On the DEWLine 2.0: Dwight Williams

A couple of things getting my attention as I take a short break from my own job search and other house chores:

1. ysabetwordsmith makes celebratory noises about Coyote and Crow, a Kickstarter-funded RPG designed by Indigenous gamers. You might want to take a look at the project yourselves!

2. james_davis_nicoll notes his review of Harlem Unbound, a Call of Cthulhu sourcebook created by Black American talent and set in Harlem during its 1930's Renaissance.

Both of these are, I suspect, worth attention from the larger communities of Dreamwidth.

So I'm fiddling with some map design practice - I'm going to have to build one for Shuster, the home city of Local Hero, sooner or later, after all - and I stumble across something that puts me in a nostalgic frame of mind: an article on Newsarama's house blog about the Mayfair Games DC Heroes role-playing game.

An admission: I've rarely played these sorts of games, but the concept fascinates me. More importantly, a lot of the merchandise generated by such games does a lot for me. Particularly the world-building - world-explaining? - material. You see guides to specific characters, groups, places...and you see a lot of stuff that explains where the creators of a given moment are coming from. DC Heroes was very good for that, particularly where they started profiling the cities of the DC Universe. Towards the end of their run with the RPG license, they really ran with Gotham City.

This is part of where my interest in mythical geography began, as much as with the galactic geography debates of Star Trek. It's what prompted me to co-write The Daily Planet Guide to Gotham City with Matt Brady a few years back. I enjoyed doing all that digging through the back issues, cobbling together the clues that made Gotham not just a backdrop, but a real place, somewhere you might expect to live or visit. Or avoid visiting, if you could. (Although Gotham is still unwillingly competing with Hub City, Vanity, the remains of Blüdhaven, and so on for the title of "Most Dangerous City in America".)

I just wish I'd been able to do this one thing: color-coding the map by neighbourhood. Gotham's been around four or five centuries, it's got a lot of neighbourhoods on those islands.

So...when am I going to unveil the results of my map design practice? Not sure yet. As soon as I'm done. And then, I'll move on to mapping out Shuster.

I just found out tonight that Hero Games used three pieces of my handiwork in Digital Hero # 33.

I'm just a tad happier now.