Rook and Rose Pattern Deck

Happy New Year + lettering update!
about 1 year ago – Tue, Jan 07, 2025 at 11:32:55 AM

Happy New Year to you all! I know it's hard times for a lot of people, but I still hope that 2025 brings you many good things.

For our first update of the year, I think I should talk about the lettering! As you may recall, hand-lettering in place of a computer font was one of the stretch goals we achieved. Originally we tossed that into the list just because it's nice to have something unique; this way there's no chance that anybody will look at our cards and think "oh, I saw that font on a book cover/in an advertising sign/etc. the other day."

But I realized it offered another opportunity, too. You see, while much of the worldbuilding for the Rook and Rose books was very much a joint effort between me and Alyc, pattern has always been my baby (as numinatria is Alyc's). And while obviously I've been taking point on a lot of matters related to this Kickstarter, and I'm the one writing the guidebook . . . there was nothing in the deck itself that was my contribution. I do photography, not any kind of drawing or painting.

. . . but I used to do calligraphy. And I was more than willing to put in the hours scraping the rust off those skills to be able to point at the lettering and say, I did that!

It's not just a matter of getting my precision back, though. While I used some standard calligraphy styles as practice, the pattern deck shouldn't be lettered in gothic or uncial or italic. It needs its own style -- which means everything from choosing letterforms (should the lowercase a be a single-story closed bowl, or a two-story a with a hook on top?) to considering the angle of the calligraphy nib.

This is a new challenge for me! I've never actually developed a lettering style before, only replicated the ones I'd been taught (with variants creeping in accidentally as I forgot the orthodox specifics). But hey, never let it be said I'm afraid of research. I dove down a rabbit hole of the history of Western calligraphy, looking not only at familiar things like the ones I listed above but at secretary hand, court hand, and other such obsolete styles.

WOW was that a trip. For many of the older writing styles, you can barely even tell what letter you're looking at -- or sometimes you just have to take the word of the person who glossed them. That's an R? I would have assumed B. I don't even know what that one over there is. Needless to say, I wasn't going to use any of those for the lettering; we do want you to be able to read the names of the cards!

But I'm glad I did the research, because it gave me the epiphany that proceeded to guide my work:

Ligatures.

We almost never see these anymore in English, except for the rare æ or even rarer œ. (And the ampersand, which started life as a ligature of "et," the Latin word for "and." But that one's morphed a lot over the centuries.) Broadly speaking, a ligature is any situation where you join two letters together -- sometimes by literally smashing them into each other, as with æ, but also by linking them with an additional line.

Like . . . a thread?

Pattern is, as its core, about the connections between things. Which makes ligatures the perfect feature for the lettering on the cards. And you almost never see them in computer fonts, because they're so situational; the line springing off the top end of an s to the neighboring t only shows up when those two letters are adjacent. A very few fonts will include special options for them, but most don't bother.

And because this is hand lettering, I don't have to be consistent -- in the ligatures, or in the letters overall. Sure, it would make my life easier if I drew one perfect copy of every letter and then just copy-pasted them into place, but I like being able to customize each card. So you'll see different ligatures in different places, depending on the overall shape of the word and which letters look best joined together this time. You'll also see variation in the letters themselves; the capital S in The Face of Stars is not quite the capital S in The Face of Song, and The Mask of Worms got some extra spirals because c'mon, it's worms.

I haven't finalized anything yet. Alyc needs to composite the lettering together with a card and make sure what I'm doing will be fully legible at the appropriate size; I've been keeping that in mind as I make my choices, but I want to double-check before I commit to lettering everything. Still, it's been a deeply pleasurable process so far, and it's absolutely making me feel like I, personally, have contributed something to the cards you'll hold in your hands.

--Marie

Sneak peek: The Face of Weaving!
about 1 year ago – Tue, Dec 10, 2024 at 12:56:48 PM

I'm not sure what neuron misfired to make me say the last update of 2024 would go out on the 7th, when today is the 10th. Possibly I accidentally looked at January instead?

Anyway, today's sneak peek is for a card that took a fair bit of revision. This is the set of options Avery originally sent us for The Face of Weaving:

I have to admit, I was intrigued by the top right, even though in general we've been taking the approach of making the Faces more human-looking and the Masks less so. But overall, there was a bit of a problem with this set, which is that the designs are more evocative of knotwork than of weaving. That's not inappropriate to Vraszenian culture, of course . . . but this is The Face of Weaving. We wanted the design to really reflect that.

Since we liked the two middle designs the best overall, we suggested that the facial lines be made more like the grid of a weave, as if the face itself is fabric. The result looks a little sharp in the two sketch samples Avery sent us, but it'll be subtler in the painted version:

Much closer! Now our tweak was that, for the card that is supposed to evoke community (usually in a positive sense), neither of those faces looked that friendly. So Avery did one more mockup, slightly softening the features and also adding in the sixth face from the original set:

We really liked the shifts between a closer weave and a more open one on that new addition, and the friendliness of the features. So the ultimate answer was to use the face on the lower right there -- its features and its weaving pattern -- but with different braids.

And that's the last update for 2024! I hope you all enjoy whichever holidays you're celebrating, and I'll be back in January . . . with your first look at some of the finished art!

