I seek the publisher of Title Undetermined

My local public library lists new books.

Each new book usually has both a title and a cover.

Sometimes a new book has only a title and a grey rectangle substitutes for the cover.

The new book at the bottom left intrigued me:

Now, that is an interesting way to market a new release! I thought. 

Intrigued, I clicked on the rectangle. 

The mystique increased:

Who is the author behind “Title Undetermined”?

Did that person have a title in mind and argued with the publisher over it, then both sides gave up but decided to print it anyway? Or did the author never determine the title, ever? How long did the author slave away at a work without even a working title? (Is this work created by AI and the title was not part of the parameters?)

Setting aside authorial intent and the marketing team's effective yet murky method of hyping this book by obfuscating the title,  I really want to learn more about any publisher who decided to go ahead with promoting a book called “Title Undetermined”.

Perhaps this is a publisher I could work with!

I pulled up the Full details and scoured the Original record for this work:

Obviously the author and the publisher value their privacy. In today's digital age, when so much information is out there, I can respect this. 

Still, I remain very intrigued, and decided to place a hold on this work.

Here, I became devastated:

It appears that both maximum secrecy and minimum utility have been achieved.

I am not able to secure this work using the app.

I intend to seek it out In Person at my local public library branch. 

If I successfully determine Title Undetermined I will update this post.

What made you smile?

I had a really good time at the 32nd Annual Surrey International Writers' Conference October 25th to 27th 2024.

Friday I pitched to an agent who asked for the first one hundred pages of my fantasy novel and a synposis. That's very exiciting!

Later on Friday I had a very good conversation with Darren Groth. I really liked one particular scene in his novel Are You Seeing Me?. I'm very thankful he signed my copy.

I had a great time visiting with friends and making new friends in the seminars, over meals in the banquet halls, and even waiting in lines to register for Pitch Sessions or Blue Pencil Cafe sessions. While there's a stereotype that a lot of writers are shy introverts, I found I had no problem asking, "What do you like to write?" then listening to the answer and taking the conversation from there. Some of the new friends I made include Penelope Rose who has already published Deviant Desires and Magnus Skallagrimsson who runs Noir At The Bar in Victoria and Vancouver.

The agent Laura Bradford helped answer a question for me about finding beta readers. I'm thankful for that chance meeting over lunch Saturday in the banquet hall.

Prior to the conference, the thought of taking a novel of 91K words and boiling it down to a 750 word synopsis would be impossible and frustrating. I now see it as another piece of writing, thanks in no small part to Mira Landry's seminar Saturday.

One of my favourite parts of the conference, and one I hope inspires me and you for a long time, came about because I took a chance. Sunday morning at 08:05 I started standing in line to get a second Pitch Session and a second Blue Pencil session. By 08:45 I had both. For the second Pitch Session I pitched a trilogy; I kept it to myself that the trilogy has only gone through two drafts and is not ready to be sent out. I learned a number of things. The first is to not pitch an entire trilogy; pitch the first book as stand-alone. Since the title is a play on words with a homophone, I asked the agent to read my query letter. She did, which meant I could watch her face as she moved her pen across and under the sentences.

At one point while she was reading, she smiled.

I listened to her feedback. I then asked her, "At one point when you were reading, you smiled. What made you smile?" She indicated one specific turn of phrase, and I said, "Oh, I was worried about that, because it uses profanity and I wasn't sure about including that in a query letter."

"No, it's not a problem here. For one, you are using it to good effect. For another, your query letter is not full of needless profanity. And for a third point, all sorts of query letters get written but you've made yours stand out."

When I am down and when I am lonely, I'm going to come back to this memory, when my writing made another person, an agent, smile. Not a family member, not a sympathetic friend, not an aspiring writer newer to this than myself. An experienced successful literary agent from a named agency in the USA.

If it happened once, I can make it happen again.

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If you liked this, you may find out more here:

• Faster Gamemaster - my blog
• Bluesky: @standardeyre.com
• www.standardeyre.com
• instagram.com/standard.eyre/
• info@standardeyre.com

SiWC 2024

I will attend the Surrey International Writers’ Conference for 2024 this upcoming weekend, October 25th to 27th.

I feel a range of emotions, but mostly excitement. I am very glad to know that a number of friends will attend this year at the same time.

If this SiWC 2024 is your first introduction to this site, I encourage you to buy my novella Battle Stove Spectacular via Amazon.

I can also be reached via info@standardeyre.com

I have a number of works on the go. I hope all of them get published and shared with enthusiastic readers soon!

