Creator Spotlight: Anekdota Press
Map Series
Meet the Creator: Michael
Give us a quick overview of what you make!
Originally it was just ship diagrams/maps/battlemaps for TTRPGs, with background and contextual information on the vessel, the vessel’s operation, and crew. Stuff intended to be system-agnostic, though its mostly on 5 ft grids because most people still play D&D.
This has sprawled into a larger ongoing collection of ship maps with a lot more context and supporting information.
How did you get started in gaming?
A relative gave me the 3rd edition D&D starter set when I was in elementary school. I played 3E with my siblings, then there was a decade where I was mostly playing board games and video games. But I got back into TTRPGs a few years ago and have been very taken with the indie RPG scene and the variety of great RPG content people are putting out.
What inspired you to create maps?
I wanted to run a murder mystery session on a multi-decked sailing ship and could not find any pre-made maps which matched what I wanted. So I researched and made the map I wanted, and it got a good response when I posted it to some battlemap subreddits.
The form of the maps, minimalist and diagrammatic, was necessitated by my limited artistic skills. I haven’t quit found an app that does all the things I want it to, so I will be sticking with diagrammatic ship plans for the foreseeable future.
The research process turned up a lot of interesting things that I thought could add depth and flavor to an RPG encounter. So like a lot of creative projects, it just kept growing on its own accord from there. I kept turning up new facts and ships I had never heard of, which prompted more research and more interesting details and things I think are worth sharing.
Making ‘historically accurate’ resources might seem comical or hopelessly pedantic when TTRPGs are fictitious and mostly played in a high fantasy setting. But while I do not believe in adding historical accuracy for its own sake, I do think it can make a game more compelling in a variety of ways. By giving ideas to the GM, presenting players with more complex choices, or lending verisimilitude to the fictional world.
So the idea with these ‘historically-accurate’ resources is to provide a wealth of detail, in the hopes that GMs can find something that serves their story or game. For instance, all my diagrams have side views showing the elevations of the masts, fighting tops (crow’s nest), sail-spread, and sometimes rigging. These details are irrelevant to most games. However, if the detail is there the GM (or the players) might be more likely to add dimensionality to a combat encounter, which hopefully would make the game more enjoyable.
Or another example, I recently have been researching riverine transport in Imperial China. It was common on high mountain rivers for cargo ships (some as large as 150 tons) to travel upriver. To get past fast-flowing sections or rivers the ships would rely on ‘tracking.’ This was when scores of people on shore towed the ship by way of long braided bamboo ropes.
Sometimes the trackers would just march along the riverbank, but sometimes they would be advancing along narrow paths carved into the cliffsides of these high-mountain gorges.
All of this is detail is potentially pedantic on its own, but it has the potential to create very cinematic encounters. A team of people on the ship, maneuvering the vessel with long yaolu oars and giving orders to the trackers by drum signal. A small Wuban, a sort of chase boat, moving deftly through the rapids, keeping the tracking rope from snagging on rocks. Prodigiously brave and skillful wranglers tasked with diving into the rapids or climbing up the cliffs to free snagged towlines. And a hundred trackers precariously advancing, high on the cliffside, pulling the massive vessel upriver. Having players defend against an enemy attack or have a combat encounter in this context seems extremely interesting to me.
But I want to reiterate that I do not TTRPGs need more pedantry, I just think accurate details can both add depth to the mechanical aspects of gameplay and make the story aspects more real for players. I view it as giving options to GMs, for them to choose which ones are right for their game.
What is your next big goal for gaming-related work?
I already alluded to it, but I have got about 50 pages and 15,000 words written of a collection of historical Chinese watercraft. The last two products I released were both about 15 page .pdfs focused on a single complex multi-decked vessel. This one is eventually supposed to be 25 smaller ships and boats. About half the text is general background detail on various aspects of China’s pre-industrial maritime/fluvial networks. The other half of the text is the detailed keys for the individual vessel maps.
It has been a fun project to research, it is obviously somewhat niche, but I think it is an interesting niche which deserves attention. You hardly ever see a battlemap of a non-European ship. Which is particularly wild for China given that they had pre-industrial maritime activity on an unparalleled scale, dominated global trade for most of recorded history, and pioneered a bunch of nautical innovations centuries before anyone else did.
Unfortunately (or fortunately?) the project keeps sprawling in new directions. I was originally going to include a small list of trade goods and prices. But really went down a rabbit hole and ended up spending weeks of my free time transcribing part of an eighteenth-century manuscript of the Guangzhou trade goods register, which I ultimately released as a separate product including 550 trade goods with prices and other details.
But I’m happy with where the writing and research are going, and will hopefully release it is some form this fall.
What's one fun fact people should know about you?
I am in a book club, and they don’t know yet, but I am going to spend every iota of social capital I have with them to force us to read/play “Thousand Year Old Vampire” for our next book.
Follow Michael on twitter, check out their website, and pop on over to DriveThruRPG to get your hands on this exciting nautical work!
Email: anekdota.press@gmail.com
