Risus: Thirty Years!

We're almost out of 2023!

This year has been the 30th Anniversary of Risus: The Anything RPG, the 20th Anniversary of The Risus Companion, and the 10th Anniversary of Risus 2nd Edition.

As I write this, we're at the end of December, and I feel like I should raise a glass to Risus before the year is done. I've kept quiet so far because I think it would be unseemly, nowadays, for me to parade the Risus name too much. But, 30, 20 and 10 years are worth taking a moment for, so I'll mark the triple-occasion with a story from the youngest of the three celebrants, the 2nd Ed:

It was a scary Colorado day, for the time had come to draw the Little Cartoon Bastards (the name my stick-figure "art" takes when the sticks pose specifically for Risus).

I always dreaded that part.

Not from dislike! I love the little idiots, and they represent the best of what Risus can be, but I can't draw. That's not some false-modesty thing. I hardcore can't draw. I can't-draw at a world-class level. I could fail to draw at the Olympics and win the can't-draw gold. Almost every Risus "illustration" took several drafts, and came from many false starts, and for every one that made the cut, there were six or seven that didn't, because they were worse.

But, the time had come, so I'd sit around doodling when I was hanging out with my players, hoping some of those doodles would work out.

Around that time, a Risus supporter I was following online got a guitar, and he was super happy about it, and his joy over it felt infectious, so I thought: "I should have a guitar-playing LCB for the new edition, as a shout-out to that gamer's new guitar!"

And I liked that idea almost too much? Like, I wasn't willing to let it go. I had a vibe in my mind and I wanted an LCB who would deliver that vibe: a triumphant vibe, a rock-and-roll-fantasy vibe. A happy LCB, shredding with joy.

But, see above. I cannot draw. So, it's a terrible, heartbreaking idea for me to develop artistic ambitions, no matter how humble.

I did something like 20 gods-forsaken drafts of guitar-playing stickmen. And they all suuuuuuucked.

I did many from pure imagination, and many from photographic reference. I searched the Web for classic images of triumphant guitar poses from the likes of Hendrix, Prince, Van Halen, Clapton, Page, Zappa, Buddy Frickin' Holly ... hoping that their moments of triumph could give me that triumphant vibe.

And if I could draw, that approach would have worked. I would have had the skill, the eye, the insight necessary to translate some of those moments into something sticklike.

But, see above. I cannot draw.

So, I was sad, I was adrift. I wanted a triumphant guitar guy. I couldn't let go of wanting that piece. But the chasm between my approach, and that desire, was blocking my path.

It took me a few weeks of beating my head against that wall before the tweety-birds circling my head got me a light bulb, out of pity.

It came to me when I was waking from a snooze, and I scooted to the computer to search for new references. This time, I was no longer searching for rock stars or guitar legends ... I was searching for people IMAGINING they were rock stars and guitar legends. I searched for pictures of people playing, not guitar, but AIR GUITAR.

Go ahead and try it. You'll see what I saw (well, ten years later, you'll see the equivalent of what I saw): that is the triumph I was craving. Not the reality of shredding guitar, but the fantasy of it, the love of it, the roleplay of it. The absolute frickiting nonsense of it. I wanted the joy of the daydreamer, and the air-guitar people are the people who GET that, and deliver it all the time, so I loaded my eyeballs with air-guitar triumphs and air-guitar dreams, and I stood, and I shredded some air of my own, because I knew this was was the missing piece that would snap the chasm shut, so I could stride across, as if I'd always known how.

I got it on the first (new) try. The little dude danced from my pen without further iteration. A triumphant doodle, by a guy who can't draw, of a triumphant performance, by a guy who can't play.

But we can pretend. Happy anniversary, little game (almost belated!), and here comes 2024.

May we all shred triumphant.

Love Nest

Correspondent Diederik Van Arkel made a request for more nitty-gritty posts on how I produce graphics, in response to my post about 1-bit images. I expect I'll do a lot of that over time, but I'll begin by describing what my Life Cycle of a Simple Risus Map only hints at: the way I construct a Risus map-graphic by working back-and-forth (and back, and forth, and back, and forth) between rasters and vectors.

