Melody [00:00]
Welcome, welcome to our listeners! Oooh, we have an exciting episode to share with you today! The Game Master Certification Organization had the opportunity to interview Bo from the Guild of Navigators! In our interview excerpt for this episode we will be touching on Bo’s expertise in worldbuilding for tabletop role playing games! I’m your host, Melody Rainelle.  

Why don’t we start at the beginning. Bo, how do you start worldbuilding?

Bo [00:30]
For me, world-building starts at the map. And I told you already that I'm actually moderating a group of 3,000 and growing on Facebook, which is the Azgaar's Fantasy Map Generator. And I started with that too some two years ago. And it was a totally different story like it is right now. And nowadays with Azgaar's Fantasy Map Generator, you don't generate a map really, but you are creating a world. So a single map can have everything from rainfall to wind to population levels, religion, diplomacy between countries, disposition of armies, and right now the latest addition, which is going to be is banners, coat of arms. So you will actually even have over your map, a layer of coat of arms, not just for your countries, but for each of the province within your country. Azgaar actually came up with a new tool, which is called Armoria. Armoria is a tool for making coat of arms and banners for your countries. So not just coat of arms, but flags as well. And it's huge - it has like endless options. And even within the endless options, you can customize so much that if you are into such details like creating coat of arms, then Armoria is your way to go. And as I said, for me my world, it started with a map and how it goes on - I'm writing it, I'm writing it into a book, and I'm writing it into a doc file. And I'm posting details of it. I have my Facebook page where I'm building my own world, but I'm just using it really to publish my notes to put on my notes when I finish something. And recently I finished the races and I finished some background - like occupational packages. So I'm using nowadays GURPS and with GURPS it's a bit different than with Dungeons and Dragons. So it's my system to go to because it's much complicated, it's much bigger, it's much harder. And even the character creation is on a quite of a different level. I would say it's pretty similar to Fate - just to advertise Steve Jackson and his GURPS here a bit. I've started to play it maybe like 15 years ago and the main thing was really with character building. And as it's a universal system, you have a base book where you have actually one part is for the players and the other is for the game masters and it's a great because you can already play everything with that book - you can play from being cave people, Caveman hunting dinosaurs or and up to trans-human space in the 50th century or something, so you have all the options, all the tech levels. You know what a laser blaster does in the year 5000. And you know what spear with a stone tip does 1000 B.C., you know. And this is great in the system that it's not just going in age up and down. But it brings in the magic, it brings in martial arts, it brings in Psyonix, it brings in different tech levels, it brings in biotech, and you can put together your game. So you want to play cyberpunk, you can grab biotech, you can grab high tech equipment book, and you play it. In the older editions, so right now it's GURPS fourth edition, in the third edition, you had quite a lot of, I was calling it, world books. So pre-done settings. Right now, the major setting in fourth is Banestorm, which is kind of a mixed setting, I would say it's kind of Forgotten Realms in GURPS; you have Arabic, you have Asian, you have classic European fantasy style mixed. However, you know, just beside this, you can play horror campaigns, you can play Illuminati, you can play spies during the Second World War, you can play Star Trek, that was one of the favorites with us guys. Or you can play different specific styles like after the third world war, when kind of Terminator style when the artificial intelligences take over and the humans are put into concentration camps, and you try to get out of there. So these all had like a specific setting and the setup and book and you could buy like maybe they were like 50-60 different. And the good thing is third edition stuff still valid in fourth edition. And the older brews get quite reused and work. This is one of those game systems where if you know if you are fed up with just having the same setup only just running after dragons, then you can just start and I don't know, go for a shadow run and try to extract a VIP from a corporation which is run by a dragon. So yeah, it also can actually take games and make it into GURPS. Like I said, we have GURPS Shadowrun, or we have even a GURPS Warhammer. So there is quite a lot of