I'm sure this is old hat to many of you, but I recently found a thread on boardgamegeek about mapping a sphere with hexes. Post 11 is the real meat of it.
Apparently you use an icosahedron as the base, then divide each triangular face into hexes, dymaxion map style. The points where the three faces meet? They're always going to be pentagons, although that might come in handy if you want particular nodes of power at certain places in the game world.
Of course, no mention of such a project in our circles would be complete without a suitable link to the Tao of D&D (just for the passing few who haven't yet stood stunned at the sight of a man gradually hexmaking an entire fantasy Earth, and then using those maps to model pre-modern systems of trade on a planetary scale).
Related, but less likely to be of interest to anyone other than me. Awww, what a cute little hex map of England. Anyone know how I can blow that up to a useful size without it pixelating horribly?
Monday, 24 May 2010
Sunday, 23 May 2010
Cinnabar: Mapping the Infinite City
"Cinnabar? It's no Utopia. There are more options here than you've had before. That's all. There's diversity on an asymptotic curve that never quite touches total breakdown."
Curse you, Tom Fitzgerald! Your mention of extropian science fantasy in the comments to my last post got me thinking about what use one of my favourite New Wave sci-fi novels might be in my game. How could you possibly know that was my Achilles Heel?!
M. John Harrison's Viriconium, China Mieville's Bas-Lag and Jeff Vandermeer's City of Saints and Madmen (one word review: over-rated) seem to get all the love in the esoteric urban fantasy stakes, but Edward Bryant's Cinnabar stories beat them to it by years, and did it with style too. Fine by me, it keeps Cinnabar more of a well-kept secret that I can mine for my own dirty purposes without others calling me on my packrat-ism.
What good then is The City at the Centre of Time for an old school D&D game? Well, in accordance with my recently evolved idea that "the right answer is always the wilder and more audacious of those on offer" (didn't Feynman say something similar?), I think the answer is: plenty.
Cinnabar is a city built around a time vortex and governed by an AI going slowly mad from the strain of synchronising itself across helical time. The burg is described as:
"...a flux of glass towers and metal walls perched atop red cliff crumbling down to a narrow strand of beach..."and is a post-scarcity dream of genteel urbanism filled with Clarkean sufficiently advanced science (bioengineering, time travel and outright weird sh*t), helical time distortions, and an array of characters bored to the edge of madness by the ennui of their immortal lives.
"And this" said Timnath Obregon "is the device I have invented to edit time."
The quartet of faded and blurred ladies from the Craterside Park Circle of Aesthetes made appreciative noises; the sound of a dry wind riffling the plates of a long-out-of-print art folio.
A few of the more memorable/exploitable elements of the setting:
- Parlours filled with generations of embalmed ancestors.
- Giant ravens and revived prehistoric sharks acting as spies and proxies for warring omnidisciplinary scientists (*cough* wizards).
- Memory scrubbing and personality overwriting.
- Factional strife between bio-modified heterogynes and Luddite natural birth fanatics (the Neo-Creelists)
- Intra-city teleportals (known as the Klein Expressway)
- Living animal statues embedded in concrete to stop them from wandering off.
- The Network, a combination public infrastructure/entertainment system, which hosts shows by sex star Tourmaline Hayes and action star Jack Burton (famous for doing all his own stunts).
- Cougar Lou Landis - a deconstruction of the heroic archetype in a city that only looks to heroes to provide some variety in an interminable existence.
- Catmothers - Nanny/bodyguards for the children of the elites. Genetically modified cats with their maternal instincts refocused on human children.
Perhaps the oddest thing about the city is that it is described as becoming wilder and ever more expansive the further in toward the centre one travels. Birds are described as travelling in widening gyres to avoid the confusion brought on by time distortions, and characters talk about time compression as one approaches the singularity at the heart of Cinnabar:
"Its the same phenomenon that would make Anita and the others in Craterside Park think we'd have been gone only a short while, regardless of whether we've spent several subjective years at City Centre."
