TL;DR: Released v0.51a of the Lexicon of the Vastlands. 90+ pages of weird apocrypha from my fantascience world-setting.
One of the things I've been working on almost since the moment I published the Ultraviolet Grasslands way back in 2019-or-so has been a list of strange terms, weird places, odd events.
It started as "Fragments of a Glossary" (p186–190), but as I wrote other books and then edited the second edition, the idea of keeping a glossary within the book itself (and later within other books) became harder to justify.
For myself, flipping to the back of a PDF or ebook to look up a term is ... a hassle. And while it is lovely to have a glossary in a physical book, the more I wrote and drew about the Vastlands, the bigger and weirder the glossary became.
Other things started creeping in: vignettes, stories, characters, creatures.
As I worked on the sequel-rulebook-worldbook to the UVG named Uranium Butterflies (I'll explain that in the next post, I think), I extracted v0.1 of the Lexicon of the Vastlands some time in 2022. In late 2022 I finished Uranium Butterflies, but realized it was not the fork I wanted to take. I forked that book - simplifying the rules back closer to those in UVG 1E (that's the Vastlands Guidebook I finally offi-launched last week) - and the world-setting into Our Golden Age.
But that left this growing document - the Lexicon.
I was pretty clear on was what it was: an alphabetical compendium of oddities, strange terms, and unreliable narratives. In game terms: an anticanon* grab-bag of ideas and goodies for the game master and their players.
I was less clear on how it was. That is to say, I tried a number of different ways of writing and layout and process. It's a challenging document since it's not finished or, indeed, finishable. Every time I write a new thing or have a new idea, there may be a version of it that should make it into the Lexicon - either the way it is described in the work in question, or undercutting it in some way.
I initially laid it out in Affinity Publisher, but after the whole memory bleed debacle of 2022 and then the colorspace catastrophe as we went to print with UVG 2E, I decided that Affinity - while a nifty piece of software - was more hassle than it was worth in my workflow.**
Then I tried maintaining it in Apple Pages, then I moved the whole thing to Adobe Indesign, but that turned out to be overkill. Now, the whole Lexicon lives as an Apple Pages file that I export into a little PDF every time I add enough entries.
As far as this kind of text-first digital publishing goes, I must say Apple Pages does nearly everything I need, including hyperlinking the table of contents, all for the low-low price of free. So, I guess besides announcing the Lexicon of the Vastlands, this post is also endorsing that software.***
Anyway, this was a long and rambling way to say: I hope you enjoy the Lexicon (v0.51a) and have fun with it!
—Luka
*Another old blog post I need to revitalize. Again, soon.
**Specifically, I need to work with my publisher to create printed books, which are in a CMYK color space defined by the printer, while the digital PDFs are in an RGB color space. Affinity is far more finicky at translating between color spaces, which cost me a couple of weeks of my life.
***Which has also recently transitioned to a freemium model that tries to push you to subscribe to the Apple creative suite or whatever they call it, because subscription fatigue is clearly not a word in this world.
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