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In Toast of the Town, a Risus fantasy module you can snag for free if you'd like, the PCs are likely to meet a group of NPCs trapped underground in a place called the Nest, a repurposed room accessible from the town's sewers. Toast of the Town isn't a dungeon-crawl, so there's no real need to map the tunnels, but I felt a simple diagram of the Nest would be useful for the Game Master.

All Risus graphics are stick-figure drawings, which gives the game and its support material a goofy warmth I enjoy, and leverages my own absolute inability to draw. Like, I really can't draw. I do drafts of the stick-figures. And then sometimes the final stick-figure is a composite of parts of the drafts, because none of the individual drafts were tolerable. It's that bad.

So, while I have a decent visual sense and can make a pretty map if I want to, a Risus map needs to feel like Risus, which means it needs to be more like a "doodle" than a "drawing." With that in mind, let's follow the steps, to see how I use both Photoshop and Illustrator in a funky back-and-forth to get the doodle I want.

Step One: Scribble in the Art-Hole

Since this is a minor map and doesn't rate a full page, I wanted to fit the map to the page instead of the other way around. So, working with a draft of the laid-out module (you can see bits of copy poking in at the edges), I doodled the first draft directly onto the page, so I'd be 100% sure it would fit the aspect ratio of the "art hole" (what a lot of us call copy-spaces left empty for forthcoming illustrations). The original plan was to have the map where the hole was situated. As in all other creative pursuits, the plan didn't survive to the end, but that's usually a good sign.

It's Supposed to Be a Circle. My High-School Art Teacher Coddled Me.

As you can see, the very-basics are present: a round room with crushed radiating corridors, and two ways to get in: the secret door from the "sewers," and the tunnel leading to a kitchen basement that plays its own role in the adventure. Note my perfect handwriting. Even I'm no longer sure what word I'm labeling the radiating corridors with. Robe? Pole? This is why I'm a good typist.

Step Two: First Pass in Illustrator

In Adobe Illustrator, even a yutz like me can draw a circle and perfect straight lines, so the next step is a simplistic line-drawing using the Pen tool and some basic shapes in pure Illustrator vectors. While I want the map to be a doodle, I want it to be a better doodle than my doodle. I want the circle to be circular and the radiating corridors, crushed though they are, to be a uniform width in their non-crushed places.

In Illustrator, Even a Schmuck Like Me Can Almost Draw

Step Three: Tracing it to Pieces

I print out the Illustrator drawing, and trace it using a Flair marker (all Risus graphics are drawn with a Flair for consistency, and because that was the pen I chewed the most in grade school). At this point, I'm doing the actual doodle I'll use for the module, so the perfect circle acts as a guide, but I'm adding little notches to indicate grooves or supports in the walls, and I'm adding speckles of texture, and furniture and things: everything I know should be there ... sort of.

All Secret Sewer-Temples Available Pre-Furnished.
Ask Your Leasing Agent.

Because this is a planned process, I know I don't need to draw every piece of furniture, and I know I don't need to draw everything in its correct place, so I don't. I know I'll need more than three bits of bedding, for example, but I know that three different bedding symbols will be sufficient, in the final graphic, to make the whole thing feel hand-drawn, so I only draw three. What I'm doing is creating pieces, that I'll later be able to copy-paste and rotate and place correctly. I don't even attempt to draw the door in its correct place, because I know I'll only mess that up!

Step Four: Digital Tracing and Layout

I scan the Flair doodle at high resolution, and, in Photoshop, I simplify it to a 1-bit raster, and clean away any schmutz I don't want. I leave the lines in their rough, natural state for now.

At This Stage It's Just Like Playing in a Mapping Program

I leave Photoshop and bring the image over to Illustrator, where I use the Live Trace feature (Illustrator CS2 to CS5) or Image Trace feature (Illustrator CS6 onward) to trace it. When I first developed this technique for A Kringle in Time, I did the tracing in Adobe Streamline, and you can also use Corel Trace or the Potrace function built in to InkScape, or other methods. In digital graphics, "tracing" programs are those that create vectors from rasters. Tracing can be messy and fraught, and it's only a good idea in very specific instances ... but a simple line-drawing like this map is one of them.

