The sigil of Gispyri (the Hourflame) seems fitting for this occasion. Inkvein's funding campaign has ended! And thanks to over 800 of you fine backers not only is the book c...
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Murkdice
4 days ago
60 minutes left!
We've given a load of sneak previews of Inkvein over the past couple of days. For this last call to back it, just 1 hour from the campaign ending and so close to the Pentowe...
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Murkdice
4 days ago
Sneak Peek Part 4: Layout design
6 HOURS LEFT! We are in the twilight of the Inkvein campaign: if you like the look of those stretch goals and haven’t backed it yet, now is the time! We're closing ...
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Murkdice
5 days ago
Sneak Peek Part 3: Mapping
Only 10 hours left on the Inkvein campaign. A massive part of Inkvein is the mapping. Today, as my next pound of flesh to tempt people into supporting the book and ...
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Murkdice
5 days ago
Sneak Peek Part 2: Regions
Only 24 hours left on the Inkvein campaign! If you haven’t backed it yet, get over there. We’ve been waiting for you for over a month! In exchange, and perhaps to convince t...
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Murkdice
6 days ago
Sneak Peek Part 1: Factions
There’s just 48 hours left on our Inkvein campaign! If you haven’t backed yet, now is the time! And in case you need more convincing, or if you're a backer and j...
The sigil of Gispyri (the Hourflame) seems fitting for this occasion. Inkvein's funding campaign has ended! And thanks to over 800 of you fine backers not only is the book coming to life but we're getting to add even more to it via the stretch goals. Your enthusiasm and support means the world to the whole team.
Now, about what happens next. There's still some stuff to do until Inkvein is ready to be sent as a beta pdf: we've got editing cycles to go through, Luke needs to write some of the remaining stretch goals, and he needs to finish up around 40 illustrations (he's already done 60 though!)
We expect to have a beta pdf of the core text available to backers towards the end of Q2 (late June). If things go well, we might manage earlier than that, but we'll see!
The GM handbook will be designed after we're happy with the core book to avoid having to rework it if there are any changes to the core text. We expect to be sending off for test copies of the main book, GM handbook, and bookmark character sheets in Q3.
For now, we'll update you on progress on the core text at the end of each month (you'll get an update at the end of April, May, and June) to keep you in the loop.
In the meantime, thank you again, and you'll hear from us soon!
We've given a load of sneak previews of Inkvein over the past couple of days. For this last call to back it, just1 hour from the campaign ending and so close to the Pentower Dungeon Expansion stretch goal, I’m going to share the draft foreword of the book.
I’ve talked a lot about what is in the book, but not why I wrote it.
When I was eleven, I went on a school trip. Part of it involved caving. Not casually walking around a few large chambers, but getting suited up, helmeted, and head-torched. I was a tall boy, nearly 6ft by that age, and my muscles still had a lot of catching up to do. I was still afraid of the dark; I remember staring at the yawning mouth of stone that held only dark within.
I had to crawl through letterboxes and try to heave myself over slippery ledges that I was too tall and weak for. My helmet kept catching the cave ceiling mere centimetres above my stooped head.
Towards the end, I had to squeeze through a tunnel filled with water up to my waist. One by one, my classmates dropped into it. When it was my turn, as I sank into the water, my light began to flicker and give out. The people before me were already far ahead, obscured by corners and twists, and I had to move forwards before anyone else could descend safely behind me.
With light fading and the darkness closing in, I waded and pawed my way through the tunnel, dragging my fingers along the walls and hunching to fit into the constricting tube. I still remember the feeling. The disorientation. The alien nature of the space around me. I learned a couple of lessons: our tools and senses can fail us, can abandon us, and that there are places that I do not belong, that I do not know, and perhaps never can know.
Earlier than this, at 9 years old, a wave caught me and tumbled me to shore in a grip that I had no power to resist until I washed into the shallows. I had felt a tiny portion of the ocean’s mass envelope my body, and it was suffocating.
I knew this feeling before these incidents. My earliest memory is of a jumper being pulled over my head and the head hole being misaligned. It took too long to be fixed. My sight was gone. My hearing muffled by thick twisting fabric. My arms were constrained, pinned to my body.
I hate being trapped. That is why this book exists.
If you think a caving megadungeon written by someone with claustrophobia might be interesting, now is the time to get it!
6 HOURS LEFT! We are in the twilight of the Inkvein campaign: if you like the look of those stretch goals and haven’t backed it yet, now is the time! We're closing in on the print-at-home battlemaps!
To tempt you further, and give backers more previews, here’s a look at the ‘one-spread’ centric design of Inkvein’s layout.
The argument that information in a ttrpg book should not be split across multiple spreads is not new, but it’s something that we continue to see in the industry despite this popular rule.
Inkvein holds to this rule and then some. It is strict about space and layout. Make no mistake, detail isn’t sacrificed for this, but usability is more important than ever in a megadungeon. Let’s take a look.
Note: These samples are not fully edited.
It was important for me to get the contents on one spread. The pdf will be hyperlinked to the point of driving me up the wall, but for the physical copy, having a single spread that shows you where to find everything is essential in a book like this.
I took the same approach for the overview of the book. It’s easy for an adventure of this size to feel intimidating: our answer to this problem is a single spread overview that guides you through how to digest the book.
We use the same technique for the history of the dungeon…
And all the additional sub-systems in the book. Alchemy fits on one spread: procedures, reagents (ingredients), and recipes.
For locations, whether they are caverns, places in the city of Wel, or sub-dungeons, descriptions always fit within a spread. For the city of Wel, sub-locations fit on a spread or a page.
Locations within the cave network never run between pages, and a mini-map is included to minimise page switching.
For sub-dungeons, like the Pentower, each level is contained on 1 spread.
