The First Fantasy Campaign - Digitized

Happy Dave Arneson day to all of you! In celebration of this day, I have an exciting announcement -- the one I was referring to yesterday.

The Announcement

A couple of months ago I won an eBay auction of the 1977 print edition wherein all illustrations were done by Dave himself. The book cost me $150 -- and yes, it really is that hard to obtain, though it was in rather good condition with both maps present. The books is beautiful and a unique insight into the early days of our hobby. One that I am truly sorry to see people being restricted from by its steep price.

 

Through the last couple of months I have busied myself with the creation of a digital PDF version of the whole book and have gone to great lengths at creating the best result I possibly could. I will return to this digitizing process below, but before that I would like to present my plans to you.

I learned from this blog post by Dave Arneson, that he owned all the rights to the book. Rights which I assume has been transferred to his estate. I therefore contacted Kevin McColl, who hosts Dave Arneson's official website, and he agreed to send it along to the Dave Arneson Estate when I am finished with the PDF. I don't expect anything in return, but hopefully, the finished PDF will make it easy for the Dave Arneson Estate to upload the book (eg. to DriveThruRPG) and make it available again for everyone to enjoy.

I would say that I am about 75% finished with the whole process, but with my slow rate going through this I expect some more weeks before I will be done (The work has taken me 30+ hours until now and I don't have a lot of spare time currently). I will of course update you all when I get done.

Here are two samples of completed pages of the book:

The process

I have been photo editing for a long time (as seen from my previous posts as well), but quite recently learned about a great tool for taking on bigger projects like the scans of books. ScanTailor can, among other functions, organize, crop, rotate, de-skew and optimize images for the creation of beautiful PDF files with a small size. A lot of these functions can even be done automatically, though for some books it works a lot better than for others.

The whole process of digitizing this book can be listed like so:

1. Scan all 96 pages + cover + two maps equivalent to 8 pages in best scanner resolution
   
2. Go through all pages in ScanTailor to create preliminary PDF
   
3. Read through the whole book and mark printing errors, speckles, spots for editing
4. Retouch all marked places in Affinity Photo
5. Separate the grid from the maps in Affinity Photo for 18 pages (plus the equivalent of 8 pages from the two separate maps) to get both grid and map represented in a 3 color index image compression.
6. Go through the retouched pages in ScanTailor to create the final PDF
   
7. OCR to make the text searchable and copy/paste-able
8. Create PDF bookmarks for all headings
   

At the moment, I am through 75% of the pages in step 5 though it is a slow process. Retouching and editing of each image takes me at least half an hour. For most book purposes, steps 1, 2, 7 and 8 is enough to get a good usable PDF. In this case, however, I wanted the book to look as good as possible. This is two examples of the fixes I did throughout the whole book:

If anyone is interested I will gladly post some guide or detailed instructions at some point. Just ask in the comments

Dave Arneson's True Genius - First impressions

In celebration of Blackmoor week and Dave Arneson day tomorrow I have occupied myself with the book Dave Arneson's True Genius by Robert Kuntz.

I only received the book quite recently, since I had put it off for a while due to the shipping and import tax in Europe. The book is only available from USA and our postal service have some steep fees for their service. For an item that is only $15, the shipping+VAT+fee can easily triple or quadruple the cost. Luckily, I was offered the book as a private gift (no VAT on those) and for that I am thankful! Now that I read the book, I am so glad I finally have it.

I wanted to do a full review of the book. I did not think this would take much time since it is only 69 pages. Boy was I wrong. The book is so densely written that there is easily enough review material for a whole series of blog posts. Additionally, I have been hard at work recently on another Blackmoor project of mine of which I will have exciting news to share tomorrow. All things considered, this post will end up being a "first impressions" and the rest of the review will have to wait a bit until I have some more time.

First impressions: What a wonderful and thought-provoking little book. The intricate writing, grand concepts, systems, and scientific approach to a subject such as the invention of role playing games makes this a really unique read. The subject and ideas are fantastic and I eagerly look forward to the expansion of this subject that hopefully will be published in the form of Kuntz' A New Ethos in Game Design.