Once the trace completes, I can expand the tracing and group together lines into sensible objects: crates, distilling gear (there's some alchemy, of a kind, happening in the Nest) bedding and so on. Since each object is a group of vectors, I can grab them with my mouse, move them around, duplicate them, spin them, mirror them and so on - they're now just symbols I can use at my discretion, including some stacking (that little pile of three crates I make). In this step, I use the vector-pieces to assemble the map into its final configuration.

Step 5: Smoothing

It's time to leave Illustrator and go back to Photoshop. I rasterize the map at a high resolution, and I apply a nice Gaussian Blur filter to it. Then I "harden" the blurred image by using the Contrast sliders (refer to the graphic for the slider settings). This trick is essential to the Risus look, which always has that kind of smoothing applied to my rough Flair ink-lines. Everything I'm doing to this map, I do to the LCBs (the stick-figures are called the LCBs; it means Little Cartoon Bastards).

To finish this step, I once again drop my bitmap to 1-bit, that magical, lovely format.

Step 6: Tinting and Finishing

So far, we've done a doodle, then an Illustrator drawing, then a physical tracing, then a cleaned-up scan, then a digital tracing, then some "refurnishing" in Illustrator, then rasterizing and smoothing in Photoshop. So we've gone from vector, to tracing, to raster, to vector, to raster again. Yikes. And now it's time to go back from raster to vector!

Vectors are Cold, Doodles are Warm.
When Combining Them, The Warmth Wins Out, Overall.

Back in Illustrator's cold embrace, I digitally trace this new 1-bit graphic, resulting in a new vector. But this time, the goal isn't to arrange the furniture, just to color it. Toast of the Town has a very specific "pale chocolate mint" color palette, which every stick-figure/doodle graphic conforms to, and I begin the finishes by hand-selecting each part of the new trace and applying the relevant color swatches. I finish the finishes by applying the labels, complete with label "halos" to keep the label text from blending too cleanly with the mappity background.

Amusingly (perhaps) the part I'm glossing over is that I create those halos with an entirely separate series of vector-to-raster-to-vector techniques (in photoshop I thicken the label text with a crude application of the Minimize filter, and then smooth it out with that same Gaussian Blur followed by extreme contrast).

Eventually, I end up with a nicely-layered Illustrator document, with map layers underneath label layers, and every visible thing a result of these multiple passes between raster and vector.

This is a Raster of the Final Vectors,
Which Means I Did it AGAIN. I'm Cruel to Doodles.
Click to Embiggen, if You're Into That.

Now, obviously, this is a lot of planning and a lot of steps to end up with a doodle map, and you're probably too cool for doodle maps. I get that. You are super cool; I've always said so. But if your brain is a creative brain, you're already seeing how this technique can apply to many other kinds of carefully-constructed graphics, and you'd be right about that.

If you're an experienced wizard with these tools, you might also be thinking: couldn't this be simplified by smoothing the raster before moving between Steps 2 and 3? It's true that I can, technically, shave a step there, and Risus Game Masters might never notice the difference. The reason I don't is the (beautiful) way the Gaussian technique smooths overlapped lines. Just a moment of reflection should reveal what I mean, but if you're still doubtful, try it yourself, and compare both methods using symbols that you overlap in Step 4. Look carefully at the overlap points in the final image. It's a tiny thing, I know, but this is what I get when I combine my zeal for excellence with my focus on ... badly-drawn stick art. If nothing else, this is how we get our recommended daily allowance of irony. Stay healthy, folks, and remember: my inbox is always open.

Fantasy Cartography: Just Add Something Blotchy

It's been a while since I've done a graphicky post, so here's a new one for the chilly weather. Over on the doomed platform of magnificence known as Google Plus, reader Michael Lee tagged me to ask:

I remember reading about you taking a lot of pictures that you store away to use as textures and reference for the work you do on your art. If you have an article kinda going through your process on using those photos in a piece, I'd love to have a link to it. If not, is it something you wouldn't mind sharing?

I do make extensive use of snapshots in my graphics, and the technique is so simple it's almost embarrassing, but that makes it super-easy to share, and something even a Photoshop novice can fiddle with as long as they're comfortable with the basic Layers palette.

To demonstrate the effect from the ground up, we'll need some ground. We'll take a chunk from one of my finished maps.

