Quote from: CRKrueger;818745The 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.

The really amazing thing about it is that it's a free "how to lay out your own game" guide, which also happens to also be a playable game on the side.

Quote from: Spinachcat;818852His 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.

So much this.  He's one of the extremely few publishers (probably the only one, actually) whose kickstarters I will give money to first, and then go back and read the description to find out what it is.  Everything he's done is consistently of such high quality and so usable outside of its primary focus that I have no doubt that I'll get more than my money's worth even if it were to nominally be about something of no interest to me.

Quote from: noisms;818894For 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.

I'm glad I'm not the only person who feels that way. Indesign looks like a great tool for people who do pro layout work every day. I need an Indesign Lite with clear instructions on how to use it to do RPG-rules like things. Even there its Pagemaker-style of operation would likely make working with it a big struggle for me.

I think InDesign can be very intimidating at first because it has so many knobs and dials on it. It allows ridiculous levels of customization and tweaking- but when you're shooting for a bog-simple LBB-type pamphlet, it's honestly a perfectly simple process.

You create a new document. You set the page dimensions and margins. It uses points and picas in the size blanks, but it understands inches- you can type "0.5 in" in the top margin blank, and it'll understand you just fine. It makes one page to start with, but you can go to the Pages tab, right-click on a page, and just insert however many more you need.

With the page made, you go over to the text tool and draw a box on the page, which defaults to a normal text object. You click in the box and paste in your text or type it in and it's there.

You highlight the text, click over on the Paragraph sidebar, and pick the paragraph style you want it to be. If such a style doesn't exist, you click the little "New Style" icon at the bottom and set it the way you want it- font, size, justification for the basics, down to a hundred delicate little tweaks if you want them. Maybe you're tired of setting things for each text box, so you go up to the Objects menu, pick your default text box, and set it so it always defaults to your preferred paragraph style.

If the text is longer than the box, a little red "plus" sign appears in the corner of the box. Click it and you get a second box stuck to your cursor. Drop it down on a new page and it continues the text from the first box.

And that's basically it. You want a head? Click on the line and change the paragraph style to a head style. You want an illustration? Draw a new box and drop the image into it. Right-click on the box, pick "Fitting", and decide how you want it to fit- proportionally, or scaled to the box, or the box scales to it. Drag it around the page until it's where you want it to be, and click the toggle to make other boxes' text wrap around it. Need a table? You can just insert it inline with the text, or if you want more control, make a new box and put the table in there, dragging it around like it was an illustration.

Combined with an existing template where someone else has already set up the paragraph styles and text object styles, that's basically all you need to know to set up an LBB-style pamphlet. Once you get comfortable with the basics like that, you can start branching out into all the tools that InDesign offers to streamline the production process and fine-tune your pages to your exact specifications.

It's true, though, that the really critical part of good typography for a project is the understanding of what should be there. If you don't have that, it doesn't matter what tool you use- you're gonna have a bad time. If you do have it, then the tool might fight you every inch of the way, but you'll at least know what you're supposed to make it do.

@SineNomine
How did you acquire Indesign? I am curious how the subscription service is working out if that what you went with.

I've got an academic affiliation, so I can get the full CC package of pretty much everything Adobe makes for $30/month, with a year's commitment. Without it, I'd be paying $50/month with that same commitment, which may be more than a casual publisher wants to drop.

For them, I'd recommend the single-app option. just taking InDesign, which comes with their TypeKit font selection. It'll run $20/month for a yearly commitment, or $30/month if you want to be able to drop it early. I'd suggest a month or so on the per-month plan if the publisher's hesitant or just doing a casual one-off, but if you want to do serious sustained production, this is the tool you need.

I'm not completely familiar with Scribus, but from what little I looked at (to confirm I'd installed it and it was working,) I might recommend that over InDesign for people just trying to sell a couple RPG products. Unless you are working for a large publisher and hired to do the design, you don't want to fork over even $20 or $30/month ($240 or $360 for a year.) Go with free.

The main thing you want from InDesign that you can't get from a word processor is the way it flows text into connected frames around graphics and tables. You can get that with Scribus. You can get some of the other features of either, like better typograhical output, precise/easier positioning, not screwing up or bloating the PDF, and  just avoiding the annoyances built into word processors, with plenty of tools. But only a dedicated honest-to-god layout program like InDesign or Scribus seems to do the flowing text into linked frames.

Is MS Publisher (which I have) still considered laughably bad, or merely sub-optimal these days?

Quote from: Baron Opal;819115Is MS Publisher (which I have) still considered laughably bad, or merely sub-optimal these days?

It's better than trying to use a word processor for layout, and I don't know that I'd bother grabbing Scribus if you already have it.

If cash is a concern for people, Scribus is a real alternative. It's not going to be as friendly as InDesign, but the real crux of the matter is having the typographic knowledge, rather than having a really good layout tool. The latter won't help you if you don't have the former, which is why it's so important to master the very basic stuff: composing spreads, identifying elements and keeping them together, spacing heads correctly, using paragraph following spaces and indents correctly (i.e., not at the same time), and all the other things that you could theoretically do even with Microsoft Word if you had to, if only you knew that you had to do it.

