The publisher of D&D co-founder Gary Gygax, Troll Lord games, reports that Mr. Gygax died today in his home at age 69. For more information, go to:

http://www.freeyabb.com/phpbb/viewtopic.php?t=4373&mforum=trolllordgames

Ernest Gary Gygax, one of the most influential figures in gaming, died early this morning at his home in Lake Geneva, Wis. Gygax was 69. The earliest report appeared on his publisher, Troll Lord Games’, forum.

Born July 27, 1938, Gygax is best-known as the co-creator of the seminal role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons with Dave Arneson. Beginning his career in the 1960s, Gygax wrote and had published more than 80 games, game products, and books. He founded the Gen Con gaming convention, which began as a gathering of wargames enthusiasts at the Gygax home in 1967, and co-founded games publisher TSR, Inc. (originally Tactical Studies Rules) in 1973.

Often known as the “father of role-playing,” Gygax co-created the Chainmail miniatures rules which led to the development of Dungeons & Dragons. He also wrote or co-wrote, among many other games and game supplements, the World of Greyhawk fantasy campaign setting, Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, Gamma World, Boot Hill and other role-playing games. He authored several novels and was the co-producer of the Dungeons & Dragons cartoon show for television.

Gygax had previously suffered from strokes and a near-heart attack; no cause of death has been officially announced as yet.

That said, I have not forgotten about the “How To Organize Your Research” article I promised. I am still going to do it, but in a slightly more expanded way than originally intended.

When you’re getting ready to write, you’ve done a bunch of world building. For the most part, your research should be done. Of course, things always pop up while you’re working on a chapter that you didn’t expect. So what do you do? Do you stop writing and research, or keep moving ahead, leaving yourself a note for when you do your revisions.

In almost all situations, I would recommend forging ahead, and doing the research later. You don’t want to get bogged down and distracted by all the neat things you’ll discover, and the tangents you’ll end up following. It’d be nice if I could follow my own advice, isn’t it.

In working on the script for the Domino Girls, the ghost of a Confederate Army Colonel is being added to the mix. He’s about to introduce himself to the twins, and I suddenly realized I know next to nothing about manners and etiquette from that time period. This is one situation, though, where I can’t just forge ahead. This information will affect everything have this character do from now on, so I can’t avoid it. I have to stop working on the script and do some research.

This is where my old habit of buying reference books for the sake of buying them usually comes in handy. I have a copy of Everyday Life During the Civil War, so I go grab it off the shelf and start looking through it. Lots of info about prices, clothing, and everyday life, but nothing about manners and etiquette.

My Google-Fu is with me tonight, and I find a number of useful links. One of them has links to a site that has scanned in copies of manuscripts in the collections of Robarts library at the University of Toronto. I manage to stop myself after downloading half a dozen etiquette primers (and believe me, that’s quite a feat - having broadband makes it waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay too easy to feed my research material addiction). Now I have to read through them all and hopefully find what I need.

Still, there is a point where I will have to draw the line, stop researching and start writing again. If I haven’t found what I need, I’ll just fake it, saying he’s been watching what’s going on for the past two hundred years and had learned the changes in manners, and that will explain why it’s not 100% accurate.

What do you do when you discover while writing that you need to do more research?

If you can get a hold of it, the Forgotten Realms Interactive Atlas (FRIA)has many cities - real cities in it. Waterdeep in particular is a very large city that should be a suitable model for what you’re speaking of.

My suggestion is to in a piece of paper, start with the *sketch* of a hamlet. Think about why it’s there, and how the people made their living. The roads, if there even are any will go around trees, hills and large rocks. There’ll probably be a “village green” or something, etc. Either keep using that paper, or a duplicate if you want to keep history, grow the hamlet into a town Make it bigger but don’t change a lot of the original portion. Think about events in the history of the city - has it ever been sacked? If so, destroy a few things.

Now you’ve got a town, time to grow again into a small city. Put in some walls, destroy parts of the town to make way for public works like “city hall” etc. Straighten some of the roads that wandered around things like trees and rocks - leave the ones that wandered around hills, destroy buildings as needed to do this. Occasionally, just leave the twisty way there, AND make a straight one too. Build more buildings, and more and straighter roads. Remember, people don’t really like walking around the block to get to the other side, so leave spaces and back yards in your city at this stage.

