Book Preview: Four Kingdoms
9 days ago – Tue, Apr 09, 2024 at 05:32:20 AM

This post is for backers only. Please visit Kickstarter.com and log in to read.

Book Preview: Languages in Pictland
about 1 month ago – Wed, Mar 13, 2024 at 06:32:21 AM

This post is for backers only. Please visit Kickstarter.com and log in to read.

Milestone update: Section 2 is Drafted!
about 1 month ago – Wed, Mar 13, 2024 at 06:21:47 AM

Hello!

I’ve spent the last few months writing, and I’ve hit a major milestone, which I’m very happy to share with you.

I’ve completed Section 2 (out of 3) of this book. 

Section 2 covers the categories of ‘Kingdoms’ and ‘Perspectives’. Together, they summarise what we know of the social structures and cultural norms of Pictland. Section 2’s topics include:

• Primers on the Four Kingdoms, including Dal Riata, Northumbria, Alt Clut, and - of course - Pictland. These feature rumours you’d hear about the surrounding nations, and major landmarks you could travel to.
• Spoken Languages, how you might speak them, and what it's like to be a multilingual Pict.
• Trade across Pictland, and what it’s like to live inside of a barter economy.
• Proximity and Prestige, and the social strata of Pictland.
• Your Protector, King Bridei III, a history of your current King as recounted by a variety of his subjects. Most, but not all, are pleased with him!
• Memory and Learning, and how the Picts transferred and preserved knowledge via Oral Tradition.
• Culture, including how Picts conceived of time, what the average Pict finds interesting, what they might celebrate, and how you observe and respect the cyclical nature of all things.
• Magic and Miracles, including everything you might know about spirits, the distant Magi of legend, the venerated Saints, and their many divine relics.

All in all there’s about 16,000 words across this section, to be displayed on about 20 pages, not accounting for diagrams and illustrations.

Everything that’s been written has been double checked through by our researcher, Heather, who has been incredibly supportive throughout this book’s development. There have been so many 4-hour rabbit hole questions, and it’s been Heather’s expertise that has steered us through uncharted waters.

(By the way, if you like the sound of Archaeology explored through Minecraft builds, go give Heather’s channel ArchaeoPlays a watch on Youtube!)

Slow but steady progress

This section of the book was a nightmare to write. Basically, we know next to nothing about Pictish cultural norms, save for what has been documented by external scholars. Often those scholars are themselves incredibly biased against the Picts! Unpicking a consistent and entertaining narrative (especially one that people could roleplay within) has been… complicated.

There have been so many base-line questions that have required weeks of drafting and redrafting, again and again. Each topic requires refining to a point where the text is easily referenceable, contains all of the research that we do have, and doesn’t reconnect evidence in a way that misrepresents the past. 

Different pieces coming together

Here’s what we have so far:

• Section 0 introduces who the Picts were, and summarises our methodology. 
• Section 1 summarises the natural world, the biomes of Scotland, and its seasons. 
• Section 2, summarises cultural norms.

Section 2 has been particularly hard to write because every topic is interdependent; you can't talk about social hierarchies and noble class structures without talking about politics, and trade, and religion, and so on.

What’s next?

With all of this context established, the next leg of this book will be easier to chip into. 

Section 3 topics like ‘equipment’ are pretty straightforward. You have ropes, tools, a satchel, maybe a wood axe. 

Natural questions, like where you might get these things, are already part-answered. We’ve already explained barter economies, so we can redirect to that section, or add a little more context with a few short lines.

I’m going to post a few of the individual topics that I’m happiest with as separate updates. If you have any questions, please feel free to ask! There’s a lot of tangents that have had to end up on the cutting room floor, and I’d be glad to talk about them!

Next Milestone

Here are the next few milestones I have for Carved in Stone:

• Full Draft Text. This is the full, unreviewed and unedited manuscript for Carved in Stone. I’ll have this once I’ve completed Section 3. 
  Once it’s been reviewed internally, I plan to share it with you all, and have a Google Form open for feedback.
• Copy Editing and Draft Layout. A formatted version of the draft text, with spaces left for artwork and brief descriptions for art or diagrams and how they would interact with the text. How information sits on the page is going to be a big part of how CIS is experienced, so I want to get this done ahead of our second and final academic peer review. 
  Once the layout is complete, I’ll be sharing it with you!
• Peer Review 2. Returning to our peer reviewers with the draft layout, and implementing their feedback. This may include changing a few sections across the book, but hopefully will be limited to rephrasing or reorganising information. 
  Once these changes are made, I’ll share an updated version of the draft layout.

