Dungeonosophy
Legend
The Rainbow Books unfinished drafts
Ghyr Project file dump
As some of you know, I was working on a sourcebook for the implied homeworld of the LJN Action Figures, in collaboration with Michael Gray, author of XL1: Quest for the Heartstone.
Everyday life (house moving, new jobs) resulted in the project petering out. Which I don't feel happy about, especially in regard to wanting to fulfill the gracious help which Mike lent at various points in the research and design.
Yet there was a lot of beautiful nuggets of work put into it, which I wish to make available to the community. A person wrote to me recently who'd seen one of my old posts on this, and their interest inspired me to upload my unfinished "Rainbow Books" project notes to GoogleDrive, and to share this with the Mystara Piazza and ENWorld forums, and also with Michael Gray (as an update). So that even if I'm permanently stalled on this, the work still is available for the future.
As I type this, I'm also trying to upload my entire "Ghyr" file on my computer (see the link at top of post), which has a gazillion files -- I don't even know what's in there: rough drafts of images and documents...all sorts of flotsam and jetsam.
As for the Rainbow Books, I was originally working on one gigantic book, but the file was so large that it crashed (which dispirited me for awhile), by then I figured out how to recover the file, and I split it into the 'Rainbow Books' that you see there.
The books are in a random unformatted state. A gathering of bits and bobbles, with unedited textual passages.
There were two main legs to the project:
1) Gathering every bit and bobble of Action Figure-related lore. There will be some new stuff which has come out. Wild Beyond the Witchlight and later stuff is not in there; e.g. new Warduke merch, the upcoming new sculpts of the Action Figures, etc.
2) Picturing the homeworld of the Action Figures, gleaned from every bit of lore. I corresponded pretty intensively with Michael Gray (author of module XL1, the only adventure which was entirely centered on the Action Figures), and we co-designed a world. He decided to also place FANTASY FOREST (TSR boardgame and tie-in choose-your-own-adventure books), since he was the original designer of the boardgame.
One thing I was going to change, was the overly weird cosmology (using various polyedra-shaped planets, with shapes even beyond the regular D&D dice). I don't know exactly how I would simplify it, but I went too far there. I would still keep the Great Square cosmology of AD&D 1E, and the square planet.
I was very happy with the world map of MOTHERLAND (the name which Michael Gray chose). Every place and name is there for a reason, and has a specific source in the lore:
postimg.cc
The map is one of Chris Scotese's paleogeographic Earth maps. I showed them all to Mike (except for the Jurassic map which was already taken by Mystara), and he picked this one out
The world is square because there's a reference to "the four corners of the earth" in one of the Action Figure graphic novels. And because it fits with the illustration of a square world in the AD&D 1E DMG
So that's where it stands.
-Travis
Ghyr Project file dump
As some of you know, I was working on a sourcebook for the implied homeworld of the LJN Action Figures, in collaboration with Michael Gray, author of XL1: Quest for the Heartstone.
Everyday life (house moving, new jobs) resulted in the project petering out. Which I don't feel happy about, especially in regard to wanting to fulfill the gracious help which Mike lent at various points in the research and design.
Yet there was a lot of beautiful nuggets of work put into it, which I wish to make available to the community. A person wrote to me recently who'd seen one of my old posts on this, and their interest inspired me to upload my unfinished "Rainbow Books" project notes to GoogleDrive, and to share this with the Mystara Piazza and ENWorld forums, and also with Michael Gray (as an update). So that even if I'm permanently stalled on this, the work still is available for the future.
As I type this, I'm also trying to upload my entire "Ghyr" file on my computer (see the link at top of post), which has a gazillion files -- I don't even know what's in there: rough drafts of images and documents...all sorts of flotsam and jetsam.
As for the Rainbow Books, I was originally working on one gigantic book, but the file was so large that it crashed (which dispirited me for awhile), by then I figured out how to recover the file, and I split it into the 'Rainbow Books' that you see there.
The books are in a random unformatted state. A gathering of bits and bobbles, with unedited textual passages.
There were two main legs to the project:
1) Gathering every bit and bobble of Action Figure-related lore. There will be some new stuff which has come out. Wild Beyond the Witchlight and later stuff is not in there; e.g. new Warduke merch, the upcoming new sculpts of the Action Figures, etc.
2) Picturing the homeworld of the Action Figures, gleaned from every bit of lore. I corresponded pretty intensively with Michael Gray (author of module XL1, the only adventure which was entirely centered on the Action Figures), and we co-designed a world. He decided to also place FANTASY FOREST (TSR boardgame and tie-in choose-your-own-adventure books), since he was the original designer of the boardgame.
One thing I was going to change, was the overly weird cosmology (using various polyedra-shaped planets, with shapes even beyond the regular D&D dice). I don't know exactly how I would simplify it, but I went too far there. I would still keep the Great Square cosmology of AD&D 1E, and the square planet.
I was very happy with the world map of MOTHERLAND (the name which Michael Gray chose). Every place and name is there for a reason, and has a specific source in the lore:
Motherland preview — Postimages
The map is one of Chris Scotese's paleogeographic Earth maps. I showed them all to Mike (except for the Jurassic map which was already taken by Mystara), and he picked this one out
The world is square because there's a reference to "the four corners of the earth" in one of the Action Figure graphic novels. And because it fits with the illustration of a square world in the AD&D 1E DMG
So that's where it stands.
-Travis