Time to crowd your city. Within the walls, start filling in empty spaces with buildings and more buildings. What used to be back yards and paths to “cut across” blocks become alley ways between new buildings only feet from each other. You should still be thinking about the primary industries going on in the city, but there should be other industries moving in as well by now, so allow for them. As the city grows, so will its commerce. If it’s coastal, add docks and warehouses, and “dive bars” along the waterfront. Rip down things as needed to make room for them. If that leaves a blind alley, so be it.

Now the city is too crowded, build more city close to the walls & gates outside. Destroy some random spots in the city, build something new. Leave a little “ruins” in some of the more crowded sections of town. People want their space, and want protection, but they can not have both. Inside the walls is still more desirable than outside, tear down large swaths of “individual” buildings and construct row-homes instead. This will result in alley after alley that used to cut across the block instead ending at the back of a building. Wealthy merchants will likely take over a block here & there, clear the block & put up a wall & nice house. They tend to congregate together for security to to associate with their peers – keep them clustered.

Time to grow some more, The city planners decide to build a new wall. New walls are expensive, so they’re going to build it as small as they can get away with while still leaving a little room for expansion. Draw a new city wall, Breach the old one in lots of places as the stone will be scavenged for other construction projects. You may even turn the old wall into a road. What was previously poor land outside the walls along the main roads is now expensive land, The poor are shunted away from the main roads - build “shanty” town in between the main gates. Consider whether there is enough external threat to have the city build a fortress somewhere. If there is a large enough threat, a fortress may even exist prior to this point. The rich will move out into the larger spaces, so convert some of their older good places to live into multiple “middle class” buildings, and a few of the closest to the “rest of the city” into solid masses of buildings tacked onto the original main house.

Just keep growing in this manner until you get to the size you want. Keep in mind changes in government, the “revitalization projects”, “public works” like fountains and parks, and the acquisition of properties by the wealthy. Erase & overwrite as you go. Don’t be shy. Bear in mind that old fortresses can be abandoned and new ones built elsewhere, but it’s expensive. More likely, the old fortress will become a city guard barracks, prison, or other “public” building. Also, somewhere along this time, the city will realize it needs to do something about sanitation. The open-channels in the streets in the “old city” might have been OK when the city was small, but out here, they’re going to build sewers to do things right while they have the chance. They may even extend some of them through the old city if there’s a port, river, or other good way to get things “flowing out of the city” off in that direction - or if there’s a particularly wealthy merchant still over there.

Keep reusing the same paper (or copies). The sketch will become more and more detailed. As it does, it will come to the point when it’s time to put it into CC just because it’s easier to edit there than to keep erasing paper. I like to think out the whole life-cycle in broad terms before I sit down in CC so I know where the tangled mazes of alleyways are, where the planned streets are, where the “rich” live, and where things are not so pleasant. The REAL / CURRENT roads are actually simply a result of how the city grew. Where did people need to travel between to do their business, and what was the current shortest route at each stage of the cities life?

What I’m basically saying is that a truly large city is an incredible amount of work. But when you’re done, you know WHY any given part of the city looks the way it does. In one city, “Taris” I even went so far as to make a coordinate system and and index of every business and place of note in the city, listing the coordinates in the index, and having a cross-reference to the page number of the place description. 154.5×12 = Golden Eagle Inn pg:33. 155×12 = Harls Blacksmithy pg:38. etc - with the place descriptions themselves listed alphabetically and noting their coordinates on the map. Unfortunately for me, that was long before CC-DOS even came out and it’s just a huge binder of paper I hadn’t the heart to redo. Taris has been used at one point or another in 5 campaigns.

I did do a town to this detail - Garvuns Rest. But that campaign died out when the entire party of first level adventurers all killed themselves trying to cross a series of 20′ deep pits with undead at the bottom. Why they didn’t destroy the undead from above (shooting fish in a barrel) before trying to cross the pits, I don’t know… …they had the time… …and when the player says “I can only fail my balance check on a 1″ well… …Murphy is always listening.

Or, alternatively - you can try to go straight for the end-run. I find I’m much happier knowing why the city is laid out as it is, and that you wind up with more “real” mazes of alley and streets if you “grew” the city instead of just “building” it. If you go for the end-run, start big and get smaller and smaller. Which sections of the city are more open? Which more crowded? Draw mazes of streets, then fill in every nook and cranny with a building to create your alleys and dead-ends in the crowded areas of town. As you go, plan - how do the people living on this block make their living? Where do they work? Where do they get their food? Where do they go on a date with their girl/boyfriend?

I hope everyone has a great weekend, and see you on Monday!

(fingers crossed)