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Isometric Maps

GM Achievement Unlocked: I create Isometric Maps

I have been having Joy Out Of Measure with two tools for making maps. Today, though, was a massive step forward.

When my friends and I first started with Roll20, my first thought was: “This is totally optimized for combat. Number-crunching combat. Guess all that role-playing and talking and writing is put on hold for a while.” 

My second thought was: “This is going to totally drain all my free time as a GM, creating all these high-quality maps. I do not want to go broke trying to find and buy good quality digital maps.”

Thankfully, two sites have saved my bacon and my wallet. They’re also rather fun to use.

I’ve done more with Inkarnate at first. I poked around it a bit, and thought, “This is a very good bargain for a year of Pro level access.” I’ve made both regional maps and Roll20 battle maps. I even had success creating the catamaran that the players in my campaign have just boarded and will be on for a session or four.

My players have to date not seen all the maps I’ve created. They are a very intelligent bunch, so I’m not going to give them here additional hints of undiscovered locations. I will show some maps of places they have already encountered or are not likely to reach.

This is my first cut at a catamaran.

This is the first bar I put together, run by a dwarf and made of stone. It’s called the Solid Favour.

I also am very thankful to have Dungeon Scrawl. Dungeon Scrawl makes some things quick and delightful to do. Other tasks are nearly impossible: I spent 45 minutes trying to make the white square in the bottom left room red. I eventually did it, but decided I’d just annotate the square differently next time, or mark it red in Roll20, or something else.

The truly outstanding achievement I unlocked today, though, is something I have always thought was beyond my skill set:

Isometric maps.

I remember looking at Ravenloft in 1983 (or, rather, peeking over the shoulder at the GM’s copy in 1984) and being stunned by the utility of the isometric maps that module had. I thought, “Wow! Those must be really hard to make!”

My pride at creating my first isometric map in Dungeon Scrawl fills my house today. I normally make a throwaway map when I try something new. Today, though, my first cut at an isometric map was for a setting my players will ideally reach. That first cut worked so well, I’m keeping it hidden. I have created a second isometric map to prove I can actually do it to anyone reading this blog. This map is a hasty slap dash born of memories of the shopping malls in the suburbs near where I grew up.

My map making skills are only going to improve. I am very thankful to have found these tools, and to have an opportunity to build with them.

For Maximum Fun, Follow the Instructions

This Gamemaster is overjoyed to have run two sessions of Fun City to date. Overall the prognosis is good. The campaign looks healthy, there is no shortage of players expressing interest in participating, and everyone is having a good time.

Last session had two serious challenges attacking the level of fun around the virtual table. To address this, a royal commission was struck. Today the findings can be made public.

Let’s address the two major considerations that came out of the last two gaming sessions one at a time.

The players found it hard to see everything at once

More than one player said something along the lines of “I cannot see everything all the time for all characters” or “I found it hard to know what was attacking.” With Dynamic Lighting and limited vision and barriers to sight, the characters had limited visibility. This led to the players having limited awareness.

Partly this is by design. The Gamemaster has paid some coin to Roll20 to explore their Dynamic Lighting feature. I did this to push the edges of what the VTT offered, and to instill fear and terror in the players. The dark is meant to be scary, and not seeing how many opponents there are is meant to be disconcerting.

However, the game is still meant to be fun. This Gamemaster is willing to concede that particularly with the most recent battle against the animated skeletons in the crypt, the terror sliding scale may have been set too far in the “Stark Raving” direction and needs to be pulled back to the “Giggling” setting.

Plan for next time: Instead of Dynamic Lighting, the Gamemaster will set the map underground to Explorer Mode. Intent here is that everything is blacked out and hidden until one player explores it. After one player has seen it, all players have seen it. We can try it. Perhaps for the most scary dungeons underground the Gamemaster will go back to Dynamic Lighting.

The Gamemaster reported poor system performance

Roll20.net quit once on the Gamemaster. Browser just said "No!" and went away. The site was very slow the rest of the evening. The “Spinning Beach Ball” showed up much more frequently than requested.

After a thorough investigation (and by that I mean “actually reading the site instructions” on Graphics Performance Troubleshooting and Optimizing Roll20 Performance ) a number of solutions presented themselves:

1. Stop using Dynamic Lighting. Yes, yes, yes. Already addressed above. We’ll try that route.

2. Limit the number of lines on Dynamic Lighting. Essentially this means the room with the skeletons, which had lots of pillars, puts more load on Roll20.net than a standard box of a room. Understood, but some rooms have to be complicated to contain complicated threats.