This is the exact opposite of the time dilation which supposedly occurs in a singularity in the real world and, combined with all the other elements involved, makes Cinnabar something of a challenge to map.
Whether you want to use the Cinnabar singularity as written, or make a journey to the centre of the city a one way trip into a timelike infinity (as in the Stephen Baxter short story Pilot, reprinted in the Vacuum Diagrams collection) is up to you. I'm torn between the Narnia/Oz conceit of no time having passed at home, or having ancient and long-forgotten things from the distant past erupt from the inner regions of the city at irregular intervals.
Perhaps the simplest way of doing so would be to treat the wild reaches at the centre of Cinnabar as an inverted wilderness map, with the city as centre point for expansive exploration of its TARDIS-like forgotten areas. Given how big a factor the warped nature of space and time in the city is, this isn't as absurd an idea as it might first sound.
Picture your classic hex map (the one here is from turn-based card PC game Armageddon Empires, chosen purely for prettiness):
The centre hex, rather than representing the city itself, represents the entire world beyond Cinnabar. The wider world receives short shrift in the original book, being described as comprising no more than "The desert. The greenbelt. The city. The sea", and a disused elevated railway to a long-unvisited city known only as Els (I'm sure the striking resemblance between this far-future SoCal and the self-absorbed worldview of La-la-land is no coincidence...). As the city acts as the gateway between the two wildernesses ("beyond Cinnabar" and "within Cinnabar") it really makes no odds.
The robot-groomed greenbelt surrounding the city would be the ring of hexes surrounding this solitary central hex. The greenbelt might need to be modified slightly for the chaotic and hostile conditions of a D&D world; perhaps into the kind of active defence/free fire area the Neo-Victorian enclave of New Chusan had in Neal Stephenson's Diamond Age. After all, one can't have riff-raff turning up uninvited...
Surrounding the greenbelt hexes on the map, but within them in terms of topography on the ground, would be the commonly visited, inhabited areas of Cinnabar itself in all their ferment and glory:
"The Tancarae Institute, Craterside Park, the Neontolorium, Serene Village - where the irredeemably elderly live, the Klein Expressway, the Balloonworks-"
Take your favourite fantasy city sourcebook (or better still, a sci-fi one) and crank the whimsy, spectacle and self-indulgence knobs up until they break off. Cinnabar should be thrilling, OTT and always full of the next big thing. The inhabitants crave novelty to the point of mania. Don't forget the dark undercurrent of ennui, despair and casual cruelty though. Citizens may be inviolate under city law, but you do know how they discipline Catmothers, right?
Spoiler: Implanted memories of the litters of kittens these hybrids could never have. At any time their masters can have their mind replay the memories as if the death of their litter was happening all over again.
Beyond the ring (outlying in terms of topography, innermost in terms of cartography) comprising the currently active areas of the city would lie the largely unfrequented centre; interior suburbs inhabited by people tired of the bustle of Cinnabar proper or opposed to the omnipresent panopticon of the Network, or left deserted on human life by the changing tides of ideology and fashion:
"The capacity of Cinnabar is so much greater than its actual population. I assume the inhabitants of Cairngorm grew weary of this austerity millennia ago and simply moved on."Things would gradually becoming more desolate, outlandish and seemingly impossible as one travelled further in. The Klein Expressway connections would become ever patchier, and things out of their rightful place and time would become more commonplace.
"It appears to be a Tyrannosaurus Rex. They're presumed extinct."
[...]
"Obregon peered over the lip of the chasm; he could not see the bottom. He looked to the sides and saw that the abyss had no apparent limit in either direction. Directly ahead, the other side of the chasm was about ten metres distant. "This is impossible" he said "There's go geologic feature like this in Cinnabar."
