In Stranger Skies: An Insider's Review

First draft cover design, with art by Ben Wootten

A few hours ago, I completed and submitted the last tiny diagram for +Bruce Heard's Calidar: In Stranger Skies.  In Stranger Skies is the name of the first book for the +World of Calidar — hopefully the first of many more to come.  The layout phase is drawing to a close, and any day now Bruce will submit the book to the printers.

Now that my work on this book is done, I'd like to share my impressions of the project — an insider's review, so to speak.

I've seen a draft, and I have to say, it looks wonderful.  More importantly I have read through everything three times while proofreading, and the truth is that this is why I am so excited about the project: the writing.

Yes, I have been a fan of Bruce's writing and maps for more than twenty five years, and a member of the Mystara online community for seventeen of those, so sure, I'm biased.  But I'm also a picky and discerning reader.  I know what I like and what I don't like, and by extrapolation what is good and what is not.  (As always when it comes to opinions, your mileage may vary.)

Calidar is good.

I always enjoyed the Voyages of the Princess Ark series.  Every month I looked forward to its release, and indeed I bought Dragon solely for that one article.  The months when it didn't feature, I was not happy.  To be fair, I was also looking for articles for BECMI, but the Princess Ark was always my favourite.  Bruce's quirky humour and very current genre references made me smile every time, but the stories also served a purpose in introducing new areas.  The fiction brought everything to life, allowing readers to sample the flavour of a culture, which made the gazetteer sections all the more interesting.

I guess you could say I'm a fan of this rather unique pairing of fiction and gazetteer.

Well, the thing is, Bruce's writing style has matured and improved over the last twenty years.  In Stranger Skies is very much the spiritual successor of the Princess Ark, and there are many similarities.  Some will undoubtedly call it a reboot, although I wouldn't go that far myself.  You see, it's much more than just a reboot: it's a whole new thing of its own.

With Calidar, Bruce has created a whole new universe with its own themes and tropes.  It has some very interesting themes and plot devices built into the story and the setting, such as the Vortex, which allows a limited form of travel between realities; world souls as a source of magic and life; skyships and space travel, including multiple ways to travel the Great Vault; as well as some rather interesting dynamics which shape the relationship between mortals and their gods.

An excerpt from the Great Caldera poster map.  Bruce came
up with a new language, Kragdûras, for the names.

You can see some of this in the short stories which Bruce has already released — and if you haven't already read them, you should — but it'll become apparent just how much there is when you read the main story and its gazetteer.

I would be remiss if I didn't mention another of Bruce's talents: he is great at coming up with names.  Any Mystara fan can attest the linguistic richness and logic of place names in Mystara.  It's no secret how he does this, by adapting real world place names, but it's also something that's very hard to get just right.  For me, as a Tolkien fan as well as a Mystara fan, I have been completely spoiled with great place names, and it's something that continually holds me back from enjoying many other fantasy worlds.  I'm sure I'm pickier than most in this regard, but suffice it to say that Calidar's names just fit.

So yes, the story is wonderful, and the gazetteer section is great.  In fact my only complaint about them both is that they're too short, and left me wanting much, much more!

Art by John Dollar showing the ship's cook — sure to be a fan favourite.

Moving on to other parts of the book: the art is sumptuous.  A total of four artists contributed to the book: Ben Wootten painted the cover art; John Dollar and Savage Mojo did interior art; and Pierre Carles drew the astrolabe which has become the Calidar Publishing logo.  All of these artists have contributed wonderfully to the look and feel of In Stranger Skies and indeed the whole World of Calidar.

My new topographical style in its most zoomed in form.

Obviously when it comes to the maps I am totally biased, but I hope you will enjoy them, too.  As my blog's subtitle suggests, I have made every effort to make Calidar's maps as accurate and consistent as possible.  Every town and city has its own latitude and longitude coordinates, and there is even a special coordinate system for each planet in the Soltan Ephemeris.  I have tentatively called Calidar's "Calidar 2014", although perhaps "Calidar 1512" would have been more appropriate.  You can see these things in the maps with graticules (latitude/longitude grid lines).

I have also developed my own original style for Calidar's topographical maps, which you can see on the Great Caldera poster map, as well as the in-book Kingdom of Meryath map, and the local map of Glorathon's Royal Domain.

Close-up of the Meryath poster map, with all new hex art.

For fans of hex maps, the bonus poster map shows the Kingdom of Meryath in glorious hex format.  It's 100% compatible with all the other maps.

