Pictures and Words

According to Kevin Smith, a writer “creates his ideal world”. In the world of Kevin Smith films, people talk in lengthy monologues about pop culture and sex. In the world of Charlie Kaufman films, reality is a bit vague and everyone seems to be miserable all of the time. That’s why the good guys win most of the time, nice guys get the girl, and everyone in movies is so attractive. People create the world that they wish they lived in, and hope that others enjoy it as much as they do.

All my work on All-That-Is has been written with myself as the target audience. If I thought something was cool, would be interesting, would solve a problem I have with the Dungeons and Dragons universe (or fictional universes in general), would be fun to play…if I liked an idea, I’d throw it in.

Bits and pieces are also based on various public domain works (The Wizard of Oz, Peter Pan) and others are (much less directly) inspired by works that aren’t public domain. I’ve only included information about the parts of All-That-Is that are vastly different to your typical fantasy universe (Lord of the Rings, Dungeons & Dragons) and I’m focussing on the parts that are relevant to the Traveller’s Guide.

One of the most interesting series of articles I’ve ever read was by Rich Burlew, the man behind Order of the Stick. (a webcomic set in a world that obeys Dungeons and Dragons rules, but is not necessarily a game of Dungeons and Dragons.) The series of articles was called “The New World“; it’s an (unfinished) account of him creating a new campaign setting, writing stream-of-consciousness, explaining his decisions as he makes them, and giving general universe-building advice.

I’ve been working on All-That-Is for literally years now, so I don’t even know why some of the decisions were made, but I’ll share the thinking behind the parts that I remember. Over the years I’ve bounced more than a few ideas off people – most notably my cousin Gavin, my friend Damon, and my sister Elizabeth. Without their input, All-That-Is, would be quite a different world.

You can see why I need an artist. This sketch is from 2006, when I first started working on the world. It really wasn't meant to be seen by eyes other than my own, but it nicely demonstrates the difference in size between the races.

Races

There are exactly 10 sentient races in All-That-Is.

In Dungeons and Dragons, not only are there the base races that come with the rulebooks, but you can buy dozens of supplementary books, full of more playable races. What’s more, a huge number of the enemies you fight are sentient as well. Reading through the monster manual (or, honestly, playing a standard adventure) it feels like you’re living in a world where you can’t go ten metres without running into a new sentient race.

It also brings up…I suppose it’s not really a “moral issue”, but I’ve always felt a bit strange, playing a character of “Good” alignment who has no problem murdering an entire town full of kobolds or goblins, casually killing children and unarmed men and women alike. The alternative, of course, is to let them live, which doesn’t really make sense either.

In All-That-Is, I decided to simplify it – there are exactly 10 sentient races, and 20 cross-breeds that can be made from those races. (I’ll be using the word “people” a lot in this article – a “person”, in All-That-Is, simply means “a member of a sentient race”, with people being the plural.)

There aren’t more races on other planes, there aren’t more races coming out in later handbooks, and any group of creatures terrorising a village is either going to be one of these ten races (making killing them a legitimate moral choice) or a non-sentient race that you can slaughter without feeling guilty. (if you’re the sort of person who feels guilty killing fictional people.)

I’ll be making a lot of comparisons to “humans” – this could be confusing, because Humans on All-That-Is are different to humans on earth. To make comprehension easier, whenever I say “humans” with a lowercase H, I’m referring to regular-brand Earth humans, and whenever I use a capital H, I’m referring to All-That-Is Humans. (this is in keeping with my habit of capitalising All-That-Is race names anyway.)

Similarly, if I’m comparing All-That-Is Dwarves to regular-style D&D dwarves, or halflings, or gnomes, I’ll use capitals for All-That-Is races, and lower-case for all others.

Halflings and Peedlings:

Halflings
I have never liked halflings – I don’t like the name, and I don’t like the race. Halflings are a D&D Race who are…well, they’re Hobbit rip-offs at best, but the way they’re described in the handbooks, they’re basically just short humans. They have almost nothing that makes them individual or unique, they’re just short humans with slight personality changes and hairier feet. If you want to play a human but shorter, you play a halfling.