options. And a lot of people are actually spending quite a lot of time into creating new game books and new world books and new rule sets. So GURPS is evolving, and it's growing all the time. So you have quite a lot of options there. I completed two books for GURPS right now. I prepared a book about occupational lenses. It's called "Lenses" here. So it's basically advantages and disadvantages and packages of skill that create a specific occupation. And then I created anthropomorphic races, and their skill sets and advantages and disadvantages. And right now I'm working on a major revamp of the magic system with colleges and colors and combining colors of different colleges saw it you know, this system is giving dungeon masters a lot of options on how to play around. I'm always saying Dungeons and Dragons is great. But somewhere I think it's an entry level role playing game, where you learn how to play, how to run a game, and then later probably you want to see something different. And here I would say there are many good systems beside GURPS even. I said Shadowrun - Shadowrun is a great system if you want something on the cyberpunk style, but with magic inside, with dragons running international corporations and having orc street fighters and elven hackers and stuff like this, so it's pretty cool. Then I would say Ars Magica is a great system, where you actually play like a 14th-15th century magician in the middle of Europe. However, the funny thing is that you don't create only one character but you create three or four characters based on how you want and one story is usually half a year and the magic system of Ars Magica because it's called the art of magic; Ars Magica is quite special and unusual. You are basically putting together forms with base of how to use these forms. So you have, for example, create fire or create life or destroy life. So it's really interesting how they manage to play with the magic system there. Another funny game, I would say it's paranoia where you learn not to be too clingy to your character. And with paranoia, you have one character, but the character has multiple clones, it's kind of a futury, post-apocalyptic game, where if you die, then you get a clone of yourself shot from the orbit into the same place where you died. And you usually are trying to uncover who is the mutant or the communist in your group of players while the great computer AI is giving you something to do, something to uncover, or something to find. So it's also funny game, and it's worth playing. And I will also mention Rolemaster, which we actually dubbed "Rulemaster", because that's the game where you have rules for everything. I know that you have rules for walking on the street, it can happen that if you don't make your goal on acrobatics, you can slip on an invisible turtle and break your neck and die just by walking on the street. And beside that every weapon, and there were like hundreds of weapons, and every weapon has one single page of how you hit what type of armor. So it's numbers and "Rulemaster" needs a calculator to play it, because you are throwing around numbers in over like 100-200. So all your roles are D100 and plus your skill and plus the other stuff. So it's really a lot of calculation. And there a simple fight - fighting three orcs with three players can go into four-five hours even until you finish it. So you see, I'm saying that really when you are looking at setting up your games and looking building up, it's really up to what game you are playing, what system you are trying and - and I would encourage everybody to try different games. Go and be a vampire. That one really changed my view on playing - Vampire the Masquerade part of the World of Darkness game series. And I was playing it from the first edition, it was really something special because you could put together a character like in five minutes. And it was more about talking and using your skills to do stuff other than fighting, so not really fight and combat oriented gaming, and also something very special. And beside Vampire the Masquerade, there was Werewolf the Apocalypse - which was great, Mage: The Ascension, and probably I should mention also the hunter part, I'm not sure what was the full name. But there was a part where you were the hunter and you were basically hunting, the werewolves, the mages, and the vampires. So I said, it's really up to how you build what you create, what system you are playing, because every system needs a bit of a different approach. And I would say that to be a good game master, you really need to try even different systems; try to play something different than just classic fantasy because I would say with something like cyberpunk or science fiction, like Star Trek setup, or even Star Wars be played, you start to see your game a bit differently than with classic fantasy only. 