--Marie

Sneak peek: Sleeping Waters!
over 1 year ago – Tue, Nov 26, 2024 at 06:31:16 PM

Time for another card update! Sleeping Waters is from the cut thread, which deals with matters of the physical world, but the place it represents is a very spiritual one for Vraszenians, as the name refers to the Wellspring of Ažerais, the most holy site in all of Vraszan. It stands atop the Point, the highest part of the island that divides the River Dežera, and so we knew we wanted the card to depict the island, rather than the wellspring itself. (We could have done the latter, but then it would have looked a great deal like Labyrinth's Heart, as the wellspring traditionally stood at the center of a labyrinth.)

But that raised an interesting question. When are we depicting the Point?

The Tyrant, Kaius Sifigno, razed the labyrinth that used to stand at the island's peak. In its place, he built the Great Amphitheatre, intending to obliterate the ritual that used to take place there. Instead the wellspring started manifesting in the middle of the stage. So in depicting this most important site, we had to think about whether this card's imagery predates his conquest or not.

That's something that probably varies by deck. I doubt many decks that old are still in active use -- even with imbuing to make them more durable -- but the iconography would survive, used by those who don't want to depict the effects of the Tyrant's actions. For others, though, it might be more important to acknowledge the destruction and the attempt to overwrite the Vraszenian faith. Here's what we ended up with:

Now, like a magician unveiling their trick, I admit that for the purposes of a deck sold to readers, that question doesn't matter. What's that building you see there? Is it the Tyrant's amphitheatre or the structure of the old labyrinth? Since none of you have ever been to Nadežra, you don't know! What you read into it is up to you.

. . . but having said that, yeah, we decided when we briefed A.C. that we wanted it to be the old labyrinth, not the amphitheatre. Screw the Tyrant; he doesn't get to put his works in our deck!

I will be back with one more update on the 7th, and then we'll go quiet until the New Year . . .

--Marie

Announcing . . . The Sea Beyond!
over 1 year ago – Tue, Nov 12, 2024 at 07:43:13 PM

I largely keep these updates focused on the material of the Kickstarter itself, but if you'll forgive a tangent, this is news we just can't resist sharing everywhere. Alyc and I are officially collaborating again, this time on a historical fantasy duology called The Sea Beyond. From our publisher's formal announcement:

In an alternate Spanish Golden Age, where the map becomes the territory and mapmakers are the architects of reality, the Council of the Sea Beyond has risen to unrivaled power, exploiting the world’s most precious resources for their own gain.

Determined to discover how cosmographers pin down the islands of the Otherworld, Estevan seeks power with the Council of the Sea Beyond—but he risks the exposure of his own secrets, too. For he is a changeling, a faerie masquerading as a mortal. And for a faerie to enter the mortal world like that, a child must go the other way…

The Hungry Girl, the nameless human daughter whose place he took, has grown up opposite her “brother.” Lost among the fae and desperate to find some purpose for her pitiful existence, she leaps at the chance to help a group of Spanish explorers in the Sea Beyond…only to be horrified at the atrocities they commit.

Soon the unlikely siblings will need to overcome their rivalry–because only together can they bring down Spain’s worlds-spanning empire and save the homes they have come to love.

We've secretly been hard at work on this since March, first with several months of research, then tiptoeing into the process of drafting while also still doing research (because that part of it never really ends). The first book probably won't be out until 2026, so there's some time to wait yet, but we're incredibly excited for this new series! And in case it wasn't obvious, once that's done, we have other collaborations in mind, because we really enjoy working together.

But don't worry -- we're still charging full speed ahead on the Kickstarter, too. So I'll be back in two weeks with a sneak peek at another card!

--Marie

Sneak peek: The Mask of Fools!
over 1 year ago – Tue, Oct 15, 2024 at 03:44:38 PM

The preview for this fortnight's update takes us to The Mask of Fools, the counterpart to The Face of Ages. We had a fair bit of back-and-forth about this one, because the name kind of drags one's thoughts in the direction of a European jester, but in terms of the concepts behind the card, it's more about contrast with the elder wisdom of the Face, i.e. the foolishness of childhood. Avery's drafts covered that whole gamut in various forms, but also brought in a detail that was entirely her suggestion: using spirals as a kind of counterpart to the labyrinths that play a central role in Vraszenian religion. (Those of you who have read Labyrinth's Heart may also recall a key use of that image in a very chilling context . . .) Here's the array we started out with:

(I was especially amused by Avery's gloss for #6: "I hate this with all of my heart and I am definitely using it if you don't because it makes me deeply uncomfortable. Seriously looking at it makes me want to die but that is a visceral reaction and those can be very good.")

As with several of the other cards, we wound up hybridizing elements to arrive at a final sketch. I liked the baby face of #4, given the symbolism around the card, but the diamonds were too blatantly Venetian-coded, and Alyc felt the top curl too strongly evoked kewpie dolls. So we stole the hair/ribbon surround off #5 and worked the spirals onto the face, and here's the resulting mockup:

I thiiiiink the top curl scribbled in there will be going away -- that's a relic of earlier fiddling -- but I don't remember for sure. Either way, I'm certain the actual painting will look amazing, and I will be haunted by that creepy tongue spiral in my sleep!

As a heads-up, there will be no update two weeks from now. I'll be back on November 12th with more news of progress!

--Marie