Here at Paizo, we understand that our fans, friends, and contributors (and the sizable cadre of folks who combine all three categories) are a little different than most companies' communities. It's not uncommon for Paizo fans to send us pizzas out of the blue as a thank-you gesture, or offer to buy us drinks when they run into us somewhere in the city. (Both of which initially confused us—you're giving us presents for selling you books?—but we aren't complaining.) We've seen a room full of Paizo trivia champions, Paizo cosplay, and a whole darn Paizo theater performance from an extremely talented grade school (and their supremely cool teacher). It's humbling and awesome at the same time.
Tim Hitchcock, however, may have just taken the cake, at least for me personally. You see, a while back, Tim and I were talking about music in the Tuesday-night Paizo Chat. Tim, a musician who retired from touring in order to become a teacher, was asking me about the bass rig I used in my metal and hardcore band, Shadow at Morning, and my opinions on distortion pedals. I said that I thought they were cool, but I'd never gotten around to picking one up.
"Why don't I build you one?" he asked. Apparently Mr. Hitchcock knows a thing or two about electronics.
I wasn't sure what to expect, but it's not every day somebody offers to build you custom gear. I said sure, and promptly forgot about it for about six months.
And then today, I got this in the mail: proof positive that Tim Hitchcock is totally insane, in the best possible sense of the word. (When I originally opened the package, the glowing light made Wes think Tim must have finally had enough and decided to send us a letter bomb.)
Photograph by Christopher Carey. Goblin illustration originally by Kyle Hunter.
Without question (at least until I get it home and plug it in), my favorite part is the little goblin that Tim etched into the steel of the faceplate. (And in case you're wondering, the goblin is referencing the classic Big Muff bass pedal, upon which Tim based the electronics.)
Though Shadow at Morning unfortunately disbanded a few weeks before the pedal's arrival, I'm already in the process of recording with a new project, and you can bet that when we're ready to hit the stage, Tim's phenomenal creation will be front and center...
Here at Paizo, the normal process for ordering a map for an adventure or sourcebook goes something like this: First the author sends us a map of the imagined area, drawn out to the best of his or her abilities. With that in hand, we check it thoroughly for any contradictions with existing continuity, and redraw or retag sections as necessary to correct mistakes, make the map more interesting, or simply increase legibility. We then hand the map over to Art Director Sarah Robinson, who sends it off as reference to a professional cartographer. Once the professional version comes back, we check it against the original and make changes as necessary. It's a process that happens every day at Paizo.
And then, once in a great while, an author turns the whole system on its head.
In this case, that's Tim Hitchcock, who provided such amazing map turnovers for several locations in Heart of the Jungle, our guide to the Mwangi Expanse, that we couldn't in good conscience send them all away to a cartographer. Instead, we're doing something we very rarely do, and including several of Tim's original art pieces—such as this rendering of Usaro, city of demon-worshiping apes—as player handouts, perfect for GMs who want an in-game reference they can show their players. Between the loads of professionally rendered, heavily tagged maps and Tim's pages torn straight from an explorer's diary, this book is one of the map-heaviest supplements we've ever done, and I can't wait to hear what GMs think when this experiment finally hits bookstores.
Nothing ruins a session of Pathfinder RPG more than a badly drawn map. You sit in your chair, your character sheet and dice firmly in hand, and stare at the crudely drawn map the GM sketched on the mat, struggling to discern exactly what those squiggles on the board are supposed to be.
"So, where's the door?" you ask and the GM points to a series of more complicated squiggles in the mass of squiggles. You put your mini down on the map and your GM sighs and says something like, "That's not even a room," and moves your mini over a few squares—like you could even see a room in the spaghetti shapes spattered on the mat.
Good maps make for good adventures. A bad map, whether it's drawn on a mat by your GM or published in a printed adventure, can ruin everything. If you can't tell where anything is supposed to be or what those squares, lines, tags, squiggles, or eraser marks are supposed to represent, it's going to be awfully difficult to explain them to your players—or, heck, to even figure them out for yourself. Pathfinder RPG, like its predecessor, is a game wherein eventually minis come out, get placed on 5-foot squares, and action happens. That action can either happen in a lavishly detailed temple of Cayden Cailean, or it can happen on a board that looks like a cross between a blood stain and a chalk board full of combinatory mathematics.
I have a handful of authors for the Pathfinder Society scenarios who turn over absolutely amazing maps with every adventure—sometimes these maps are so good I question why we're sending them to a professional cartographer to, essentially, just be colored. Tim Hitchcock is easily my best author-turned-map artist. The sample map below was his turnover for the temple of Cayden Cailean in Absalom for Pathfinder Society Scenario #40: The Hall of Drunken Heroes. As soon as I opened that image I knew exactly what the hall looked like, where everything was, how to get in and out, and where every set of stairs, every door, and every window was. In my art order to Mike Schley, the Pathfinder Society cartographer (and an amazing artist), I simply said, "Awesome author turnover—follow his lead."
Turnover by Tim Hitchcock
I wish I could say it was always like that. I wish I could say every turnover we receive at Paizo is art and requires no extra work on the part of the developers. I wish I could say every turnover had a one-line art order to the cartographer like mine above. Unfortunately, we receive a lot of really bad maps. That's not to say we have a lot of really bad designers or anything—far from it. It's more to say that perhaps we haven't emphasized enough what a gargantuan pain in the tail slap a bad map turnover is. Let's say you're designing a small 5,000-person city for us. Your map turnover comes in with 5 box shapes, a circle, and a few smudges. Now, we can read through your text and pull out all of the relevant tags and information about the city and add those to the map (which we'd rather not do, mind you) but, in the end, we're going to have to redraw that map ourselves—which is time we should be spending making the adventure or city write-up better, rather than fixing the turnover.
A good map, like Tim's, tells us immediately everything we need to know about the location. I don't have to redraw his map and I don't have to send a novel with the map order that includes tags and descriptions for every room so the cartographer can get the map right. Were we to send our cartographers the bad map example from above, without also sending along the entire article that goes with it, we'd get back a nicely drawn, full-color drawing of 5 box shapes, a circle, and a few smudges. Our cartographers are awesome, but their base for quality is only as good as the hand-drawn map they receive. A cartographer should be able to open the author's map and immediately get to work turning a good map into a great map rather than reading a wall of text and then turning a terrible map into a mediocre map.
A lesson for all of you would-be future Paizo authors and current Paizo freelancers: a map turnover can make or break your submission. When you're done drawing it, look it over with a careful, discerning, player-focused eye. If you drew that map for your table of players, would they have any idea what it was on first glance or would they, like the first example, put their mini in the wrong place when combat started? Your map doesn't have to be a work of art—it just has to be interpretable so our artists can make it one.
New Blog Entries