Melody [12:23]
There certainly are a lot of tabletop role playing games to work with out there! Were you saying something about training videos for Azgaar's Fantasy Map Generator?

Bo [12:33]
I was telling you that I'm actually running the Azgaar's Fantasy Map Generator group. What I thought is I created kind of like entry videos. And then there is two 25 minute videos I made right now and I will be posting it showing the people how to get into the tool, because I see that a lot of people use it actually. But they just scratching the surface. I see they post a map only with colorful blobs on it. And I'm like, wow, come on - the tool can do so much more it can do so killer maps. And, and when you look into the maps I posted, like in the last half year, that's a different story, you know, with creating a map in AFMG [Azgaar's Fantasy Map Generator] and then revamping it a bit doing a bit work on the colors, it pops out so much and it's so beautiful. So, and this was where I saw that I will come up with those training sessions, or training session videos of how to start. There are already training sessions I wrote down in the Facebook group, but I think the videos are more hands on and - and are going to be showing a bit more for the people. 

Melody [13:51]
Awesome! Thank you for posting those training videos. What are your thoughts on virtual table tops as it relates to  worldbuilding?

Bo [14:00]
Lately, we started also adding tokens to our games. We see, you know, this change and due to the virus troubles, a lot of people actually moved their game on VTT's, so on virtual tabletops, and a lot of games are actually being played online. I had to look at virtual tabletops for my flavor I think it's not bad. However, we are playing with huge maps so my maps are much, much bigger and it's actually better details when you have like 10,000 times an 8,000 pixel map. And VTT's usually either don't support such big maps, or they butchered the quality of such a huge map. So it's exactly the same problem when you are, for example, posting on Facebook a map, it butchers the quality because you really have just a small style of a map. So that's why I'm running most of the maps, in HD on Patreon, where all these maps are actually in their best setup, best version. And due to this fact we started actually a way of playing where we have a map and we have kind of a focal battle, is it I think called, so where I prepare a map and the map has multiple layers, and of course, some of the layers are these tokens. What you see right now here is the tokens which are from the front, however, the tokens created are top down, so you can actually see the top of their head and their shoulders and the weapon they are holding. What I'm creating with this page here is that it's actually easier to visualize what you really see from top down. So a lot of people you know, create only a token from top down. And sometimes you have trouble to get the feel of how this token really looks like from the front. The picture you are actually showing is the latest one we've been doing. The undead is first so zombies and skeletons, because those are the usual NPCs or enemies actually in our game, so zombies, zombie masters, different skeletons, then we did a few anthropomorphic tokens based on a combination of a human and an animal. And the latest one is orcs. And I would say orcs are another prolific enemy in most of the games for - for the people, so I thought to have a smaller clan of orcs with a close combat fighters with ranged fighters with two bosses. And of course, shamans to use magic or magicians. So this is actually the idea. If you see it, the tokens come in also in a large size. So whoever is playing them is just downloading the tokens and then they can adjust it to their own games. And what I'm using right now, as I said is we don't use any VTT we are using GIMP, which is kind of, I would say Photoshop for free, but it's quite good. So it's a software where you can actually paint or change your pictures or graphics. And we are creating multiple layers on the gaming map. And some of the layers are actually the tokens and you know, it's quite fine to use the tokens, you can turn them around, you can move them around as different layers. So you end up with a map and your tokens moving around, it looks like well, you're basically playing chess on your setup. And really the idea came from the current situation with the virus that more players are actually not able to meet up or even trying to play games with people from different countries. And I see this is quite happening right now. I see my GURPS team, there is quite a lot of people who are looking for games or creating games and looking for players. And maybe this is going to be on one way, the future of it. But I still like more to meet up with my friends sit down and be like in the same room and chat about it because it leaves a much more or a much deeper impression than just running it online.  

Bo (Continued) [18:31]
And this is exactly where I see that a lot of people are coming back to me and asking me for, let's say customized maps, specific maps or even customized tokens, I want to give a shout out here to Hero Forge who is right now one of the softwares I'm using to create these tokens. It's basically a base token. And then it goes through multiple layers of work in Photoshop until it looks like it looks. So again, if you look at the tokens, they are dark fantasy tokens. So the strong colors are a bit more muted, it's more dark and even the, you know, the way how the tokens are, it's more towards showing them as the evil so even the orcs are not that green or strong green as I see most of the time, but it's more a muted type of a green. So with less a strong coloring. I like this style and if you look at the maps I'm doing, I use a lot of real art or actually photography or pictures from all over the world. And, for example, right now you are showing me this picture. This is roughly 60% real photography, it's a drone photography from an Asian Park, a Japanese Park. However, most of the trees are added in, the lake is redone, the bridge is added, the house in the middle is added. So I like to combine actually real drone pictures with extra assets and creating a final feel of the map which looks quite close to a realistic feel. And I think it works out so I wanted to stay close kind of Japanese tea house or Dojo next to a little lake where, for example, a deathmatch can be done between to nobles, or where local noble can go for a tea ceremony and someone wants to attack him there. So you know, coming up with different base of how to play a map. And there is always a lot of options because I know even in Dungeons and Dragons, in Forgotten Realms, there is a setting, which is, I would say quite close to Japanese-Chinese style, which is I think Kara-Tur. So it will not really just stuck in making the usual castles, British castles or French castles or I would say usual European fantasy, but I try to put in something from the Orient, from Japan from China. And right now I'm working on a map, which is going to be like North African style. So once again, mixing cultures into your games. That's what makes it a bit different. 

Melody [21:32]
The COVID-19 pandemic sure did create some challenges, but it has been fun to see the ways people have found to work around the situation. What a creative solution you are using with your maps and tokens, and an interesting approach to map making! 

