Has anyone else even seen this?

This is awesome. It's like someone rewrote OD&D to run Exalted with it... in 48 pages. Because fuck you Onyx Path.

As someone who's endlessly fascinated with the permutations of classic D&D, I love it. I might even give it a try one of these days.

The amazing thing about this product is, it's not only a game, but a "how to layout your own game" with free files and art.

He's got a module that does the same thing for the TSR-style module layout.

Oh yeah, both of these are free, too.

Sine Nomine is a treasure of a resource.

I hope he gets around to a tune-up for SWN eventually.

I love reading his promo blurbs.

Your right this is as epic as Exalted and Scion.  Common enemies and horrible monsters are going to get cut down pretty quick.

It's basically his fantasy system (from Spears of the Dawn) coupled with the rules from his solo adventuring books, so it's not straight out of nowhere, but an evolution of his stuff, but yeah, it's pretty nifty.

OTOH, I think his ambition of teaching people how to make old school modules in InDesign is a bit misguided. I don't think the vast majority of people trying that will even make half of what it costs to buy (or rent) InDesign.

You can turn out products almost as good with OpenOffice. Look at Mad Monks of Kwantoom, an Asian rules/solo play supplement for Labyrinth Lord (on sale for $3.50 right now, so you should really buy it), it's got nearly an identical layout.

And while it's plainer, Basic Fantasy Roleplaying was all done in OpenOffice (or LibreOffice, or something free office)

Quote from: JeremyR;818794OTOH, I think his ambition of teaching people how to make old school modules in InDesign is a bit misguided. I don't think the vast majority of people trying that will even make half of what it costs to buy (or rent) InDesign.

You can turn out products almost as good with OpenOffice. Look at Mad Monks of Kwantoom, an Asian rules/solo play supplement for Labyrinth Lord (on sale for $3.50 right now, so you should really buy it), it's got nearly an identical layout.

An InDesign sub a la carte costs $20 a month with a year's commitment. The full deal of just about everything Adobe makes, plus access to all their Typekit fonts, runs for $40 a month, or $30 if you've got an .edu email for the academic discount. If you're stone broke you can go with Scribus for free and just use the .IDML markup file to import things. But you really, really should not use Open Office. Laying out a book properly requires actual layout software, or things don't work so good. I'm really impressed at how well Mad Monks of Kwantoom came out, and it clearly comes from someone who knows how to use their software, but the internal paragraph spacing alone shows why you don't want to use a word processor.

First, take a look at the paragraph at the top of page 6 in the full-size excerpt file at DTRPG. See how the spacing is all over the place inside the paragraph? It's because hyphenation seems to be turned off for the style, which forces the program to balance the words on each line to avoid breaks. You can see it in all the other paragraphs up to that point, too- gaps and rivers inside the paragraphs because the program had to make sure that no words ever broke over a line.

Word processors are not good at making these decisions, whereas InDesign has a paragraph composer that copes much more perfectly. For an example of that same paragraph rendered in InDesign, take a look here.

I can also make life easier for the composer by individually setting glyph size wobbles for each paragraph style. For that one, I told it to allow each letter to be from 97% to 103% of its standard point size, which helps the composer keep things smooth. Word processors do not generally allow this kind of fine-grained typesetting. By setting up these styles beforehand in the source files I hand out with my examples, the end user doesn't need to know about these little tricks- they just use my styles and things work out.

But really, the most crucial parts of these examples aren't even the source files themselves, they're the commentary that explains why the choices were made and the underlying typographic principles behind putting together your game product. Nobody's ever going to confuse my layout designs with those of Jez Gordon or John Harper or Zak Smith, but my layouts are very strong on "respectable pro-am competence", and that's a very attainable goal for even those of us with limited artistic gifts. Whether you use InDesign or Scribus or even, alas, OpenOffice, knowing how to block out a spread, how to use indents versus paragraph spacing, how to choose margins, how to position heads, and other basic Typesetting 101 stuff is all very useful to amateurs who want their products to look as professional as possible.

Nabbed. Definitely has a good look to it, both layout and system-wise! Now to have a better read through.

Oh, yeah.

Right up my alley. Was using 5e for high-level Zelazny-style play (epic boons, 21+ ability scores, etc.), but now might just ditch that in favor of this game.

Awesome work, Sine Nomine. I can haz supplementz?

Quote from: SineNomine;818801An InDesign sub a la carte costs $20 a month with a year's commitment. The full deal of just about everything Adobe makes, plus access to all their Typekit fonts, runs for $40 a month, or $30 if you've got an .edu email for the academic discount. If you're stone broke you can go with Scribus for free and just use the .IDML markup file to import things. But you really, really should not use Open Office. Laying out a book properly requires actual layout software, or things don't work so good. I'm really impressed at how well Mad Monks of Kwantoom came out, and it clearly comes from someone who knows how to use their software, but the internal paragraph spacing alone shows why you don't want to use a word processor.