3. Reduce number of light sources. Check. Install Gust of Wind traps to blow out torches, leaving the Player Characters in the dark. I can do that.

4. Reduce number of tokens that have vision. This one I had not thought of. Currently the game has seven players and two of the PCs have animal companions or familiars. I thought about introducing a deposit of $150K to reduce the number of active Player Characters. That kind of goes against the spirit of Fun City, though.

5. Keep map sizes small. Aha! Here we go! One page lists a default size of 20 cells wide by 20 cells tall. Another page says:

   Maps or pages are typically recommended to be 25 x 25. As the map size increases, the effective area that must be rendered increases which can negatively impact performance. This can also be highly subjective to the individual systems used by players in your game.

Aha!

The first map used by the Gamemaster, created with Inkarnate, was 40 cells wide by 40 cells tall. This was the surface map of Fort Runefort.

The second map, the one of the crypt beneath Fort Runefort, was 52 cells by 67 cells, and was created by Dungeon Scrawl.

Personally, I blame the tools, for being so delicious and wonderful to use. The Gamemaster got carried away

Plan for next time: Maximum map size with Dynamic Lighting enabled will be twenty-five cells in any one dimension.

That sounds like fun.

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Campaign? No. One-off? No. It’s a Bash!

I sent out invitations to “Fun City” and one of my dear friends wrote back:

Is this intended to be an ongoing campaign or a one off? I admit to being sorely tempted.

First: Small Victory Dance! Always celebrate when your friends express interest in what you write.

To answer his question: “Fun City” is a Pathfinder First Edition campaign. It is not a One-Off. I prefer the term bash as in: “Fun City will be the latest bash set in County Playground.”

Let’s take those one at a time.

“Fun City” is a campaign because it is a continuing set of interwoven adventures. Each single session will be a scene or an act within an overall story arc. “Fun City” (the Pathfinder First Edition campaign) will also span multiple playing sessions as the Player Characters learn more about “Fun City” (the place).

However, it’s going to be the most flexible and forgiving campaign I’ve ever run, for a number of reasons.

• I expect some of the players will drop in and drop out, as everyone has different demands on their time. I want to be flexible and accepting of player schedules.
• The last campaign I ran, I got deeply caught up in the background details and tried to, uh, make them the foreground of what the players faced. I’m not sure how successful that was.
• I put a lot of pressure on myself to have a deeply compelling complicated campaign last time. Not going to do that to myself any more.
• This time around, I intend to stratify and simplify the setting. I’m still enthusiastic about the setting. I will provide background details if the players want them, while the majority of my efforts will be focused on “let’s have a simple and fun time tonight with the game pieces in front of us.”

A One-Off, by contrast, is meant to be a single self-contained adventure. Ideally a one-off lasts a single session. “Make It Big,” the last one-off I ran, went for two sessions. I guess that says something about my skill at estimation. I estimate I can only get better.

I considered running a sequence of unconnected one-off sessions for “Fun City” and decided against it.

• My personal preference is to build a setting full of interesting people, places and things, all connected. With a campaign, it’s easier to share my enthusiasm for that unified setting.
• Some of the players may drop in and drop out, but some will want to game regularly. For those regulars, I want to provide an opportunity to take a character from Level One up to Level Double Digits. That “growing a character” is something I always enjoyed as a player, and I want to provide that as a GM.
• It’ll be easier for players to contribute to a setting they’re familiar with.
• I have the time and resources to prep a campaign.
• I want the game world to be internally consistent. A campaign just logically seems to flow from that.

The noun bash is what I think of in my head, though, when I think of what I’m doing. Instead of “a campaign set in County Playground” or “a one-off set in County Playground” I consider what I’m doing as the latest bash set in County Playground. All three of the definitions for that noun line up in a way I admire.

1. (informal) A forceful blow or impact.
   • Just to be clear, I am not advocating in favour of hitting players here.
   • The Player Characters, on the other hand, frequently give and receive bashes with the NPCs. Often to much merriment.
2. (informal) A large party; a gala event.
   • There might be eight characters at the first “Fun City” session. That there’s a large adventuring party.
   • I like attending a gala event. Hosting them, too.
3. (UK, informal, often in the phrase ‘have a bash’) An attempt (at doing something).
   • Yeah, that also tracks. I am making an attempt at creating maps, at trying new tools and using existing tools in new ways, at evoking an engaging setting, at showing my friends a good time.