I can’t know how long it will take to reach each milestone. I will continue to post updates when I reach them.

Thanks!

This will be the 4th year I have been working on this book, and the 3rd that I have gone entirely unpaid. Thank you for believing in me throughout all of this chaos. I am ride-or-die with this project. 

This is also the first time in about 10 months it has felt like there has been a light at the end of the tunnel, and I’m very excited to get writing on Section 3. It contains some of the coolest topics I have planned!

-- Brian

Behind the Scenes #11 - Pictish Clothing
6 months ago – Fri, Oct 27, 2023 at 04:52:22 AM

Hey everyone!

I’m checking back in with some fun new artwork showing what Picts of different social statuses might have worn!

🏠 Before we get into it, some housekeeping!

Wrapping up Border Riding. As of last week, I’ve finished Border Riding. While the project put rent money in my bank account for the next six months (allowing me to keep working on CIS unpaid), because of a chain of disasters with fulfilment it dragged out weeks longer than it should have. Really sorry about that :( . 

Finishing Other Side Project. The VAST Guides were completed in September, but Creative Scotland have been rather slow to get back to me about officially concluding it. This coming week I’m also finishing my freelance work, which has replenished the CIS budget for artwork, design consultation and more.

Resuming work on CIS. I’m able to resume full time work on CIS starting November 2023. I’ve been juggling serious burnout, and returning to CIS has been intimidating. However, I’m keen to make the best book I can.

Backer Addresses. As a reminder, no addresses have been collected for any rewards. Surveys for addresses will go out when Carved in Stone is ready to print, and you’ll know well in advance when that is because I won’t shut up about it 😅!

Further Updates. New updates will come out when there’s solid progress to celebrate. Because we want to be absolutely certain everything we're sharing is as accurate as possible, updates can take a lot of time to write (time we don't always have spare). 

Thanks for your patience between updates; please trust that I’m doing everything I can to keep pushing Carved in Stone ahead.

Now, on to clothing, with beautiful illustrations provided by VER!

--

Tailored Clothing

The average Pict owns between 3 and 4 full sets of clothing. Each garment can take days or weeks to make, and so they are made with care, and to the precise needs of the wearer.

Naturally, this means any garment you own is tailored to fit your body, with allowances in place to facilitate future alterations as needed (such as changing of physique, and for comfort).

Altering and mending garments is commonplace, as is swapping, borrowing and hand-me-downs.

Layering. The demands placed on your clothing are constantly changing. The weather can shift from warm, to cold, to drenching rain, to frosty, and back again in a single day. Your workload is similarly fluid, as you swap between different forms of labour, travel, socialising and relaxation. The easiest way to design for changing needs is modular clothing.

Each of your garments are designed to layer with and style well with whatever else you’re wearing. You can maintain your comfort by donning or shedding layers quickly, and alter individual pieces on the fly, such as by tying up long tunics or letting out sleeves to keep the wind off of bare skin.

Garments

Different combinations of common garments are shown in the artwork above, and described here.

1. Hooded Cowls keep the sun out of your eyes, and have joyful swaying fringes or embroidered details.
2. Pinned Cloaks are used to protect against the wind, rain and hot sun, and are fastened with personalised pins, made of bone or metal.
3. Tunics and Dresses cover the chest and arms, and extend down from anywhere above the knee to just below the ankle. Their hems could be decorated with woven interlacing patterns.
4. Belts secure and cinch, provide a quick space to hang pouches or tools, and tuck shed clothing.
5. Shorts and Trousers protect against thorny brushes, prevent inner thigh chafing, and insulate against the cold. They are often paired with tunics or dresses, and might be dyed complementarity.
6. Leg Wraps and Socks cushion feet against rough terrain and keep legs warm when you need to stay still for long periods of time.
7. Leather Shoes protect feet from sharp stones, and stretch to fit their wearer snugly over time.
8. Specialist Clothing could also be produced, designed to suit your specific needs. This could include aprons for craftspeople, and gloves for builders clearing nettles from blocks of turf.

Materials

Most of your garments are made out of Linen, which is woven from beaten flax fibres. It’s lightweight, breathable, and dries quickly.

Wool is a denser and more insulating alternative, well suited to wetter, windier and colder seasons.

