Engineers of Valhalla Brainstorming Thread

[TREX]

Hey guys, just finished up a pretty fun Logo in photoshop. Hope you guys like it. Here's a link to our welcome thread.
https://www.heroscapers.com/communit...90&postcount=1

@S1R_ART0R1US or @lefton4ya If one of you would like to commandeer a thread for the ERB, to give an outline of our processes as you two previously discussed above, that would be sweet. Feel free to use my logo to head your threads if you like. Please list all the members and contributors in the OP. I'll be changing this thread to the Engineers of Valhalla Discussion Thread. We will add other threads later as we expand our movement. Thanks guys. This should be fun.

[Just_a_Bill]

I'm not sure which of the threads this should go in, but I don't want to clutter your new one without understanding the structure so I'll post this discussion topic here for now.

It's always good to nail down terminology sooner rather than later, so in the same vein as Grish sharing with us the work he's done on that front, I'd like to bring up the fact that there's already one class of "semi-canonical" terrain that needs a disambiguating terminology adjustment: the plastic tiles in the Arena of the Planeswalkers games.



AotP calls this terrain "sand," but it's visually different from official Heroscape Sand and thus should have its own name when used in 'Scape.

Fortunately there's already a precedent for this kind of thing. Most of the tiles in HS are named for their material, but a few are named for their function or environment. For example, initially there were generic Rock tiles (material) and then later we got other tiles that were likely or inclusively also based on rock/stone as their material, but that got named for their function or environment: Road, Wall Walk, Dungeon. These functional names also allow some interpretive latitude on the actual material: is a wall walk just stone, or cobblestones and mortar? is the dungeon floor rock, or compacted dirt?

With this in mind, for some time now I've been calling my tan AotP tiles Desert. The color fits well enough, and certainly there's a strong association between the terms desert and sand. But of course "desert" is also a broader term than just sand, encompassing any barren, hostile environment with very little precipitation. There are sand deserts, dirt deserts, even polar deserts. I quite like this term since the tile color works for both Sahara-type and American-Southwest-type deserts. In fact I've been working on a Southwest-type desert terrain expansion for some time, and I assume the EoV will at some point want to develop something similar, for more fun with the growing number of Lawmen and Outlaws in classic and VC.

Thus I propose that the EoV consider adopting "Desert" as our working label for AotP tiles imported into Heroscape.