Artweaver: New Version in Beta-Test.

Artweaver is an amazing program for digital painting and more. You can still get the free version or upgrade to the ArtweaverPlus version really cheaply.  This is a very good digital art software package that just keeps on getting better. If you are on a tight budget, or want an alternative to the Big Name software, take a look at this software, give a try and see for yourself. We still use it a lot, and it plays nicely with Photoshop.

Organic Tags: Sorting Out Nanobits

The Space Elevator -A Nano-Rope Strong Enough to Haul Things into Outer Space

This article from 2008 mentions the use of Organic Compounds to 'tag' desired nanoparticles and molecules produced through the current 'shake-and-bake' approach to assembling such things. By tagging the desired compounds/molecule, the producers of such nanoparticles can get them all sorted out into neat groupings that will allow them to accumulate the ones deemed suitable for specific tasks. It's a lot like all of a sudden inventing the Dewey Decimal System or being able to apply XML tags to the contents of a blog, book or broadsheet.

It's things like this that really bring it home, just how new all this really is--that we're still at the level of inventing the means to use this newfangled 'wheel.' Without roads, axles, brakes or a million other developments to support, augment, enhance and accommodate the initial invention, it doesn't go very far. Not right away.

But once the support system is in-place, watch out. The sky will no longer be the limit.

But what other uses could a system of tags composed of organic compounds be put to, besides sorting-out nanoparticles?

Hmmm...might be something to go and do some more research on, doesn't it?

Geomorphs: A Guide to What's Out There

Being a Hopefully Somewhat-Useful Compendium of Links, Posts, Articles and Resources pertaining to the High and Noble Art of Geomorph Design, Construction and Ultimately their Actual Utilization Within an RPG Environment

  

What are Geomorphs Good For--How Do I Use Them?

• J. D. Jarvis on Using Geomorphs, and More On Using Geomorphs
• Wikipedia gives you the history of Dungeon Geomorphs

Who Actually Makes Geomorphs & Where Can I Find Some Geomorphs?

• Aeons & Auguries features a bunch of Geomorphs which you can sample here, and they offer a collection of J. D. Jarvis' Geomorphs which you can access here
• Dyson Logos' Geomorphs Mapping Project/Challenge
•      (Note: You can also download Dyson's PDF of Geomorphs from the Challenge page.)
• Risus Monkey Click here for all the Risusmonkey Geomorph posts in one place
• Stonewerks Offers a few sets of their excellent Geomorphs as freebie pdf downloads: Stonewerks Geomorph Set1 & PDF for Set 1 , Stonewerks Geomorph Set 2 & PDF for Set 2, Stonewerks Geomorphs Set 3 & PDF for Set 3
• The Nine and Thirty Kingdoms blog also has a very nice selection of Geomorphs that are well worth taking a look at
• The This is Dice Country blog also has a bunch of very good Geomorphs for you to use
• Over at the Quickly, Quietly, Carefully blog you will find a fresh selection of Geomorphs 

What Can I Do With Geomorphs?

• You could try your hand at building a sweet dungeon map like FrDave has done with a few Geomorphs and Illustrator
• You could use Dyson's Geomorphs to make a random map instantly at the 1km1kt site
• Aeons & Auguries has an excellent article on More You Can Do With Geomorphs that demonstrates how you can stitch the tiles together to make impressive maps in minutes
• You could consider doing a set of Hexagonal Geomorphs like J. D. Jarvis did here or here
• Or you could do a set of Triangular Geomorphs
• Look at what Dave Millar did with the Geomorphs produced by Dyson, J.D. Jarvis, Stonewerks, Risus Monkey and others plus some serious Code-Fu: Dave's Mapper
• Dizzy Dragon (dot) net has an online Adventure Generator that uses Dyson's Geomorphs
• Or you can print out a few hundred Geomorphs and tape them all together into a massive megadungeon...like you can see here...not for the faint of heart...

This is by no means complete and will get periodically updated as new Geomorph-makers arise and new developments shake the very foundations of contemporary Geomorph making.

Useful Resources: More Mapping Stuff

Creating maps is a lot of fun, at least I enjoy the process.  It helps to really bring a campaign or a setting to life in a way that a few cryptic passages just don't.  Even Robert E. Howard sketched-out a rough map of Hyboria to go along with his seminal essay on that land and time that never existed but will ever persist in the imaginations of all whom his work has touched or influenced.  Maps are powerful tools and can be inspiring works of art, often both at once.