From the Scott's Landing Article
(Uresia: Lore and Curiosities)

I've left the Layers palette visible to show the dance-steps, and in particular I've highlighted the Layer Group called "Texture Bundles," seven grouped layers of varying transparency and blending modes. To see what those layers are actually doing, we'll now turn them off.

All The Graphics in This Post Are Embiggen-Able, But Do So Somewhere With Unmetered Bandwidth; They're Big Images

It's still the same map, but ... smoothier. Soapier. A bit more plainly digital, with those nice-even gradients and Cloud filters and so on.

Having stripped the image of its textures, I'll need a new one. Flipping through the snaps on my phone, my eyes are drawn to this delicious cheat-day indulgence from several weeks ago, so I send it to my laptop and whip it into a tile by copy-pasting the good bits over and over on itself (use the Offset filter and avoid the edges):

Seriously look at how thin that crust is.
It's draping over the lip of a PAPER plate.

Why the pizza snap? It's blotchy, without too many large zones of overtly-different contrast (there are no pepperoni slices, for example). I don't always use food ... I use snapshots of rocks, leaves, vegetable skins, supermarket bins of almonds, dirty painters' drop-cloths, broken concrete ... pretty much anything blotchy or grainy or streaky (remember that Oscar the Grouch song about trash? Like that).

I did some great textures once from a frying pan I'd ruined with a grease fire. Sad day for the skillet, but that was a fine mapping texture. Anyway we just flood that pizza-tile into a new layer:

And that's not helpful, but it's amusing. It becomes helpful when we choose a blending mode for the pizza layer. Three of my favorite blending modes for map-textures are Soft Light, Screen, and Overlay. Here are all three, each at 100% opacity.

Soft Light Mode

Screen Mode

Overlay Mode

Compare. Contrast. Consider. The overly-digital gradients of the base are now crudely and productively interrupted by the contrasts of cheese, sauce, and dried herbal flakes. This one layer, made from a phone snapshot, adds some legitimate character to the map.

It also changes the colors quite a bit, giving it an autumnal vibe we may or may not want. But if we want it to look different, we can just de-saturate or hue-shift the pizza layer. Or we can invert it to a negative-image of itself. Or we can reduce its transparency, or cross-cut two different versions of the same texture (one rotated 90 degrees, for example) or (as I did in the original map) include it as just one transparent texture among many. Or any of a million permutations or combinations of these or other effects.

Some Quick Variations. There's So Much More You Can Do.

This is why Photoshop is one of my favorite videogames. Just one simple "trick" becomes the basis for a thousand looks, and the best way to get there is just play with it. Play and learn.

Hope that gets your juices flowing and/or gets you supporting a local pizzeria. Thanks to Michael Lee for the prompt, and remember: my inbox is always open.

Shave and a Haircut: Half Price

This is a post about wise practices in RPG PDF production. If you produce gaming material in PDF, you might find it useful. If you don't do production work (in particular, if you don't work regularly in Illustrator, Photoshop, InDesign or equivalent programs like InkScape, Gimp and Scribus), posts like this will be nonsense moon-language. See the left-hand sidebar to escape.

I love graphics production. I love vectors and rasters and vectorized rasters and rasterized vectors. I love fonts. I love photographs. I love pencil and charcoal and watercolor and oil. I love RGB and CMYK and HSB and the feel of Pantone swatches in my hand. I love lossy and non-lossy compression. I love all those things and more, but most of all I love using the right tool for the job, because this stuff matters to print quality, screen clarity, file size, methods of layering, palette consistency and more.

I read a lot of gaming PDFs, and my head dents a lot of desks. Many producers of gaming PDFs make an easy-to-fix mistake: they use grayscale space for purely black-and-white artwork. Alas. We are, every one of us, learning our craft. Let me help you learn one small thing that might make a huge difference in the quality of your work: the power of 1-bit rasters.

Some people call them "bitmap" images. I do, too (so does Photoshop), but that can also mean a raster image in any colorspace, so we'll be careful with that. Some people call them "pure bitmaps" or just "black-and-white" bitmaps. For clarity, I'll try to stick with "1-bit" in this article.

