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 game designer and writer and use it on a regular basis. I am at the same time a lousy mapper. When I see the gorgeous maps produced by Profantasys cadre of dedicated mapmakers and by its fan community, I am reduced to fits of envy.

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

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

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

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

Part 2 Moving stuff around

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

When sketching out an encounter map for publication, youre always going to realize midway through that you need to make an adjustmentyouve left a tactical bottleneck at the entrance, placed a trap where it wont get tripped, or given a confusing position marker to a creature. You can move stuff around in Photoshop or one of its equivalents, but its a pain. On paper, forget about it. Moving stuff around is what CC is all aboutfor me at least.

Without that function, the already time-consuming job of designing Mutant City Blues Quade Diagram would have been well, some things are too awful to contemplate. For those who dont know it, Mutant City Blues is a super-powered police procedural for the GUMSHOE line of investigative roleplaying games. A mystery game set in a world of super-powered heroes doesnt work unless all the extraordinary abilities have been documented and work predictably. In the MCB setting, all of the available super powers have been charted, cataloged, and placed on a relational diagram named after its primary discoverer, Dr. Lucius Quade. The diagram shows where powers cluster together on the genome. Youre highly likely to possess powers that cluster together on the chart and unlikely to manifest ones 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 while solving 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 an obvious 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 version looked like in Campaign Cartographer

Part 3 Developing fiction

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

Plotting never gets easy. For me, it typically starts with a few key situations or images. Then I bash around on a scratch document in which I trawl for some kind of unifying spine. During this phase I ask myself the defining 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 conception of the narrative to a visual one. Basically Im taking the known elements of the story and treating them as dots Ill have to connect. Usually at this point Ill already have an opening sequence that poses the above questions 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 that build engagingly toward those moments.

Screenwriters often place their plot points on index cards and move them around on a cork board. CC allows me to move them around on a virtual corkboard thats as big or small as I want it to be at any time. I can zoom 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 see that 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 the readers attention for all of that time. I may need to introduce him earlier to suit his new weight in the narrative, 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 resulting PNG file into a CC symbol. This allows me to easily drop the symbol representing each character over each plot point. If your doodling skills are even more primitive than mine, you could cast your characters from images found on the internet, converting them to PNGs if necessary and then to CC symbols.

A look at the diagram so far shows me the gaps I need to fill, if any, in my search for a narrative that is coherent 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 it establishes.) What practical considerations within the world of the story am I glossing over? I might want Josie 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 my plotting needsor concede that my story is contrived, and start over with a series of plot points that properly arise 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 a major story beat. Character symbols identify the driving character in the scene; Ive also color coded the boxes 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 points in a series of boxes, I use up and down arrows to see the shifts in fortune as the hero cycles between adversity 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 some relief into an otherwise down section, or find additional ways to challenge a protagonist who is having too easy 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 problem area in need of revision.

Whenever I spot a scene that needs minor clarification, I can change the text element. If the whole thing needs 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 to nonsense phrases.

Notice that the character symbols are sometimes scaled differently within a scene. Sometimes Ill want to indicate which characters are dominant in a scene, and which ones are hanging around on its periphery. The easy 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 werent registering 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 and character icons might be more help than hindrance to someone else. Other writers might, for example, want to start by importing images of locations, organizing their plotting process geographically. They might want a layer of images keeping track of clues in a mystery story, or marking various ways in which the theme of the story 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 to inescapably depend upon.