In All-That-Is,”Halfling” is a name for any cross-breed. “Half-elves” aren’t listed as a separate race, they’re simply a Human/Elf halfling. The races are split into 6 different sizes (Big, Large, Medium, Small, Tiny, Xpedious) and any race can cross-breed with races of the same size, or the size one smaller or one larger.

There are a total of 20 different Halfling races – these won’t be covered in the Traveller’s Guide in any kind of detail. Halflings, to keep it simple, were originally going to be born sterile (like mules) but then I worked out a simple system that allows them to breed without a degree in mathematics required to calculate their children’s stats. (more on that in a later post)

While any individual Halfling’s culture is dependent on their parents, where they were raised, etc, they also tend to have an affinity for other Halflings. Most towns have a Halfling bar or club, where they can meet and associate with other Halflings without the prejudice that they regularly face from “normal” people. Halflings commonly become travellers, because they don’t really feel that they fit in anywhere.

Peedlings
To replace Halflings, I included a race called “Peedlings” (the name was chosen at random from about 50 different x-ling names I wrote down) – Peedlings are slightly taller than Dwarves, and covered entirely in hair. They have disproportionately large heads, hands, and feet, and skinny arms and legs. Peedling hair comes in all the colours that human hair comes in – brown and black are the most common, there’s an occasional blonde, and the much rarer redhead. Clothes are optional, but Peedlings in situations where loose hair could be a risk (such as, say, adventuring) tend to wear protective garments and tie their hair back wherever it’s longest. (or cut it off, but that’s not a common habit.)

Peedlings are the entertainers of the world – the vast majority of the great writings, paintings, songs, dances and plays of the world have come from Peedlings, and their culture is based around culture. A stereotypical Peedling is like a personified D&D Bard – great at chit-chat, terrible at combat. (give them the right class, of course, and they’re as tough as any other character.)

Peedlings suffer from an artistic temperament. This invariably makes them restless – a Peedling rarely stays in one city for their whole life, preferring to see the world, draw inspiration from life, and have adventures that they can work into creative pieces.

Tomorrow: Angels, Fairies, Demons, Ogres

Generally when I’m writing about All-That-Is, (expanding the universe, starting a novel, exploring characters or ideas etc) I like to write in-universe, pretend that someone who actually lives there is describing whatever I’m describing, as if my piece of writing exists in All-That-Is itself.

It’s a really useful technique for a couple of reasons, but it’s not something that I came up with by myself. I stole it directly from the video game The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, which has been my single largest influence while creating All-That-Is.

The Elder Scrolls is a series of games that started in 1994 with a game called Arena. I’ve never played Arena, or the sequel, Daggerfall, but from what I’ve read about Daggerfall, one of its main draws the huge world in which it was set – the in-game area was around the size of Great Britain – and one of its main drawbacks was that the huge world suffered from complete blandness.

Creating a game area the size of Great Britain requires either ten thousand monkeys programming for ten thousand years, or a program that will auto-generate locations. You tell it that a room has four walls, two doors, and a window, and the program can randomly generate an unlimited number of extremely boring rooms.

Apparently that’s what they did with Daggerfall. There were thousands of towns, which were essentially made up of the exact same buildings, slightly rearranged every time. There were 20 real quests, and an infinite number of “go here and get this for me” quests.There were over 750 000 named characters you could talk to, all with the same six topics to talk about.

So when the company started work on their next game, Morrowind, they focussed on fixing these flaws. Instead of making the game as large as they could (Morrowind covers about 0.01% of the area that Daggerfall covered) their aim was to create a world where almost every city looked completely different to the next, a world of strong visual flavour.

They succeeded spectacularly.

From top to bottom, left to right: Ald'ruhn, Balmora, Sadrith Mora, Ald Velothi, the Zainab Camp, Vivec. Any Morrowind die-hards could recognise almost all of them without even having to think about it.