This is where all the post-apoc ape world, transhumanist dystopia and alternate evolutionary history fanfic stuff you feel ashamed to include in an otherwise fine and upstanding D&D game can hang out. Me? I just consider it another vista to be tainted with my own grimdark gonzo vision. ;)
Ultimately, after as much travel, adventure and confusion in the laws of nature as the DM finds entertaining, travellers would (Terminus* willing) reach the singularity which powers Cinnabar and creates the space-time distortions characteristic of the city. This would be the functional and philosophical area beyond the edge of the map; but not, however, the end of the line:
"What you see is the innermost point of the time vortex over Cinnabar. Yet this is not in itself the destination of the time flow; the anomaly is both hole and tunnel, exiting somewhere and somewhen else."
* A ruling singularity AI called Terminus: did the people who designed the city never hear about the power of names? Did they really expect that to end well? Bloody urban planners and their (apparent) failure to understand the importance of mythic resonance...
So, Cinnabar. That (or a decadent, introverted city state so similar as to be its' near-identical twin) is definitely being included as part of the wider Wilds when (if) I ever get around to mapping them. See it while access is cheap, and while it's still there.
"It's a tall mountain."
"Well that can't be helped" said the double helix "Dream quests are known for their arduousness"
edit: feel the power of the grogblog hivemind! Posted at about the same time as my half-formed brainwurble:
- Netherworks on synthecosms in Riskail
- Zak on Weird vs. Noir (interestingly he considers urban fantasy a cousin of noir)
- Trey on hardboiled urban fantasy in a weird world setting
Saturday, 22 May 2010
Memestorms and Ideocults
The folk of the Wilds of Nagoh seem almost uniquely prone to outbursts of religious or socio-cultural hysteria, and to infection with a wide variety of passing fads, quixotic ideals, and other such hobby horses. For every pseudo-medieval castle town or classical city state on the map there will be a dozen or more nomadic tribes, eremitic communities, utopian communes and personality cults, each with its own strange ideology.
Part of this tendency towards apparently insane behaviour can be ascribed to living in a post-apocalyptic world where magic, monsters and interfering godlings are facts of life. In a world gone mad, sometimes madness is the right survival trait. But there are also other, oft-overlooked, founts of strangeness in the Wilds.
Memestorms
Mind-affecting haunts, infectious curses tailored by long-dead geniuses of the biothaumic arts, or a form of free-floating psychic mass hysteria (as ever, the scholars are divided on the exact nature of the phenomenon), memestorms can lie dormant in unknowing host populations for generations before taking effect. Although these infections sometimes cause physical symptoms similar to more mundane diseases, and many also result in gross morphological changes, the primary and characteristic effect is infection with outlandish - but sometimes beneficial - neurochemically-enforced behaviour patterns.
Most memestorms are highly infectious to humans and kindred races, requiring those exposed to carriers of the sickness to make a save vs. poison/death or suffer the effects themselves. Their removal requires the casting of both remove curse (to undo the neurological changes wrought on the sufferer) and cure disease (to kill the infection). Either/or casting will result only in healthy carriers of still active and infectious memestorm strains, or non-infectious sufferers.
16 Sample Memestorms
1. Giving Plague - The sufferer feels driven to divest themself of all worldly goods.
2. Excelsior Fever - Typified by soulful staring at the skies in its initial stages, and later by an unshakable desire to ascend ever higher. Infections generally end tragically in steeple-jacking and mountaineering accidents, or when ramshackle towers and flying machines fail catastrophically.
3. Jabbering Ague - Sufferers become prone to fits during which they they suffer from outbursts of speech in ancient languages. When translated some of these are useless, others are snippets of information about the ancient past, or post-hypnotically encoded secrets, or spell formulae.