Bo [21:48]
As I said, I'm actually lucky because I grew up at a location where four countries meet so and I'm, well, multilingual since I was born. So I have four mother tongues. Plus, I learned four additional languages in the last years while I'm actually moving around the world. I'm a digital nomad, and in the last 15 years, I lived in nine different countries and visited much more of them. So this way, you pick up languages where you are living, you pick up the local way of talking, and even when it comes to English, it's quite different. You know, I lived in Ireland, I lived in UK, in the US, and it's all different, the way how British speak is different, how Irish speak, how South Africans speak. So for me, I would say I even incorporate the way of a bit of Irish when my dwarves are talking so - so it's a way of talking and using the languages. When it comes actually when I'm world building, for example, I'm using quite a lot of foreign languages for naming. So be it from a Japanese, Chinese, Mongolian, or cross over languages using languages like even my own languages, but for example, cutting off parts and coming up with a specific name just with like partial words. And it works and sometimes even like writing or saying that these people, for example, speak elvish and elvish is some other language which for example, I can speak and one of the players. So it's good because I'm right now in such a multi-language area. So there is a lot of people here who speak German, Spanish, French, Italian. So we are sometimes incorporating these languages also into the game, or even I'm using the option. For example, my South African friend is using Africans when his dwarf speaking. So this is, I think, part of the thing where you can mix into your games quite a lot. And actually my favorite world building tool which is the fantasy map generator is actually having over 40 possibilities when you are generating a world - how to play your naming conventions from which country or even go with different specific setups like gnomish, or dark fantasy. And I see that it gives a extra flavor when you have reptilian names, or when you have, for example, giant folk names in your maps, and players pick it up. So they see the difference. Because if everything on your map is kind of base English, and you have high peak and lowlands and such names, then the players don't really come up with some combination for it. So if you name some places a bit differently, and you give some specific naming for a different race, it will make them understand that this is something totally different. So you don't call a orcish place the "green rocks", but you call them [another language name] "ur garuk". And they will understand: "Oh, that sounds so orcish." So I would say this is the way how to incorporate languages. And not just languages, but even the way how other cultures work into your games.

Melody [25:36]
Would you like to talk a little bit about some of the maps you’ve created? How about the Raewonia Map?

Bo [25:42]
Raewonia was one of those maps I was testing with Dungeondraft. So it's basically a smaller map with just a few places to go. You have the, well quite generic, you have the dwarfs in the north, you have the Necromancer city, you have the kind of a barbaric, evil, chaotic city, you have some orcs, the elves in the middle, the classic human port cities, and there are the Arabic flavored cities as well on the eastern part. It was a test actually to see how I can incorporate real style assets into making a map. So this map, if you look at, for example, the part in the north with the snowy mountains, those are actually real pictures of mountains. So it's not really hand drawn, but it's the real stuff. So you know, I was trying to make a map with multiple different assets, multiple different styles, put it together. And it's kind of a small map for a few sessions, I would say to run around. And to have a bit of everything I would say. It can be quite a generic Dungeons and Dragons map. 

Melody [27:07]
And about the Black Pike Inn?

Bo [27:10]
The Black Pike Inn is actually part of the story arc I play with my guys here right now. It's called "The Evil You Can't See". The whole idea behind the story arc is actually about a necromancer who is employing a group of bandits and helping them out while the bandits are, well, doing their job of stealing the stuff and the Necromancer is getting the few dead bodies they produce when they are banditing around. So the Black Pike Inn is actually a map, which was created as an inn map. You know, you have a lot of maps where you meet at an inn or you get the information there. Or you just stay a night over and something happens or it's an inn where you trying to look for someone. In my game, this inn is actually a front for what's happening in the underground and the underground is a small arena where the area's, I would say, richer people are coming to see fights, illegal fights, between different people or even animals or zombies against fighters and stuff like that. And they are betting there. So the whole inn is actually... the top floor areas can play a nice game of find the killer, who was the one who killed this guest or that guest or just meeting up. However, the underground is where the real story is, with the Necromancer's lair, the arena, the place where they actually store the dead bodies, and the cages with the unwilling fighters, I would say. So this one was actually also a test Dungeondraft - Dungeondraft is basically a software, which helps you to set up actually smaller scale maps of battle maps, actually. So it's pretty great for making maps of smaller houses, bigger houses, smaller settlements of underground places, be it catacombs or natural dungeons. And as you can see, the style is again, a bit different. It's more cartoony, but I'm still trying to actually pull over this darker feeling. So I'm trying to actually make my maps in a more darker, gloomier style. So not really manga style where the colors are popping out. And you have a lot of pastel colors and a lot of strong, warm colors, but rather gloomier, darker colors, which actually show more this feeling of a dark fantasy setup.