A 1-bit raster has no dimension of hue or saturation, and only the simplest concept of luminance. Like every raster, it's made of pixels, and every pixel is either black or white: yes or no, yin or yang, Siskel or Ebert, Kei or Yuri. No tones, no shades, no mulligans. Black, or white.

This distinguishes it from the grayscale space, which lacks color (hue and saturation) but has gradations of luminance. A layman would call either kind of image a "black and white picture," but one of them has grays.

Grayscale is generally ideal for representing soft colorless media like charcoal, ink-wash and graphite (and digital art created specifically for that space). 1-bit is generally ideal for representing hard colorless media like black ink. Basically, it's right in the name: grayscale has gray. 1-bit doesn't. If your image has meaningful grays, stick with grayscale. Grayscale is fantastic, for gray. Here are two bits of quickie digital art to demonstrate. The first one contains meaningful (or at least pretty) greys. The second contains no greys at all: every pixel is either black, or white.

Click to Embiggen, If Your Viewing Method Permits

Since these are purely digital creations, I could decide, and plan for, their destination colorspaces. When you're dealing with scans of hand-drawn illustrations, it's sometimes less about planning and more about just asking yourself: does this image have meaningful (or at least pretty) grays?

In real terms, every real-world piece of art has greys if you peer closely: even a "clean" ink-drawing will have subtle variations in the black, leftover ghosts of graphite or blue pencil used in the sketch stages, and so on. And, if you're dealing with a freelance artist over the Net, the scan they send may well contain some of these, lingering as schmutz in whatever colorspace they scanned in.

If you're actually doing an RPG book about the beauty of schmutz, then by all means, leave it grayscale, or heck, insist on full-color for the complete in-your face schmutz experience. But if an image is clearly meant to be a clean, black and white image, it belongs in clean, black-and-white raster (or vectorized raster, but that's another article for another day). If the thousands of RPG PDFs available across the Web are any indication, there are a lot of folks unaware of this distinction.

Let's consider an extreme illustrative example. Point your peepers into this folder I've prepared over on GDrive. There are two PDFs (ignore the subfolder for now). They're the same file  size (as close as I could get 'em). They're the same image size (U.S. Letter). They're both distilled from the same source image, a black-and-white fragment of a city map in progress, except one is distilled from the 1-bit version, the other from the grayscale. See the differences?

Guh.

Because grayscale is designed to handle many shades, it has a higher overhead in terms of file size, and responds well to lossy compression methods, while 1-bit has a lower overhead and is perfectly amenable to lossless compression. To get the grayscale version the same approximate size as the 1-bit version, I had to drop it from a buttery 600dpi to a foggy 83, a total pixel loss of 98%, and then subject it to super-lossy JPEG compression (excellent for grays and colors, dead-stupid for black-and-white).

"But S. John!" some may cry. "I don't care about file size! I have a fast internet connection and a stack of external hard drives! I could give two crunchy poops if an RPG book is 20 megabytes or 20 terabytes! File size is meaningless here in the shiny Buck Rogers world we live in! I'll just keep the image gray, refuse to downsample it, and apply only non-lossy ZIP compression!"

And if you're crying all of that, it sounds like you know what you're talking about with the Distiller options, so yes, you can do that. The resulting files will be huge, and it's your prerogative not to care. But, your customers might, and the differences are multiplied by the number of rasters in your book. Quite a lot of gamers are still stuck with DSL or satellite or less. And yeah, affordable storage is great, too, for those who do find it affordable.

But even if you bloat your file to the max, 1-bit images frequently print cleaner on most home or office printers, because of the way most PDF software interprets them. They also render more quickly on slow machines, especially tablets and smartphones. And judging by the many gaming PDFs I've spent time with, a lot of people care about some version of these things, because what I often see is a less-extreme echo of my example PDFs: compromised images downsampled and JPEGged to achieve some kind of more-or-less legible size, when that kind of compromise is unnecessary.

Bottom line on the basics: if a drawing is actually a for-real black-and-white drawing, producing it in 1-bit results in improved quality across the board, without compromise. You can simultaneously achieve higher resolutions, cleaner print, faster renders, clearer on-screen legibility, and smaller file sizes. There's no bad side, no gotcha, no hidden cost.

