CC3Writer-DesignerFriend

7/28/2019 CC3Writer-DesignerFriend

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Campaign Cartographer, the Writer / Designers Friend (Robin D. Laws)

Part 1 Better than the hideous scanned-in scrawl

Heres a paradox for you. I consider Campaign Cartographer an indispensable tool of my work as a gamedesigner and writer and use it on a regular basis. I am at the same time a lousy mapper. When I see thegorgeous maps produced by Profantasys cadre of dedicated mapmakers and by its fan community, I amreduced to fits of envy.

After all these years of using the program, I lack mapping chops because I only infrequently use it for itsintended purpose. Instead, Ive press-ganged it into service as an outlining tool. I use it to create productmock-ups, build diagrams for game books, and, most of all, visually organize my thoughts when plottingfiction projects.

Sure, as a designer of tabletop gaming products, I am occasionally called on to submit rough maps to myclients and do call on CC3 to save me time and effort on that front. Although I havent put in the time to tomake the resulting roughs reliably attractive, the result is better than the hideous scanned-in scrawl Idotherwise be foisting on my saintly developers.

The ability to create background fills from photographs offers a quick and dirty way to make a submitted maplook suitably spiffyat least for submission as a rough. Although I wouldnt want to see something like theexample below published in a book, it at least gives the illustrator more to go on than the crude hand-sketchId otherwise be handing him.

When walking around with my digital camera, I keep an eye out for interesting textures. Sometimes myinspiration for an encounter will come from the texture. Ill build the map around the texture, then theencounter around the map. For example, shots of mossy ground got me started creating the encounter mapyou see above.


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Part 2 Moving s tuff around

CC3 offers the primary benefit of a CAD-based illustration tool in a gamer-friendly form. Whether creating amap or using it for any of the purposes Ill discuss below, that benefit is ease of editing. It lets you thinkvisually, by allowing you to easily and continually manipulate its various elements. Changing either anelement or its position relative to others proves blissfully easy.

When sketching out anencounter map for publication, youre alwaysgoing to realize midwaythrough that you need tomake an adjustmentyouveleft a tactical bottleneck atthe entrance, placed a trapwhere it wont get tripped, or given a confusing positionmarker to a creature. Youcan move stuff around inPhotoshop or one of itsequivalents, but its a pain.On paper, forget about it.Moving stuff around is whatCC is all aboutfor me atleast.

Without that function, thealready time-consuming jobof designing Mutant CityBlues Quade Diagram wouldhave been well, somethings are too awful tocontemplate. For those whodont know it, Mutant CityBlues is a super-poweredpolice procedural for the

GUMSHOE line of investigative roleplaying games. A mystery game set in a world of super-powered heroesdoesnt work unless all the extraordinary abilities have been documented and work predictably. In the MCBsetting, all of the available super powers have been charted, cataloged, and placed on a relational diagramnamed after its primary discoverer, Dr. Lucius Quade. The diagram shows where powers cluster together onthe genome. Youre highly likely to possess powers that cluster together on the chart and unlikely to manifestones that are widely separated.

The Quade Diagram is both a rules and a world artifact. In the world, the characters employ it as a tool whilesolving their cases. In the game, players use it to choose and cost out their mutant powers. Because similar powers cluster together, I was forced to rearrange the chart whenever I realized that Id missed including anobvious comic book power and had needed to add it to the master list. The thought of completing each of these ongoing changes in a drawing-style illustration program fills me with existential dread.

The chart appears in gussied-up form in the published rule book. Below youll see what the work versionlooked like in Campaign Cartographer


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Part 3 Developing fiction

Outlining a work of fiction is also about moving stuff around. Some writers prefer to hit the page and startwriting, and then sort out the structure during subsequent revision rounds. Personally, I need to have thenarrative line worked out in some detail before the first draft starts. Minor transitions and obstacles are oftenstronger if you think them through on the day, but the broad sweep has to be in place. (Outlines are alsoessential when youre working with an editor who has to sign off on your story before you start writing inearnest.)

Plotting never gets easy. For me, it typically starts with a few key situations or images. Then I bash aroundon a scratch document in which I trawl for some kind of unifying spine. During this phase I ask myself thedefining questions shaping the story Im about to assemble. What is this story about, in a single sentence?Who are my characters? What drives them, and to what actions?

