The implied metaphysics of Daggerheart

Roleplaying games have implied settings. Daggerheart's is deliberately kept as sparse as possible, as it offers a plethora of game settings (“campaign frames”) and advice on using them or creating new ones to structure play. The pros and cons of the approach are obvious: maximal flexibility, minimal fallback.

That said, “Daggerheart has established ancestries, communities, classes, abilities, and spells – so some worldbuilding aspects will exist similarly across every campaign” (page 11). I'm setting my sights on what these imply about Daggerheart's metaphysics. What's stated? What can be inferred?

By metaphysics I mean cosmological, structural, and supernatural elements of the game world(s).

 

 

What can we learn?

I'm looking only at the Daggerheart core rulebook here. The “World Overview” in Chapter 1 is particularly informative. I'll give page references in other cases.

The Core Realms

The Mortal Realm is a plane, in the many-dimensions sense, and is where “the majority of material beings and objects” as well as the Faint Divinities are. Allegedly but not definitively, the Mortal Realm was created by the Forgotten Gods during the Earliest Age.

The Hallows Above is another core realm. It formerly belonged to the Forgotten Gods, and is now home to the New Gods.

The Circles Below are also called the “lower realms”. Many of the Forgotten Gods are banished there, becoming Fallen Gods. Allegedly but not definitively (a) “places of corruption, destruction, and violence”, and (b) the home to some of the most dangerous creatures in the core realms.

The Realms Beyond: The book is laid out as if these are the fourth of the core realms. However, the text implies that the Mortal Realm, Hallows Above, and Circles Below are the core realms, and that the Realms Beyond are some of the “many realms” of the overall cosmos.

The Realms Beyond include “the Elemental Lands, the Astral Realm, the Valley of Death, and countless others”. The “Chaos Realm” (page 250), an “otherworldly space where the laws of reality are unstable” is “alien to the Mortal Realm” and likely a Realm Beyond. It features impossible architecture and glimpses of other worlds. 

Gods and such

→ The Earliest Age was a time when immortals from the Hallows Above intermingled with mortals. Of nonspecific duration and distance other than “millennia” ago (pages 11, 235).

→ The Forgotten Gods were the first known gods. No mention of what they were called when they were in control – certainly not “Forgotten Gods”. They fought the New Gods and lost, and “many of” them were imprisoned either in the Mortal Realm or the Circles Below. Presumably the others were killed, but the ones “who fought most passionately” were the ones banished to the Circles Below, so there's room for interpretation that some of the losers were rehabilitated as New Gods.

→ The Fallen Gods are simply those of the Forgotten Gods banished to the Circles Below. Unlike in e.g. Christian mythology, nothing is implied to have changed about them in the process. Fallen Gods are designated (but are not objectively stated to be) “evil practitioners of tainted magic”, and their banished Faint Divinity allies (and their descendants) “demons”; Infernis descend in turn from demons. Temples to the Fallen Gods still exist (page 102), and it is possible to have a “direct channel” to them (page 106). Fallen Gods might also be encountered as an adversary (page 235); interestingly only at the same level of threat as “really muscular zombie” (page 239).

→ The New Gods turned up after the Forgotten Gods as a distinct set of entities, but it's unclear whether or not the war began immediately. They seized and colonised the Hallows Above. They still exist and can intervene in the world in set ways.

→ The Faint Divinities are “lesser deities created by both the Forgotten and the New Gods to oversee the Mortal Realm.” They have narrower spheres of influence but “can greatly influence the lives of mortals.” The main text does not actually say so, but many of the campaign frames place the Faint Divinities as being physically present in the Mortal Realm.

The gods' reach includes (page 44) the ability to “appoint” seraphs who are “imbued with sacred purpose” but whose ethos are only “traditionally” in alignment with their god's domain or goals. Some seraphs (page 236) are tasked with enforcing their god's will. Deities who appoint seraphs are those who exist “within the realms” [plural], which implies that seraphs can serve a Forgotten or Fallen God, or possibly even a Faint Divinity.

Interestingly, Daggerheart definitively has gods but does not seem to have an afterlife. The gods have specific observable qualities, and can be communicated with. There is no mention in the text of a heaven, hell, reincarnation, paradise, judgment, or such.

Aside: Resurrecting a dead character is merely “often” (i.e., not always) difficult and costly (page 106). Page 182 contradicts this, calling death “more permanent in Daggerheart than in other games of the same genre” and the Risk It All roll being “final unless you provide another means of resurrection in your story”; it also contradicts the wording of the Resurrection spell by claiming it can only be used once.

There's a definite impression that the Hallows Above and Circles Below are just places where gods happen to live, and not afterlives. Getting there takes specialist knowledge and an enormous investment while, crucially, being alive. The gods are more like super powerful alien beings than anything that maps well onto the belief patterns we have on Earth, but this is generally true for most fantasy TTRPGs.

Not much is set in stone about Daggerheart's gods, their powers, their domain, or the extent of the human-like qualities (agendas and personality traits) which the text hints at.

We do know that the gods are mortal – confusingly, given that they are several times called ‘immortal’ and juxtaposed to mortals. It is possible (page 250) to “breach the gates” of the Hallows Above or “break the barrier” between it and the Mortal Realm, slay one or more gods, and usurp their powers. The mortality of the gods is emphasised several times by the campaign frames (e.g., page 255).

Planar travel

Communication: The Hallows Above are “closely connected with most other realms” (page 11), and according to the text it's because of that cosmological feature (i.e., not because of some godly power or designed property) that “the gods residing here can see and speak with the creatures of the Mortal Realm without leaving their domain”. Communication with the gods may be obfuscated, although it's unclear if this is an interplanar limitation or a feature of the gods themselves.

Travel: There are specific methods by which the New Gods “can leave the Hallows Above to occupy other realms, but in the current age they must always sacrifice something of personal importance to do so.” According to rumour (not definitively), this was a deliberate choice to help protect the Hallows if the Forgotten Gods return.