The writing is passionate, quirky and relevant, though the book certainly doesn't do much to communicate the message in an easily consumable way. The first time I read it, some passages were almost incomprehensible. I have seen people call it unreadable, but that is really not the case. I can imagine that my engineering textbooks on continuum mechanics would be unintelligible to anyone other than engineers (Even as a student they were close to I will tell you!). The point is that the book treats advanced subjects such as Systems Science and Game Theory and it does not make any effort to explain the majority of the terms and concepts that it uses.

In connection with this post, I have started reading the book again and I must say, the second time through is a much easier read. A read that is worth it. The task that Kuntz has set himself is admirable, not to say genius in itself and I can imagine I will read the book many times more -- at least until A New Ethos in Game Design is released.

I don't have a foundation in either Systems Science or Game Theory so that is where I will start. I have compiled the references from the citations in the book and will read each of them before I return to the book again. I have now read The Architecture of Complexity and about half of The Sciences of the Artificial. Not only does some of Kuntz' concepts make a lot more sense already but the material is riveting -- The Architecture of Complexity was downright mind blowing! 

I feel like the indirect push into reading the references of the book has genuinely done me a bigger favor than if Kuntz had spent a lot of time explaining every concept in the book itself.

Bibliography of DATG:

• Felder W N (2013) Interactions Among Components in Complex Systems,
  
• Simon H (1962) The Architecture of Complexity
• Simon H (1969) The Sciences of the Artificial
• Koestler A (1967) The Ghost in the Machine
• CalResCo (2004) Self-Organizing Systems FAQ. See also http://www.calresco.org/
  

Gem appraiser

I wanted to write a blog post today in celebration of Blackmoor week and Dave Arneson day tomorrow. Then I saw this draft of a blog post and thought, why not just finish it to get myself into gear before writing the actual post. There's not that much to say in this post anyway.

Ages ago I wrote a blog post detailing how to embed small scripts of code written in java script into a blog post. Last time i showed how to do one that could roll on a random table. I thought that would be the most useful since so many people publish random table constant on their blogs. With a few simple steps each of those posts could be interactive.

Since last time I have found out that you don't even need to host the code anywhere else that directly in the text field here on blogger. The code from the example below can be coped and pasted directly in between the lines of text and it will produce the program embedded into the post.

The program is a simple calculator of gem prices, that could easily be expanded upon. I thought I would make it as simple as possible so that most people would understand what the code does. The idea of the program is to be able to put a price on complex items. Instead of a simple table, the DM could set up parameters, such as quality, color, size, nature etc. and their influence on the price of the gem. For example the size might multiply the value of the gem exponentially. They might even put in a factor for the place in the world or a random factor representing luck. When this has been set up, the DM would always be able to price any gem just by inputting its details.

 

I think this is a great idea since objects of wildly varying prices can be put into the world, and their value will not be up to DM fiat, but instead will be a constant of the world. The DM doesn't have to produce a list of prices of all combinations since every combination can be appraised and will always give the same answer. 

Type of gem DiamondPearl

Number of gems

Size of gem oz.

Press appraise to get a price

The code for the above program is the following. Try to go to HTML view while editing a blog post and pasting it in (though please note that java script will not work when the post is rendered as a preview).

<p style="color:grey">Type of gem <select id="gem_type" value="diamond"><option value="1">Diamond</option><option value="pearl">Pearl</option></select>
<p style="color:grey">Number of gems <input id="gem_no" type="number" value="1" step="1" /></p>
<p style="color:grey">Size of gem <input id="gem_size" type="number" value="1.2" step="0.1" /> oz.</p>
<button onclick="appraise()">Appraise</button>
<p style="color:grey"><span id="gem_result">Press appraise to get a price</span></p>

<script>
function appraise() {
	var gemTypeSelection = document.getElementById("gem_type")
	var gem_type = gemTypeSelection.options[gemTypeSelection.value].text;
  	var gem_no = document.getElementById("gem_no").value;
	var gem_size = document.getElementById("gem_size").value;
  	var price = Math.round(gem_no * gem_size * 277.78).toLocaleString('en');
	document.getElementById("gem_result").innerHTML = "The " + gem_type + " is worth " + price + " gold pieces";
}
</script>

Addendum: I just realized that you need to enable "Interpret Typed HTML" In the blogger settings. See the last post on programming JavaScript for instructions on how to enable the setting.