4. Builder Frenzy - Infectees labout under an unwavering compulsion to assemble objects into abstract symbolic or representational patterns. Anything that comes to hand will be pressed into service (potato mountain in Close Encounter)
5. Demolishing Mania (aka Iconoclasmiasm) - The antithesis of Builder Frenzy. Sufferers are overcome with the compulsion to tear it all down and flee the wreckage of their former homes in search of who knows what. Highly infectious, entire villages and towns have been known to succumb in a single night of wild-eyed mania.
6. Migratory Compulsion - "Go into the water. Go into the water."
7. Immuring Frenzy - "We have to get under the earth. It's not safe on the surface!" The subject begins compulsively digging, either with their bare hands, or with whatever tool comes to hand. A nuisance to the neighbours if they live on the upper storey, and a disruption to trade if they start in on the market place. Potentially deadly if they succumb while on soft earth.
8. Wainbrurm - The sufferer becomes fixated on low-toned, repetitive rumbling sounds. They will spend all their time obsessively following farm carts, or do themselves lasting serious injury by placing their heads against the wrong parts of mill wheels or trip hammers.
9. Sanguinary Quietism - Sufferers won't initiate violence, and become distressed and sickened by the sight of blood. The infestion is bloodborne, and easily transmitted by the spray of fluids caused by violence. Catastrophic for predators if it enters their food source animals.
10. Slayid - The sufferer becomes fixated on aural stimulation, constantly drummming and hammering. Those sufferers most far gone yowl and screech at unpredictable intervals. Some lucky few are able to lead semi-normal lives, but the worst cases are horrible indeed.
11. Acquired Corporeal Revulsion Syndrome - Some part of the sufferer's body becomes abhorrent to them. They become convinced that they can only survive if it is surgically removed. Quite how heartless or liverless sufferers manage to survive the voluntary renunciation of their vital organs is unknown, but, through some quirk of fate, magical or biological in nature, survive some do.
12. Red Star Fever - Sufferers forcibly share all goods with those around them, giving and taking as they require with no regard for social or legal norms. A viral form of "to each according to his need". Many Goblins suffer this.
13. Communicable Ahistoric Bias - A viral psychosis triggered by the smell of decomposition attendent upon death. Sufferers entirely forget about the deceased, regarding them as fictions rather than real people and their mortal remains as loathsome trash.
14. Asocial Demophobia - A visceral loathing of crowds, and of the urban areas they inhabit. The longer the infection persists, the smaller a group needed to trigger the violent withdrawl from society. Sufferers tend to flee their homes, ending up either as misanthropic trap-setting hermits, or as dinner for the crows.
15. Nam Shub - The sufferer lacks self-will. They will obey the instructions of the last person to speak to them to the best of their ability to understand. In advanced cases even the most self-destructive commands will be mindlessly obeyed.
16. Cleromantic Compulsive Syndrome - The sufferer entirely abdicates personal decision-making responsibility, instead obeying the divinatory properties of dice, coin tosses, or other totemic objects. Sufferers of similar strains will be uncannily in accord over what their divinatory devices tell them. Those infected with different strains will argue viciously and interminably over the correct interpretation of same.
-----
IdeoCults of the Wilds
So what becomes of the disease-ridden lunatics affected by the memestorms? Although many die or are incarnerated for the protection of themselves, their kin and neighbours, others escape into the Wilds, scraping a living among others of their own strange, outcast kind
Gun Eunuchs of Draozz - A large, evangelical group suffering from a particular strains of Acquired Corporeal Repulsion Syndrome (or, as they argue, 'liberated from carnal hunger thereby') the infamous Gun Eunuchs have found meaning as self-emasculated worshippers of a giant gun-spewing stone head. Their raiding and slaving parties are led by Taks Eksile, a sword-wielding, moustachioed warlord whose accent never matches his stated origins.
The Henon - Singlehandedly give the lie to "the wisdom of crowds" and living embodiments of the proverbial madness of same, the Henon are a floating carnival of social levelling and mob rule. A rigidly anarchistic group of transvestite mummers, the Henon chant obscure slogans, commit nonsensical and sometimes dangerous pranks, and assault any percieved authority figure who crosses their path.