There's an implied symmetry for entering the Hallows Above, and the requisite sacrifices have caused “some of the great calamities that have befallen the Mortal Realm in recent millennia.”

Accessing and traversing the Realms Beyond from the Mortal Realm “requires specialised knowledge and hard-learned skills”, possessed by some beings in the core realms.

Security: Other planes typically have “safeguards against Fallen [Gods?] who wish to cross from the Circles Below. Within the Mortal Realm, the use of arcane magic in acts of great evil is said to open a temporary rift between the two planes, allowing Fallen [Gods?] to pass through.”

 

Details of the magic system

Magic is “very powerful and incredibly dangerous” (page 12). It permeates the environment, and there is specifically a “magic of the wilderness” (page 30).

Magic can manifest within people (page 12). Some magic is innate and heritable (page 46). This kind of magic can be cultivated and there's a skill component to using it.

Magical power can be acquired and developed through learning, tool use, and taking supplements (page 50). Having knowledge of magic leads to, or correlates with, being able to use it. Secrets can be inherently powerful.

...Other than that, magic is largely left as a mystery. Daggerheart doesn't make commitments about its origin, ground rules, systematisation, relationship to divine powers, etc.

There's not much to glean from the domain cards. Many game powers labelled ‘ability’ rather than ‘spell’ seem nevertheless supernatural. Magic can be used to break the rules in all the classic ways (slow time, transmit information from the future, negate gravity, break space, directly change reality, create and destroy matter, etc). This ‘canonical’ collection of spells is constrained in various ways that would be visible in-world, e.g., in magnitude and locality, which is obviously a TTRPG design consideration.

Notes from the bestiary

Fantastical creatures, undead, and things like “waygates” and “incarnations of fate” exist without any specific metaphysical underpinnings. “Outer Realms” monsters are likely from Realms Beyond. There are also nature spirits that are mentioned repeatedly (pages 183, 230, 283, 338, 339).

Sapients

Where did people come from? According to “stories” the gods created the world (page 12), but that has little epistemic weight. It seems unlikely that people evolved biologically, given that there are eighteen subgroups of people that (a) have enormously varying physical biology (e.g. dragon breath, flight, drastically varying lifespan and size, being made of metal or fungus), (b) are all capable of having children together, and (c) have such similar brains that there is no variance between subgroups in mental characteristics or personality traits.

Aside: There is one exception to the latter. Humans specifically (page 65) “incorporate [sic] both magical and mechanical tools, accessories, and items that assist their daily life and tasks”, and “often dress to clearly display social status, wealth, personal faith, or aesthetics”. These traits are necessarily rare amongst the other seventeen kinds of people, otherwise they would not have been ascribed to humans in particular. Daggerheart separates culture and community from ancestry, so these are inborn traits of humans, not ones developed amongst insular human-dominated societies.

Daggerheart is otherwise very careful about this sort of thing (“individuals from all lineages possess unique characteristics and cultures, as well as personhood”) and notes that all people's minds work indistinguishably, i.e., in a fundamentally human way. I think we should therefore regard these notes on human ancestry as an outright error.

Either way, the ability of e.g. infernis, fungrils, and clanks to mix ancestries seems to preclude a model of biology similar to that of our reality. Of course, Daggerheart has deeply pervasive magic, so although the book doesn't state it, all such cases could be magically induced. This might anyway be a case of “game design considerations” rather than actual metaphysics of the setting.

Campaign frames

Chapter 5 doesn't really talk about modifying the metaphysics for a campaign frame (outside of mentioning unique setting distinctions and special mechanics).

Looking at the details of the cosmos mentioned in the book's campaign frames, we quickly find that (of those that get into it) they are built firmly on the implied metaphysics above, with little deviation.

The Age of Umbra (as laid out on pages 281, 284, 287, 288) and Colossus of the Drylands (as described as “myths” on pages 308–310) for example are each fundamentally compatible with Daggerheart's underlying metaphysics, but develop those basics in different directions.

The Witherwild

This frame reinforces the mortality of the gods, featuring a successful deicide (Shun’Aush) and giving a physicality to their powers (the bodily dust of a dead god gives rise to a plague; the god Nikta's two eyes are individually responsible for ripening and ruination; maiming a god changes their powers).

The Witherwild frame develops the Faint Divinities: “Gods in this land [...] wander the land as incarnate beings, residing in both the natural world as well as within homes and small villages. [...] Many communities, and some larger families, even have their own small god or tutelary spirit who watches over them. […] there is a constant push and pull between the goals of people and their deific neighbors. The gods must curry worship from mortals, often by performing small miracles [...]” Note that this is the only mention in the book of gods having any interest in being worshipped!

The Witherwild frame names six Faint Divinities (Fulg, Hyacynis, Ikla, Oove, Qui’Gar, Rohkin) and says there are hundreds or thousands more. Gods are person-like, with allies, alignments, and special interests. Interestingly, a god's domain is described not as a source of power or set of powers but somewhere that effort is required (Qui’Gar presides over deaths near brambles and the current magical verdancy has “made her job harder”).

 

Motherboard

This is the only canon campaign frame that arguably departs from the base metaphysics. In Motherboard, magic is ancient technology. There's a lot of reskinning necessary, with somewhat vague guidance: “Consider how these would manifest in a world where magic comes from technology, then adapt the flavour of each feature accordingly.”

Faint Divinities are ghosts in the machine. Regarding divine power, players “should determine why their character relates to technology on a spiritual level, rather than simply employing it. They should also consider if and how they offer their devotion to the Motherboard or Faint Divinities.”

The text falls short of saying that gods (and the Hallows Above, etc) don't literally exist in the Motherboard frame. But that's the more plausible and parsimonious reading: the Motherboard is a “master program” left behind by ancient technomancers, whose indistinguishable-from-magic advanced technology gives rise to all supernatural phenomena.

In conclusion

Daggerheart has magic, and lots of it. But it has no deep underlying rules for a GM to fall back on in rulings (or viewed the other way, no constraints that the GM has to work within). 

