Landscapes for Writers and Game Masters


Book Description

Landscape science tells fascinating stories, whether in fiction or a role-playing game. Earth's varied terrain provides many examples of scene-specific challenges and resources for story characters, with distinctive land features, compelling locations, and intriguing traits. Landslides, floods, coastal erosion, glacier movement, and volcanism can deliver fresh plot points and alter the social character of an imagined region. Characters traveling different river types encounter very different puzzles, opportunities, and combat environments and the same variety awaits within other classic settings, such as caves, mountains, deserts, shorelines, and volcanic zones. Atypical landscapes such as tundra, karst, and vast glacier surfaces can breathe fresh air into any stories. This handbook is a reference source for creative writing and game world building. It delves deeply into many landscape characteristics that help set the tone, shape character behavior, and drive the plot. Chapters are divided into diverse geographic environments, from rivers and shorelines to caves and volcanoes, and show how knowledge of the terrain can deliver plot points, add veracity, pose key problems, establish conflict, and lead into the next scene. Discover how authors and game masters effectively weave land and terrain into their stories.




Landscapes for Writers and Game Masters


Book Description

Landscape science tells fascinating stories, whether in fiction or a role-playing game. Earth's varied terrain provides many examples of scene-specific challenges and resources for story characters, with distinctive land features, compelling locations, and intriguing traits. Landslides, floods, coastal erosion, glacier movement, and volcanism can deliver fresh plot points and alter the social character of an imagined region. Characters traveling different river types encounter very different puzzles, opportunities, and combat environments and the same variety awaits within other classic settings, such as caves, mountains, deserts, shorelines, and volcanic zones. Atypical landscapes such as tundra, karst, and vast glacier surfaces can breathe fresh air into any stories. This handbook is a reference source for creative writing and game world building. It delves deeply into many landscape characteristics that help set the tone, shape character behavior, and drive the plot. Chapters are divided into diverse geographic environments, from rivers and shorelines to caves and volcanoes, and show how knowledge of the terrain can deliver plot points, add veracity, pose key problems, establish conflict, and lead into the next scene. Discover how authors and game masters effectively weave land and terrain into their stories.




A New Garden Ethic


Book Description

In a time of climate change and mass extinction, how we garden matters more than ever: “An outstanding and deeply passionate book.” —Marc Bekoff, author of The Emotional Lives of Animals Plenty of books tell home gardeners and professional landscape designers how to garden sustainably, what plants to use, and what resources to explore. Yet few examine why our urban wildlife gardens matter so much—not just for ourselves, but for the larger human and animal communities. Our landscapes push aside wildlife and in turn diminish our genetically programmed love for wildness. How can we get ourselves back into balance through gardens, to speak life's language and learn from other species? Benjamin Vogt addresses why we need a new garden ethic, and why we urgently need wildness in our daily lives—lives sequestered in buildings surrounded by monocultures of lawn and concrete that significantly harm our physical and mental health. He examines the psychological issues around climate change and mass extinction as a way to understand how we are short-circuiting our response to global crises, especially by not growing native plants in our gardens. Simply put, environmentalism is not political; it's social justice for all species marginalized today and for those facing extinction tomorrow. By thinking deeply and honestly about our built landscapes, we can create a compassionate activism that connects us more profoundly to nature and to one another.




The Game Masters of Garden Place


Book Description

A quirky Dungeons & Dragons-inspired adventure that will appeal to gamers and readers of the Mr. Lemoncello's Library series. What if your favorite fantasy game characters showed up on your doorstep IRL? Sixth graders Ralph, Jojo, Noel, Persephone, and Cammi are hooked on fantasy tabletop role-playing games. When they somehow manage to summon their characters to Ralph's house, things take a truly magical turn! The five are soon racing around town on a wild adventure that tests their both their RPG skills and their friendship. Will Ralph and crew be able to keep their characters out of trouble? Trying to convince a sticky-fingered halfling rogue not to pickpocket or a six-foot-five barbarian woman that you don't always have to solve conflicts with a two-handed broadsword is hard enough. How will they ever send the adventurers back to their mystical realm? "Epic...for young fans of Stranger Things."--SLJ "An exciting new adventure exploring friendship...[with] often humorous commentary on social issues."--Booklist "Both funny and heartfelt...[The Game Masters of Garden Place] has as much to offer diehard fans as it does newcomers to fantasy role-playing."--Bulletin




Re:direction


Book Description

An extraordinary resource for practitioners and students of directing providing a collection of ground-breaking interviews, primary sources and essays on twentieth century directing theories and practices around the world.