But not everyone wants to draw fiddly little details for hours on end with colored pencils, smelly markers or borrowed crayons.  Some folks like to go all digital on such projects.  There's freeware/trialware graphics software like Gimp, Inkscape,  Artweaver, Twisted Brush, or even more dedicated mapping software such as Autorealm, Hexographer, Dundjinni, Profantasy's line of RPG Cartography software, and the Greenfish Random Relief Map Generator which I discovered via this article at Welsh Piper's awesome site, the freeware Hexmapper, and of course you can find out about more resources via RPGmapshare or The Cartographer's Guild.

The Random Relief Map Generator from Greenfish just might be a nice complement to the Dizzy Dragon Random Adventure Generator.  Running a completely random campaign might be fun, at least for a while...

You can also find a range of options for simply making your own graph, grid or hex paper for free at incompetech's site, or the Print free graph paper site, though the Incompetech site is much better overall.  We're currently building our own hex-grid from scratch so we can number or letter it as we see fit on a project-by-project basis.

The Roleplay-Geek blog has a post on How to make your own Fantasy Googlemap with MapLib without needing to be a code monkey which walks you through the process of using Google Maps and Maplib to make realistic and versatile maps for your campaign.  It is a different approach, and one that seems rather interesting, personally, as it could very well solve a few of the problems we've been wrestling with for Riskail in particular.

Useful Resources: Some Handy Weirdness

Weird.  I'll not waste time defining the word.  Nor do I intend to waste time further debating or defining Weird Fiction versus the New Weird, (which are really more Market Categories than any sort of distinct genres in and of themselves) since I prefer to simply pursue my own take on the matter and listen to my particular Muse in this regard and leave such fiddly-farting polemics and debates to people too busy to actually write (or draw, or paint, etc.) Weird stuff.  As a genre, it seems to be slippery, ambiguous and quite mercurial, often appearing very differently to each author, editor, fan or connoisseur.  That's just how it ought to be.  Below are a few handy dandy Weird resources.  Make of them what you will...

The Weird Review is a rather nice e-zine/website devoted to Vintage Victorian Weird Fiction , to quote from the Home Page: "The focus is on vintage weird fiction, especially Victorian give or take a couple decades, with a little extra focus toward the Short Story. Reviews of anthologies, single-author collections, & even on individual short stories of merit are just the thing, but also of course old weird novels of ghosts & the supernatural."  If you are at all interested in Weird fiction, then this site is a truly wonderful resource.  There are some nice essays and the like on Lost Race tales and novels, vintage Swashbuckler tales, and H. Rider Haggard is well represented.  The essay on Dennis Wheatley was particularly excellent.  You don't necessarily have to be a vetted and papered scholar to contribute, though it could help, probably, especially if you can babble blasphemously, yet prettily, in print.  The Gallery sections will also prove to be of some interest to the usual suspects engaged in vulgar gaming endeavors.  The Weird Review grew out of the Alt.Fiction.Ghost-Fiction UseNet group, the archives of their postings are available here. Overall this is part of the excellent Aunt Violet's Book Museum site, one of those treasure troves of Weirdness online that can steal hours from your day and leave you wondering just where you ran into a Shambleau...oh and they are open to contributions/submissions pertaining to the Weird, and anything else pertinent to the editor's various special interests, including swashbuckling/pirate romance tales, juvenile series (Tom Swift), and Lost Race novels, etc.  Very Highly Recommended and with a very high Rabbit Hole Index...

Grim Reviews is a blog that provides thought-provoking reviews, essays and articles on various and sundry aspects of Weird fiction, both vintage/classical and modern, with an emphasis on scholarship and definite opinions, which makes it a lot of fun to read--and often inspirational as well.

Weird Fiction is a blog/site that is ... well ... pretty Weird, and it's another online venue that could drain away some precious moments from your schedule if you're not ultra-careful.

Skulls in the Stars is the blog of an Associate Professor of Physics...and he likes Weird Fiction, which he blogs about off-and-on.  Anyone who mentions Henry Kuttner, Manly Wade Wellman and Marie Corelli in the course of their posts is well worth giving a few minutes of your attention to in order to hear what they have to say, or at least write/post.

The obligatory link to H. P. Lovecraft on How To Write Weird Fiction...if only to make sure that it's handy for later.  You can alternate versions of this essay here, here, here, here, here, and here, as well as several other venues.  There's also the Supernatural Horror in Literature essay (Public Domain version), which is also available in a variety of versions/formats here, here, here, here, here, here and here.  Whew.  Yes, there are other locations where you can find this essay, but that ought to be enough to at least get you started...

Clark Ashton Smith weighs-in on Atmosphere in Weird Stories over at The Eldritch Dark site, another high-risk Rabbit Hole Index site that might drain hours from your life before you even realize that you've read half a dozen classic tales...

Arthur Machen gets some respect.  Finally.

A Quick and Painless Introduction to the Lovecraft Circle of correspondents, which had an enormous impact on Weird Fiction.