Compare those six buildings. Each of them is not only unique and gorgeous, but their design makes complete sense, culturally and structurally. The second you step into a city containing any one of those buildings, you’re instantly aware of where you are. This is not only useful when playing a game, but it shows how effectively they created a rich, beautiful world. (it didn’t stop at building design – there are dozens of creatures that you can fight, almost none of which you’ll have ever seen before, and some of which have their own food chains and life cycles. They invented architecture, animals, plants, geography…Morrowind is my single favourite game, largely because it’s so visually striking.)

Throughout Morrowind, you can find, buy, sell, and (most importantly) read books. There are around 6 full novels worth of books to be read in the game, and none of them is entirely reliable.

Because they’ve been written from the point of view of characters within the world, they contain the same inaccuracies and biases that real books written in and about the real world by real people contain: a book titled “The 36 Lessons of Vivec”, by Vivec, detailing his own adventures throughout the land is to be taken with a grain of salt. As a writer, you can safely put anything you like into that book, and not worry about it contradicting canon – like the film 300, it’s deliberately subjective.

But it’s more than the safety of unreliable narrators, it lends a sense of character to the world. By writing a book that exists within the world, you’re not only adding depth through the content of the book, you’re adding more information simply through the fact that it exists within the world. Someone who exists in All-That-Is must have had cause to write the book – they had motivation, they had a purpose, they have a target audience. And there’s no better way to flesh out a character than by writing as them, so we learn about the kind of people who inhabit the world as well.

The aim of this project (the All-That-Is RPG blog project) is to create the equivalent of a Dungeons & Dragons Player’s Handbook – a book that the players can have next to them as they play, with everything that they need to create and play a character. I want this book to be written half in-universe and half out-of-universe: it’s going to be called The Traveller’s Guide to All-That-Is, with the idea being that it’s roughly (and I only just realised the similarity) the equivalent of The Hitch-hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

The Traveller’s Guide to All-That-Is is a book that Travellers (the name used for “Adventurers” in All-That-Is) can take with them anywhere, with a rough overview of all that they need to know. A bit about each of the different races in the world, a bit about each of the different countries, other travellers that they can expect to meet and band with, handy spells to learn, weapons to buy, different deities and their worshipper’s customs, etc etc.

Anything that is simply description (“A Barbarian is someone who survives on their wits” “Gnomes are the smartest of all the races” “The problem with casting magic while fighting a man with a big sword is that you’ll probably die” etc) is going to be written in-universe. Anything that involves numbers that the player needs to crunch, or dice that the player needs to roll (“To see if you succesfully cast a spell while fighting a man with a big sword, roll a six-sided die and hope that it comes up 7″) is going to be written out-of-universe.

For clarity’s sake, I’m going to use a number of different background colours. Without committing to anything, I’ll probably use an off-whitey/yellowy/parchment-coloured background for anything written in-universe (like this) and a grey/”stone” background for anything written out-of-universe (like this).

I’ll also need a third colour, (probably a dull blue like this) because I want to use content from the Open Gaming License:

In late 2000, the company that publishes Dungeons and Dragons decided to take the basic rules and principles of the d20 system (rolling a twenty-sided dice to determine failure or success, the idea of characters gaining more skills and feats as they level up…heck, the concept of leveling up) and release them under the “Open Gaming License”, allowing anyone to publish a game using those rules, provided they included a copy of the license somewhere.

The reasons for doing so are interesting and complicated, and Ryan Dancey, the man behind the Open Gaming License explains them really well in this interview. Basically sales of Pen-and-Paper Role-Playing Games were beginning to drop, and Dancey came up with the Open Gaming License to try to boost sales. The idea is that the more role-playing books being published, the more people who are going to be getting into the hobby, and since Dungeons and Dragons is the cornerstone of pen-and-paper role-playing, more people getting into the hobby means more D&D books sold.

I can’t tell you whether or not it worked, but they wrote the Open Gaming License in such a way that they can never take it back – the second it was published, everything was irrevokably released for other game-designers to meddle with, alter, and release as their own.

