Winged Hairies and Inspiration

So, I firmly believe that inspiration can come from anywhere and the more open we are to novelty and allowing inspiration to come to us, the more we will be inspired. This being said, years ago, when I was in the very early stages of FAL and coming up with the creatures who would eventually find their way into the Tome of Awesome, my wife sat down and had a brief drawing session alongside me. In the span of that session, she drew the very first iteration of the winged hairies which eventually made it into the books and lore of FAL. I loved the name she gave them and it felt like those creatures were so meant to be part of the weirdness of FAL. So they went into the book and we devised the lore around the image. She is also responsible for the nubyeb, ootoom, and cat tenderers.

Guts and Iron and Ideas That Don't Work Out

Back in October, I shared an image from one of my first attempts at a game called “Guts and Iron.” This (admittedly very faint) image is an early pencil sketch from that game. The art ultimately didn’t work (neither did the game) for some pretty straightforward reasons, but there are also the embers of something here. Keeping those embers burning until the idea for Far Away Land caught fire in my imagination took time and effort. And that’s really all this post is about: “Guts and Iron” didn’t work, but that is totally okay because very few ideas worth anything are easily made into reality. In some ways, I think that’s true when you play an RPG, too. The effort to shed the world around you for something new, to leave everything else behind and escape to somewhere far away, doesn’t come naturally at first. Sometimes it’s because you haven’t built that muscle yet. Sometimes it's because the world we all live in can be pretty relentless. But as long as the ember burns, your imagination can still catch fire.

Travel and Vehicle Thoughts

Originally the rules for ships and sea combat were part of a separate book for FAL, Seas of Far Away Land. However, along with other travel and vehicle rules, the rules for ship combat and sailing are included in the Enchiridion. It is a fairly simple system that builds on normal combat. Aspects of crews are simplified to make combat between ships quick while offering a narrative element. As so much of Far Away Land is water, it feels like it makes sense that an extensive section on naval combat be included. Also, I have always found adventures on the high seas to really fun. All the mystery of what is to come, what lies below, storms, pirates, etc.

Level 0 PCs

The goal of the Enchiridion’s Level 0 character generator is to enable the quick creation of PCs without defined specialties, advanced skills, or fancy equipment. I’ve said in other FAL books, that every race needs its blacksmiths and farmers, its cooks and carpenters, just like it needs warriors and leaders. A Level 0 character is the quintessential “ordinary person,” a bystander thrown into a dire situation defending their village in battle or caught up in a wizardly plot. That’s just fun to play with.

For the rest of this post, we’re going to look at an example of a Level 0 character generated by a friend for what turned out to be a very bloody combat session. All of the below took less than 10 minutes.

To start, the player rolled two dice and used a table to determine their heritage, which ended up being Croatallian. (For those of you not familiar with them, Croatallians are a reptilian humanoid species of average size.) After the Heritage was set, the player rolled for their single Boon and received Pilot, which gives a maneuver bonus when operating and controlling vehicles. Even though Level 0 characters only get 1 Boon, they still get 2 Flaws. After two more rolls, this player ended up with Impatient and Skeptic.

The next step was to roll for starting equipment. At least one piece of equipment should be linked to the Boon for best effect, and after a few rolls with that goal the PC had a not-so-new but still-useful cart. A few more rolls for other random equipment yielded no additional armor, but did provide the character with a backpack, a belt, and a tarnished hayfork. Hayforks make sense for a cart driver, and it’s tarnished or rusty or otherwise in poor condition because this is a Level 0 character who also starts with no gold. Putting it all together and with their base stats, a picture starts to emerge of our Croatallian. 

BRT: 2, DEX: 2, WIT: 2

HP: 14, AC: 2, ACT: 2

Actions: 2

Luck: 0 (equal to Level)

Boons: Pilot (MAN). (1). Operating and controlling vehicles such as watercraft, aircraft, wagons, etc. MAN indicates the Maneuver score of the vessel being piloted.

Flaws: Impatient, Skeptic

Abilities: Bite: 1d2 damage. Cazzz Blade Proficiency: 1d6+1 damage. (In the hands of a non-crotallian, the cazzz blade does 1d6 damage and has a -1 die penalty when used). Claws: 1d3 damage.

Boon Related Gear: Cart

Additional Starting Gear: Backpack, Tarnished Hayfork, Belt

All that was left was for the player to create a short background for their character. Keeping it short is good practice with a Level 0 character because you don’t know how long they will survive, and also because each adventure survived on the way to Level 1 will add to their story. With a little bit of light-hearted conversation around the results, the Croatallian cart-driver Fezzeekeka (Zeek) was born! 

“Fezzeekeka was born on a Croatallian farm. His mother died of plague when he was young and he was raised by his single father. He is known in his village for winning the cart races at the annual harvest festival for three years running.”

Old School Inspiration

The cover of the AD&D Manual of the Planes was always something terrifying to me. That big cyclopean lobster-handed dude rising up out of some gaseous ether of another realm was so striking the first time I saw it. It begged for adventure and I never forgot the image or the feeling it gave me. I feel like that’s what good art does, it burns an image into our brains so we never forget. The sketch here is from really early days of FAL when I was trying to get a feel for how I wanted the art to look. You might see some vague resemblance between our friend on the cover of the Manual of the Planes and the Mountain Lord featured in the early sketch.

New Logo and Font!

I thought, with a second edition, it would also be a good thing to have a revised logo/font for the game. In all honesty, I was never that keen on the original FAL logo/font. It always felt a bit halfway to me. Sorta flat and boring. Maybe it’s one of those things you spend so much time on and it loses its appeal or you lose focus. Like re-reading a word again and again until it loses meaning. This is called semantic satiation and I wonder if there is a design/visual/art equivalent for that?

The original font is a text I created modified from an existing font (I don’t remember the name of it anymore). So, the original wasn't even a font, just an image that I kept copying and pasting and resizing and… ugh. No more. You might notice on some of the recent branding stuff that the new font looks different. I’ve just been testing here and there to see what works. What you see here is most likely the final design and primary color. I wanted to stick with red and white so it feels familiar but the old font has been replaced. Something a bit more streamlined.

Finding Footing in FAL

In the early days of Far Away Land, around 2012 or so, I had a pretty good idea of what I wanted to do with the world. I had loads of characters and ideas floating around but things were nebulous and I was finishing graduate school and super stressed. FAL was very much my catharsis in those days. It was a place I could go to escape and explore and there was no judgment and I had no expectations of myself. 

This is an image from a sketch for a Poomkin settlement. I think a more refined version of this found its way into the original Tome of Awesome. At this point in the art process I was largely trying to figure out the style for FAL. In the early days I would draw everything in pencil, scan it, redraw it in vector using Inkscape, and then finally drop it into Photoshop for the finished coloring. The results were fine but I always felt limited simply due to time constraints. I didn’t want an outside artist and I didn’t want art that looked like art in other games at the time. I wanted something that stood out, something colorful, something that seemed playful and fun while hiding a world where everything was dangerous. I'm not a fast drawer so this process was incredibly slow. Of course, that all changed once I moved into digital but early on it was a crawl. 

In a future post I’d like to talk about the proto-FAL game I made where I was figuring out the style of the game along with the type of mechanics I thought would fit best. I'm going to be posting some more early sketches as well as I thought it might be fun to see the evolution of the game. 

What draws you into a game concerning art? What is it you gravitate toward?