Melody [30:09]
That's neat. How about your bridge map?

Bo [30:12]
For this bridge, what you're actually looking at is the, I would say's, the promo picture. So there is a day and a night version of it. So the idea here was to have a bridge over a fast flowing river and imagine the bridge is quite high, so it's much easier for the people to somehow get over the bridge. And the idea was with multiple options here, to have the bridge to be a tall bridge where you have to go through the bridge, pay your toll. However, bringing in some extras, maybe you can't cross the bridge, because the other side of the river is, let's say, the enemy nation or it's held by some thieves, brigands or bandits. So the game idea here was really to come up with a way for the players to clean the part of the bridge, so the tower part of the bridge, and that's why there is also a night version of it, because I think that when it comes to something like that, some would actually go and try to use the shadows to get closer to climb, and get up to the top floor and maybe walk or get down through the top floor to the second floor and first floor and fight your fight through the three floors down to the first floor. And they're opening the bridge and letting the rest of the group in to help out. So it's a very, very easy and very straight-forward map. But there is especially that the bridge is a tall bridge, it makes sure that most of the action is actually happening on the bridge. However, I think you can also approach it head on: you have a wizard and then he can fly all the guys over to the top floor. Or he can just blast the front gate away and you can pile in and clean out the place there. So it's as you can see, the idea was based on having a straight line of sight from the bridge of making it hard for just go around it. So the players really have to go on that long road which is going towards the tower.

Melody [32:35]
Thank you so much for sharing these maps and stories with us! It sounds like a lot of fun to play, and I can see this is just a tiny sampling of the possibilities available for the tabletop roleplaying game community! I’m sure a lot of people will look forward to using some of these maps you’ve created.

Bo [32:54]
Feel free to use any pictures from Patreon, you can see there is quite a lot. I was doing also fantasy art as well; been doing gun design, weapon design as well. So I have a DeviantArt page, but truth to be told, I ended up on Patreon because it's much easier to store and save the maps and the work I am doing on Patreon. So it's nice. And from the start, I was like I don't want to be the Patreon guy who you know who is doing it just to have money and make it for money and selling map packages for two dollars and stuff. So that's why the maps are for free because I want to give to the community. And I want people to feel free to use whatever I am putting out. And if there is someone like yourself who wants to support me, I'm happy because the money is going back to the community. Going back into buying and testing new software, new mapping software, buying new gaming systems and stuff and it goes back into really giving back to the society and to the community of players, gamers, and companies that are actually working hard on putting out stuff for us players and Game Masters. 

Bo (Continued) [34:15]
As part of actually Patreon setup, please feel free to chat on me anytime you need help with your map be it AFMG or be it whatever tool. I'm using, or actually I tested, probably all the major mapmaking tools. So if you want to try something with mapmaking, I can help you. If you want to try doing something with characters. So you want to visualize your characters like you saw on the picture I was doing for the tokens, I can help you out, you know, to do your own stuff, I can give you some tutorial, some introduction, what to work with, what not to work with, what to dodge, and how to play it because some of the tools are pretty high level, some of the tools are so high level that they are nearly unusable. And some of the tools are great, but you have to know where to find your assets to it. And this is one of the things you know, looking for assets - going and actually downloading 20,000-30,000 pictures and cutting out your own small thing out of a huge picture or creating your own stuff, creating your own textures, water textures, cobblestones, whatever. So there is a lot of work when it comes to mapping and I'm always looking out for new pictures for new stuff. You know, sometimes I see someone took a nice picture of the beach they are living, and I just - one of my friends, you know - and I just click and a cut off the beach or some stones on the beach and I use it in my map just a part of the stone. So this is how it really works always, always looking, always searching, always trying to find something to use. I'm making a new map. So you know, I'm that type of a person who is not really bored ever because I sometimes reach days, like 50 hours long.

Melody [36:18]
Wow! Bo, thank you so much for being here with us and for sharing all this wonderful and exciting information. We really appreciate it!

To our listeners - This is the last podcast episode for our interview series with Bo from the Guild of Navigators. Please check the podcast description for details on how to find more information about Bo from the Guild of Navigators! Also, if you missed any other episodes, please check them out as well! 

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