming stuff, in comparison, is actually not in that room – it’s outside, with the CD collection and the DVD collection and the board games collection, and the more commonly-used reference books).

I have only to glance this way and that until free association connects with something – the things that are most stimulating at a distance are all there.

Process

An example of the thought process that I go through is:

“The Hollies – Long Cool Woman In A Dark Dress – named Holly? maybe not – Rick Springfield, what was that lyric? – “Were we too busy looking at the left hand that we didn’t see the right”? So, the Long Cool Woman is a diversion of some sort, designed to capture PC attention. From what, and by who? – figure that out as I go. How’s she going to show up? The Golden Age of Hollywood – maybe a musical number while she descends a glowing staircase. Seductive, Marilyn Monroe type, maybe with a hypnotic voice. Lorelei Monroe. Silver Surfer – a herald of some sort?..”

Total time before I’m ready to play: 45 seconds (yes, I timed it).

Notice how this draws on a number of different sources, sometimes obliquely

• A remembered song title from a cassette.
• A remembered song lyric from a different cassette.
• A remembered Hollywood era from a book of video reviews by Howard Moulton.
• A remembered Hollywood star, free association from that Hollywood era.
• A remembered iconic moment for that Hollywood star.
• The title character of a comic book that I free associated with that iconic moment.

Whenever I need more inspiration, perhaps to figure out some of the parts glossed over.

Basic plot: A space warp opens somewhere over planet earth where the PCs happen to be. A thin, tall woman in a thin black dress – Morticia Adams? – emerges, descending a staircase of glowing panels of light, her mouth moving. TV crews are quickly on the scene. Males enthralled, literally laying in the street so that she can walk on their backs. Effect is carried over the airwaves. Male PCs get a saving throw. Females can make sense of the lyrics which announce that she is some sort of cosmic herald, come to announce the coming of The Redeemer. Males who failed their saving throw: ‘we must prepare for the coming of The Redeemer’.

This would be flirting with the ‘scope’ constraint if I hadn’t already decided that this was all a distraction, probably from something far more prosaic and mundane, a cosmic con-job. There is no ‘Redeemer’, but she’s got everyone focusing first on waking the men up and getting them protected from her spell, and second on who or what the ‘Redeemer’ is. Meanwhile, her confederate is stealing something they consider valuable – something we would want protected, but not of great inherent value.

So I’ve given the players a fairly strong visual impression, and something to focus their immediate attention on, and something to keep them busy after that. What about NPCs? They would probably attempt to act along similar lines, perhaps with less success than the PCs. So there’s a wave of violence. Some people would try to take advantage of the situation – looters and the like, wearing headphones of course. Choice of targets to be female-driven, and so a bit unusual.

Can’t you just feel the dominoes falling into place?

The middle part of the adventure – ‘Lorelei Monroe’ (named so by a female TV reporter) or ‘Siren’ (named so by another female reporter) would realize that women posed a threat to what’s really going on, and would whip the men into a frenzy, creating an instant war of the sexes. Lots of rescues while working on the bigger issue – finding some way of countering the effect her voice has on men.

Succeed in that, and someone (male) will spot some flaw in the deception, maybe in Lorelei’s powers. And if they are a fake, that gets the PCs thinking about what else in her performance is also a fake – which leads them to the real motive and what’s really going on. Maybe her partner creates the space warps (that was clearly not faked) – giving him a way past security systems and into secure locations.

Job done – a coherent plotline, self-contained, and likely to take a single game session, in three primary acts – a beginning, a middle, and an end.

The Tabula Rasa Bottom Line

Ultimately, what you spray-paint on your Tabula Rasa is less important than the process used to get there. That’s a process of knowing what you need (and what you don’t), and cherry-picking those pieces of inspiration that fit the bill. The example that I offered works for a superhero campaign; it would NOT work for a fantasy RPG (though it might start from the same premise and pieces of inspiration), nor for a Pulp campaign (same comment).