In Daggerheart, gods exist but at times seem curiously divorced from serving a religious purpose. There are only a few mentions of them being worshipped (e.g. page 313), and this isn't strictly required even for the chosen champions who channel their powers. There's no mention of an afterlife, moral judgment, or belief in gods other than the ones that literally exist. There's also no mention of god-oppositional philosophies, even though the Faint Divinities affect people's lives.

(As I wrote in “Put Flourishes, Fairy Tales, and Folk Beliefs in Your Fantasy World”, these are the kind of details you are definitely going to want to expand upon in your campaign frames.)

The four core realms are “the basis for the worldbuilding elements inherent to many of Daggerheart's mechanics” (page 12). The obvious question to ask now is: do Daggerheart's implied metaphysics constrain campaign frames?

Arguably. The book's frames are all built on those basics or agnostic to them. The game provides very little guidance for tinkering with the metaphysics, even as it weighs in on other analogous matters for creating your own world (in Chapters 3–4 and especially 5). On the other hand, there's lots of customise-it, revise-it, collaborate-on-it, reskin-it, make-it-work-for-your-group sentiment throughout Daggerheart, which could be extended to imply permission.

The Ambrose-Harris Vortex: Four design book reviews

It's Febreviewary! I'm reviewing four graphic design books in this post. They're all written by Gavin Ambrose and Paul Harris, sometimes with a third author.

Enter the Ambrose-Harris Vortex 

The design books I've read so far in 2026 have been tied by an unexpected thread: Their remarkable number of typos and textual errors, despite in some sense being "text objects about making good text objects".

So far we've had the book that misspells its own title and the book with the broken index. Today we'll be looking at, amongst other things, a book with a remarkably wrong colour wheel.

I should note first off that the errors aren't a deal-breaker. These books are informative, visually delightful, and full of great examples of graphic design work. That they're very good books on the whole really just highlights how shockingly un-proofread they are. If they also had mediocre content, poor writing style, dull layout, etc, then I would have written them off and moved on, instead of bothering to note down the details for these reviews. Unfair? C'est la vie.

 

Book 1:

 

The fundamentals of typography (third edition). 2020. Gavin Ambrose, Paul Harris & Sallyanne Theodosiou.

This is a comprehensive primer. Between Practical typography and Typography essentials, I was already familiar with a lot of the basic instructional information that's given in The fundamentals of typography, but it was a comfortable familiarity. I think it would be a good introduction for a beginner or would serve in some respects as a reference work.

I found some of the visuals quite inspiring, and made some notes about things to try. Check out this neat bit of graphic typography, for example:

The book is pretty good about identifying its lettering examples, only occasionally mentioning a typeface without a visual example or giving an example without naming the typeface.

Problems 

The fundamentals of typography contains lots of basic typos (e.g., a repeated "the the", page 41). Beyond that, some poor wordings are compounded by a surprising number of outright textual errors in the examples constructed by the authors.

The first example of leading on a baselines grid on page 51, for instance, is incorrectly described as having "an effective leading of 24pt" and then is discussed in several contradictory ways.

An example of text justification causing too broad word spacing in spots somehow manages to place the highlight boxes over random parts of the paragraph, not over the spaces in question. This kind of error left me with the overall impression that some systematic reformatting done for an edition update broke some of the examples, and the creators never bothered to find and fix them.

In summary 

A solid introductory text let down by frankly amateurish errors. The book reproduces tons of nice pieces of typography from various designers, and is quite enjoyable to page through just to look at.

Book 2:

The fundamentals of creative design (second edition). 2011. Gavin Ambrose & Paul Harris.

This is a great design book. It's wide-ranging and comprehensive. Some of the material is shared with the other Ambrose & Harris books I'm reading, but most is new. The examples of graphic design work are numerous and on-point, and occasionally exquisite. I particularly enjoyed reading the chapter on layout and grids, and I also found the discussion of semiotics useful.

The book's visual design is just as nice as you'd expect. It's subtly colour-coded. Various varnishes, page treatments, and spot colours are used illustratively, to great effect.

Andy Potts design (page 105)

This is, I suppose, a fairly old book now. 2011 still feels recent to me, but 15 years on it really jumps out when the book mentions Youtube and Flash Player ('the format of choice for embedding video on the web') in the same breath. The whole 'for screen' section was a miss for me, but the only one.

More sloppiness 

I spotted the first typo on page 10 ("In turn, became were the basis for") and these proved to be omnipresent. The authors also have a problem with occasional poor sentence structures leading to ambiguous meanings.

More importantly, just as in The fundamentals of typography, the examples of real world graphic design soar, but the examples constructed by the authors are a joke. This book is riddled with diagrams which embarrassingly don't work. e.g.:

• Page 57 says "Although the bottom part of the letters in this subheading have [sic] been removed, it can still be read easily." The bottom part has not been removed.
• Page 124 mixes up left and right.
• Pages 137 and 169 have example images that don't match their descriptions (a greyscale image is meant to be magenta, and spot varnish is not applied as the authors describe).
• The colour wheel on page 126 is preposterously mislabelled:

Sorry for the poor photo. The two colours you can't see are labelled as yellow (correctly) and yellow-green (arguably correctly).

It's hard to even count the colour wheel errors because it's so mangled. I think it's meant to be a cyan-magenta-yellow colour wheel, because yellow and magenta (the latter mislabelled as 'red-orange') are labelled as primary, and cyan is included (albeit mislabelled as a secondary colour). The twelve hues are what you'd expect: it includes the tertiary rose hue between magenta and red, and it has three hues for red through yellow where a red-blue-yellow wheel would have five.

...But the tertiary hue labels are for a red-blue-yellow colour wheel: yellow-orange, red-orange, red-purple, blue-purple, yellow-green, and blue-green. And these aren't even a 'best effort' to try to apply the R-B-Y labels to a C-M-Y wheel! They only have the word 'primary' on there twice! Yellow-orange is between yellow and red! There are two red-oranges!

I assumed at first this got broken during an edition update, but nope: I managed to find the original (2003) edition and it doesn't include a colour wheel at all. What happened?

