AAJ Interview Series 1: Jay_zer0
For the last couple months, I've been gradually working on editing and formatting entries submitted to the Antarctic Adventure Jam into a monstrous Antarctic Adventure Anthology. As a way of gently building up a bit of hype for the anthology, spotlighting its many contributors, and sharing the collective knowledge built up by this undertaking, I've been conducting short interviews with each participant.
This first installment is with Jay_zerO, who blogs at shifty louts and has an itch store here. Jay's entry is called the Eastern Cordillera & Western Shrublands, a densely-keyed and intricate region totaling a whopping 50,000 words!
Idraluna: What is your ttrpg background? How did you get started, and what games are you playing today?
Jay: I vaguely remember making/buying what I now know as 3.5e dnd books in middle school / early high school, but never played. Then, COVID happened, and I picked up Call of Cthulhu as I enjoyed more horror-based games, and through various games like CoC, Delta Green, Wolves Upon the Coast, Mausritter (and other Odd-likes), I eventually found my way to "OSR stuff" and back to ODnD in a circuitous way.
As for games I'm playing in now, I'm trying to be better at balancing playing/running stuff, so our ongoing Antarctica Open Table game, I just wrapped up a year+ long campaign using a heartbreaker of mine based on Harnworld, Bateman's Evil Labyrinth game, the Mausritter game I've been running for close friends, the occasional pick-up of Classic Trav, the sporadic Arduin Arcade stuff I run, or whatever seems to catch my eye.
Idraluna: Awesome, that is a truly stacked list of games. Moving on to your Antarctic entry, what tools (if any) did you use to write it? Any random tables or writing techniques you found particularly useful?
Jay: I used your Littlest Brown Book, https://mrjoshbear.net/odd-referee.html for stocking, Delving Deeper for creatures, https://idraluna-archives.bearblog.dev/gonzo-sci-fantasy-village-generator/ for town inspiration, and I sought out https://straitsofanian.blogspot.com/ for additional inspo alongside Basque names lol. Oh and Skerples Monster Overhaul too!
Idraluna: I think you probably had the highest words per day rate of any participant, I remember being shocked at how quickly you turned around an entry with 50 thousand words. What is your writing practice like, and do you have any productivity tips?
Jay: Haha, the English degree finally came in handy.
I tended to scope out my work from easiest in terms of creative lift to most difficult/time intensive. I found that monster lairs/treasure were easiest to accomplish, while towns/villages/polities fell in the "middle" in terms of creative lift, while dungeons were the most intensive to work on.
I did the tried and true method of slowly chipping away at it. Daily practice. Incrementalism and commitment over rushed sprints, which just meant setting a daily goal of finishing at least four entries while building notes for other entries so I would always have something to come back to and work on the next day.
Idraluna: I really like the idea of consciously building notes for new entries while finishing others. It definitely comes through in how interconnected the Cordillera and Shrublands are.
I think you just answered my next question, which was going to be "what part was easiest, and what part was hardest?" Your answer tracks pretty closely with my experience, minus the last paragraph (I'm a sprinter).
Something else I wanted to ask, touching on both your writing process and the inspirations you mentioned previously: your region has a very fleshed-out history and mythology which can be pieced together from the hex descriptions. Was that something that you decided on ahead of time, or did it grow as you were writing hexes?
Jay: I had some ideas of like, the Cordillera being vaguely Andean and Basque coded, but it eventually began to morph and develop into its own thing while writing it. But it was never this grand unified vision of "this is the culture/these are the polities". It was a more organic process that stemmed from the natural evolution of doing it rather than fussing with it from the outset
I still find myself (after having run some sessions, going back and editing things to reflect changes)
Idraluna: As you work on writing your next areas, are their things you are approaching differently based on your experience with the WS&EC?
Jay: So with the WS&EC being done, a lot of the creative lifts of monsters, lairs, and general setting things are essentially finalized, which has made keying things easier this go around, as the tracks have already been laid out, so to speak
This second time, however, I've been building a bit more entries around "Builder tech" written about within WS&EC and have been particularly inspired lately by Geoffrey McKinney's Carcosa for its entry terseness and relative lack of context.
With that as an inspirational north star, I've been writing more sparse entries for lairs in hopes that players rely more on SRD (surprise, reaction, distance) to inform encounter context. I've also been borrowing from its robot table, Ultraviolet Grassland/Luka Rejic stuff alongside a few 76 Patron book Traveller missions to help inspire hex entries.
All that said, the process for writing is still the same: chip away at the low-hanging fruit with more sparse writing while saving the "deeper" hexes for more creative input. I'm certainly going to grapple with how to wrangle the near 100-room air temple dungeon haha.
It has been nice to allow things to percolate a bit more without the deadline hanging over me, but I feel as if I'm still making fairly good progress
Idraluna: I'm really excited to see the outputs of the robot table (along with the rest of it)
Penultimate question: if you had to pick one hex as your favorite, what would it be and why?
Jay: Oh, that's a tough question. I would say I have a few, 😩
I really liked writing the few hexes in the authorial voice of NPC Professor DuBoig, as it allowed for a different timbre and change of pace.
169-569 The Sylphid Spirit, Maitalemorea, 178-568 The Two Cubs, and 177-589 The Guilt Giving Behera Goitik are all personal favs as well
Idraluna: Awesome. And concluding question: Other than your blog and itch.io, and projects or links you want to plug?
Jay: I hope to put some more stuff out on itch sometime in the future, but I don't have anything pressing to plug. I just hope that people enjoy the entire AAJ project.