So I hi tmy irst major snag, and it is a doozy, but not entirely unexpected.

I narrowed down the major puprose of The Wyrlde Book to dea in the setting — so that it is of value to both players and GMs who might not want to run my carefully crafted campaign, but would love the equally cared for setting.

Not that I expect it to happen, mind you, but…

I have to redo the world map, and add a few cities. I paid a bit more attention to stuff, loo, and the DMG notes that a city size is around 25k max. a fifth of that is 5k, which is good for a Town, and a fifth of that is 1000 which is great for a Village, and a fifth of that is 200 which is perfect for a sleepy little Hamlet.

I like 5. sue me.

But this means that all the information about populations and such that I have in the back of my head are blow out of the water, because, well, yeah, in a recovering system that is trying hard to expand, 25k is a lot better and more readily managed a number than some megalopolis.

So massive rescaling, and since I need to redo the world, I can look into the particular climatology of the place and all that. Not that such would hit the players much, but right now I have a tropical paradise across a sea and slightly south of a temperate wonderland. In truth, it is jarring.

But, this gives me the ability (the need, lol) to flesh out the cities a bit more and introduce competing forces. Plus I can smooth out the rough edges around the Guilds, Clans, Syndicates, Posses, Cartels and so forth. As well as introduce the orders of the Paladins and the like by city.

Richer experience, blah blah blah.

But a lot of what triggered this isn’t just the minor details I could readily discard (they are a guideline, and I will use them as such). It is that I moved and set up my new in home office space. IT is a creative specific space — I am separating the work stuff and the play stuff, and the play stuff gets my laser printer.

I also have a situations where I don’t like the size of the book itself. My goal is a 1.5 inch binder, three hole punch. with space left over for a character sheet, adventure journal, and handouts. I will include some sheet protectors as well. But that means the physical number of sheets needs to stay down around 200, and that means a total number of pages of 400. I am dancing around 325 to 350 right now depending on formatting, so whatever I add needs to be done right.

And then I am struggling to do the ethnicity I want them each to be different, but I went a littt–no I went way too dark for a few cities that are supposed to be good places, and I shouldn’t have done that. Plus the format for each of them is not the same — I have broken a rule I used to have which was to do a list of all the places first, so that when I wrote them, they at least read the same.

The benefit to doing it the way I did it was that I come up with little in jokes and am able to put in plot hooks and so forth. The downside is that it lacks cohesion and gets confusing.

IN setting up the Creative Office (work office is separate, remember) I opened a few boxes that were still not really touched and found several old modules, some Harn stuff, and a lot of my old maps and Dungeons. This works out well because I have the pieces I need for some of the adventure outlines now, and that means I can hook them into the map more effectively.

The new map will take a while — I tried the online tool which is awesome and all, and I will likely go back to it, and I do have the program for such, though it needs more buildings if I am ever going to use it for hamlet’s, villages, towns, and cities. The big trick to the new map is that it has to match the needs of the region, which I am going to do in more depth and detail than I have, while also making it look like I didn’t do it in more depth and detail, lol.

I am going to use a table layout in the book. Not sure how I will do it here, yet, since it relies on essentially making a two column layout in a given post. The table will contain all the tables that are currently in the book (though I suspect my effort at familial terms will go away), introduce a regional map that shows the actual region of the ethnicity (1000 square miles), and provide the text in blocks (see, wordpress did give me an idea or two).

Adding in Quivira, Cahokia, Agartha, some other. I am going to shift to a less creative pattern for cultures, though, and allow for some of them to really ramp up their regional representations — Asian, Caribbean, Mediterranean Western, Roman, Gangster, etc. I will still twist all of them, but I also do have some resources now that I didn’t have previously.

I am still missing the essential reference books, though. Which annoys me. A lot.

Among the old modules I found was U1 — which was just recently re-released for 5e as part of the full set. I also learned that the Slavers series was done with rough conversions for the new rules when they were being developed. I hope my take on blending them and a few others will be welcomed.

The 3D printer is still boxed — had to order tables to support it and some other stuff — but I expect it will get at least some use.

All of which points to a rather startling realization — I am ready to start creating the dungeons. Well, adventures, but you know what I mean. I won’t be using my old stuff to do this — everything has to be new and from scratch, so even the world map will be new despite having several old ones to choose from.

But at least now I can also see about rearranging the cities into areas and with stuff that makes the sequence of the adventures work out better, and will still enable the PCs to travel the world and see everything.

Plus, I may end up with more than just nine side quests. And hooks for some I never even bother to create…