Tuesday, April 21, 2020

What I've been up to for the last year

Thanks to everyone for the enthusiastic response to the new pdfs coming out, if it continues like this I'll post more...

So this is one of my notebooks, it used to be a copy of The Way of All Flesh by Samuel Butler..
 Inside, pages have been added, removed, primed over.

I made lots of D&Dable pictures, then cut windows into the pages ahead of them....

So you've got a players' map and then each "window page" is a completely different scenario using the same image...
 That's a good, small notebook for if you just want to throw something in a bag and run a one-shot across town, the next one is much heftier...

It used to be a cook book--a compilation of La Cuisine Magazine--the contents page isn't quite finished yet..
 It's been turned into massive area-by-area atlas of the entire Cube World, kind of like all the old TSR Gazetteers mashed together. The original book was color-coded, so it used to be "vegetables green, seafood blue, meat pink" etc now its Gaxen Kane green and the islands are blue and the area around Vornheim is pink...
 I've been altering it page by page...

That's Broceliande, the western-europe mishmash where the jousting takes place. Every area has a big map, its own random encounter table, and features like this set of "staging areas" for random encounters.

The actual entries are in different formats--like, the North of Broceliande on the Goblin Empire border is a bunch of short, illustrated hexcrawl-style entries, (that's the Warbox: Broceliande module)

....and then other individual areas are longer, like this one based on populating a xylene-transfer of the port illustrated at the top of the page with a chaos warband for the players to take out (The Siege of Ortheque).

Anyway, thanks! See you soon.
-
-
-

16 comments:

GCM said...

Your Fantasy geography seems... well... so French. But I like it.

Zak Sabbath said...

Its a little cheesey

Half Dead said...

Man, I really want to try this out.
But how did you actually setup a page for this? Like how did you erase his contents?

Zak Sabbath said...

@half Dead

I used a few methods:

-Some I simply painted over with Gesso (white primer). This was the method of last resort since it takes a day to cure, i have several books going at once on a table that im continuously priming
-Some pages I just used pva glue to glue a piece of paper or finished drawing on top--this works fine but it makes the book thicker so you have to cut out pages to compensate
-Some didn't need to be erased because i cut a "window" in them--i chose a book with wide margins to give lots of room for notes
-Sometimes--as with title pages and diagrams in the cookbook, i just blacked out what was already there. I reused part of many of the tables in the cookbook to write new tables

Babby Booey said...

How difficult would it be to uh, print something like this?

Zak Sabbath said...

@Babby Booey

Child's play. Scan and then ship to the printer.

The problem is the harassment campaign has cowed all the publishers, and the fans (who certainly seem willing to buy this stuff in pdf) don't have the same taste for fighting about it on the forums that the harassers do.

And I'm definitely not going to do all the work to print physical books, take orders and ship them if it's just going to me alone against the entire internet again.

Babby Booey said...

Even with the windows and shit? Seems like it'd be too hard

Zak Sabbath said...

@Babby Booey

Dude, 2 years ago Raggi was ready to do a book with a hole all the way through the cover, all the pages, and out the backside so you could literally fuck the book.

The technology isn't the problem

Babby Booey said...

would it be a5 again?

Zak Sabbath said...

@Babby Booey

The window book would likely be in the original format, which is like A5

The cube world atlas would also have to be original size--more coffee-table--it's a lectern-sized book with small details and writing you couldn't shrink. 8 1/2 x 11

Raggi's fuckable book? (insert bra size joke here)

Hanzo said...

Yeah, it's simple geometry.

Peggy said...

Love it !
And what about a book of Sand, are you up for it or not ? ;)

Le Webmaster said...

Hi Zak,
I am curious, what kind of GM Screen do you use ? Personnal one i presume , if so, what do you choose inside ?
Julien

Zak Sabbath said...

@Le Webmaster

I don't use a screen, i find the best and easiest thing is just to have a clipboard. I try to keep the players' stats, the death and dismemberment table and a few other random tables on it, depending.

Gabe said...

Haven't been around the blogosphere (is it still called that?) for a while so I'm catching up on all the things. Holy shit, Zak. That atlas is fucking brilliant. I wish I had half the ability to think outside the box (cube?) on stuff like this. Nicely done.

Zak Sabbath said...

@Gabe

Thank you!

If you want a piece: http://dndwithpornstars.blogspot.com/2020/04/the-store.html