I really like the d20 system, and I love the idea of the Open Gaming License, so I’ve decided to do the All-That-Is RPG using the Open Gaming License content as my base.

One of the conditions of using Open Gaming License content is that you clearly mark what is original content, compared to what’s being used under license. There’s no one correct way to do this – some people use footnotes, underlining, have open content on specially marked pages – I’m planning on fairly drastically altering a large portion, so that last one definitely isn’t an option for me.

Since I’m already using a couple of different background colours, using one more to mark Open Gaming License content seems logical. (all of this is assuming that I end up with a nicely put-together pdf file or (best-case scenario) actual physical book. If my final product is a word document, I’ll probably just use underline or something basic like that.)

If you want to have a look at the Standard Reference Document, the base Open Gaming License content, it can be found here. (I’ll be using the 3.5 edition because that’s what I started working from in 2006, and so a lot of my notes so far are based around it and also because they drastically changed the License for 4th Edition content. I intensely dislike the 4th Edition license, but that’s a post for another time.)

Despite my taste for writing information in-universe, I won’t (tempting though it is) be using that style for these blog posts. It’s great if you want to set a mood, or build character, or create depth and flavour, but it’s not ideal for concisely sharing information. Another problem I’ve found with it is that you can’t explain concepts that don’t exist – for example, in All-That-Is, the wheel was never invented. Try explaining that while writing as an in-universe character.

Another problem about writing in-universe is that you sometimes get distracted by writing about the author who is writing whatever piece you’re trying to write. (say that ten times fast.) The original plan for my 2007 NaNoWriMo novel was to rewrite The Wizard of Oz (the original has fallen into the public domain) as a novel that existed in All-That-Is, called The Vizard of Az.

The original Wizard of Oz was written by Frank L. Baum, and was so popular that he wrote a number of Oz books – The Marvellous Land of Oz, Ozma of Oz, etc etc. In the later ones, the true ruler of Oz appears, a girl called Ozma. She has complete power over Oz, and is completely beloved by all. One of the first things that she does is ban magic: no one can use any kind of magic unless they have her express permission. Naturally, as she’s beloved by all, this suggestion is celebrated and they all come out and kiss her feet, etc etc etc.

The Vizard of Az books were going to be written as thinly veiled political analogies, for an idiotic dictator who really tried to ban magic. In the months leading up to November (the month of Nanowrimo, when I was going to write the first Az book) I started to write a backstory for the writer. You can find Frankel’s backstory here, and the backstory of the idiotic dictator here.

November came around, and I realised that having written Frankel’s story, I didn’t actually feel motivated to write The Vizard of Az at all. There was no need for it; the story of Frankel was done, and actually writing the novel was suddenly unnecessary. I still have all my notes for it, a couple of paragraphs of prose (including the opening) but the story didn’t need to be told. (instead, for my 2007 Nano novel, I attempted Basil Turret and the Prisoner of Algebra, a Harry Potter parody set in All-That-Is.)

I have a couple of notes around about who is actually going to be writing The Traveller’s Guide to All-That-Is in-universe, but I’m not allowing myself to do anything with them, for fear that it will render the actual Guide superfluous.

For more information about All-That-Is, check out The All-That-Is Wiki, my (unfinished) novels. or the All-That-Is-themed entries from my livejournal.

Next time: All-That-Is Races: Halflings and Peedlings

I thoroughly enjoy an occasional game of Dungeons and Dragons. I’ve never completely understood the negativity that surrounds pen-and-paper roleplaying games – I have friends who have met their spouses over the internet, who own every episode of Star Trek ever made, who will argue for hours over whether Han or Greedo shot first, who own and have finished a hundred and ten computer games, who have been blogging since before it was cool…I have friends who seem to be involved in every “geeky” activity known to man laugh at me and call be a nerd because I like Dungeons and Dragons.

The logic escapes me.