In summary

I like this book as an instructional text, and the examples of people's graphic design work are so good. A real shame about the errors. I've been thinking about that colour wheel for weeks.

 

Book 3:

 

The layout book (second edition). 2015. Gavin Ambrose & Paul Harris.

I like the opening quote, which articulates my reason for wanting to learn more graphic design:

Design is a plan for arranging elements in such a way as best to accomplish a particular purpose. 

– Charles Eames

I want to have a more purposeful approach to every page I make, and have the skills and tools at hand for doing so.

It's unfortunate

I am still deep in the Ambrose-Harris Vortex. The layout book gets sloppy immediately.

• There's a 38-word run on sentence in the first paragraph of the first chapter.
• Page 12 is missing a sentence subject.
• There are missing commas every few pages, plus a few unnecessary extra commas (e.g. pages 17, 149, 164).
• Page 19 alone has a missing space, a missing comma, a missing word, and begins two sentences in a row with "Here, the".
• Page 86 has a section on creep (a technical term) without ever saying what it is. Other times it was unclear whether an out-of-place word was an undefined graphical design term which the reader should go look up, or simply the result of a botched sentence. See e.g. "reveals" on page 150.
• Some sentences have a singular/plural mismatch (e.g. pages 144, 150).
• There are tons of basic typos that should be picked up by automatic spellchecking (e.g. page 145, "mutliple"; page 114, "0dominate"; page 176, "challanges"; page 179, "picutred").
• The instructions on page 73 for dividing a golden rectangle end with "multiply by 1" for some reason.
• The page 184 caption is a run-on sentence of more than a dozen phrases.
• Page 99 changes horses in midstream with "Notice how use of a grid to create balanced areas of intervention, where text blocks mirror adjacent images or white space."

There are awkward phrasings or grammatical errors on almost every spread. I just don't understand how everything else about the book is so nice but they couldn't be bothered to fix the text-level stuff. Speaking as a former semiprofessional copy editor, you don't even need to hire one to pick up most of this stuff! The authors could have just taken a day to read their text aloud and noticed 95% of it!

Take the phrase-salad on page 92. Incorrect comma usage and subject/object mismatch, plural/singular mismatch, all in one paragraph. You can tell there's a text problem from the most casual read. It really comes across as text that was drafted but at most got a single edit at the paragraph level.

On the bright side, there were fewer author-made examples in this book. The systematic botching of them seen in the previous two books wasn't present; I only noticed a couple of very minor mistakes. In fact, a part of the book I liked the most included this straightforward author-constructed example of layout elements (and the accompanying discussion):

 

Size

This is a 22×30 cm book. It's really nice to have a larger space with so much allocated to visual examples. The authors also break up the text by switching to a large point size for introductory paragraphs, which I don't consciously care about but which I have to presume is a considered, psychologically effective choice (given that this is The layout book).

Structure

The book's six chapters cover historical context, basic layout principles, grids, page objects, interviews with designers, and reader exercises. The last two make The layout book stand out from the other primers I've read.

This book helped me understand hierarchy and orientation in particular and was worth it for that alone. Generally the content is very good. At its worst, there are a few cases where the authors fall into the trap of saying that a thing can be done but not properly explaining how it can be done, relying too heavily on the book's (again, just excellent) real-world-design visual examples. This happens e.g. in the analogy of depth-of-field to hierarchy and layering on page 150.

In summary

I liked The layout book. It's a visual extravaganza. I think I'd have enjoyed it more if I wasn't coming from two other books by the same authors, covering some overlapping ground, with the same boatload of sloppy errors.

 

Book 4:

 

The fundamentals of graphic design (second edition). 2020. Gavin Ambrose, Paul Harris, & Nigel Ball.

I'll admit, I picked this one up weeks after reading the others, just out of a perverse sense of curiosity. Would it continue the pattern?

Visual design

Each chapter page has a footnote looking ahead to the chapter contents in short-form, with page references, a bit like an old-fashioned novel summarising the chapter's contents ahead of time.

Odd book design choices I wish I knew the creators' reason for:

• They use a large-sized display font for the opening body text in each spread.
• There's a text adornment gimmick: a long underline at the start of each introductory paragraph for a new section. A hundred instances of that meant at least fifty times that I instinctively tried for a moment to 'solve' the text like a crossword clue. Probably not what they intended!
• Subsection headings are set in green boxes, subsubsection headings in white boxes, but the text is flush with the bottom of the box (so that letters with descenders dangle out of it) for some reason.

The callout boxes at the bottom of the page used to define terms of art are a nice touch, although I was amused on page 62 when the definition of 'values' relied on four-dollar words like 'acrimonious'.

The book's accompanying glossary is very comprehensive (seven pages)!

Content and writing

This book's take on the classic what is graphic design? opener includes (page 8):

Graphic design takes ideas, concepts, text and images and presents them in a visually engaging form through print, digital, or other media. It imposes an order and structure to the content in order to facilitate and ease the communication process, while optimizing the likelihood that the message will be received and understood by the target audience. A designer achieves this goal through the conscious manipulation of elements [...]

...which I rather like. It sets expectations that the book is going to be slightly more pragmatic than the others; these were borne out. The authors describe the expected commercial/studio graphic design process, walking through the steps, and go into some detail on the practicalities of paper, ink, production, packaging, etc.

By necessity, there's a fair amount of overlap with the other Ambrose-Harris books, but refreshingly few repeated examples of real-world design (I'd guess 98%+ were new).

The authors impressed me by covering all the bases and then finding room throughout for some really thoughtful discourse. There are short essays on social responsibility, consumerism, anti-consumerism, "subvertisements", greenwashing, design as a non-neutral process, and the "misery of choice".

Aside: I find that as I get old and set in my ways I'm caring far more about the serial comma. The authors refuse to include it, but are at least consistent about it. Still, it really is conspicuous in its absence, creating a visual hiccup every time you miss it and have to re-parse the word 'and'. Why choose to make your text harder to read?

Are there text-level problems?

