Please welcome to Farsight Blogger Simon Powell of the rather excellent Dramascape, 'A wonderland of maps and adventures' for your tabletop games.
1 - Perhaps you'd like to tell us a little bit about
yourself?
I’m 49 and live in Newport South Wales UK, I’ve been a bit
of a Jack of all trades through my life, from Army to Shop Manager and lastly
Fork Lift Instructor. I had to retire 8 years ago due to ill health and had to
look for something to occupy my days.
2 - Tell us about your gaming history - what got you into
the wonderful world of tabletop?
In my early 20’s I discovered a little shop in Newport
called Armchair Adventures, it had lots of wonderful games and figures, after a
while of popping into the shop and attending the Dragondaze conventions they
ran yearly, in a small hall, I got invited to join in with a group playing
Warhammer Fantasy, and that spurred me onto running my own games, I discovered
Earthdawn and used to run that weekly at the local gaming club and enjoyed
participating in the RedBrick forums.
3 - What is it about the tabletop hobby that attracts you?
What do you enjoy most when playing a game?
No matter how your week has been, you can emerge yourself
into your character and forget all your troubles; you can enjoy the social
interaction of like-minded people who tend to think above the level of “normal”
folks. As a gamemaster you enjoy watching the players characters develop and
solve the problems set before them, and of course the constant bribing the GM
with cups of tea and snacks always helps.
4 - What's your favourite game? What games that are out
there at the moment float your boat?
I must say that my favourite game is Earthdawn, it’s the
diverse world that’s based on past earth and the way that the dice are open
ended so that anything can happen, the dragon can be slain with the lucky shot
and of course the totally unlucky can happen too.
5 - Do you still get time to play? What are you playing at
the moment?
Unfortunately due to my illness my brain doesn’t work well
in live situations and I’m not always well enough to attend regular events. So
I’m not currently playing anything but I like to keep an eye on all the new
developments in the RPG world.
6 - The tabletop hobby has been through a lot changes over
the years and it seems that its death-knell is always sounded when newer
hobbies come along such as computer games. It still seems to be able to hold
it’s own, though – what do you see happening to the hobby in the future? What changes,
if any, do you think will have to be made to ensure its survival?
I think that family interaction through board and RPG games
is still as important as it always was; it’s up to us to teach the youngsters
what we learnt at their age. There does seem to be a reemergence of board
gaming, and especially war games, its seem the be the “eye candy” games that
work well and those based on products that are already known to the public,
like Star Wars and such.
Virtual technology is also helping restart the gaming scene,
we have now copied the MMOG strategy that seems so popular these days, with
Virtual Table Tops, players from all over the world can sit down and play games
with each other over the internet, with software such as RPMaptools,
Battlegrounds and Roll20. I think one of the reasons that DramaScape has been
so successful is that we provide a Virtual copy of each map we produce so that
it can be used online.
One of the things we have tried to do with our maps is to
move away from the traditional hand drawn cartoony look, we have tried to make
our maps look realistic and give them the computer game feel.
7 - Out of all your projects, what are you most proud of?
At the moment my favourite map is the Asylum, it’s a five
level Victorian style mansion converted into an institution to hold
indefinitely the mentally disturbed. The five levels include a basement, three
main floors, and an attic each with multiple rooms, this was great fun to
create and we worked alongside Aaron Huss from Savage Insider who was looking
for a map for an adventure he was writing.
8 - Tell us more about Dramascape; what was the inspiration
for creating these wonderful floorplans, what goes into creating them and what
are your inspirations?
I have always tried to include maps when I was
gamemastering, they say a picture speaks a thousand words and a well-drawn map
enhances the gaming experience. I found Dundjinni many years ago and used it to
produce my maps. One of the things that I started to use to occupy my time now
I’m not working was digital art and after producing a few fan images for
RedBrick I was asked to produce some covers, this was something that I really
enjoyed, after a while I approached RedBrick and proposed the idea of running a
map company within the RedBrick umbrella, and thus DramaScape was born. We went
solo in May 2012 when Redbrick closed down.
I met Steven J Black and Vidar Edland who are also part of
DramaScape while I was creating images for the RedBrick products and they
joined in with me, Steven is the Assistant Manager and writer and Vidar is a
writer and editor for us.
The maps are created through 3d modeling, we use high end
software to create the scenes sometime making the models ourselves, the scenes
are then rendered and put up on our development forum where Steven and Vidar
look over them and decide what works and what doesn’t, when we finally have a
completed image Steven then writes the descriptions and plot hooks for them,
these are then edited by Vidar, I then sort out the layout and then publish
them on Onebookshelf. Sometime if we are inspired this process can be very
fast, we have gone from inspiration to published product in one day on a few
products.
We also like to listen carefully to our Facebook community
and if there is a map that they want us to produce we will do our best to
create it, these always sell well.
We produce a free map each month and we have found this has
done well in introducing people to our product range.
9 - What are you working on at the moment?
We are currently working on a Savage Worlds source book
called Tribes of Yggdrasil, this is based on a series of books by Best Selling
Canadian Author Hugh Long, it’s a sci-fi setting based on the idea that the
Norse Gods are real and that they seeded life on Earth and several planets
around the Galaxy.
We are also producing a series of cards for use with the
Savage Worlds system, our first one was the Savage Worlds SciFi Weapons Cards and we have a Sci-Fi NPC set in the works too.
We are also working with a few writers to produce a series
of generic adventures based on our current and future maps.
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