Dungeons and Dragons, for those not in the know, is a game in which you sit around a table and pretend to be someone else. There are a group of players and a “GM”, the “Game Master” (or DM/Dungeon Master) who controls the world around the players – all of the non-player characters, any natural events (“Rocks fall from the sky. Everybody dies.”) and everything that is needed to keep the story going. I like the idea of calling the DM the “StoryTeller”, but it’s never really caught on.

I have a friend who doesn’t enjoy any of the standard “nerdy” activities, but he loves Dungeons and Dragons. “It’s a game about building a character and using your imagination. It’s like writing a book with friends,” he has said to me before. “I don’t understand why that’s so nerdy?”

If I had to guess, I’d say the nerdy part comes in when you start dealing with specific situations – if two players (or a player and a non-player character, etc) want to have a fight, you can just sit there and describe it (“I aim for your neck with my sword.”) but you’re unlikely to come up with any kind of mutually satisfying resolution. Enter the rulebooks and the dice – when you create your character, you roll a number of dice, and assign the resulting numbers to attributes – Strength, Dexterity, Charisma etc etc. You could choose to put all of your higher rolls into the attributes that will help you in combat, and create a great fighter who is lacking in social charm and smarts, or you could decide to have a well-spoken, intelligent character who is as weak as a kitten.

Then when you decide that you want to fight, rather than just sitting there and talking about it, you consult the rulebook. Wait for your turn, roll the dice, and see if your sword successfully hits your opponent’s neck.

There are various roleplaying systems that use only 6-sided dice (those are the ones that you think of when you hear the word “dice”) but Dungeons and Dragons, the daddy of all the pen-and-paper RPGs, and the most famous one, uses a number of different-sided dice, most notably “d20″s:

A 20-sided dice, commonly known as a "d20".

Dungeons and Dragons, popular and fun though it is, is a flawed system. As the pen-and-paper RPG system that’s been around the longest (there are now literally hundreds, and more springing up every day) the rule-system has grown larger and more bloated – if you want to attack someone in D&D with your sword, it’s a simple roll. But if you want to move from one square to another, there are dozens of factors you have to take into account – How many enemies are in the squares around you? What sort of terrain are you running on? What have each of those enemies done in the previous round? Whate are they planning to do in the next round? Are you trying to cast a spell? How tall are you? Does your uncle live in this village, or the next one over?

Each one of those factors (except maybe your uncle’s whereabouts) can factor into whether or not you successfully run one square over. It started simple, but then people started wondering “Hang on, why can I just run past a guy holding a sword while he stands there and looks at me?”, and added rules in to deal with it. The rules upon rules upon rules…it can be a bit overwhelming.

And don’t even think about trying to physically grab another character (grappling) – you’ll be there for months, just trying to work out whose arm is where.

As well as the bloated combat rules, there are other bits and pieces of the Dungeons and Dragons rules that a number of players just find impossible to deal with. A lot of people write their own little patches to fix these up, others have house-rules like “No one is allowed to grapple anyone else” (when I first started playing D&D, we just ignored the more complicated rules completely), and some work around them however they can. (“just as you are about to grapple them, rocks fall from the sky. Everybody dies.)

On top of the bloated rules and inconveniences, there are a lot of other little bits and pieces about Dungeons and Dragons that have always just annoyed me – they’re not badly made or overly complicated, they just bug me. In combat, for example, everyone’s rounds are supposed to occur simultaneously, but you can see what everyone else has done before deciding upon your move. The magic system has always frustrated and annoyed me. Dice randomly determining how good your character is – that can go well, but more often than not it goes horribly wrong. The god that you choose to worship has almost no bearing on your character at all. Little things like that.

Rather than work out dozens of increasingly complex house-rules (which would, of course, layer on top of each other and end up being horribly bloated) I decided, like so many have decided before me, to create my own set of RPG rules.

This was in 2006. Around the same time, I was doing a lot of writing – I was in that stage that every young writer goes through where they want to write short stories about vampires. (mine was called Jhusmet. He was a gentleman thief. The stories were about as bad as you’d expect them to be.)