No prizes for guessing yes. I noticed all sorts of basic errors:

• Agency accidentally assigned to an immersive experience (page 7).
• Misuse of words and phrases like "despite" (page 11), "impact on" (pages 14, 42), "comprising of" (page 58), and "resided" (for "resized", page 159).
• Several missing spaces on page 57 and missing words like "the" on page 89.
• Faulty pluralisation in a few places, like "is"/"are" confusion on page 68, and "access to a mobile devices" on page 152.
• Grammar mistakes that smack of hastily rewritten sentences. On page 108: "[...] a wide range of flexibility in the finish, which can be obtained in the final product and the print run possible."

(The authors also use "his or her", a phrase I'd consider deprecated by this point.)

There are only about 15 author-created examples in this book, and perhaps due to that relative paucity, none of them were outright broken. The "communication flow between agencies and clients" diagram on page 143 does approach that status. It ought to serve as an aid to comprehending the text, but this one is so abstract that a reader who hasn't already understood the main text won't be able to puzzle out the meaning of the diagram.

In summary

The fundamentals of graphic design didn't wow me quite as much with its real-world graphic design examples as the other Ambrose & Harris books. But it covered a lot of ground in quite practical ways, and the interspersed high-level ethical and philosophical treatments of graphic design considerations were a pleasant surprise.

 —

Closing thoughts

All books have flaws. It was a weird experience to read books so deeply flawed in one aspect and almost impeccable in all the others.

Reflecting, I think all four books were very good at 'describing the process' but fell slightly short on 'teaching the process'. I would have been interested in an extra chapter in each for the authors to go through one or two examples in meticulous detail. The fundamentals of typography could have picked fonts or modified typography for particular situations, The layout book could have worked through the actual process of deciding and applying a layout, and the two design books could have gone from a brief to completed design. A missed opportunity.

I should emphasise in closing that I'd still recommend these books.

Okay, fling me free of the Ambrose-Harris Vortex. I have a few more graphic design books to read and review this month and I think they're going to be a change of pace.

Modern graphic design: Three book reviews

It's febreviewary! During my 2026 design / layout / typography challenge, I picked up a bunch of books around the subject. I've previously read Butterick's Practical Typography and Spieker's Stop Stealing Sheep, both of which are stalwarts. I've also been reading It's Nice That articles. That's the limit of my knowledge. Now I've read a dozen or books on or adjacent to graphic design, and I'm reviewing three here!

• Typography essentials: 100 design principles for working with type. 2019. Ina Saltz.
• The complete color harmony: Deluxe edition. 2024. Tina Sutton.
• Web and digital for graphic designers. 2020. Neil Leonard, Andrew Way, & Frédérique Santune.

 

Preamble (rant)

First I have to vent steam about ebook software. Feel free to skip ahead to the actual reviews.

I had to read the first sections of Ina Saltz's book with the 'overdrive dot com' ebook viewer my library system partners with.

Technically you can use this software to read. It displays pages and you can move between them.

But... You can't see how far through the book you are (this is way more disorienting than I would have guessed). The navigation bar is inscrutable and sometimes has a delay. Nothing is made for mouse clicks. The shortcut for 'chapter back' doesn't work on the first page of a chapter although 'chapter forward' does, so you can skip forward but not back. There's a bunch of stuff you'll seldom use (bookmarks! notes! highlights! word search! previews!) yet the core functionality is awful.

The pages are split for the smallest possible screen size and so none of the examples are on the same page as the corresponding discussion. You have to flip pages constantly. The clincher, then, is that the viewer has baked-in headache-inducing animated 'page turning' visual transitions. These are visually truly unpleasant, and there is no way to turn them off in the accessibility settings.

I tried the 'Libby' app-ified version of the software, which has a setting to "reduce animations". This setting doesn't do anything.

So anyway, the book.

Book 1 

 

 

Typography essentials: 100 design principles for working with type. 2019. Ina Saltz.

This visually delightful book manages to misspell its own title in the opening paragraphs.

(Spoiler: That kind of thing is going to be a recurring theme in my book reviews this month.)

The content

Typography essentials contains 100 design principles, divided equally into four sections (the letter, the word, the paragraph, and the page). This structure works okay, although frankly the divisions are a bit improvised. Half of the principles in "the word" would fit better in "the letter" (typeface stuff) or "the page" (hierarchy stuff).

This book demonstrates its value through a superb collated collection of visual examples, which I found tremendously useful. The accompanying explanations are usually on point. I wrote lots of notes!

Principle #95 is about tables, charts and infographics, calling that kind of design work "a specialty all its own", and indeed, I'm hoping to find a book about this.

Vagueness

Some of the introductory and bridging text uses vague, emotive, positive language which these days feels chatbot-coded (although note this book predates that).

There's quite a lot of "you can do this thing, or this other thing that is the opposite" without saying what might inform that choice. I kept coming across lines like "Again, everything is relative, so optimum line length may vary based on typestyle, leading, tracking, and even the texture and tone of the printed surface." It's worth stating once, but the author keeps repeating it without discussing how and when such things might vary.

Entry points

A page having "entry points" for the reader is a design concept I'd been struggling to really get. Typography essentials helped a lot! I just wish Saltz had gone into more detail on how to achieve things. Hierarchy cues relative importance and relation of content to the whole, sure. Shifting typographic style will "provide entry points", okay. You should maintain "overall balance [...] simultaneously", got it. But please, more details and examples.

The visuals

It should go without saying that Typography essentials is visually delightful. It's full of examples that are fit to purpose and in most cases just nice to look at. This is a big success.

Typos

The book's generally high production values didn't extend to proof-reading. Just a few examples at random: as well as getting its own title wrong it misspells "cacophony", "typographic", and "flourishes" (repeatedly); uses "it's" for "its"; mispluralises "Lego"; and has a number of systematic grammatical mistakes. That said, its pervasive sloppiness is far from the highest in the design books I've been reading.

In summary

Typography essentials is a great book in most regards. But save yourself a headache if your only option is an e-reader.