Then, there's more, as you gain some expertise. Peek at the PDF in that subfolder now, or click here directly, if you like. That's the "Grandma August" map from Uresia: Grave of Heaven. All the meaningful details in Uresia rasters, including this one, are that full buttery 600dpi. The colors aren't fancy, but they're nice enough. It prints clear and it's clear on-screen, even tolerating some zoom. It's nice. I think it's nice, anyway.

File size? One third of a meg. 335 kilobytes. Total. Boom.

Feel free to rummage your hard drive for 600dpi color images of comparable dimensions, weighing in at one third of a meg. While you're rummaging, compare the JPEG version of the Grandma August map, in that same subfolder. Nearly 8 megabytes to maintain the full quality of the image. 24 times the size of the PDF.

What does a full-color image have to do with pure black and white, anyway? And either way, how is this miracle achieved?

There's not a speck of color in the rasters used to create the PDF version. Not a bit. It's made of multiple 1-bit layers sandwiched over a single grayscale layer, and each layer has an appropriate swatch applied as a tone in InDesign ... leveraging two hidden powers of the 1-bit format. First, InDesign (and Acrobat) sees the white pixels as transparent by default, allowing for clever multi-layer bitmap effects (the home-digital equivalent of spot design) without resorting to blending modes. Second, InDesign is happy to tell Acrobat to treat the black pixels as tinted ones, making every "full color" Uresia map possible.

"It's not an illusion, your majesty. It only looks like one."

There's one more trick: I said the meaningful details are 600dpi, and they are: the text, the borders, the town symbols, the oceans: all of that is in a single 1-bit layer of pure black, and things like forest edges and dotted-line borders are in another 1-bit layer, tinted brownish-sepia on its way toward Distiller.

But the parchment background? And the darker forest-fills? I made this PDF using the same settings I used for the earlier example files, so while the 1-bit elements are 600dpi lossless, the parchment (which contains no meaningful details because it's just nonsense parchment backgroundy stuff) is 83dpi and lossy as can be: a grayscale layer tinted the same brownish-sepia (though, in fact, it could just as easily be a full-color layer like the one in the main Uresia world map; there's no significant savings for such a blobby background). In other words, I used the right tool for each job, within the same job.

If that's confusing, well, like I said: that's a sort of expanded 1-bit power awaiting your future expertise, and it's got friends. For now, please consider getting in the habit of using 1-bit files for black and white images (in Photoshop, the colorspaces are under IMAGE > MODE in most versions of the menu; Google around if you need more help). Your PDFs will be smaller, print clearer, and can have much higher resolutions. And I'll suffer a lot fewer head-desks.

I'll post more about RPG production and Best PDF Practices now and then. Drop me a line if there's something you'd like to read about.

Warm & Crinkly

“In this replacement Earth we’re building they’ve given me Africa to do and of course I’m doing it with all fjords again because I happen to like them, and I’m old fashioned enough to think that they give a lovely baroque feel to a continent. And they tell me it’s not equatorial enough. Equatorial!” He gave a hollow laugh. “What does it matter? Science has achieved some wonderful things of course, but I’d far rather be happy than right any day.”     “And are you?”     “No. That’s where it all falls down of course.” – The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Douglas Adams

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I picked up my first copy of Hitchhiker's at the "Seven-Day Store" on Quantico, a convenience shop where Marines would go for Doritos and beer. They had a wall-rack of paperbacks with distinct leanings for the target audience: science fiction, spy novels, self-help books. They stocked the whole trilogy (this was in the last few months of it being a trilogy in the mundane sense), and after reading the back covers, I knew I wanted them. After begging a couple extra quarters from my father, I had just enough for the first one; I'd get the others as soon as I could.

I met Slartibartfast that night as I raced through the book, addicted from page one. Like that X-Men Annual that would show me a magic item before I needed magic items, Slartibartfast taught me fjords and "lovely crinkly edges" before I needed fjords and lovely crinkly edges. Later on, when I'd sit down to draw my first coastline for an RPG fantasy world, I'd settle for nothing less than a lovely baroque feel, and I knew I wouldn't care how equatorial it was.

Slartibartfast is the source of my obsession with crinkly coastlines, but that's just one facet of warmth, a quality I treasure at every level of RPG creation.