These vampire stories were set in their own distinct universe – it started out as a modern fantasy version of this world, but the more I played with the idea, the less like earth it became. I started toying with various “what-if”s – What if no one in the world had pets? What if wheels had simply never been invented? What if magic, instead of being a mystical, mythical thing, was an ordinary everyday part of life?

Working simultaneously on my RPG and my own world, they slowly got mixed together, and my new RPG system became specifically tied to this universe that I was creating. It stopped being modern fantasy, and just became regular fantasy. I don’t actually read much, and I’ve never found a fantasy book that I enjoyed (other than The Hobbit when I was a child) so it doesn’t really have much in common with most of the fantasty you’ll see on bookshelves, I’ve been told.

(the closest series that I’ve seen is probably Discworld, simply because they’re both comedic fantasy. I hadn’t actually read any Discworld until 2008, when I got into it at the recommendation of my cousin Gavin - he suggested it would be a good study of world-building. It took me a while to get into the series, but it does pay off. I personally recommend Going Postal or The Truth (but not both, because they’re essentially the same book with different characters) as a one-off, or the series of Guards books. And the world-building side of it is fascinating. Once you’ve found a few Discworld books that you’ve enjoyed, go back and read the first few – they’re written in a completely different style.)

The RPG system got shelved after a few months, and instead I simply worked on expanding the universe. It eventually became known as All-That-Is, and I created a wiki to put all of my notes on. Each year for NaNoWriMo I’ve tried (and failed) to complete a different novel set in All-That-Is (in 2008 it was Life on the Wall, in 2007 it was Basil Turret and the Prisoner of Algebra, and in 2006 it was a novel called Writing a Novel.)

In 2007, I started working in a map shop, which inspired me to start drawing maps of the world I was creating.

I’ve invented hundreds of characters, dozens of locations, and designed more than a handful of games for All-That-Is. I’m yet to actually finish anything, but I consider myself more of a geofictionist anyway – I do it for the fun of creating the world. It’s a hobby, it doesn’t necessarily have to lead anywhere.

Recently, at a pen-and-paper roleplaying convention, I met a number of people who had created their own RPG systems, and (in some cases) published them. In the several years since I’d last worked on my own RPG system, Dungeons and Dragons 4th Edition came out, and fixed most of the major issues I’d had with the system.

But All-That-Is had grown from its humble roots of “let’s fix a few problems”, and become its own universe, and I feel that it’s time to pull out the very first notes that I’d ever written – the class list, the weapons, the combat system – and revisit them, see if I could put together an All-That-Is RPG System.

I find it extremely interesting when other people share what they’re working on. I like to see something created from nothing, watch as the creator makes decisions – I especially like it when people do it in blog form, and allow input from the comments, so I thought that I’d share my notes, share the creative process, and garner audience participation and suggestions.

This blog will primarily be focussed on the mechanics of the world, not the flavour. (except, of course, when they cross-over.) If you want to know more about All-That-Is as a world, I recommend visiting The All-That-Is Wiki, or checking out my (unfinished) novels. In 2007, I did a series of All-That-Is-themed entries on my livejournal, they’re worth a read as well.

Whenever I use a term that may not have the same definition in All-That-Is as it does elsewhere, I’ll explain it (Demons, Hands, Halflings…) and for the sake of people who have never played a pen-and-paper roleplaying game in their life, I’ll be explaining all of that terminology as we go as well. (d20, classes, skills…)

At the end of this project (which I predict will be around the end of the year, included play-testing) I hope to have a completely playable RPG set in the land of All-That-Is. I haven’t decided if I’m going to have any kind of art in it (the map above is about the extent of my artistic abilities, so I’d have to get someone else in for that) or if I’m going to print it, or just have it as a downloadable set of rules. I’m not going to be working full-time on it, but there should be a new post about about once a week.

At the end of this project, I hope to have a completely balanced, playable RPG set in the land of All-That-Is, and probably an adventure or two to go with it. The entire process will be documented right here, on Pictures and Words, and audience input will more than likely  be taken into account.

Should be an exciting ride!

Next time: Writing in-universe, a bit about the book, and Open Gaming License.