As I'm working on my maps I often find myself looking for the right font.  After a while you get tired of Papyrus and Old English--the two most common fantasy-ish fonts (for lack of a better term.)  Over the past couple of weeks I focused on finding more that have a fantasy look to them.  To me that is something Gothic or Calligraphic.

I found a great site that hosts the work of a font-maker Dieter Steffman.  (It is in German so try a website translator to sort of read it.) If I'm reading his site correctly (and erring on the side of caution) he is declaring his fonts free for non-commercial use.  His site links to another site hosting a few hundred of his fonts.  Unfortunately it doesn't show samples on one page so you need to click each font name if it seems interesting and that shows a preview page. My favorites for fantasy are Devinne swash, Gabrielle, Roland, Romantik Initialin.  For westerns, try Billboard, Old Town or Billboard.  For science fiction look for the cleaner fonts or if you want something different try Starburst.

Another site that shows Dieter Steffman's fonts and many other free fonts is dafont.com.  However, since they miscategorized Steffman's fonts as simply "free" you should be wary and doublecheck the copyright status of any font you wish to use. (Just above each download link they summarize the distribution status as "Free for personal use" or "Donationware" or simply "Free" etc.)

To install a new font on your computer, do a web search for your computer's operating system name and "how to install a font" or something like that.

What other free font resources do you know about?  Which fonts are your favorites for fantasy or science fiction or western maps and handouts?

Late last year I started putting together a number of random charts to create names that are reminiscent of the names of cultures in the real word. The goal is to make it easy to create names that seem to be from a particular culture and therefore differentiate those names/locations/culture from others in the world.

Today, I've created a fourth set of random location name generator charts. (Although in some cases they may work for naming characters as well.)  This set is based on locations in part of India.

Hopefully it isn't too late to look back at 2009.  At Inkwell Ideas, the specialty is to give others tools and ideas useful for RPGs.

Although December was a little slow (working on the largest Inkwell Ideas project, Hexographer, as well as real life issues) there were a few November posts centered on random charts to create location names that sound similar to locations in various cultures. (The link goes to a main page that links to pages with charts for Chinese, English/UK, and Native American Indian sounding names.)

2009 also brought on some other random charts: random potion descriptions and charts of effects of expired potions, for fun.  Further, one set of random charts was converted to Javascript code to create the Magic Item Shop Random Inventory Generator.

Although the major projects at Inkwell Ideas are Hexographer and the Coat of Arms Design Studio, another large task was the 2009 RPG Blog Readership Survey. Hopefully something similar will happen later in 2010, but with more collaboration with other blog writers. Using the RPG Bloggers list it can have questions tailored to more blog writers and receive a higher number of responses.

Because of Inkwell Ideas' Hexographer product, there are often several articles on Worldbuilding topics.  Three of these were: Timelines (tips for creating a constructed world's timeline),  10 Ways to Vary Your Game World's Cultures and 10 More Ways to Vary Your Game World's Cultures.

By far, three of the most popular entries were for map collections: 101 Fantasy City, Town and Village Maps; Two Sites with Hundreds of Real Historical City Maps (which included direct links to many of the best); and 25 Inn and Tavern Maps.

The Random Dungeon Generators Reviewed article was also very popular.

My favorite advice columns described how our groups often use experience point bonuses and listed the Top 5 Overlooked Rule Subsets of RPGs.

Yesterday I put together some charts for randomly creating city names that sound like English/United Kingdom cities.  Today I've put together another collection of charts to randomly create Chinese sounding city names.  In each case I've also noted a very rough translation of each base word. Most Chinese city names seem to be  a combination of two other Chinese words.

Using the charts you will get city names like: Juining, Zishan, Dongdao, and Guangxi.

For one (maybe two) of my other projects, I'm putting together some charts to randomly generate city names that are reminiscent of cities of varying cultures.  The first charts I've done are English/United Kingdom city names.  I've split up a number of the real city names, usually by syllable, then divided them into a random chart with three columns.  There's also a chart for determining which columns to use to assemble the syllables.

Using these charts you can get city names like: Covenfield, Winbury, Oxenpool, and Lanham.  You may also get some bad results, but just re-roll or swap one syllable out.  Or ignore the random rolls completely and just pick syllables that sound good together.

Link: Random (or not) City Name Charts

When I was putting together my potion description charts I had a fun (for game masters anyway) idea. Many of these potions could be locked away for years or even hundreds of years... so could these potions expire over time?

Sure, through magic one could say they stay potent forever. But it is more fun to say that while they last a very long time, they can expire causing the potion to:

• Have no effect.
• Have a diminished effect.
• Have a heightened effect.
• Have a strange side effect.
• Be poisonous.  (Note that this "little bit of fun" for the GM doesn't and shouldn't cause a "save or die" situation, so the poisonous effects listed here are limited.)

A poor alchemist can also explain why a potion (even one just brewed) might not have the expected results.

Before getting into the random charts, depending on your game system, consider giving characters a chance to notice that a particular potion has expired and may have no effect or have a side effect or especially that it may be poisonous.  This can be accomplished through an Alchemy or Spellcraft skill check or an equivalent in your game system.