The Slayidheads - hammer-wielding louts in bizarre costumes, led by a loud-voiced captain possessed of unnatural charisma. Slayidheads are hopelessly fixated on the repetitious pounding noises of their hammers, often to the detriment of their health. They are sometimes pressed into service as cheap labour when roadbeds or building foundations require flattening.
Circoncellionites - A quasi-religious body, all of whose members are deliberately infected with Sanguinary Quietism during indoctrination. Dedicated to spreading their creed of universal pacifism through the swords of others...
Part of this tendency towards apparently insane behaviour can be ascribed to living in a post-apocalyptic world where magic, monsters and interfering godlings are facts of life. In a world gone mad, sometimes madness is the right survival trait. But there are also other, oft-overlooked, founts of strangeness in the Wilds.
Memestorms
Mind-affecting haunts, infectious curses tailored by long-dead geniuses of the biothaumic arts, or a form of free-floating psychic mass hysteria (as ever, the scholars are divided on the exact nature of the phenomenon), memestorms can lie dormant in unknowing host populations for generations before taking effect. Although these infections sometimes cause physical symptoms similar to more mundane diseases, and many also result in gross morphological changes, the primary and characteristic effect is infection with outlandish - but sometimes beneficial - neurochemically-enforced behaviour patterns.
Most memestorms are highly infectious to humans and kindred races, requiring those exposed to carriers of the sickness to make a save vs. poison/death or suffer the effects themselves. Their removal requires the casting of both remove curse (to undo the neurological changes wrought on the sufferer) and cure disease (to kill the infection). Either/or casting will result only in healthy carriers of still active and infectious memestorm strains, or non-infectious sufferers.
16 Sample Memestorms
1. Giving Plague - The sufferer feels driven to divest themself of all worldly goods.
2. Excelsior Fever - Typified by soulful staring at the skies in its initial stages, and later by an unshakable desire to ascend ever higher. Infections generally end tragically in steeple-jacking and mountaineering accidents, or when ramshackle towers and flying machines fail catastrophically.
3. Jabbering Ague - Sufferers become prone to fits during which they they suffer from outbursts of speech in ancient languages. When translated some of these are useless, others are snippets of information about the ancient past, or post-hypnotically encoded secrets, or spell formulae.
4. Builder Frenzy - Infectees labout under an unwavering compulsion to assemble objects into abstract symbolic or representational patterns. Anything that comes to hand will be pressed into service (potato mountain in Close Encounter)
5. Demolishing Mania (aka Iconoclasmiasm) - The antithesis of Builder Frenzy. Sufferers are overcome with the compulsion to tear it all down and flee the wreckage of their former homes in search of who knows what. Highly infectious, entire villages and towns have been known to succumb in a single night of wild-eyed mania.
6. Migratory Compulsion - "Go into the water. Go into the water."
7. Immuring Frenzy - "We have to get under the earth. It's not safe on the surface!" The subject begins compulsively digging, either with their bare hands, or with whatever tool comes to hand. A nuisance to the neighbours if they live on the upper storey, and a disruption to trade if they start in on the market place. Potentially deadly if they succumb while on soft earth.
8. Wainbrurm - The sufferer becomes fixated on low-toned, repetitive rumbling sounds. They will spend all their time obsessively following farm carts, or do themselves lasting serious injury by placing their heads against the wrong parts of mill wheels or trip hammers.
9. Sanguinary Quietism - Sufferers won't initiate violence, and become distressed and sickened by the sight of blood. The infestion is bloodborne, and easily transmitted by the spray of fluids caused by violence. Catastrophic for predators if it enters their food source animals.
10. Slayid - The sufferer becomes fixated on aural stimulation, constantly drummming and hammering. Those sufferers most far gone yowl and screech at unpredictable intervals. Some lucky few are able to lead semi-normal lives, but the worst cases are horrible indeed.
