#Mike Schley

[haaaaaaaaaaaave-you-met-ted]

Vassa Map by Mike Schley

[gilgalahad]

[educationaldm]

Mademoiselle Geraldine's Finishing School. Another wonderfully creative map from Mike Schley (@schley). Reminds me of anime airships like in Laputa and makes me what to create an adventure around this.

[mapas-fantasticos]

Map of the world from the comic Skullkickers by Jim Zubkavich (map by Mike Schley).

[rookie-critic]

A Man Called Otto (2022, dir. Marc Forster) - review by Rookie-Critic

TW: suicide

A Man Called Otto had its moments, but tended to be a little too sickly sweet for its own good (when it wasn't being way darker than advertised). I'll admit that I was on the side saying that I wasn't sure I could believe Tom Hanks as a grumpy old man, but for all of the film's faults, the believability of Hanks' Otto Anderson is not one of them. As much as we as an internet collective have corralled Hanks into the role of "America's Dad," and as much as Hollywood has begun to cast Hanks for roles that genuinely don't suit him (excuse me while I glare at Baz Luhrmann), we tend to forget that Hanks is a phenomenal actor that got as famous as he is now for being consistently great, not just in his more typecast-aligning roles like Big and Sleepless in Seattle, but also for movies like Road to Perdition and Philadelphia. Also, let's be honest, we all love him as Woody in Toy Story, and he's basically playing a giant buzzkill (pun absolutely intended) for a majority of the first film in that franchise. I actually found most of the film's cast to be quite endearing, especially Mariana Treviño, who practically steals the film from Hanks, which in and of itself is an impressive feat. As I've said in previous reviews, I love when we get to see fairly unknown actors play big roles in movies alongside the legacy names. The big name draws in the crowd and then they get to see this new (or new to the average moviegoer, anyway) face thrive. I hope to see Treviño in bigger and better things in the future because she was a delight in this.

The biggest detriment to the film is that it really tends to get caught up in itself a lot. I'm actually quite a sucker for sentiment in a film and get swept up very easily in a movie's emotional manipulation if I'm even remotely enjoying it, and I'm not ashamed to admit that I did shed some tears while watching A Man Called Otto, but there were moments that, had they been dialed back about 75%, would have been so much more effective. There are multiple montages set to the most over-the-top, Josh Groban-esque music (which I'm seeing now was mostly written by Hanks' wife, singer and fellow actor Rita Wilson) that absolutely kill the emotional momentum of the film. It is so unbelievably heavy-handed and saccharine that I think I was audibly groaning by the third time it happened. I really can't stress how hilariously atrocious these sequences are. There's also quite a few scenes of these incredibly out of touch depictions of the younger generation that seem to be plaguing a decent handful of films in the recent months, including one sequence involving a train station that is laughably obtuse, and the way the young people in that scene behave ends up being beneficial to Otto later in the film anyway, so I'm not really sure what the commentary is supposed to be, and I don't think the film does either. I find it odd that these sequences are even in the movie for how amazingly progressive a lot of the film seems to be.

Lastly, I'd like to talk about something I mentioned at the beginning of this review about the film being way darker than advertised. I would also like to take this moment to issue a trigger warning (TW: suicide) for those that might have PTSD or anxiety about this topic. This film presents itself in its advertising as a wholesome family drama where a young, friendly family melts the heart of the neighborhood grump. What this movie is really about is a suicidal man learning to find his reason for living again. I won't divulge the details of why for people who don't want those plot spoilers, but I feel it is heavily important to know going into this film that suicide is a heavily felt presence throughout the entirety of the film, and I think I counted five suicide attempts that are shown on screen (it could be six, but I remember at least five). I'm not against the depiction of suicide or suicidal thoughts in film, I think it's an incredibly important topic to discuss openly and without shame or judgment, but I also think that it is paramount for a piece of media to clearly state when it is going to depict something as potentially traumatizing (or re-traumatizing) as that on screen. When the first attempt happens, the film is barely 15 minutes into its runtime, and I was so jarred by it that I almost thought I had somehow walked into the wrong theater, that this had to be some other grumpy Tom Hanks movie and not the fun-loving, cheery looking one whose trailer got "The End of the Line" by The Traveling Wilburys stuck in my head for weeks. I don't know if I can hold a fault of the trailer against the film itself, but I was quite angry with the film's marketing for not giving some kind of indication of what the film and its tone actually were.