When I was pulling together this blog post, this diagram came to mind:

Complete        Where                  The GM hands your PC his lines
Extemporized    this Bash                  and a script. "Your cue is
Chaos           probably lands            when the dragon bites you."
|               |                                                   |
V               V                                                   V
+---------------+---------------------------------------------------+

I am not enthused about running a series of unconnected one-offs like the far left would imply. County Playground is already plenty comical because, hey, that’s how I roll. Some structure would help.

On the other hand, I don’t want to veer too far to the other end and structure out everything.

The final point I wish to make here is that in preparing for this I found email messages from November of 2007, back when I had a different setting but the same comic tone. It warms my heart to think of every dice roll, every pun, every word written in every email or blog post and every word shared across a gaming table for the last few decades contributes to a fulfilling time. I reserve the right :-) to throw out all the terms used above and say that I’m working on a Pointillist style of RPG Gaming and I hope you’ll contribute to the art.

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Moderating My Desire For Crunchiness

I like role playing games that are crunchy, like Pathfinder First Edition. I could extend that word from crunchy RPG games to include other interests. I prefer Linux over other operating systems, Vim over other editors, and extensive world building in my RPG settings. I like getting into the details.

• I like figuring out how big a flying castle has to be to feed air cavalry.
• I like digging into the core of Pathfinder rules to determine how many languages there are.
• I like having a highly detailed story behind the setting of my campaign world.
• I like having maps in my games.

Occasionally this has led to problems

Obsessing over the details can slow things down. Some examples:

1. Let’s say this is the first time you are playing Pathfinder 1e. You learn that you could do a Full Round Action, a Standard Action, a Move Action, a Swift Action, a Free Action, an Immediate Action, and/or something that is Not An Action. By the time you finish understanding all of that, I would bet it is next week.
2. I did up a campaign, and created a Epub book as a guide for my players to create PCs, and I gave the book an ISBN. Because I thought I might sell that Epub book on Amazon to… someone…. The logic of that escapes me now.
3. I am the GM who likes drawing up a wiki that details out how the opponents fight with each other, manipulate their underlings, and motivate the characters. After a long day at work, coming back to this once a week, it’s doubtful my players have the same enthusiasm for this exposition that I do. I remember vividly the night I was trying to rush through some world building to force a plot point and one of my players in my gaming group said, “Please. It is too much.”
4. I like role playing games. In a pandemic, my group has shifted to Virtual Table Top games like Roll20. This expects a map. I’ve created a lot of pressure on myself to produce “High Quality” maps, so we can obsess over whether the character is five, ten, thirty or thirty-five feet from the target monster.

That last point is really telling. When I first started playing RPGs, we sat around a table in a comfortable room. No one in my group could afford miniatures nor figures, so we played without a map.

We had a blast.

I have a plan to solve the problems caused by Sybaritic Crunchiness

I’m staring a new campaign called “Fun City.” My goal with this is to share my enthusiasm for these topics with my friends, without drowning anyone.

My specific approaches to achieving this goal:

1. I’m going to expect players to drop in and drop out of the campaign. I’m going to expect new players to join and for familiar players to say, “I don’t remember who our opponent is, and I’m exhausted. May we wing it tonight?” And we will wing it, and that will be okay.
2. I’m going to leave the background for the campaign in the background. If the players ask, I will answer their questions. If they don’t ask, I will let the campaign world simmer, and eventually turn it into a novel or six.
3. I’m going to work on a small number maps, not a volume of maps.
4. The maps I do work on will be of varying levels of quality. That is okay. The initial maps might take a while to get adequate. Later maps will be better and will be done in a shorter amount of time. All art works that way. At least, the majority of art that I produce has worked that way.

In the past, I’ve started a campaign, devoted time and energy to the details, set unrealistic expectations for everyone, and felt burnt out. I’d like to break that habit.

I started a new job in October of 2021. It’s fulfilling, but so often I find myself looking at the task list in front of me and thinking, “I’d rather be Gaming with my friends.” When I dig into why I’d rather be Gaming, what specifically I like about RPGs and Pathfinder and world-building and map making, I find soon enough I can’t stop thinking about ideas I want to share with my friends.

So, I’m going to moderate my approach. Build something to share, and always start each session by thinking, “How may I best share this enthusiasm I have with my friends?” The best nights in the past have come from that starting point. Future sessions will grow out of those seeds of enthusiasm. I will build a city one piece at a time, and the end product will be fun.

Fun City, here we come!