 

Book 2 

 

 

The complete color harmony: Deluxe edition. 2024. Tina Sutton.

Of a dozen or so books I'm reviewing this month, this might be the nicest-looking. The colours are certainly on point. There's a few layout choices I'm curious about:

• The first paragraph of each section is indented, which always looks odd to me.
• The text columns have a ragged right edge instead of justification, and yet the layout uses both lots of hyphenation and sometimes (e.g. p 34) greatly reduced letter spacing. If you're going that far to crunch the text, why not get the visual benefits of right-justifying?

Tone 

The book's introduction contains a semi-endorsement of chromatherapy which is a major blow to the author's credibility. In the lengthy later section on the psychology of colour she again talks about chromatherapy uncritically (e.g., p 161).

Instead of wording something like "Blue hues are associated with calm, order, trust, and loyalty", Sutton writes "Blue: You like a sense of calm and order in your life. Trustworthy, you also value loyalty in others." This sort of thing is pretty frequent. What does the sentence "Mother Nature knows a good thing when she sees it." actually mean? What does it add to the discussion of the colour green?

Both tone and content are a bit 'airy fairy'. Green is "thought to have great healing powers" (p 162), etc.

The verbosity is just a tiny bit higher than necessary. For example, the discussion of "Special effects for color" (pp. 32–34) could easily have been reduced to two pages. It conveys valuable and interesting information, but the extravagant linking sentences and extra adjectives felt like filler. Likewise, the examples are sometimes weak or unnecessary (e.g. listing things that are both gold-coloured and valuable), which is a major contrast to the rest of the design books I've been reading.

Typos 

After you work as a copy editor for a while you develop an eye that is  so I was glad to only notice three: missing spaces on pages 22 and 180, and a double space on page 94.

Content

Half of the book (pp 50–153) is on "Moods and color". In this section, a page gives a mood, like "Powerful", "Refreshing", or "Nostalgic", with accompanying image and discussion. This page is followed by three pages of two- and three-colour palettes that work for that mood.

This is an interesting tool. I can certainly see it being useful, although I found myself craving some geometric form to have the colours applied to instead of just two or three vertical bars. Consulted as a reference tool, this might not have been a problem.

The discussions of each mood are a mixed bag. Parts are straightforward: particular colours connote things, here's how they are used in advertisements, here's what they are used to symbolise. Other parts are written in annoying ad copy, with phrases like "red can never be ignored" or "pink evokes memories of dreamy June days".

Most of this book could have been presented as a three-column table: <colour; emotion or quality evoked; real-world example>. That would have been much more usable if it's primarily intended as a reference to consult. Writing <colour, evocation, example> tuple in sentence form a thousand different ways only makes sense for reading cover-to-cover (although even then, readers like me might prefer the table).

Focus 

The greatest limitation of The complete color harmony is a subtle one. Overall the book is extremely focused on advertising (plus fashion and branding). There's nothing about using colour to e.g. connote threats or danger, evoke grief or disgust, emphasise horror or the macabre, explore alienation and dissociation, etc.

The strictly commercial focus means the things you'd want to know about colour for art aren't covered.

In summary

The complete colour harmony is a fine work. It just wasn't the book I hoped it would be based on the title.

Book 3

Web and digital for graphic designers. 2020. Neil Leonard, Andrew Way, & Frédérique Santune.

This book is a primer for web design. It covers most of the tech stack with a focus on the user-facing design aspects.

The "for graphic designers" part of the title is interesting: I'm not sure whether the authors mean it. Parts of the book assume knowledge about approaches to layout, etc, and describe how to apply them to web formats. But other parts e.g. describe widely-used functions of Adobe Photoshop and give very basic information about file types.  

I found the book easy to read, and well-presented. Sections are nicely tied to colour coding. Page numbers are at the outside edges instead of the lower margin; I'm curious what the thinking was there.

Content

Leonard et al. give very wide-ranging, and quite grounded, advice. They cover tools, platforms, SEO, prototyping, content management, the semantic web, etc. There's quite a lot of pragmatic advice (like a hefty subsection on working with clients) which other books have tended to elide.

There are interstitial interviews with ten designers divided into bite-sized Q&A throughout. It was interesting to see the different viewpoints and approaches, but otherwise I didn't think these add much.

Web and digital for graphic designers also has a number of "critical discussions", such as a remarkable subsection on "Marxism and the information economy". Others include technological determinism, feminism and intersectionality, dark UX. I found these very thoughtful, and the authors include a hefty list of further reading for each side topic.

Bits like this, with now-quaint discussions on whether crowdsourcing digital labour leads to homogenising and lower-quality information dissemination on the Internet, make it particularly fascinating to read a book on digital technologies that was published just before the spread of GPT.

Overall the textual content is high-quality and comprehensive, only somewhat undermined by its pervasive...

Errors

The time-to-typo is four paragraphs ("Through, the 1980s,"). From there, Web and digital for graphic designers continually pleads to the cold heavens for a copyedit but its prayers go unanswered.

The typos continued, e.g., "browser rations" for "browser ratios" (p 16); "a huge a stockpile" (p 62); "make sure if it is" (p 132); the phrase "standard characters" copy-pasted mistakenly (p 46);

There are grammar mistakes, awkward phrasings, and unevenness of tone throughout. A mixture of tenses on p 94. "firstly" for "first" on p 134. A stray comma on p 192. A mangled definition on p 93.

Page 34 gives a bullet list of browsers and their percentage market shares. The authors omit the stat from the last browser, then accidentally stylise the closing paragraph as another bullet.

There are outright falsehoods, e.g., "The internet has existed in some form since the Second World War, when it was used as a communication tool" (p 6). Merely ten pages later, the book says "the idea of the Internet was conceived [...] during the Cold War".

All the index entries for entries from page 167 onwards are broken, giving page numbers that are too high by 1–2. It only took a moment's checking to realise the layout was changed without updating the index. Specifically, the culprit is page 166 (examples of hotel bookings design), whose multiplicity of small images indicates that three pages were compressed down to one.