I'm having a hard time thinking of what score to give A Man Called Otto, because for all of the things that were objectively bad about the film, I did find myself getting emotional on more than one occasion. The film's sentimentality gets in its own way a lot, but when it's able to find a good balance between heart and drama it really sings, so I'd say there's a little more to like about it on the whole.

Score: 6/10.

Currently only in theaters.

[shadow-fell]

Look, a Map (Locations for BG3)

All credit to Mike Schley for the original Sword Coast map, and the 1990 Forgotten Realms Atlas for additional roads.

Notes for nerds under the cut.

So, the basis of this map is the 2e FR map to the 5e map, as they have the same geography (3e/4e is notably different/stretched). Soubar and The Friendly Arm (from BG1!) are added in from that map.

Crossing the Fields of the Dead are the Thundar Road and the Skuldask Road, meeting at the dwarven/gnomish village of Tempus' Tears. Thundar ends with the Tradeway, while the Skuldask Road continues on through Elturel southwards.

Skuldask Road is clearly the Risen Road (Leading out of Elturel and towards Baldur's Gate. As Waukeen's Rest is supposed to be the halfway point, I placed it close to the intersection, where the broken bridge could easily block off travel to the Thundar Road.

Moonhaven is the Blighted Village; south of Waukeen's Rest, the Selunite Temple is part of it. Anga Vled is a gnomish village of note, mentioned in the game as where Amanita Szarr, the Lady Incognita, was raised.

Moonrise Towers is often placed much closer to Elturel; this is based off the FR Atlas, a defunct and not fully canon map making software. The towers themselves have one sourcebook appearance, all that is said is "West of Elturel". For BG3, it makes sense to put it closer to Baldur's Gate. In purple is marked off the general area of the Shadow Curse.

Sunrise Spires have similarly only been placed through FR Atlas, but are known to be on the Northern Bank. It is generally placed to the west and closer to Baldur's Gate, so I kept a relatively close position (given also the low resolution of the Atlas maps). They're a Lathendarian fortress that fell in the 1170s, and together with Rosymorn paint a whole Lathanderian-Selunite regional shift I find neat.

Waterdeep is well to the north; Athkatla and BG2's setting to the south. That's kind of all the interesting cities.

Travel Times

From the crash site to Waukeen's Rest is 2 days normal travel

Waukeen's Rest to Rosymorn Monastery is another day's travel

Rosymorn to Moonrise Towers is 2 days

Moonrise Towers to Baldur's Gate is 3 days travel

[some-pers0n]

I'm sobbing incoherently right now there's a new excerpt for the Guide.

Here it is!!! Look through it!

https://kids.scholastic.com/content/dam/scholastic/kids/pdf/Book%20Excerpts/WOFGuide_excerpt.pdf

GRAHHH this is so cool!! I love Sepia so much– do they use they/it pronouns?? I genuinely don't know. All I know is that I'm in love– LOOK AT HOW MUCH ART WE'RE GETTING FROM JOY ANG AND MIKE SCHLEY!!

WoF artists are in tears rn we get more references of the characters and the tribes and the landscape.

[sageadvicednd]

Red Larch map

Princes of the Apocalypse! My maps from the new #DnD #RPG adventure are ready – http://t.co/kffsFYS3xO Please RT! pic.twitter.com/pLAUHUaNOW — Mike Schley (@schley) March 27, 2015

[simul16]

I think it's worth defining what this social science is and what it's not. Geopolitics is the study of how population groups are affected by the geography in which they life, and how that geography affects the way these population groups interact with each other...Geopolitics is useful for world-building because using nothing but knowledge of climate and terrain, we can make guesses about a regional population's access to resources. With these things in mind, we can then look at the communities as a whole, and make educated guesses about the needs and behaviors of these people. - Baron de Ropp (?), Dungeon Masterpiece, "From Baldur's Gate to Waterdeep: The Geopolitics of Faerun"

I've done a fair amount of complaining about low-effort video content, so let's change gears and look at some high-effort content that shakes up some basic assumptions about world-building in the Forgotten Realms, and particularly who should get credit for the verisimilitude of that setting.

Let's start off by pointing out that, while it is true that Ed Greenwood is the 'creator' of the Forgotten Realms, both in the sense that TSR bought the setting from Greenwood to make it into a D&D campaign setting, and in the sense that Greenwood had basically built what existed of the setting at that time, the setting as a whole has undergone significant revision and expansion since Greenwood's original creation, to the point where a handful of folks could be considered less 'contributors' to the Realms than co-creators, such as Sean K Reynolds and Skip Williams (and much like Carl Sargent and Roger E Moore could be considered co-creators of the world of Greyhawk, TSR's other major campaign setting).

