Today I have an interview with Chris Longhurst on The Map is not The Territory, a project debuting today on Kickstarter! This project uses one map and many perspectives to give a variety of experiences of play – a really cool idea! Check out Chris’s replies below.
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Thanks for joining me for an interview, Chris! I’m excited to hear about your project, The Map is not The Territory. What is your experience like in games that it led you to this project?
I’ve been noodling around the RPG industry in a variety of capacities since the mid-2000s, but I didn’t get serious about freelancing and publishing my own stuff until the tail end of 2014. Since then I’ve published a few things ‘the old-fashioned way’, and run four Kickstarters — three successful, one un. I think what specifically led me to this project though is less of my industry experience and more that running my RPG business as a side gig means I tend to make whatever I feel like making and hope it speaks to people. TMINT itself springs from my love of remixes, remakes and covers — I love the way different people can arrive at such wildly different creations even if you give them the same origin point.
In essence it’s a project motivated by my personal foibles when it comes to running a business and my personal tastes in creative media, to which I am personally contributing very little. The irony feels good.
Coordinating a big team of creators and being part of such a team can create a lot of challenges. What made you uniquely suited for this project and this team?
Like… as I mentioned above, this is a very personal project. It’s a thing I wanted to exist, so I decided to take the steps to make that happen. And in that sense I am the only person who could have originated this project, because it has its roots in things I enjoy and things I appreciate. I’m the only person with this particular combination of perspective, tastes, skills, and reach — therefore, I am uniquely suited to this project and this team because anyone else who did something similar would produce a different project with a different team.
But.
Everybody has a network and a perspective and some tastes. Skills can be learned, or skilled people can be hired. I like to remind people that if I ever do something that looks complex, it’s really just several simple things layered together. If I do something that looks difficult, at base it’s just several smaller, easier things combined into a greater whole. Anything I can do, can be done by someone else. Anybody could create this kind of project, and in that sense there is literally nothing that positions me as uniquely qualified to do so.
Which, I’d like to emphasize, is a good thing. Every human being is unique, and brings a unique perspective to their creations — which, full circle, is the whole point of TMINT. To highlight those unique perspectives by giving them a common origin and seeing how they grow outwards from there.
…of course, if you’re asking ‘do you have any excellent team management skills?’ the answer is ‘lol no I’m making this up as I go along’ — but I like to get the old philosophy degree out for an airing now and then.
What is The Map is not The Territory as a project, and what is the vision for the project? What from your prior experience helped you create it?
The Map is not The Territory is a project to show what a single origin point can look like when viewed through as many different lenses as possible. The vision is to bring together authors, game designers, scientists, and poets, and showcase the creativity which each individual brings to the basic concept. I want anyone into RPGs to find something they can use in there, whether it’s a dungeon quest, a whole other game, a world of adventure… something. I want people to flip through it and go ‘ooooh’.
Because I’ve been noodling around the RPG industry for years and running my own publisher for slightly fewer years, I’ve got experience with the practicalities of turning manuscripts into finished pdfs and printed books. I know how to budget and run a Kickstarter because I’ve run three successful ones (and if people want to know more about that, I do a public postmortem after every one). I’ve got all the skills needed to turn a concept into a reality. I, uh… just need the money.
For each of the 24 contributors, what is included in their contribution to the project? How did you determine the scope of the project – how long it should be, what it should cover, etc.?
Each contributor is going to write me 500-1000 words on a subject of their choice, inspired by the map, which will go alongside a customised version of the map. Some versions of the map are going to be almost the same as the original. Some are going to be wild.
I always wanted it to cover as many different interpretations of the map as possible — and to have those interpretations be as far from each other as possible — and I think we’ve hit a really good range. The sheer variety of responses when I asked for pitches was stunning, and I deliberately grabbed a selection each from ‘normal with a twist’, ‘kinda weird’, and ‘left field’ to make sure there was something for everyone.
The scope of the project was defined largely by the tension between two opposing forces: wanting to pay everyone a decent sum for their work on one hand, and what I could expect to sell it for on the other. (Down with capitalism.) I wanted to include as many authors as possible, so I just kept incrementing that number on my budget spreadsheet until I hit the balancing point between ‘will sell for about $15’ and ‘paying all the contributors okay money’.
My basic idea was that every interpretation of the map, plus the custom map, plus some art and/or layout flourishes, would sit on a double-page spread, making for a slim softcover. Once again, I was thinking about how much I could afford to pay each contributor without exploding my budget — you get 300-ish words per page, so 500 words plus a map can fit on one spread. My original idea was for a minimum of 32 pages, but with 24 contributors we’re looking at minimum 48 pages plus a few frontmatter odds and ends. I think some of the pitches I’ve received are going to run somewhat longer than that though, so the page count might go up.
Kickstarter takes a decent amount of risk out of the equation, but at the same time I didn’t put it on Kickstarter to see if it was workable — I put it on there because I already think it’s workable and I want it to succeed.
This seems like such a cool idea! So how did you find your amazing contributors? What did you look for in their ideas?
I put an open call for pitches out on Twitter and left it open for… two weeks? A month? I forget exactly. Some time. Anyway, I also specifically reached out to some marginalised creators and asked them for pitches directly because I’d heard that marginalised folk tend to self-select out of stuff like this. Once I had a nice Google sheet full of pitches, I extracted all the pitch details without looking at the names so I could do a proper blind pick.
Once I had all the pitches, I divided them into three broad categories: ‘dungeon crawl with a twist’, ‘something unusual’, and ‘highly weird’. Then I grabbed my (more or less) eight favourites in each category and that was the final 24.
I looked for slightly different things in each category. For the weird section I wanted properly out-there stuff — things which used the map in such a way that it was barely recognisable as a dungeon any more. The unusual section consists of things which are recognisable as roleplaying adventures but use the map in an interesting way or have a unique twist. And for the dungeon crawl section I wanted to see fresh elements which you don’t often see in other dungeons. And I got all of those things in spades! The scale of creativity in the pitches was amazing, and if I could make
What made you decide on the particular map that you’re using? What is unique about it?
I originally went to Dyson Logos’ page because I knew he was a very good dungeon cartographer. I was sort of half thinking to hire him, half thinking to consult his designs for inspiration. When I saw he was allowing people to use some of his maps for free, I immediately jumped on that. Quality stuff! For zero dollars! Then it was just a matter of sifting through his extensive back catalogue for just the right map. I eventually settled on the The Lost Temple of Aphosh the Haunted because it’s big enough to have a lot of encounters without being sprawling, and offers a mixture of natural and artificial terrain. I wanted something that people could project their own ideas onto and that had enough conceptual ‘hooks’ to work with without being prescriptive.
Map chosen, I emailed Dyson juuuust to make sure the plan was ok, he said yes, and here we are.
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Thanks so much to Chris for the interview! I hope you all enjoyed it and that you’ll check out The Map is not The Territory on Kickstarter today!