A decent essay on Horror Fiction that crosses-over into the Weird quite a bit, which is super-easy to have happen as horror is a major component to the weird, be it vintage or modern.

Still Weird After All These Years, a nice short article on how Weird hasn't become passe or stale.

Another blogger examines what Weird Fiction means to them, and still manages to self-promote her new book...which might interest some of you folks, either in terms of the opinions expressed, the overall subject matter, or the mechanics of marketing one's work online.

Creative Fluff has a page where they started to work out just what Weird Fiction is/was, but it hasn't progressed very far as yet, perhaps they just need encouragement, feed-back or a few dozen hits to show that anyone cares?  In the meantime, the main Creative Fluff blog itself hosts a lot of resources worth taking a look at, especially for designers, artists, etc.

Supernatural Fiction Resources courtesy of Alan Gullette (another excellent resource that'll potentially send you off on wild tangents into the dark recesses of the internet...)

China Mieville turns around and thanks that dead old white bourgeois gent Mr.Tolkien, which may be a sign of the impending apocalypse.  Very interesting reading, at least I thought so...

A Few Small Publishers devoted to Weirdness
Hippocampus Press

Tartarus Press

Fedogan & Bremer

Arkham House

Nightshade Books

Necronomicon Press

Useful Resources: More Mapping Links

Holly Lisle offers a ton of workshops, tutorials and tips on all aspects of writing, including her Worldbuilding methods and her method of developing a fictional world via map making.  Her main site is an amazing treasure house of useful resources, good advice and some just plain fun stuff.  Very highly recommended.

Strange Maps is a blog that displays and examines and analyzes ... well ... uh ... strange maps.  Yeah.  Just what the name says.  Some of the maps are really thought provoking.  If you're at all interested in cartography and maps...this is a blog worth checking out.

 The Map Room is a gateway into a lot of very strange and wonderful things, such as maps of Kamandi's world, or subway systems for places that don't exist, and so on.  The main site has links to hundreds of blogs dedicated or devoted to all things map-related.  It was by clicking through this site that I discovered a site that provided a handy guide to a lot of Historical Celestial Atlases available out on the World Wide Web.

The Theban Mapping Project allows you to explore the entire archaeological zone of the ancient Valley of the Kings in Egypt. Zoom in to see individual architectural details of temples and palaces as well as the topography of the area. Mouse over sites to get additional information about them.  This site has a database of over 2,000 images that you can examine, over 250 detailed maps and models, and 65 narrated virtual tours--including a 3D recreation of tomb KV 14.  Plus there's an atlas of the Theban Necropolis.  Very cool stuff.  Looking through this site's maps has forever changed how I approach mapping-out certain styles of tombs...especially amongst the various deliberately-forgotten cryptoria and unregistered necropoli to be found along the banks of certain of the River Gate Networks...

The Cartographer's Guild is an online community created by (and for) map makers and map aficionados. It's a place where every aspect of cartography can be exhibited, examined, and discussed in the forums by practicing professional designers, artists, and enthusiasts alike. It's a wonderful place to discover tutorials on various aspects of map-making, to see what other map-makers are doing, and to show off your own work when you're ready.  The Guild is a great resource for anyone interested in designing or finding someone to possibly design a map for them or their game.  Highly recommended.

Actual Lost Cities are very interesting places to examine and explore, even virtually.  The Shunya website has a lot of very nice photos of a variety of real world 'Lost Cities' as well as a range of articles on all sorts of topics...some of which might prove interesting or useful for those engaged in some good old fashioned worldbuilding.  The page for Ahmedabad, (Gujarat, India) has a number of photos that have inspired a whole section of the First Tier of Devukarsha...

 The 1748 Nolli Map of Rome is now available as a dynamic, interactive, online tool. You have direct, personal access to this amazing map of deep historical significance, so why not go click around the thing a bit and see what you can find lurking within the nooks and crannies of the Eternal City...the amount of detail is truly humbling.  It's an intriguing blend of ancient and modern approaches, combining the original etched maps of Giambattista Nolli with satellite photography to develop an interactive map that sets a standard for mapping-out a large-scale city.  What can contemporary map-makers do with this approach, this sort of technology, in creating the maps of fictional spaces and mythic cities?  Very inspiring.

And just so you don't think that we're only interested in digital mapping, here's a link to The Hand Drawn Map Association site, where they feature, you guessed it; hand-drawn maps.  There's also the Play Generated Map and Document Archive Project to consider.  Who knew that all those hastily scrawled maps used in games back in the day were aesthetic objects from a revolutionary period of experimental  efforts aimed at communicating shared imaginative spaces?  Cool.

More to follow...