And for islands within the Sea of Words, each is contained on a single page which details their mini-pointcrawl.
I value detail in an adventure: I often find dungeons that summarise locations in brevity tough to run. But detail doesn’t mean usability needs to suffer. By segmenting information properly and setting spatial constraints, Inkvein is a joy to use at the table. It’s detailed but digestible: the best of both worlds.
We've got one more sneak preview before the campaign closes... something a bit special. See you soon!
Only 10 hours left on the Inkvein campaign. A massive part of Inkvein is the mapping. Today, as my next pound of flesh to tempt people into supporting the book and as a treat for backers, I’ll showcase a number of the different maps you’ll find within its pages.
Mapping caves is hard. You can:
Map in horizontal layers like a traditional dungeon map, which makes encoding verticality hard, and doesn’t feel like caving.
Attempt to map in 3d, which makes it difficult to understand and even harder to describe to players.
Or…
You can map the way we map caves in Inkvein: side profile. This gives you verticality but keeps things readable. And I’ve had folks who do actual caving say I made the optimal choice, so there.
Inkvein also opts to avoid attempting to illustrate individual tunnels: this means maps are more readable and can fit in a reasonable space. The properties of routes are still easily communicated though with solid, dashed, and dotted lines.
But there are some areas of the Inkvein that need different maps…
Like for example, the Colloidburg city map.This page has been trimmed at the bottom to reduce image size.
This is a top-down pointcrawl, which is perfect for a city where the spaces between keyed locations are abstracted. Plus, by keeping the map simple, it still works as a mini-map on spreads like with the caving maps!
But also within Colloidburg is a sub-dungeon: the Archive.
Because of the verticality of this dungeon and the differences between floor plans, an isometric map called to me. This type of map gives you an idea of room sizes which is important for this location. Though quite the challenge, yours truly made sure there were still mini-maps for each spread of keys!
I also needed toa sea with islands, and a tower. The Sea of Words is a subterranean sea of Ink, with a scattering of islands within it. For this, I returned to the top-down pointcrawl:
The top-down pointcrawl map makes adjudicating travel between the islands simple, and keeps it easy for players to make a map. ~I loved making this with my charcoal brushes~
Islands themselves have a simple ‘sub-pointcrawl’: a top-down perspective with some topography lines to give an impression of the lay of the land and a clear graphical pointcrawl on top.
Each island is kept to one page, which makes them easy to run at the table.
Last of all, we have the Pentower: a sub-dungeon on one of the islands, which has a ‘classic style’ dungeon map per floor: Whilst I was tempted to go isometric, I found the regularity of the floorplan meant a top-down perspective would be a bit clearer.
And last of all, I made an isometric pointcrawl for the Inkdrake’s hoard! This captures the elevation changes that are an important aspect of this region.
It was important to me to create functional cartography for all the different spaces in the Inkvein. Above all else, I prize clear communication: that’s why a lot of my cartography style is routed in diagram design rather than illustrations (I save that for the paintings).
We've got a couple more sneak previews before the end of the campaign, so keep an eye out for those too!
Only 24 hours left on the Inkvein campaign! If you haven’t backed it yet, get over there. We’ve been waiting for you for over a month! In exchange, and perhaps to convince those scared to descend below… let’s examine the anatomy of a region of the Inkvein.
There are 10 regions in the Inkvein (originally 9, but backers made no.10 happen woohoo)! A couple of them have some differences but many follow this structure. Our example today is the first region of the Inkvein: the Old Mines. Note:This material isn’t fully edited yet.
To start, we get an overview page:
You get a full page illustration, then the region map, some overview info, and - in this case - a supplementary rumour table.
Next up, we get the region encounter table:
This is where a lot of the magic happens. We get 6 encounter sequences, which offer evolving situations to give the subjects of encounters their own goals and agency outside of PC interaction. We have a saying (my editor, my playtesters, and I) that “the Inkvein never waits.”
Most folks in this dungeon have goals and agendas, and they do not sit still. These encounters can be linked to each other or into locations in a web of connectivity that makes the space feel alive and breathing.
And it’s not just monsters. There are all sorts of encounters to be found in the Inkvein. Plus, not every monster is going to try to gut you on sight.
Oh, and if you just want a standard encounter table that simply has a number of creatures in the entry, this is bolded in the first entry of each row so it doubles up as a traditional encounter table.
With that, we get to the keyed locations. Let’s take a look at a spread:
There’s a few things of note here so let’s dig in.
On every spread of keys, you get a mini-map. No flicking back to the map page (except in 1 region where trust me… it makes sense), the chunk of the map you need is always on the spread.
At the top of each key (except for dead-ends) are exit descriptions that give your players meaningful sensory information to make choices with. Whereas a map only gives you spatial information, Inkvein gives you texture, smell, sound, and taste. This is all part of the claustrophobia-themed experience.
The grey callout boxes are for some special features:
Faction-event triggered evolutions. In some locations, if a faction event has occurred in the setting, the location evolves as a consequence. This means you don’t need to think so much about how faction actions change the setting. I’ve done a ton of that work for you.
Return triggered evolutions. For other locations, simply returning after a reasonable period of time results in change. These are like ‘pre-planned’ restockings of locations, so you don’t need to do so much work!
NPC events. There are some special NPCs in Inkvein who are making their own long journeys through the setting. In some locations, you can find them and trigger them to progress along their event track.
Cause and effect. In some cases, specific player actions have repercussions that need highlighting, so they are given callouts too.
Statblocks and magic items.
As you can see, the keying is structured to provide a dynamic environment beyond the immediate content of the location. Locations can change over time without PC involvement! But it’s made easy for you to follow and to run.
Thank you from the team for all your support so far! Our next preview will be an overview on mapping!