Leather is durable and long lasting if cared for, though a cut of leather could only be as large as the animal it came from, making adult body sized pieces difficult to produce.

Nearby are a collection of some colours you could dye linen using locally available materials. Dyes would have been ‘set’ (or made permanent) with the use of astringent ingredients, called mordants. Some mordants include urine, iron, lichen extracts, or alum.

Status Symbols

There are many ways to embellish or enhance your garments. These options were available to those with different forms of power, such as those with many connections in their community, with material wealth, or with political approval from the King.

Artefacts have been uncovered for embellishments included:

• Embroidered and woven details, such as banded hems and detailed cuffs.
• Personalised brooches and hand pins, set with precious stones and made from silver and/or gold.
• High quality furs from beasts with soft pelts, such as a stoat’s or a fox’s undercoat. Access to a great many pelts would allow a tailor to cut them together in a way where all of the pelts matched, and seemed like one congruos piece.
• Silver jewellery, formed into rings, bangles, armlets, and thick chain necklaces.
• Imported Silks & Dyes in rare tones of bright reds and rich purples.
• Iron armaments intended solely for human-on-human violence, such as helmets and short swords.

Grooming & Styling

Most Picts keep their hair long, between neck and shoulder length. If your hair is long, you would fasten it with leather cordage. You could plait or braid it, and might thread in beads or flowers for special occasions. Some Picts cut their hair short or shave their heads, usually for comfort or practicality.

Facial hair is also kept moderately long. Beards would usually connect moustaches, sideburns and jaw facial hair into one unit.

All hair, no matter where it grows, should be regularly combed, oiled and trimmed.

Making Your Mark

Alternative title: Why aren't these Picts blue?

‘Picti’ or ‘painted people’ was a title (or slur) spread by the Romans from the late 3rd Century to describe the iron age tribes they had previously referred to as barbarians and Caledonians.

While the Picts appeared to reclaim this title for their own identity, no evidence has been found proving or disproving that they painted or tattooed themselves.

It is possible to get a tattoo, but it wouldn’t have been a widespread cultural practice. Tattoos using regional materials could be brown, tan or red in colour when fresh, and may oxidise and dull over time into a muted blue-grey.

It is also reasonable to apply cosmetic paints to your face and body, made from local pigments. These paints would be brighter than the dye swatches and non-permanent, fading after a day and washing off in water or with sweat.

Extra Details

Lastly, here are some specific bits of Ver's artwork that we really love, and some extra context about why 😁 .

•  Child's Hood. This is inspired by one of only a handful of in-tact Pictish clothing artefacts.
•  Belt buckle. Iron is a valuable resource, but still used daily by all Picts.
•  Bone Pins. Examples of these have been excavated by archaeologists as recently as last summer! They can feature astoundingly detailed designs at their heads, such as animals or flowers.
•  Shoes, or barefoot? Another rare Pictish clothing artefact includes a small pair of leather shoes. Pictavia Leather worked on a reconstruction, which makes for a fascinating read.

•  Brooch Orientations. Archaeologist's have suggested a linked how a penannular brooch is pinned to a form of gender expression. Pinning horizontally across the chest could be a form of feminine presentation, while pinning diagonally across the shoulder could be a form of masculine expression. Many brooches have been found over the years, and no two have ever been the same.
•  Silver. Our research leads us to believe that silver was an potent demonstration of wealth for the Picts. The Picts didn't use a standard coin-based economy, instead bartering and trading with hack-silver. While Picts traded internationally, we suspect that silver was only ever bartered internally, as it was too rare to "lose" overseas.

Behind the Scenes Part 10a: Developing Layouts
10 months ago – Fri, Jul 07, 2023 at 09:18:24 AM

Hey everyone!

This update, we’ll be looking through different decisions I’ve been making about how to lay out Carved in Stone, and how there’s been a back-and-forth conversation between how we want to present information, and how that affects what we write.

Note. Example images only have titular alt text, but the text of this update is descriptive of each layout.

Design Goals

When first conceiving of Carved in Stone, I wanted to make a book that was easy to reference, and quick to digest. With this in mind, my goals when creating content have been:

• Keep topics contained to a single spread. If a topic takes more than two pages to explain, it can be broken down into more granular subjects.
• Use images to explore what words cannot.
• Use the position and size of text to enhance the navigation of a page. Important pieces of information should be easy to reference.
• Make each page feel distinct and memorable.
  