First, take a look at the paragraph at the top of page 6 in the full-size excerpt file at DTRPG. See how the spacing is all over the place inside the paragraph? It's because hyphenation seems to be turned off for the style, which forces the program to balance the words on each line to avoid breaks. You can see it in all the other paragraphs up to that point, too- gaps and rivers inside the paragraphs because the program had to make sure that no words ever broke over a line.

Word processors are not good at making these decisions, whereas InDesign has a paragraph composer that copes much more perfectly. For an example of that same paragraph rendered in InDesign, take a look here.

I can also make life easier for the composer by individually setting glyph size wobbles for each paragraph style. For that one, I told it to allow each letter to be from 97% to 103% of its standard point size, which helps the composer keep things smooth. Word processors do not generally allow this kind of fine-grained typesetting. By setting up these styles beforehand in the source files I hand out with my examples, the end user doesn't need to know about these little tricks- they just use my styles and things work out.

But really, the most crucial parts of these examples aren't even the source files themselves, they're the commentary that explains why the choices were made and the underlying typographic principles behind putting together your game product. Nobody's ever going to confuse my layout designs with those of Jez Gordon or John Harper or Zak Smith, but my layouts are very strong on "respectable pro-am competence", and that's a very attainable goal for even those of us with limited artistic gifts. Whether you use InDesign or Scribus or even, alas, OpenOffice, knowing how to block out a spread, how to use indents versus paragraph spacing, how to choose margins, how to position heads, and other basic Typesetting 101 stuff is all very useful to amateurs who want their products to look as professional as possible.

Aside from Google, or InDesign training books do you have any recommendations on books for Typesetting 101 stuff?

Quote from: CRKrueger;818840Aside from Google, or InDesign training books do you have any recommendations on books for Typesetting 101 stuff?

That's a hard one, because what we do with RPG books is so niche. RPG books combine many of the same use cases as a reference book, a textbook, an artbook, and a fiction volume. The traditions that fit one genre don't play so well with the rest, so often it's a matter of synthesizing some sort of good practice out of the raw basics and a healthy dose of personal creativity.

The Elements of Typographic Style is as close as you're going to get to a basic bible of the process, though it goes very heavily into typefaces in a way that's not always useful for an RPG book designer. I've heard that The Complete Manual of Typography is more approachable, but I haven't read that one myself.

A lot of the things that are crucially important to good RPG page composition, like holding topical elements together on a spread, are a lot less important when you're typesetting a novel or doing a series of discrete magazine articles. And you also edge into graphic design with much of what we do, which isn't really a strict matter of typography and its canons. Still, understanding the basic concepts like spacing, leading, tracking, runts and orphans, appropriate margin balances, and the like can make a huge difference even if you have to wing it with other parts of the page.

I keep thinking of putting together a short document covering Typography 101-level basics for RPG page designers, but I'm perpetually short on time, and I want to sharpen my skills a little more before I put significant effort into something like that.

Quote from: Ladybird;818761I love reading his promo blurbs.

His marketing is a major step up from the rest of the DriveThru / PDF community, but what keeps me coming back is the extreme high quality of his work. Even if I don't use it RAW, his books are a treasure trove of goodies.

Quote from: JeremyR;818794OTOH, I think his ambition of teaching people how to make old school modules in InDesign is a bit misguided. I don't think the vast majority of people trying that will even make half of what it costs to buy (or rent) InDesign.

I have an old copy of Indesign (CS5, I think) I got as part of a package deal a few years back, but I've never been able to use it. As far as I can tell, it works like Pagemaker -- and I don't think like that. I need something that works more like the old Ventura Publisher -- which works much more like I think. Therefore, Microlite74/78/81 have all been done in MS Word. Word is not really suited for layout, but at least I can make it work.

QuoteYou can turn out products almost as good with OpenOffice. Look at Mad Monks of Kwantoom, an Asian rules/solo play supplement for Labyrinth Lord (on sale for $3.50 right now, so you should really buy it), it's got nearly an identical layout.

Thanks for mentioning Mad Monks of Kwantoom is on sale. I've been wanting to look at that and I'm willing to pay $3.50 to do so. Yes, I'm cheap when it comes to things I just want to see and know I'll likely never play.

I'm going t o have to look at this.

I used to use InDesign CS2. That's what I used for a couple projects I did on Dragonsfoot. I don't have it installed on the new computer, though. I did install Scribus, but I haven't really tried it out yet.

What I'm using right now is LaTeX.  Not completely; I start out with writing stuff in Markdown format, convert it to LaTeX with Pandoc, then do some table stuff and other formatting by hand in LaTeX. That's what I used for the Subhex Wilderness PDF I put up for free this past week. I didn't do everything I should typographically; I set narrow margins because that works better for screen-only formats, but I didn't adjust paper or font size to guarantee 65 to 72 characters per line. I figure I'll do that next, because I'm using my projects as a learning lab.

For me the issue with InDesign isn't the out-of-pocket cost; it's the time investment involved in learning how to use it. I find it an extremely user-unfriendly piece of software. I think Kevin has made a really good and honourable effort to show how things can be done...But still opening InDesign and getting to work on something remains a prospect that fills me with dread.