Determine if the potion has an altered effect.

(You may wish to alter the percentages based on age of the potion or the location where the potion was found.)

Poison Effects

See the "Effect Duration" chart below to determine how long the effect will last.

Strange/Side Effects

See the "Effect Duration" chart below to determine how long the effect will last.

Effect Duration

Adding some extra descriptions to your game can help make things interesting for your players.  For example, when PCs discover a potion, initially it isn't a Potion of Healing or Potion of Invisibility.  It is a potion that is a certain color, has a given consistency, has a particular smell and taste (if a PC tries it) and comes in one of many types of flasks.

If you keep some consistency, interested players can guess at a potion's purpose just as their characters would. (Assuming a character doesn't have a lot of arcane knowledge.)  Of course, potions with the same purpose can be made in different ways and the resulting properties can vary. Or sometimes potions with different purposes can have overlapping properties. For example, alchemists who study at one school may make Potions of Strength that are blue gray, fizzy, and taste like almonds.  But alchemists at another school may make Potions of Water Breathing that are blue gray, fizzy, and taste like almonds.

Whether you keep a one-to-one relationship between each type of potion and its properties or not, this idea can add a little bit of depth and fun to your game sessions.

Below are a number of ways to vary potions and different options for each property.

Color

Consistency

Taste

Roll 1d4+1 times, or choose a few that have some strange connection to the potion's perceived ingredients. Some alchemists may add flavor to mask the taste. Each flavor may occur at the same time as others or may be the initial flavor, main flavor or aftertaste.  In addition, you may want to add a general taste description such as spicy, sweet, sour, bitter, floral, etc.

Smell

You may use the same flavors from the taste chart for the potion's smell. The smell may match one or more of the flavors or be completely different.

Flask

This chart determines the material and shape of the potion's flask.

Examples

1. Thick chestnut colored potion that tastes and smells like fish and tomato in a clay, tubular top, 3" long, 1" in diameter, Spherical bottom 6" in diameter flask.
2. Thin and bubbly, translucent red violet colored potion that smells like ginger and mustard and tastes like snake with a ginger and mustard aftertaste in a steel, tubular top, 3" long, 1" in diameter, triangular bottom 6" on a side flask.
3. Clumpy white potion with teal blue drops that smells like chives but tastes like pickled venison and mushrooms in a steel, tubular top, 3" long, 1" in diameter, triangular bottom 6" on a side flask.

Improvements

If you've got ideas for more options, please post a comment and I'll periodically make updates!

Sample portion of a map (scaled down in size) created with Hexographer

If you're not familiar with Hexographer, it is a software tool that allows users to quickly create wilderness hex maps in the style of late 80's and early 90's TSR products. (See the sample to the side here.)  It also has a set of hex terrain and icons to create star maps for games that use space flight hex maps. There are free (on-line, web-based) and pro (download and install, includes several bonus features) versions of the software.

A new version of the software was recently released. Below are the highlights:

• The dynamic map key is the major new feature of this release. There's still more work to be done with it. But you can go to the "Options" menu and choose "Configure Map Key" to start it. The system sets up a number of defaults for a map key, and you can edit the settings to give specific background colors for icons, change the text for the labels, modify the font, etc. Note: this is a pro-version only feature. (See the sample map key below.)
• Second, the terrain wizard has a new variant. The regular terrain wizard allows you to sketch in your terrain and then it fills in your map by adding a copy of the closest terrain from your sketch for each blank hex. There is now a "Run Terrain Wizard w/Randomness" option. This adds a little bit of random terrain to your map before running the terrain wizard. So an ocean may get an extra island or forest may have a small cluster of forested mountains, etc.
• Users can now set elevations for each hex. To see elevations, first go to the "Show/Hide" menu then choose "Show Elevation." You'll see a highlighted edge for terrain above 0 and a shadowed edge around terrain below a 0. The difference between two hexes determines the value and then the shading or lightening is darker or lighter based on the values. To change a hex's elevation look for the "Set Elevation" button on the bottom. Then left click a hex to make its elevation higher, and right click it to make it lower. Elevations can vary from -5 to +5. (This feature was actually in the prior release a couple of weeks ago, but I don't believe I posted about it here.)

More details on the release: http://inkwellideas.com/hexographer_forum/index.php?board=7.0

Main Hexographer web site: http://www.inkwellideas.com/roleplaying_tools/hexographer/

Sample map key created using the new map key configuration tool:

Sample map key (scaled down in size) made with the map key configuration tool.

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This tool is perfect for creating a coat of arms for your character, NPCs, countries or other organizations in your game. (I hope it is anyway.) The software now has a much nicer and smoother default shield shape, a more curvy name/motto scroll and 15 new charges.

To the right is an example of the new shield shape, scroll shape and one of the new charges (wyvern wings displayed.) It was scaled down from the original size.

If you want to read more about the update, see this post.

Or you can jump straight to the software. (Keep in mind there are many small image files within the software so it is a 4 megabyte download, even though it runs in your web browser. I hope to address that in the near future.)