When I wrote about the basic qualities of good RPG writing, pre-blog readers may have noticed the abridged version of my usual laundry list, with "warmth" conspicuously absent. There are three reasons for that. First, that article was focused on RPG writing, while my love of warmth extends also into design and production. Second, warmth thus rated a place in the RPG Lexicon series, and here we are. Finally, and importantly: some genuinely good RPG writing is ice cold, and while my love of warm design is absolute and eternal, it would be unfair to include it on list of fundamental RPG writing ingredients.

Warmth in RPG design is something I love, design toward, seek out, and talk about. What's more, I'm often stopped mid-rant and asked to explain it, because I seem to be simultaneously describing a game's systems, worlds, adventures, cartography, typography, illustrations, page design, themes, philosophies, morals, politics, history and resources. But that's only because I am.

The version most people understand immediately is warmth as it applies to color: the red/orange/yellow side of the color wheel is traditionally the "warm" side, with the green/blue/violet side traditionally "cool." I'd love to tell you this stems from some deep spiritual properties inherent in the magic of color (because that would be romantic, and romance is warm) but the ice-cold truth is that of simple association: yellow with sunlight, red with blood and red-hot iron, flames with all three, and so on, while blue and it's neighbors evoke cool water, cool evenings, cool forest glades and death by frostbite. It's not magical or mysterious, but the emotional and thematic impact of color choice is difficult to overstate. It's more than just hue, too. Saturation connotes more warmth than de-saturation: the greyer a color is, the cooler it is, even if it's orange fire greying to cooler ash. Brightness, too, tends to connote more warmth than cold darkness, so this hits every part of the HSB graph (translate to RGB or CMYK at need).

In other graphic terms, straight lines and sharp corners are frosty; wavy and curvy are warm. The same associative logic applies to arrangements and spatial relationships: a perfect line is cold, but perfect parallel lines are even colder (distance is cold, too, so if they're parallel but far apart, that's even colder). A row of perfectly spaced, perfectly-aligned boxes may as well be ice cubes, especially if there's lots of cold air between them. Warm elements relate imperfectly and hug closer; they're too alive for symmetry (life is warm and death is cold). A hand-drawn line is the warmest line, because it feels more human, more organic, more personal, more likely to collide with something or even trip over itself. A perfect vector line is cold because it's mechanical, devoid of individuality, devoid of texture or deviation. Idiosyncrasy is warm.

Warmth is casual and playful; formality and conformity are cold. Warmth relaxes, kicks off its shoes, but it loves socks, because softness is warm. Fluffy is warm. Warm reclines by the fireplace, because actual warmth is warm. Sensuality is warm. Blankets and rugs, slippers and towels, warm from the hot dryer on a cold day. That's one of my favorite little ironies: if your RPG setting is wintry, it's more likely to have warmth, because if it's ice-cold (hard, sparse, dark) outside, a lot of the imagery will be about cozy coats and bulky sweaters, Viking halls with firepits, welcoming inns with hearthside ale, yellow light in frosted windowpanes, the life-saving guts of a light-sabered Tauntaun. Norway is cold but it isn't cold, because Slartibartfast gave it crinkles and Norwegians keep it cozy.

All these things bridge toward emotional and conceptual warmth, because home is warm. Home is lived-in, used, rumpled, messy. Home smells like cooking and pets and grandma's farts, and all those are warm. Brewing coffee is warm, baking bread is warm. The word WELCOME on a mat is warm, and the sentiment "welcome" even moreso, because sentiment is warm. Hugs are warm and love is warm and comforts are warm. The past can seem warmer than the future, partly because familiarity is warm, but the quality isn't limited to the past. Serenity is a warmer starship than Enterprise precisely because it feels so lived-in, homey, messy, imperfect, dirty. It wears its past on its sleeve so the heart rides with it. Fortunately, Leonard McCoy brings the warmth of a thousand suns, so Enterprise is fine.

