Book 0A – The World of Meleram – Reference Atlas
SITUATION REPORT, Week of January 27.
As we approach the end of January, it’s time for me to update you on what’s been done and what’s in the pipeline:
1. PROOFREADING THE MANUSCRIPT
As I specified on my X post of January 1st, the manuscript is currently being proofread; on the one hand by myself, but also by my proofreader who was able to free up some time. Given that we’re both working outside this project and that life has its constraints too, it’s fallen a little behind schedule, but don’t panic!
I know I don’t have much to show at the moment, but to prove to you that the project is underway, you can see below an Obsidian’s screenshot showing the information in the first manuscript. It’s around 81,000 words long and consists of six chapters.
I’ll post the full and final summary on this website in a post to follow.
2. PDF IMPLEMENTATION
I took a few courses to learn how to use Affinity Publisher and chose the fonts for this book (and the following ones). I took fonts from Google Fonts, which are royalty-free for commercial projects. I haven’t yet decided on the final fonts to use, but I’ve downloaded a list.
So after this post, I’m going to start creating the PDF and the master pages for the book.
I’m not a professional in the field, so my credo will be “keep it simple and straightforward” to save myself a lot of grief or getting bogged down in a task that’s impossible to finish in time.
3. ILLUSTRATIONS
Yesterday, I finished defining the set of runes for the language common to both continents of Meleram, called Meldevian, an ad hoc language created from various others in our real world, such as Proto-Nordic, Old Norse, Proto-German and various Celtic languages.
All I have to do now is draw, scan and vectorize them on Inkscape. I’ll use them to embellish the pages of this book (and future ones), as a signature, as well as for other side projects.
I’m also gathering a series of images from the public domain, as well as others under Creative Commons licenses compatible with commercial projects. I’ll be making compositions directly with and via AI with these to embellish the illustrations.
I also have an unfinished front cover image. It’s the result of compositing three AI-generated images that have undergone several modifications.
All in all, I currently have 10 illustration tasks to complete in order to start populating the book.
I also have a satellite image world map in progress, which isn’t finished yet, but which I’ll post when it’s ready. The base was created in WonderDraft and the final work is done manually in Photoshop.
Here are two crop-images among the finished parts, it’s just a first pass (and it need another more, at least!) but you get the point:
I understand that using AI may be seen as a brake on some people’s interest in this game setting, but I’ve put a note in my “About” page explaining my position (reproduced in each book’s credits page).
4. WEBSITE
I’ve cleaned up the site a bit and created an “About” page to explain what Studio Herzack is and also provide a little introduction to the world of Meleram.
I’ll also need to add a download page in the future, as this site will have free documents for this world, but that won’t happen until I’ve published the first PDF.
FINAL NOTE
For the PDFs, I’ll first create the one that will be the main one, and then I’ll make a free copy (a so-called essential version) that will contain the minimum necessary to be able to play in the world of Meleram. This will give you an idea of whether or not you’ll find this setting interesting.
Please note that the first book is only a reference book, while the province books will contain the main elements of the game, i.e.: details of a province and its regions, details of cultures and factions, inhabitants, various event tables for each region of a province and, for each culture and faction, tables for generating adventure seeds.