Proof of Concept

Let’s start at the beginning. These drafts will look familiar — I made them for the original crowdfunding campaign!

Page size has been an ongoing part of Carved in Stone’s layout. Here in these original drafts you’ll see the pages are wider and lower. The format was taken from an exhibition catalogue I own. The wider format felt less formal than an A-size, and left breathing room at the margins.

Throughout the different spreads, I favoured a relaxed three column format. This made for pages that looked wide, open and inviting; but the actual word countof each page was rather lacking. Spreads might fit 500 to 1000 words.

Turning Ideas into Drafts

In early March, I went through all of the research notes completed by Heather and peer reviewed by Zedeck and MRO, and sketched a flat plan for the whole book. This involved portioning every topic into different spreads for the whole book, and consulting with the team about the flow of information. Would this topic be better here, earlier on, or later, with context built from this?

With the flatplan complete, Lizy and I began writing content to the target word counts set by the flat plan. It was at this point that we really felt the restrictions created by the proof of concept. Every sentence felt like a dance; what to include, what to imply, what to omit for brevity or simplicity.

This example above is from the introduction, explaining what archaeology is, and which practises archaeologists use to find evidence. It’s just shy of 1500 words, but the original draft of this section could have been so much longer. Even then, when laid out it leaves very little space for accompanying illustrations, or for the eye to rest.

This second example explores different stereotypes of weather. The original concept was to have a series of illustrations of the same location, but changing to showcase different weather events. Its layout sketch felt natural and exciting; when it came to placing text on the page, everything suddenly felt cramped and awkward.

Exploring New Formats

Something had to change. I couldn’t add more pages to the book — who knew if I would have the budget to be able to do so. Instead, I explore changing the shape of the page.

In traditional printing, paper comes in large standardised sheets. The price of a book’s printing can change depending on how efficiently it can be printed onto these standard sheets; if your pages need large margins and trim a lot of waste paper, the cost of your book increases drastically.

I ran through different page dimensions, seeing how I could squeeze in a few millimetres. The largest I could go before doubling the cost of Carved in Stone’s initial print run was 244mm x 290mm; as tall as A4, but a few fingers wider.

The extra space certainly helped. I could now add a running sidebar for section headers, and the pages felt a little less cluttered.

However, the real breakthrough came with changing the orientation of the page from portrait to landscape. Instead of 244mm x 290mm, the book was now 290mm x 244mm. (As a note, I tested a book of this shape on several bookshelves, and it rarely stuck out. Function is as important as form!)

Suddenly, my drafted flatplan started to work. Smaller bite-size chunks of content had the space for each line to sit well on the page, while still leaving space for additional notes, outboxes, and so on.  In the example above, the landscape layout fits all of the content of the portrait, and an additional three extra sidebars of notes for the reader.

Here’s another example of the same content arranged in portrait and landscape. This spread explores what the picts would have worn, and how they would have styled themselves (essentially a spread dedicated to fans of the character creation screen).

The portrait layout segregates content with the text blocks. They don’t have a clear flow to them, and the spaces left for artwork are cramped. Contrast that with the landscape layout, where the text draws the eye down through the page, and sits pleasantly adjacent to the white space where illustrations will sit.

Graphics and Text

As I’ve said before, I want images to play an equal part in communicating the information on any given topic. Visually, graphics make for good navigation points; you’ll remember the illustrations on a page, even if you don’t remember the specific content. Graphics are also quick to flick to, whereas text needs more involved processing to understand.

Above is an example of how I want to present different biomes in the final book. Very early on in the research process, Heather astutely recognised that many readers of Carved in Stone will have never seen Scotland before, and most likely had never even left their home country or state. On the biome pages, the majority of the space is left for the image. The carefully paired text describes ecosystems and seasonal changes; things a snapshot would miss.

The second part of that example is an updated draft of the Mountain biome, now using the landscape layout. The Mountain’s text is tall and purposeful, like the biome itself. To the right are microfictions; they describe a lynx prowling for food, a tree surviving atop the windswept mountain, and rabbits burrowed safely out of sight, hidden from the lynx by the microfictions' text.

I’ll end this update with one of the teams’ favourite spreads: Cuisine. It looks quite empty, for now. 

The text describes different seasonal meals the Picts could have prepared; rosehip teas and charlock breads, seeded porridges and seaweed puddings. All around this page will be illustrations of every dish. It’s one thing to read about historical foods — it's another to see it steaming, fresh cooked and ready to eat in front of you.