Curiously, though, de Ropp's video essay suggests that a great deal of credit should be given to the cartographers of the Forgotten Realms for making the setting geographically believable and surprisingly scientifically accurate. De Ropp doesn't name them, but the first portion of his essay where he discusses the geography of Faerun, and paricularly how accurate the Sword Coast region in particular is from a geographical and geophysical perspective, with terrain features naturally flowing from the High Ice glacier into the rough steppes of Anauroch, and from there down to the swampy lowlands between Anauroch and the coast itself, finally leading down to the Sword Coast and its major cities. DeRopp actually credits Greenwood for this accuracy, even though Greenwood's original map looks to me as if it's not quite as accurate as the later third edition and fifth edition maps. The third edition maps are credited to a team of cartographers (Rob Lazzaretti, Todd Gamble, and Dennis Kauth) in the Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting, while the fifth edition map is not only credited to Mike Schley, it's available as a print on his website.

De Ropp also makes some interesting observations about the terrain and how it's maintained -- for instance, he points out that it makes sense for many of the heavily forested areas of the Sword Coast (like the High Forest) and the more eastern regions adjacent to it (such as the Dalelands) to be near large bodies of water or otherwise fed by heavy rainfall, but that similar areas without dense forests (like the Giant's Plain) are likely home to large wandering herds of beasts, which both graze on the land and trample young trees so that they don't have the time to grow into a forest.

For me, though, the really interesting part of de Ropp's essay is where he gets into describing his impressions of what the cultures inhabiting the different areas of Faerun would be like based on the geography of those regions. It's in this area that de Ropp makes reasonable yet surprising observations, or at least surprising to those who have more than a passing familiarity with the Forgotten Realms setting:

De Ropp begins with Baldur's Gate, pointing out that despire not having as useful a natural harbor as nearly Candlekeep, the city would likely be more properous due to trade along the river Chionthar, which Candlekeep does not have direct access to. However, the lack of natural terrain barriers would make Baldur's Gate very susceptible to invasion; de Ropp likens this to the experience of Poland during the development of Europe, effectively suggesting that Baldur's Gate is to Faerun as Gdansk is to Poland, both cities being vulnerable by land (due to the many open spaces leading to the city) as well as by sea (with Gdansk being vulerable to power projected from the Baltic states or Sweden, while Baldur's Gate would be vulnerable to similar sea power projected from the Moonshae Isles. (Lucky for the Baldurians that the setting posits the tribes of the Moonshaes as fairly primitive and insular, while the closest nation-state to Baldur's Gate is Amn well to the south, with more nearby settlements either being well-trampled satellites of Baldur's Gate such as Fort Morninglord and Elturel, or the independent city-state of Waterdeep to the north.)

De Ropp next looks at the Dalelands, Sembia, and Cormyr, and points out that, based on both the small size of the towns in Cormyr and the Dalelands (based on the size of the markers on the map) and that roads that exist on the map between this region and the coast are not connected (and thus have either fallen into disrepair and are no longer used or were never built in the first place) that these regions appear to have nothing to offer the great cities of the coast. This surprises de Ropp, who points out that given Marsember's position at the mouth of a river, with stone and minerals form the Storm Horns close at hand along with plentiful timber from Cormyr's forests, and being a port on the Lake of Dragons which connects to the larger Sea of Fallen Stars, Marsember should be a very powerful city, being both highly defensible and with plenty of resources both for internal development and for trade. De Ropp compares this to the northern regions of Italy, which developed economic powerhouse city states like Florence and Venice, and wonders openly if there's a canon reason why Marsember isn't larger than Baldur's Gate.

de Ropp points out that the people who live within the Anauroch desert would be nomadic wanderers not unlike the civilizations of the Mongolian steppe on Earth, and this tracks with the existence of the Bedine nomads in that region. However, he goes on to suggest that, since the nomads from these steppes regions would frequently migrate into more habitable areas during rough times, that the Bedine would likely do the same, and even things like the name of the 'Mere of Dead Men' suggesting that such migrations led to great battles in the past.

de Ropp moves to the High Moor, pointing out that the rugged terrain and difficulty in moving people or trade good through that terrain would likely lead to small settlements comprised of rugged, insular peoples, not unlike the region of West Virginia in the United States. This, too, tracks, at least for the humans of the High Moor, which tend to be tribes of Uthgardt barbarians, but doesn't quite take into account the fairly sizable settlements in the region descended from the area's former status as an elvish nation.

