"At the Mountains of Madness" Antarctic Map

When I first had the idea for the Miskatonic Antarctic Expedition patches I was worried that the things would never sell and I'd be out a couple of hundred bucks when all was said and done. Luckily, that project turned out to be a huge success. This is what I'd like to do as a follow up:



Here's a closeup of the area roughly marked in red. Considering this is an area of about 1.5" by 2.5" on the original the hand engraved details are simply amazing. Click through on the thumbnail to see the full version:



It's a 17.5" x 22.5" map of Antarctica based on the one done by John Bartholomew for the 1922 "Times Survey Atlas of the World". Original copies of the map can be found on Ebay for anywhere from $30-$60 depending on condition, which is how I obtained mine. There's even a reproduction available from Euriskodata, a great Ebay seller that offers incredible collections of public domain books on CD that would be of interest to "Call of Cthulhu" players. You can view his listing for the map here. It's priced at just $9.99, which is very reasonable, but it does have the drawback of being a direct scan with a very visible fold line running down the middle of the map. That said, it's still a great prop as-is for anyone running "Beyond the Mountains of Madness".

My version is based on the same source map, but with the resulting scan cleaned up and the fold line down the middle of the original removed. Over the next couple of days I'll be getting some figures on how much it's going to cost to do a limited run and deciding if it's economically justifiable. Again, I want to emphasize that my whole goal is to make affordable props for "Call of Cthulhu" gamers. To me that means $10 or less. At this point I know I can produce copies for $15 using an on-demand printer with a large-format plotter. Going through a traditional printer would bring the cost down under the $10 price point, but it's also going to require a pretty substantial initial investment that I have some doubts about earning back.

Since you're the target customer, what do you think? If I can offer the cleaned up map for around $7-$9 plus shipping would you be interested? Would you prefer it plain, as pictured above, or would you find one stamped "Property Miskatonic University Antarctic Expedition" more collectible? Please leave a comment or send me an email with your thoughts.

Update: From the feedback I've received so far it looks like there's some definite interest in a map, but not enough to justify an actual print run. From the email conversations I've had people would prefer a heavily themed ATMOM map (Misktonic ownership stamp, scribbled notes, actual plot of story locations) over a plain version, so I'll see about offering something along those lines sometime in the future.

Update: A PDF file of the map is now available at Scribd. Keep in mind that it's 89 megs in size, so it will likely take some time to download.

I Give You...Cthulhu!

Well, I'm not the one giving it to you, but I do have a link to a cool little papercraft Cthulhu model from One Monk Miniatures.



They also have hundreds of other paper miniatures for your tabletop including about two dozen additional freebies. I like the "Deep Ones" set in particular.

Arcane Circle

Nothing fancy today, just an arcane circle you can use to dress up your blasphemous tome or scroll. As always, just click through for the full sized version.

If At First You Don't Succeed, Part Four

The saga continues! You can see the first three parts of project here: Part One, Part Deux, Part Three.

My walnut ink crystals finally arrived, so it's time to tackle aging my paper. The crystals themselves are a fine, black granular powder that reminds me of the instant tea powder I've used to acid age documents in the past. The difference being, at least if the tutorial pages I linked to earlier are accurate, that the ink produced when you mix the crystals with water is actually a brown dye instead of the tannic acid solution produced by tea.

After mixing a heaping tablespoon of the crystals with two cups of warm water I waited the recommended half hour and then started the aging process. Most of the tutorials I've seen for aging paper use a shallow baking pan to hold the aging solution, but I prefer to do the entire process on a glass cutting board with a pebbled texture. I saturate a sponge with the walnut ink and then swab down the cutting board with it to create a layer of liquid on the glass. Then I carefully lay my paper, in this case a 12 x 18 sheet of heavyweight drawing paper, on the sheet.

As the fibers in the paper begin to absorb the ink already on the glass I use my sponge to dampen the top of the paper. Once the sheet is fully saturated I carefully lift it off the glass and then re-apply it so that it "sticks" to the glass, using the sponge to press out any air bubbles trapped under the paper. When I'm done with this step I have a smooth sheet of wet paper that is effectively molded to the glass sheet.