Also, separate your content from your structure and layout, people. If you write your main text first and *then* do your section headers, import tables and graphics and move them where they make sense, and make other format decisions after all the creative work is done, you'll make a better product, even with MS Word.

Quote from: SineNomine;819119but the real crux of the matter is having the typographic knowledge, rather than having a really good layout tool. The latter won't help you if you don't have the former,

I agree with this 100%. Once you've got some typography under your belt, inDesign makes a lot of sense. So much so that I now find traditional word processors frustratingly unintuitive and clunky.

I was fortunate to get the Adobe suite cheap before they went to the subscriptions. If the current version is too expensive, I wonder if it's possible to purchase an earlier second-hand version of inDesign.

Quote from: talysman;819114But only a dedicated honest-to-god layout program like InDesign or Scribus seems to do the flowing text into linked frames.

Word 2010 lets me link two text boxes so that text flows from one to the next. I was very happy when I discovered that. Most of the other things described remain difficult or impossible to do; I usually resort to Visual Basic to position things the way I want them. (My documents remain ugly but that's [STRIKE]probably[/STRIKE] because of me and not the software.)

Quote from: SineNomine;818908I think InDesign can be very intimidating at first because it has so many knobs and dials on it. It allows ridiculous levels of customization and tweaking- but when you're shooting for a bog-simple LBB-type pamphlet, it's honestly a perfectly simple process.

You create a new document. You set the page dimensions and margins. It uses points and picas in the size blanks, but it understands inches- you can type "0.5 in" in the top margin blank, and it'll understand you just fine. It makes one page to start with, but you can go to the Pages tab, right-click on a page, and just insert however many more you need.

With the page made, you go over to the text tool and draw a box on the page, which defaults to a normal text object. You click in the box and paste in your text or type it in and it's there.

You highlight the text, click over on the Paragraph sidebar, and pick the paragraph style you want it to be. If such a style doesn't exist, you click the little "New Style" icon at the bottom and set it the way you want it- font, size, justification for the basics, down to a hundred delicate little tweaks if you want them. Maybe you're tired of setting things for each text box, so you go up to the Objects menu, pick your default text box, and set it so it always defaults to your preferred paragraph style.

If the text is longer than the box, a little red "plus" sign appears in the corner of the box. Click it and you get a second box stuck to your cursor. Drop it down on a new page and it continues the text from the first box.

And that's basically it. You want a head? Click on the line and change the paragraph style to a head style. You want an illustration? Draw a new box and drop the image into it. Right-click on the box, pick "Fitting", and decide how you want it to fit- proportionally, or scaled to the box, or the box scales to it. Drag it around the page until it's where you want it to be, and click the toggle to make other boxes' text wrap around it. Need a table? You can just insert it inline with the text, or if you want more control, make a new box and put the table in there, dragging it around like it was an illustration.

Combined with an existing template where someone else has already set up the paragraph styles and text object styles, that's basically all you need to know to set up an LBB-style pamphlet. Once you get comfortable with the basics like that, you can start branching out into all the tools that InDesign offers to streamline the production process and fine-tune your pages to your exact specifications.

It's true, though, that the really critical part of good typography for a project is the understanding of what should be there. If you don't have that, it doesn't matter what tool you use- you're gonna have a bad time. If you do have it, then the tool might fight you every inch of the way, but you'll at least know what you're supposed to make it do.

Thanks for doing this sort of project. Good Works like this will surely get you an upgraded afterlife.

Arise thread from the ancient past! Arise!

So...two years ago I downloaded Exemplars and Eidolons and for whatever reason, it sat unread on my old hard drive. I was cleaning up my DriveThruRPG downloads on my new computer and came upon E&E.

Oh
My
Gawd

This is a great game. Not kinda good. Not good cuz its free. Straight up badass fantasy.

I backed the Godbound KS and its superb. E&E is a precursor project, obviously born from Sine Nomine's Scarlet Heroes and you can see SWN influence too.

But...its badass AS IS.

It's easily the best OSR chargen I've seen.

It's an amazing combo of Old School and New Design. Not "new school", but fresh ideas which mesh perfectly with traditional RPG concepts.

Here's the crux of my review: its 1am now, I read it twice 6 hours ago, I want to stay up to dawn cranking Slayer and prep an E&E campaign.

Also, I think E&E would really rock for Mage Knight.

BTW, the PDF is still free.
http://www.rpgnow.com/product/144651/Exemplars--Eidolons

Thank you Kevin!

BTW, are there any 3PP publishers creating stuff for Sine Nomine's games?

This violates the moratorium on ALLITERATION & AMPERSANDS in RPG names.

Yeah, I've never run a full campaign of E&E but it's become one of my favorite games for quick one-shots or when I need to put together a handful of sessions. Characters come together quickly and are really badass when they hit the ground. The mortal heroes of Godbound give it some competition for that sort of thing, but the simplicity and portability of E&E give that game a slight edge in the not-quite-demigod department.