11. Acquired Corporeal Revulsion Syndrome - Some part of the sufferer's body becomes abhorrent to them. They become convinced that they can only survive if it is surgically removed. Quite how heartless or liverless sufferers manage to survive the voluntary renunciation of their vital organs is unknown, but, through some quirk of fate, magical or biological in nature, survive some do.
12. Red Star Fever - Sufferers forcibly share all goods with those around them, giving and taking as they require with no regard for social or legal norms. A viral form of "to each according to his need". Many Goblins suffer this.
13. Communicable Ahistoric Bias - A viral psychosis triggered by the smell of decomposition attendent upon death. Sufferers entirely forget about the deceased, regarding them as fictions rather than real people and their mortal remains as loathsome trash.
14. Asocial Demophobia - A visceral loathing of crowds, and of the urban areas they inhabit. The longer the infection persists, the smaller a group needed to trigger the violent withdrawl from society. Sufferers tend to flee their homes, ending up either as misanthropic trap-setting hermits, or as dinner for the crows.
15. Nam Shub - The sufferer lacks self-will. They will obey the instructions of the last person to speak to them to the best of their ability to understand. In advanced cases even the most self-destructive commands will be mindlessly obeyed.
16. Cleromantic Compulsive Syndrome - The sufferer entirely abdicates personal decision-making responsibility, instead obeying the divinatory properties of dice, coin tosses, or other totemic objects. Sufferers of similar strains will be uncannily in accord over what their divinatory devices tell them. Those infected with different strains will argue viciously and interminably over the correct interpretation of same.
-----
IdeoCults of the Wilds
So what becomes of the disease-ridden lunatics affected by the memestorms? Although many die or are incarnerated for the protection of themselves, their kin and neighbours, others escape into the Wilds, scraping a living among others of their own strange, outcast kind
Gun Eunuchs of Draozz - A large, evangelical group suffering from a particular strains of Acquired Corporeal Repulsion Syndrome (or, as they argue, 'liberated from carnal hunger thereby') the infamous Gun Eunuchs have found meaning as self-emasculated worshippers of a giant gun-spewing stone head. Their raiding and slaving parties are led by Taks Eksile, a sword-wielding, moustachioed warlord whose accent never matches his stated origins.
The Henon - Singlehandedly give the lie to "the wisdom of crowds" and living embodiments of the proverbial madness of same, the Henon are a floating carnival of social levelling and mob rule. A rigidly anarchistic group of transvestite mummers, the Henon chant obscure slogans, commit nonsensical and sometimes dangerous pranks, and assault any percieved authority figure who crosses their path.
The Slayidheads - hammer-wielding louts in bizarre costumes, led by a loud-voiced captain possessed of unnatural charisma. Slayidheads are hopelessly fixated on the repetitious pounding noises of their hammers, often to the detriment of their health. They are sometimes pressed into service as cheap labour when roadbeds or building foundations require flattening.
Circoncellionites - A quasi-religious body, all of whose members are deliberately infected with Sanguinary Quietism during indoctrination. Dedicated to spreading their creed of universal pacifism through the swords of others...
Friday, 21 May 2010
Sunny May Afternoon Link Dump
It's too nice a day to blog, so have some random links instead:
Mikhail Belomlinskiy Hobbit Illos (@ Monster Brains) - lizardiest Gollum I've ever seen.
The Cards of Wu (@ ellisnadler.com) - bizarre woodcut divinatory cards. Yep, these are definitely the major arcana used IMG.
Paper Ashes (@ A Journey Round My Skull) - abstract art by Bette Burgoyne. Really rather cool.
The Witless Warrior (@ Pre-Gebelin Tarot History blog) - Snail fights: srs bzns. Looks like Greg Stafford was onto something with Runequest's Dragonsnails.