See that excess liquid in the lower left hand corner? After taking this picture I went around the paper and sponged all that extra ink up. Then I walked away for a half hour and let osmosis and surface tension distribute the ink across the paper while it began to dry.

When I came back the paper was still damp, but well on the way to drying out. At this stage I did the final grunging of the sheet, splattering it with some fine droplets of bleach and a sprinkling of ink crystals. I didn't snap any pictures of this step, being leery of handling a camera with water, bleach, and fine ink crystals on my gloves, but the results looked terrible. All blotchy and nasty looking. Trust me, this is normal and nothing to worry about- as the paper dries those nasty variations will naturally tone down. After finishing the grunging treatment I went to bed, leaving the paper to dry overnight.

The next morning, this was the result:



I liked it. I liked it a lot. The paper had a wonderful mottled appearance with specks of faux-foxing from the ink crystals, while the edges of the sheet had an absolutely perfect oxidation effect from the ink being wicked there while the sheet dried. I'm so happy with that edge treatment that I'm not going to go through with the deckled finish I had planned on earlier.

Before I run the sheet through the printer I do have to do a little prep work. First, I use a stiff brush to remove any paper or ink residue from the surface of the paper. Then I use the steam from a tea kettle to lightly dampen the paper and press it under some books to make sure it's flat and won't jam on the way through. After all that I finally print out my scroll for summoning Deep Ones:

Arkham Sanitarium Case Notes

I don't know how I missed this back in July when he first put it up, but Derek Mayne has posted a handy PDF of an Arkham Sanitarium admission form. Be sure to poke around while you're there- he has a ton of cool resources.

1855 Antarctic Map

I probably won't be able to post anything tomorrow, so I wanted to get this up today.

Not to give any spoilers, but if you're running an adventure that might be enhanced by a map of Antarctica from the mid 1800's this may be useful. As usual, click through for the full size version. It's around 11" by 12" at 300 dpi and should be printed out on at least an 11" by 17" sheet of paper. Smaller than that and the writing becomes difficult to read. It even comes pre-aged!



Spoilers Ahead!





Spoilers Ahead!




You have been warned!




During the running of "Beyond the Mountains of Madness" this map was included with the papers relating to Mr. Pym's long lost scribblings, with "It changed!" scrawled on the back.

Update: In response to an emailed question, this isn't something I created. It's a scan of an actual map.

If At First You Don't Succeed, Part Three

My supply of walnut ink crystals is still in transit, so I won't be distressing my "Ponape Scriptures" project today.

Instead, I want to work on the actual graphic and try fixing the problems that were bugging me over the weekend. Before I start I want to make one thing clear- I'm not an artist. I don't have any training in art and don't have any particular talent for it, but I ended up doing stuff like this because no one else was making the things I wanted. So if you think I'm full of crap, or you have a better way of doing things, please feel free to drop me a line with some pointers. You're not going to hurt my feelings by pointing out I'm a hack. I know I am. Part of the fun for me is that I just keep hack, hack, hackin' till I get the results I want.

That said, here's the original graphic:



It's not bad, but I just wasn't happy with the end result. It looks like something produced by a desktop publishing program instead of an eldritch scroll written with squid ink using a sharpened fish spine for a pen. To break it up a bit more I'm going to try a couple of different things. First, a fourth graphic element, some kind of astronomical calculator or orrery, to break up the blocky layout. Second, the overly-large font needs to be toned down a bit while the layout of the text needs to be more irregular. Third, the text itself needs to look more natural and hand-written. Here's what I came up with after fiddling around for a while:



Much better. The text looks hand-written without looking like a meaningless scrawl and the orrery figure at the top really breaks things up and adds some visual interest. The only problem is that it still looks too fresh and clean. Realistically, those blocks of solid black ink need to have some fading and flaking added. A little blur, a little noise, some texture, and we get this:



It might look too light in pure black and white, but that's won't be a problem when it's printed on the aged paper. In my experience solid black ink looks far more jarring and artificial.