Archaeogaming


Book Description

A general introduction to archeogaming describing the intersection of archaeology and video games and applying archaeological method and theory into understanding game-spaces. “[T]he author’s clarity of style makes it accessible to all readers, with or without an archaeological background. Moreover, his personal anecdotes and gameplay experiences with different game titles, from which his ideas often develop, make it very enjoyable reading.”—Antiquity Video games exemplify contemporary material objects, resources, and spaces that people use to define their culture. Video games also serve as archaeological sites in the traditional sense as a place, in which evidence of past activity is preserved and has been, or may be, investigated using the discipline of archaeology, and which represents a part of the archaeological record. From the introduction: Archaeogaming, broadly defined, is the archaeology both in and of digital games... As will be described in the following chapters, digital games are archaeological sites, landscapes, and artifacts, and the game-spaces held within those media can also be understood archaeologically as digital built environments containing their own material culture... Archaeogaming does not limit its study to those video games that are set in the past or that are treated as “historical games,” nor does it focus solely on the exploration and analysis of ruins or of other built environments that appear in the world of the game. Any video game—from Pac-Man to Super Meat Boy—can be studied archaeologically.




Essential Techniques of Landscape Drawing


Book Description

This beginner's guide to drawing in graphite pencil uses step-by-step exercises to teach fundamental methods for rendering all aspects of the natural landscape, with additional lessons on using charcoal, colored pencil, pastel, and other media. Following in the footsteps of author, artist, and art instructor Suzanne Brooker's previous title The Elements of Landscape Oil Painting, this book pairs the most universally-pursued topic for artists (drawing) with the popular subject matter of the natural landscape. Brooker breaks down landscapes into their various elements--including the earth, water, air, and trees--to convey how the fundamentals of drawing are applied to capture each aspect. Using the graphite pencil as her baseline instrument, Brooker provides you with step-by-step lessons that help you improve your rendering skills and re-create the beauty of the world outdoors. Examples from art history and contemporary masters supplement these lessons. The end result is a drawing instruction book that provides artists with everything they need to render landscapes no matter their skill level.




Figures in a Landscape


Book Description

The Sunday Times bestseller Paul Theroux collects a rich feast of his writing and essays - from travel to personal memoir - published all together here for the first time Drawing together a fascinating body of writing from over 14 years of work, Figures in a Landscape ranges from profiles of cultural icons (Oliver Sacks, Elizabeth Taylor, Robin Williams) to intimate personal remembrances; from thrilling adventures in Africa to literary writings from Theroux's rich and expansive personal reading. Collectively these pieces offer a fascinating portrait of the author himself, his extraordinary life, restless and ever-curious mind.




The Organised Writer


Book Description

The Organised Writer is a practical, no-nonsense system that allows you as an author to write without worrying about administration, business affairs, or scheduling, because you know those non-writing tasks will be dealt with at the right time. This straight-talking guide will help you become more productive, cope with multiple projects, and make time within your life to write - while also dealing with non-writing tasks more efficiently. It includes advice on how to: · Manage your schedule · Prioritise your writing time · Take notes effectively · Work with a 'clean mind' · Get more written every day · Deal effectively with non-writing tasks · Set up a foolproof filing system · Organise your working space Read the book, then spend a weekend setting up the system described, and you'll make the time back with interest. You'll get more written every day and complete more of your non-writing tasks without being overwhelmed by all the things you have to do, forgot to do, or don't want to do.




Reflective Landscapes of the Anglophone Countries


Book Description

Too many landscapes have been reduced to silent commodities by being put into golden frames on top of our fireplaces. Too many landscapes have been reified by being considered as objects holding forth referents to an omnipotent looker-on, with his/her language ever ready to seize and transcribe. The articles gathered here, prolonging an international conference held at the University of Caen Basse-Normandie (France), 14-16 June 2007, set the landscapes loose again by engaging with their essentially relational quality. What makes this volume particularly stimulating and critically innovative is this initial acknowledgement of a landscape's reflectiveness - that is the fact that it contains unthought thought, and thus presents itself to us both passively and actively. This straightaway appraisal of the lines of flight in the seemingly static, tranquil images facing us, has opened the way to deeply critical readings bent on questioning old tracks, testing new itineraries, denying the closure of the subject. At the same time, and by way of consequence, it leads us to encounter the force in landscape. A force like an energy, an impetus, which makes it possible - if not advisable - to still compose, read and enjoy landscapes in the XXIst century.