Idraluna Archives

AAJ Reflection 2: The Future of The Antarctic Adventure Jam

The countdown on itch.io for the Antarctic Adventure Jam has run down. The jam is thus "over". Participants in the jam keyed areas covering nearly 5,000 hexes, an area roughly the size of Japan, Germany, or Zimbabwe. Total word count is roughly 261,000, just shy of Ulysses, longer than Moby Dick, but still shorter than any given entry in ASOIAF.

So what's next?

(Finished areas are in green, but note that there are quite a few WIP zones that aren't depicted here.)

What's Next

  1. The work of keying the entire map continues. Anyone can join the jam and contribute some hexes at any time (see below).
  2. The material written for AAJ will be distributed and turned into something other people can use to run games, with the following considerations:
    • Level of coordination between entries varies fairly widely: some make extensive use of the shared bestiary, others are more-or-less standalone; some have setting-specific lore, others are more agnostic; many are written for generic OSR games, but others have a specific game in mind. Any presentation of the entries needs to be honest about the fact that entries do not form a fully coherent whole; GMs running an Antarctic campaign will need to adapt and improvise.
    • Development of the antarctic setting is ongoing, some regions are finished but many are still WIP. The map will have a mix of finished & WIP areas for the foreseeable future.
    • In terms of values, I want to go against the grain of consumerism and commodification in the hobby. The Antarctic Hexcrawl will always be free, and I'd prefer to focus on things that make it playable over things that make it look nice on someone's shelf. It should follow the Palimpsest principles.

Publication

With the above in mind, I have the following publication plan:

The Webmap

Technically, the results of the jam are already published. EvilTables wrote and hosted a beautiful Webmap which is more than adequate to run any of the submitted jam entries. Full descriptions are given for each hex (click the symbols for a pop-up), and dungeons can be accessed in a separate tab. The collaborative bestiary has a tab as well.

We've discussed some further improvements, including better auto-linking to bestiary entries, more cross-references, and possibly more tools for annotating the map. We don't have a timeline for these, however.

In terms of content, the webmap will always have the "latest release", including WIP hexes from unfinished regions.

Anthology PDF & POD

I will also be making an Antarctic Adventure Anthology available as a pdf and print-on-demand. I personally prefer running games off of physical documents, and have always fantasized about having a hefty book that lands on the table with a satisfying whumph.

The Anthology will be the "stable release", only containing fully finished & proofread regions. It will be updated whenever a significant amount of new material is available, and will get an unambiguous version/edition number each time this happens.

Because I'm working from markdown files, the layout of the Anthology will be fairly minimal, more or less the same as what I used for Zurth. The layout of an individual page will be procedurally generated in Typst (no snazzy control-panel layouts or text wrapping around an illustration). My priorities are compactness (to not waste paper & needlessly inflate POD price), accessibility/readability, and print-friendliness -- once those are locked in, I'm open to making it more fancy & stylish.

An example spread from Zurth.

For the physical POD, I'm planning on offering it at-cost through Lulu (which I'm most familiar with), but may also look into DriveThru & Amazon. Depending on the resulting size, it may also make sense to split it into multiple volumes.

Individual Releases

Participants are welcome & encouraged to create stand-alone layouts for their entries. Some individual releases are below, I strongly encourage supporting them with purchase/download/reviews:

Continuing Development

Publication aside, there are lots of hexes left to fill. After the jam, I'm actually more sanguine about the possibility of keying the entire map. There are 110,000 hexes, but if we exclude some interior steppe/tundra areas, there are only about 65,000 hexes in areas that make sense to write keys for.1 If we take a relaxed approach to stocking density and key 1-in-10 hexes,2 that's only 6,500 key entries, and we've already written nearly 2,000. I may or may not succeed at rallying the effort needed to write the next 4,500 entries, but I think it's firmly in the realm of the possible.

Here's how that will work:

Submitting Material Post-jam

For those who missed out on the jam, feel free to join the Antarctic Adventure Jam discord server & sign up for some hexes to fill (you'll be joining quite a few participants still working on their entries). I'm going to keep the server open indefinitely3 & will be around to take in any material, so long as it follows the rules:

  1. No nazis, transphobes, or other variety of bigot.
  2. No AI.
  3. Entries must be written for a game that can be played for free, and must not violate said game's license for third-party adventures.
  4. Entries must be licensed CC-BY-SA or CC0
  5. (New) entries must have at least one tie-in with someone else's entry.4

Generally, without a fixed deadline I am slightly more reluctant to hand out really big areas -- I strongly recommend keying smaller regions, one at a time. But if you have a vision for a really big swathe of hexes, that's fine too.

ALSO there are lots of ways to be part of the project without claiming a region:

One thing I cannot stress enough is that NO CONTRIBUTION IS TOO SMALL. Even a single hex in the wilderness is something a future GM could build a whole campaign around. The more written material we have, however incongruous, the easier it is to fill in the blanks.

Future Jams

For those who like the itch.io jam format (and/or benefit from having a deadline), I will run one or more shorter jams in the future. Probably lasting 3 months, long enough to put out a decent little region but short enough to keep from dragging on and on.

My Own Plans

I intend to keep keying hexes for as long as I can -- I'm ride or die, baby! Up next, I have a small region in progress based on my first Antarctic campaign, which I hope to finish by the time the Anthology is ready.

  1. To be clear, I think it's worth placing points of interest in the tundra, but I don't think it needs to be treated as a conventional hexcrawl. It's good if these places feel vast and empty.↩

  2. I have reasons for thinking this type of low-density stocking is not only justified but desirable, but I'll save it for another post.↩

  3. Pending Discord pulling more age-verification bullshit, I'm looking loosely at options for migrating if needed.↩

  4. To be clear, creative freedom remains a top priority --- I intend for this rule to be very loose. But now that there is a sizable corpus of written material, I want new material to have some connection to it, be it a monster, faction, NPC, spell, or bit of lore.↩

#aaj