I chose an appropriate projection for each of the maps: Stereographic for the Great Caldera, to show its shapes undistorted; Equirectangular for the world maps, to provide a familiar view; Albers Equal Area for the Meryath maps, including the hex map, to facilitate demographic calculations; and so on.

Of course, none of this matters if you just want to enjoy the maps for what they are.

Looking at everything together, I truly believe that Calidar: In Stranger Skies is a great product.  I am seriously looking forward to talking Calidar with all of you in the coming weeks and months.

You can bet I'll keep you updated on the release schedule.

Thanks for reading!

Great Caldera Poster Map Finished

Close to a year of work on the Great Caldera's overview map came to a head last weekend, and the map is finally complete, and entering the pre-print stage.

The area around Belledor's capital.

Exciting times for me, as this will be the first map I've ever had printed.  

Meanwhile, Bruce has posted two articles previewing the maps.  Part one covers the southern realms of the Great Caldera, while part two deals with the northern half.   He mostly concentrates on giving some background to the labels he devised for each nation.  It's a great read, with some tantalising hints of what is to come, as well as some classic Heardian humour.

I'd like to add a few comments about the creation of the art featured on these maps.

First up is the Belledor fragment at the top right, which depicts the area around Belledor's capital, Seahollow, in the province of Seafolk.

Grimsvik, capital of Nordheim.

The map is composed of numerous layers, which all come together to produce the terrain you see here.  At the base of everything is the height map, which I have posted about extensively already.  Suffice it to say that this map took about six months to design and erode at full resolution.  It is a 3D model, with sculpted mountains and valleys, rolling hills, and rivers meandering through the plains.  On top of this is a gradient map, colouring the terrain based on elevation, so that the plains and lowlands are light green, the hills are tan, and the mountains are grey-brown.  There are actually five or six of these gradient maps, allowing the painting of other terrain types such as grasslands, desert, swamp, and taiga on top of the plains.

What this means is that you can tell the elevation of any particular spot just by looking at the colours, and on the height model I can measure the exact height of any point on the map if necessary.  Mountains named on the larger scale maps (such as the hex map) refer to actual peaks visible on this map.

Central Caldwen.

Next come the sea and lake masks, and the rivers.  The sea is a simple mask derived from the base height map, coloured blue.  The rivers are also generated from the height map.  We decided on the general locations during the design process, and then let erosion create the exact shapes in a natural way.  For some areas — Alfdaín comes to mind — this took multiple attempts, and was a bit of a headache, but I'm very pleased with the final results.  Lakes were added to the height map after erosion; Bruce designed logical shapes that fit in with the river systems, and I dug them into the height map.

At this point, we haven't done any work on lake or sea beds.  That may come at some point in the future, but for now it's all just flat surfaces.

With the land and sea all done, the last three layer groups add lighting, texture, and overlays.  Lighting consists of a 3D render of the height model, which with transparency effects gives shape to the underlying terrain.  Texture is predominantly visible in the sea areas, and to a lesser extent on the land.  It is a parchment texture, designed to bring consistency to the map.  I chose not to also incorporate the colour of the parchment this time.

Alfdaín's capital, Mythuín.

Finally overlays refers to the graticule (the grid of latitude and longitude lines over the map), borders, roads, icons, scale, legend, and of course all the labels.  This layer sits on top of everything else.

I will post more about all of these things after the release.

For now, I am now putting all my efforts into the second poster map, the hex map of Meryath, which is also mostly done.  The finishing touches should be done by the end of the week.  After that, it's back to the internal maps.  These, too, are at an advanced stage of design.  Everything should come together within the next few weeks.  It will not be long now before you can hold the book and the maps in your hands.

Araldûr, home of the dwarves on Calidar.  This image shows almost exactly what the final map will look like.

Calidar Kickstarter Has Begun!

+Bruce Heard just hit the big green button, signalling the start of the Kickstarter.

This is it, folks.  This is what we've been working so hard over the past six or seven months to bring to you.  You can make it possible.

But let's not stop there: let's make it a massive success!  I want to still be reading new Calidar stories from Bruce ten years from now.

Vote with your feet, and opt in to the World of Calidar now.  We're counting on you.

Here's a freebie for you to enjoy - my latest test map of the Great Caldera.  You can see it on the Kickstarter page, too.  The final format has yet to be decided, but these one of the possibilities for the Great Caldera poster map.

The Great Caldera Topographic Map, Stereographic Projection

And here's a crop at 2/3 resolution...

Close-up of Araldûr from the map above

 The full size file has so much detail.  It's going to be a gorgeous poster map.

Close-up of Meryath from the map above

Thanks for supporting Calidar!