Fallibility is warm; awkwardness is warm. Cold speaks to the intellect but warmth to the heart, so failure is warm, yearning is warm, well-meaning mistakes and embarrassment are warm. Sincerity and hope: warm. Sympathy is warm. Friendship is warm. Variety is warm. Humanity is warm. Fear is cold but every cure for it is warm. Courage is warm. Passion is warm. Contradiction is warm, and that's a good thing, because if you're designing for warmth, you'll meet more than a few contradictions, because this stuff isn't algebra (math is cold!) There are times when, according to context and connotation, any of these observations gets flipped on its ear. That makes it unpredictable but, that's okay. Unpredictability is warm! Just, not consistently.

This term is crucial to the lexicon because warmth is one of the stars I steer my work by: a core design ideal. That's not to say I don't also work with ice. Like with Norway, ice provides the contrast that makes the warmth brighter. Plus, sticking purely with warmth would be homogeneous, and that's cold. See? It's an excellent source of your daily irony.

It's also, as a gamer, a quality I crave, and I frequently go hungry. For a variety of cultural reasons, cold is the predominant temperature in RPG design, writing, and production, and has been across the hobby's history. There are, of course, many delightful exceptions, and I search them out, scoop them up, hug them, and game with them.

If you've been following this series, I'm sure you can't help but notice that the Invisible Rulebooks have a hold on me, in part, because they're rich in warmth and warmth-potential. The gaming territory they represent is the messy place outside the vehicle, as it were. It's about putting your feet on uneven ground, where the rules aren't just unseen, they're soft, malleable, irregular, contradictory, and ultimately down to the natures of fictional characters and the idiosyncrasies of a human GM. The resulting form of play is so frequently marvelous it kind of spoils me, on both sides of the screen, because that arrangement only works when there's a powerful mutual confidence in everyone's intentions and abilities. A confidence that, when it's present, warms the bones of every piece of related game design.

I'm sure there's a word for that, somewhere down the winding back-country road of the lexicon.

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Computer Games

Sandra and I are back in Denver for a couple of days for work purposes, which means I've been here in the hotel room, wide awake on my usual nutso night-person schedule.

I was feeling make-something-ish, and I've had this pencil-puzzle bug anyway, so I thought "Hey me, let's do a word-fill puzzle, those are easy to make; you just need to type up a good word-list and let the software jam 'em into a grid. Easy, quick, fun and satisfying."

"Good thinking, me."

"S'aright."

So then I decide Paranoia is a good source of words, because I'm a certified junkie fanboy of Paranoia, most especially the sublime 2nd Edition.

So I do the thing, and it's as easy as advertised.

But there's this thing about my brain. It hates easy. So, it sort of sidles up and offhandedly remarks "Hey, it sure would be cool if you dolled it up to look like Paranoia paperwork! I mean, you don't have to, though. That'd pack a few hours on to a quick project. In fact, forget I said anything. It's fine. I'm sure it's fine."

Paranoia has this tradition when it comes to in-game paperwork. It takes place in a lethally bureaucratic society trapped/cared-for by a paranoid AI in a far-future arcology and I'm sure my brain didn't really mean anything by it, it's just being helpful, but then I can't look at the puzzle anymore because it's not this cool thing it could be.

It's a one-night hotel project, you understand. And yet, my brain only seems to have the one gear.

So ... it's around 6AM as I write this. So that's still technically one night.

You can click here to grab it via Google Drive. If you've never done wordfills before, they could be described as "inside-out crosswords," because you get all the answers instead of all the clues, or "What if Sudoku wasn't quite so dry?" because the thinking is similar, but with fitting words instead of fitting math.

I don't recommend actually using this form in a Paranoia session. Not unless it's one-on-one and you need the player occupied while you take a long restroom break. But it does, I daresay, evoke the right general feel. Appreciate, if you will, the truly unnecessary craftsmanship.

I should also point out that while it did take forever to build my custom clean-vector eyeball-monitor and Great Seal graphics, those forevers were other, prior forevers, not tonight's additional forever. The rest was the rest, or pointedly, the opposite of rest.

Enjoy three forevers in a single page. Enjoy them a lot, because Happiness is Mandatory.

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Note: this isn't a contest like a full-bore crossword. Just a lil' print-and-play. But if you enjoy it, drop me a line anyway! I love to hear from readers. Version 2.0 of the puzzle corrects a typo in the original, which took another hour and change. I'm totally sincerely going to sleep now.