The errors themselves are less frustrating than how fixable they are. I mean, what are we doing here? I read the book casually, noticed the index problem just by browsing, identified the nature of the issue in three minutes, and it would take another three minutes in layout software to fix it. An hour tops if they made the index manually.

Has it been lost, The Deep Knowledge? — By which I mean that an author who can't afford to pay a copy editor for a couple of days can just read the text aloud and pick up most of the problems. Does having multiple authors make editing the text Somebody Else's Problem? Was the text absolutely riddled with errors and they did manage to fix a large percentage of them? I'm really puzzled.

In Summary

Leonard et al. have written a very good book. I wish they had also edited a very good book.

Pick this up if you have an amateur interest in the subject; it's probably recent enough that it hasn't become dated by the fast pace of technological change.

Weird maps: Three book reviews

It's Febreviewary!

Last month I set myself a 2026 challenge to learn a bit more graphic design and got some practise in by making a new TTRPG-aligned poster every day.

As part of that, I've been reading all sorts of art books to see how people put things together. Here are my reviews of three books of fantastical maps: Plotted, Strange maps, and City across time.

More reviews to come later this month.

 

Plotted: A literary atlas. 2015. Andrew DeGraff (illustrator), Daniel Harmon (editor and essayist).

This book takes classic English-language books and converts their plots into maps. As such it is full of exquisite illustrations, with some lightweight literary commentary on each one.

The concept is interesting, but it has hits and misses.

The good 

DeGraff has created some truly stellar illustrations, including in the graphic designs for the title pages. I like this title for Moby Dick in particular:

Plotted – Moby Dick (title). Andrew DeGraff.

The main illustration provided for Moby Dick is an exploded/cutaway diagram of a whale, labelled in the way that it would be butchered by whalers. It's a fascinating and compelling piece, if gross, and probably the book's strongest deviation from the 'map' theme.

Another favourite is the Library of Babel. This world of infinitely tessellating rooms really got my TTRPG gears turning, but that's as much on the original work, which is one of only a few Borges stories I've read (something I must remedy someday).

Plotted – The Library of Babel (diagram). Andrew DeGraff. 

There are some interesting design decisions. For example, charting the arcs of characters' lives towards marriage for Pride & Prejudice makes for a neat visual.

 

Plotted – Pride & Prejudice (marriage map; cropped). Andrew DeGraff.

 

The stretches

A repeated motif in Plotted is the tracking of characters, showing the paths they take through their fictive worlds. I'm not sure I'm sold on these traces. They look nice, but what do they add as an infographic? For people familiar with the work, I don't think it really reveals much. For people unfamiliar, it's just messy layers of lines that don't say much about the text.

Plotted – A Christmas Carol (map). Andrew DeGraff.

 

The trace technique is at its weakest in e.g. the illustrations for A Christmas Carol or Hamlet, where it just shows routes taken around a town or a couple of buildings.

On the other hand, it was a great fit for Around The World In 80 Days! I just think these character traces were over-used.

There are a couple of real stretches to force a text into the mold of the book's premise. Take the illustration for A Narrow Fellow In The Grass by Emily Dickinson. The source text is a 128-word poem, and Charted creates a graphic for it which (a) is barely a map, (b) goes well beyond the actual textual content, and (c) still doesn't have much to say. The book's front matter mentions that to some extent the artist and essayist just picked their favourite pieces of literature, and I'm guessing that's what happened here.

That's one of the things which made me conclude that a better premise for this project would have been to create a wider variety of pseudo-infographic non-traditional illustrations, some of which happen to be maps. Again, that Moby Dick exploded diagram (not a map) was incredible!

By modifying the approach like that you could avoid the pitfalls of the unremarkable character traces and forcing maps onto texts that are deeply unsuited to them, although of course you could no longer call it "a literary atlas".

In summary

The premise isn't as strong as it sounds, but the book is a visual feast regardless, and there are some stand-outs that individually make it worth taking a look. You'll probably get more out of Plotted the more of the texts you're familiar with.

 

Strange maps: An atlas of cartographic curiosities. 2009. Frank Jacobs.

This book lives up to its name. It's filled with all kinds of interesting things, from fictional islands to the Land of Oz to maps made of the North Pole before we knew what it looked like.

Strange Maps – The Land of Oz

 

The book is divided into sections, so we have maps of places from fiction in one, propaganda and political maps in another (the ten-state Australia is remarkable), etc.

Also abstract or fantastical illustrations of real places:

Strange Maps – Vancouver

 

My favourite map? Probably an 1834 visualisation of the world's major rivers descending into a fictional sinkhole.

Strange maps also contains the most full explanation of enclaves, exclaves, and fragments that I didn't know I needed.

Minor quibbles 

The book has some unexamined colonial language. That's unfortunate for something published as recently as 2009.

There are a couple of sections containing a lot of America-centric maps which mean little to someone outside the country. A 'cartographic curiosity' that you have to be from a particular culture to appreciate isn't very exciting. Having page after page of them becomes tedious.

The book is well-made; I only have one criticism in that regard. The large form factor makes plenty of space for the maps, but the downside is that this sometimes means a map on one page and accompanying text filling the facing page. And while often this is necessary to explain the broader historical context, sometimes the author struggles to find something interesting to say, using trivia and colour commentary to fill a huge empty page. Just leave it blank!

In summary

A fascinating book. Definitely worth picking up, although I wouldn't be afraid to skim bits of it to get to the best stuff. The fictional maps are visually interesting, but I particularly enjoyed the real-world absurdities:

Strange Maps – Market Reef

City across time. 2019. Peter Kent.

This is a children's book illustrating how an imagined city changes across the course of history, with cross-sections showing how archaeological objects are laid down in the strata.

I grabbed a copy because I'm a sucker for cross-sections, and I thought it might be useful for the dungeon archaeology project I have coming up. And it's definitely inspired me!

The book instructs you to “look carefully to see how the buildings people knock down and the garbage they drop create the layers of history beneath their feet”, and it knocks it out of the park.