The Demon-Haunted World (@ Slideshare.net) - Matt Jones' 2009 talk on practical city magic. His argument that "people are walking architecture" makes me think immediately of Greg Bear's dystopian Strength of Stones (cities using people as tools: you know it'll happen, once they wake up).
Odd Map Symbols (@ Tom Gauld's website) - inc. icons for Wicker Man, Angry Birds, Sacrificial Altar and Spooky Tree. He also outlines the perfect gamer future.
52 Ways to Die in a Cave (James Tabor @ Srcibd) - forget monsters, traps and the hostility of a mythic underworld! Caving is inherently a kamikaze hobby.
bonus links: Radium Age Eco-Catastrophes (@ Hilobrow) - If that title doesn't make your heart beat a little faster, then you may not be a true geek.
Chomsky and Zinn on The War of the Ring (@McSweeney's Internet Tendency) - Gondor-centrism, Gandalf the drug-addicted gun runner and a war "all about pipe-weed"
Mikhail Belomlinskiy Hobbit Illos (@ Monster Brains) - lizardiest Gollum I've ever seen.
The Cards of Wu (@ ellisnadler.com) - bizarre woodcut divinatory cards. Yep, these are definitely the major arcana used IMG.
Paper Ashes (@ A Journey Round My Skull) - abstract art by Bette Burgoyne. Really rather cool.
The Witless Warrior (@ Pre-Gebelin Tarot History blog) - Snail fights: srs bzns. Looks like Greg Stafford was onto something with Runequest's Dragonsnails.
"Graaaaaar!" went the snail
The Demon-Haunted World (@ Slideshare.net) - Matt Jones' 2009 talk on practical city magic. His argument that "people are walking architecture" makes me think immediately of Greg Bear's dystopian Strength of Stones (cities using people as tools: you know it'll happen, once they wake up).
Odd Map Symbols (@ Tom Gauld's website) - inc. icons for Wicker Man, Angry Birds, Sacrificial Altar and Spooky Tree. He also outlines the perfect gamer future.
52 Ways to Die in a Cave (James Tabor @ Srcibd) - forget monsters, traps and the hostility of a mythic underworld! Caving is inherently a kamikaze hobby.
bonus links: Radium Age Eco-Catastrophes (@ Hilobrow) - If that title doesn't make your heart beat a little faster, then you may not be a true geek.
Chomsky and Zinn on The War of the Ring (@McSweeney's Internet Tendency) - Gondor-centrism, Gandalf the drug-addicted gun runner and a war "all about pipe-weed"
Tuesday, 18 May 2010
Bookcrossing Gaming Materials
(Prompted by a post over at Dungeons and Digressions)
Books can, and often do, outlast life with their original purchasers. The wonderful cultural tradition of the secondhand and antique book trades is proof enough of this. As is the strange pleasure of finding a dedication or an ex libris stamp inscribed by an original owner or gift-giver.
Want to still keep track of old gaming books when they get begged, stolen, borrowed, or sold on?
I understand Bookmooch.com and Read It Swap It (UK) provide similar facilities.
Who knows, you might make some new gaming contacts along the way. Then again...
Books can, and often do, outlast life with their original purchasers. The wonderful cultural tradition of the secondhand and antique book trades is proof enough of this. As is the strange pleasure of finding a dedication or an ex libris stamp inscribed by an original owner or gift-giver.
Want to still keep track of old gaming books when they get begged, stolen, borrowed, or sold on?
- Click over to bookcrossing.com
- Tap in the ISBN of your book
- Get a bookcrossing number
- Stick it on the frontispiece along with a URL
- Release into the wild
I understand Bookmooch.com and Read It Swap It (UK) provide similar facilities.
Who knows, you might make some new gaming contacts along the way. Then again...
“Uh, what’s that you say? You’ve got an old D&D book of mine and you want to know if I want back? No thanks Mr. Maniac, and please don’t call here again!”
-- ze bulette
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