The Gaming Den

So I have all of the text and such for making an RPG supplement. Problem, I don't know where to start as far as formatting it into an accessible document for people to read. There aren't any guidelines for the ideal order of information, let alone indents and such. The most advanced software I have is Open Office, and all I've ever used it for is making reports; and using that skill set alone means I'm going to have walls of text (with section/chapter titles) with occasional blocks of inserted art.

What are good resources for getting something more appealing/accessible to the average reader?

Open Office should be able to do the job. "Walls of text with occassional blocks of art" pretty much describes any RPG Manual ever. You will want to have quite a bit of whitespace per page, but that is something you work out once and then you use that template for everything. Alternatively you might want to check out TeX, but strictly speaking Open Office should be fine.

I'm impressed with this. All done with free tools. The source code for creating it is available as well. Should be easy enough to adapt.

You can do the same thing with OpenOffice, including the nice dual column layout, but without a document markup language you need a lot of discipline to work the way you should work (ie. still marking up all your text, but with mouseclicks and hidden properties).

Dungeons the Dragoning is another nicely formatted hobbyist project, he used QuarkXpress.

Murtak wrote:Alternatively you might want to check out TeX, but strictly speaking Open Office should be fine.

If you're down for learning stuff, I highly suggest this. The basics are not really more complicated than HTML or similar markups, and you can get some fancy stuff when you want to focus on a particular area (like a title page).

On Windows, MikTex is the Tex environment that I use, and it's pretty awesome.

MfA wrote:I'm impressed with this. All done with free tools. The source code for creating it is available as well. Should be easy enough to adapt.

You can do the same thing with OpenOffice, including the nice dual column layout, but without a document markup language you need a lot of discipline to work the way you should work (ie. still marking up all your text, but with mouseclicks and hidden properties).

Dungeons the Dragoning is another nicely formatted hobbyist project, he used QuarkXpress.

I'm relieved that impressed you; my RPG book looks a fair margin more professional for that, which is a good thing as I'm selling it for standard commercial prices.

So I have all of the text and such for making an RPG supplement. Problem, I don't know where to start as far as formatting it into an accessible document for people to read. There aren't any guidelines for the ideal order of information, let alone indents and such. The most advanced software I have is Open Office, and all I've ever used it for is making reports; and using that skill set alone means I'm going to have walls of text (with section/chapter titles) with occasional blocks of inserted art.

What are good resources for getting something more appealing/accessible to the average reader?

I don't know much about Open Office, I have the standard MS Office package; that will do all of your basic formatting and PDF creation, but if you want to get fancy or pretty or manage lots of art, In Design is the way you want to go (although it's not cheap).

This is only tangential to the fanciness of your graphical layouts. But.

While an actual book format is for obvious reasons more suited to doomed attempts at retail success...

...most of us who write our own rules shouldn't really be messing around with book styled formats.

It is by far more practical to organize your layouts such that the majority your rules are presented in small one page or double sided hand outs that you can physically give to people.

Failing that, or in addition to that as much of your rules as possible should be presented in a form particularly well suited to copy and paste abuse as it makes things like throwing together NPC character sheets with all relevant notes inserted much easier for the GM, who lets face it is you.

Too many home brew rules writers are either overly ambitious or simply never put in the thought and try to reproduce their material in book form. The thing is books just aren't up to the convenience of simple modern digital text documents or piecemeal hand outs when it comes down to sharing them among the audience of 5 people at the same time who in the end are probably the only audience most of us care about.

In all honesty I feel even a commercial product for a physical RPG book should include useful separate hand outs or a useful user editable digital document, or both (or both in the form of printable handout digital documents).

Schwarzkopf wrote:I'm relieved that impressed you; my RPG book looks a fair margin more professional for that, which is a good thing as I'm selling it for standard commercial prices.

That's docbook for you, it only gets you so far. It does it with less complexity than TeX flavours though and obviously cheaper than the professional DTP software.

Also of course at and it's mostly aimed at programmers ... the subset of programmers who don't hate XML/XSLT at that.

I recommend LaTeX through LyX. It's what I use for any significant writing for other people that isn't required to be done in some particular other format.