Once the answers to those questions have been nailed down, I fire up CC to move from a verbal conceptionof the narrative to a visual one. Basically Im taking the known elements of the story and treating them asdots Ill have to connect. Usually at this point Ill already have an opening sequence that poses the abovequestions and impels the protagonist into action. Chances are Ill also know the twist that changes his or her quest, and also a climax and conclusion. At this stage I now have to conceive the connective scenes thatbuild engagingly toward those moments.

Screenwriters often place their plot points on index cards and move them around on a cork board. CC allowsme to move them around on a virtual corkboard thats as big or small as I want it to be at any time. I canzoom in and zoom out as needed. And I transform the index cards into any kind of graphic element I want

Typically I use blocks of text, coded in some way to tell me which characters are involved in any given scene.This allows me to make sure that all of the characters develop as needed throughout the narrative. If I seethat I havent got enough action for a major character, I might either create new prospective scenes for him,or realize that hes not really as important to the story as I thought. I might see that an apparently minor character is cropping up in many of the scenes, warning me to make him interesting enough to hold thereaders attention for all of that time. I may need to introduce him earlier to suit his new weight in thenarrative, leading to an insertion of one or more additional text blocks.

To visually represent characters, I doodle quick cartoony images, scan them in, and convert the resultingPNG file into a CC symbol. This allows me to easily drop the symbol representing each character over eachplot point. If your doodling skills are even more primitive than mine, you could cast your characters fromimages found on the internet, converting them to PNGs if necessary and then to CC symbols.


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A look at the diagram so far shows me the gaps I need to fill, if any, in my search for a narrative that iscoherent on both the logical and the emotional levels.

To search for logic problems is to test the believability of the story (within whatever genre conventions itestablishes.) What practical considerations within the world of the story am I glossing over? I might wantJosie to be at the bridge with the bomb, but see that logically Jimbo would have stopped her back at the

ranch. Having seen the problem, I have to either find a credible reason for Jimbo to cooperate with myplotting needsor concede that my story is contrived, and start over with a series of plot points that properlyarise from the collisions of the characters competing intentions.

Above theres a detail from a CC fiction outline composed in index card fashion. Each box represents amajor story beat. Character symbols identify the driving character in the scene; Ive also color coded theboxes to the driving characters:

I also want to be able to plot the emotional line of the story. So rather than simply connecting the plot pointsin a series of boxes, I use up and down arrows to see the shifts in fortune as the hero cycles betweenadversity and triumph. This approach wouldnt be needed for certain stories, in which its completely

appropriate to stick with the same mood for long periods of time. Most narratives, though, genre or otherwise, keep us engaged by varying our hope and fear responses. Here I can see if I need to insert somerelief into an otherwise down section, or find additional ways to challenge a protagonist who is having tooeasy a time of it.

The result can be a very long diagram. Its unwieldy on the page, but easy to scroll through on the screen.CC allows me to zoom out to see the storys entire narrative line, beat by beat, or zoom in to fix a problemarea in need of revision.

Whenever I spot a scene that needs minor clarification, I can change the text element. If the whole thingneeds changing, I can cut it and move the elements around it to fill its spot. Or add a new plot point as logic,

inspiration or emotional rhythm require, creating a space for it by moving the adjoining plot points.

Heres an example. This is a work in progress for a client, so Ive disguised it by changing the beat labels tononsense phrases.


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Notice that the character symbols are sometimes scaled differently within a scene. Sometimes Ill want toindicate which characters are dominant in a scene, and which ones are hanging around on its periphery. Theeasy resizing of symbols allows me to scale the size of my character images with a few key strokes.

Ive also used layers to create alternate versions of a narrative map, each conveying different information.For a story featuring an ensemble cast, I created a column to the side noting which characters achieved

defining victories in each installment of a serial narrative. At a glance I could see which characters werentregistering strongly enough. I then added or replaced scenes in my outline to balance the contributions of each character to the story.

It may well be that no other author would map their narratives in exactly the same way. The up arrows andcharacter icons might be more help than hindrance to someone else. Other writers might, for example, wantto start by importing images of locations, organizing their plotting process geographically. They might want alayer of images keeping track of clues in a mystery story, or marking various ways in which the theme of thestory is reinforced throughout.

However, the core ideaof using CC as an infinitely fungible and customizable virtual corkboardis one

that any writer whos every juggled story elements or drawn a diagram might find useful, if not come toinescapably depend upon.

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