de Ropp then moves to the coast region surrounding Neverwinter, pointing out that the rough terrain between the coast and the High Moor makes the cities defensible form land-based attacks, but vulnerable to sea attacks and piracy, which justifies the existence of large roads connecting the cities which otherwise would not be terribly efficient at promoting trade compared to water-based trade.

de Ropp finally turns to the Moonshaes, and points out that these islands are perhaps the most mischaracterized region of the Sword Coast. Caer Corwell, in particular, has vast timber resources and the ability to build highly defensible shipyards from which to construst and launch vessels either to prey on the shipping of Waterdeep, Baldur's Gate, and other cities of the Sword Coast, or to project military power and force these states to become subservient to the Moonshaes. That the Moonshaes simply don't have that level of organization isn't a solution, as de Ropp points out that, given the strategic importance of the islands, any of the coastal cities that could take over the islands would immediately become the greatest power in the region, as they could use the resources that the current Moonshae inhabitants are not using. In de Ropp's own words, "Whoever has dominion over these islands has dominion over the Sword Coast."

Taking these observations at face value, one begins to wonder if the folks responsible for developing the cultures of Faerun took as much time and care in crafting those cultures to the terrain as the cartographers of Faerun did in updating and tweaking the maps of Faerun to take into account the geophysical realities of our world and how they might apply in a fantastic setting like the Forgotten Realms, and it makes me think that the map-makers should get at least as much credit for how 'real' the setting feels as Greenwood and his co-creators do.

The one thing I'd fault the essay for is not mentioning what the impact of the vast regions of the Underdark would have on the geopolitics of the surface world, but that's forgivable, as maps of the Underdark in this region simply aren't as prevalent as maps of the Sword Coast and adjacent areas of Faerun. Even so, de Ropp has put together a very thought-provoking essay that leads me to consider making a few changes to the world (or at least suggests some larger plot threads) the next time I run a campaign set in Faerun. Kudos to Dungeon Masterpiece for putting it together.

[empire-of-thieves]

Favorite Maps: Tyar-Besil 

I wanted to highlight one of my favorite dungeon maps and one that I have actually played. Designed by Richard Baker and drawn by Mike Schley, their Tyar-Besil is a huge and sprawling dungeon found in D&D sourcebook Princes of the Apocalypse.

I hate superdungeons where it could very well have been designed via algorithm rather than logic -- a big sprawling mess of random rooms. this makes sense. But this one makes sense and has lore that explains what goes where and why.

Tyar-Besil is a dwarven city and possibly as a result of being built over a powerful node of elemental magic, the four quarters of the city have taken on aspects of the four elemental planes. The former smithing quarter has abundant lava for powering their forges -- the Fire element is predominant here. The palace quarter is built over a dizzying chasm with air rushing up; this is where the Air element is strongest. And so on!

Long after the dwarves departed, Cultists of the four elements showed up and have occupied the dungeon. The four groups are intriguingly unified but also rivals and even enemies with each other. They are chaotic and powerful, just like nature itself.

Similarly, the dungeon is separate and unified. The four quadrants can be reached via tunnels, and aren't actually close to each other as the map suggests -- but it makes for a lovely display! But they all work together as part of a distributed city.

I should mention that each quarter of the city has a multi-level mini dungeon on the surface above it -- a monastery for Earth, a castle for Water, etc. And there's a deeper level beyond the map above -- the Elemental Node that has lured so many cultists there.

[adventuresandshopping]

Mike Schley. Essential mapping inspirations.  

http://mikeschley.com

[mapas-fantasticos]

Map from the Court of Fives series by Kate Elliott (Map by Mike Schley).

[drinkinggblood]

The map of Phengaris for my Wings of Fire AU rp server linked!!: Here

I drew most of this myself! Referencing the pyrrhia and pantala map!

credit to Mike Schley [the artist for the Wings of Fire maps] for the style as well as reference.

[another-rpg-sideblog]

Blue Water Inn by Mike Schley (From the Curse of Strahd adventure)

[rustymaps]

Did you know that every map I provide has grid and off-grid versions! Here you can see how it looks like. The map called The Market has grid option to every version - DAY, NIGHT, LATENIGHT, EVENING, FOGGY!

On Patreon You can get day version by supporting me - Tier 1 and all versions - Tier 2!

Special Thanks to Mike Schley for permission to use his assets!