Page spreads from City across time. Peter Kent.

I'm no judge of children's books, but Kent's writing seems perfectly serviceable. He is also the illustrator, and does a truly wonderful job with the visual storytelling.

The process of archaeological deposits being laid down as the city progresses through historical periods is shown with unbelievable artifice, often in the subtlest little minutiae, which the text never draws attention to. Post holes show up where structures were. Tiny objects are lost and buried. Features from former eras are re-used. Strata are dug into and disrupted. All of it is delightfully illustrated.

There is something very emotionally impactful about showing the accretion of history in a single place as people and civilisations come and go. 

The book opens with Stone Age people hunting mammoths and discussions of the misnomer 'caveman' and the role of caves as religious sites; it closes in a postapocalyptic future Earth where a dark ruined basement is full of things the post-fall people have collected, a site with a clear religious/burial role, and paintings daubed on the wall.

 

Cropped page showing a basement serving a similar role of a cave to prehistoric people.

In summary

City across time was one of my favourite books to read in the last couple of months. You have to bear in mind that it's a children's book, so you'll only get so much from the textual content, but I really appreciate the depth of thought and planning that went into the illustrations. And the results speak for themselves. This got me fired up to work on Dungeon Dig Site, and wanting to draw some cross-sections of my own.

Tick-tock-tock game design

Let's talk a bit about prototyping, i.e., creating the foundation of a game as the first step before iterating on the design.

I sometimes use a specific approach for this, which I call "tick-tock-tock game design".

The name (as opposed to tick-tock-tick-tock) is meant to evoke simplicity and granularity, procedurality and semi-predictability, and deliberate avoidance of symmetry. Specifically, tick-tock-tock game design is

• Minimalist: The game's complexity emerges from a small set of simple, interconnected processes and abstractions acting on each other. Additional complexity may be introduced creatively by the player. For example: The game has two stats and two actions, and the gameplay state is limited to a set of five possibilities plus some numbers.
• Clockwork: There is a core gameplay loop, precisely described, which you don't deviate from. The loop's particulars almost certainly involve randomness and player choice, but in general Z follows Y follows X. For example: The game is an escalating series of four-stage cycles where you ante up, make a bet, apply the consequences, then raise the stakes.
• Asymmetric: Although minimalism + clockwork permits a very high level of symmetry and regularity in principle, the game deliberately leans in the other direction. For example: The game has four stats, but they aren't equally important. The game has four actions with the same magnitude of effect, but one is only situationally useful, and another one has a cost.

This combination can be a potent one for engaging play.

I'll give a few examples from my current game project, Overzealous.

This is a solo TTRPG where you (an outsider god) want to be summoned into reality, but you're mismatched with a cartoonishly bloodthirsty cult who keep getting distracted by their own horrible havoc.

Poster by me. Art credits: Evlyn Moreau. Gordy Higgins. Adobe Stock. Lorc, CC-BY (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/), modified.

 

Overzealous is Minimalist. There are five stats. The two 'good stats' are Cultists and Imminence. The three 'bad stats' are Fervour, Divergence, and Monstrosity. You want to get your good stats high and keep your bad stats from creeping up too fast.

All the game's additional mechanics (random weekly events, the actions an outsider god can take, ongoing problems like your cultists turning into cannibals, etc) revolve around these essentials. It is very easy to understand the fundamentals and everything hinging off them aids further comprehension.

Overzealous is Clockwork. Stats matter at the values 0 and 13 (as starting points, points where you win or lose, etc). Stats change iteratively, each turn, with a random factor. The actions available to you have precisely specified outcomes.

After setting up, play proceeds in a tight game loop in which a turn begins, developments happen, actions are chosen, random events are rolled, and consequences are suffered. The loop only ends in a victory or a loss, with a little extra gameplay associated with either, much of the complexity of which is driven by player creativity.

Overzealous is Asymmetric. You want 13 Cultists and 13 Imminence so that you can win, but you need more Cultists than that if your cult has too many heretical ideas. Also, having high Cultists increases the rate of increase in all your other stats.

Fervour, Divergence, and Monstrosity are all bad, but Divergence is the worst because it can passively make it harder to win the game. All three stats can make you lose the game if they reach 13, but Fervour and Divergence matter more before that because they result in worse effects from the random rolls you make for cult shenanigans.

Ongoing problems in your cult can cause stat penalties over time, and there are 25 possible combinations for this, but in practise you only face a subset of ten problems the cult can bring upon themselves, with stat penalties appropriate to the nature of those problems. There's a wide variety of actions that you can choose between to trade off your stats, but they don't all have quite the same expected value or magnitude of effect, some are random, and some effects you might want aren't encoded as actions.

Why tick-tock-tock game design?

Minimalist and clockwork approaches are easy to learn and play and well suited to casual and solo gaming. The flip side is that they can be boring, and the kind of complexity they create can be limited in various ways, such as predictability or lack of verisimilitude.

But small deviations from a pattern feel meaningful (whereas pure unpredictable randomness circles all the way around to pablum).

To put it another way, wielding asymmetry means setting up expectations – the player can envisage a huge gleaming clockwork machine built on these simple bones, a game where a player is barely needed because everything proceeds in so orderly a fashion – and then subverting them. Having things go in different directions. Hiding better solutions amidst worse ones. Presenting a damaged machine to play with. Making things messier and more interesting in the process.

The earlier the better

I think it's best to bake this sort of thing in at the prototyping stage, where it will necessarily affect the end result, rather than try to get it right in later stages of design.

Accidental symmetries are possible, and in my experience if you're not careful when you are designing to thread the needle between symmetrical and chaotic, you can end up e.g. creating trap choices or areas of game-space which never get reached because the better path is so obvious.

This is all part of the game design vision where you avoid having equilibrium states or necessary actions or unavoidable penalties or slow death spirals. Early in the design of Overzealous I switched from ongoing problems causing a stat change of 1 to a 50% chance of a stat change of 2. It should be obvious why. It's less fun to just go around in circles, tick tock tick tock tick tock.