A Brief Guide to Small Publisher RPG Production

Version 0.2.Still-Unfinished

by Kevin Crawford Illustrations By

Bradley K. McDevitt William McAusland

Table of Contents
About This Guide........................................................................... 1 The Sequence of Work.................................................................. 2 Choosing Your Project................................................................. 3 Budgeting and Accounting.......................................................... 4 Crowdsourced Funding................................................................ 5 Anatomy of a Page........................................................................ 6 Fonts and Typefaces...................................................................... 7 Buying Art..................................................................................... 9 Using Art in your Product......................................................... 10 Printing Your Product............................................................... 11 Sales Strategy.............................................................................. 12 Example Layouts.......................................................................... 13 Monster Page Elements.............................................................. 18 Module Elements........................................................................ 19 Magic and Spell Elements........................................................... 20

Introduction

About This Guide

These few pages are meant to cover some of the bare rudiments of producing a simple gaming product, whether a full-fledged game, supplement, or adventure. It presumes that you have access to a recent version of the Adobe InDesign software, possibly through an educational discount or Adobes new Creative Cloud monthly subscription offer. A free alternative to InDesign is the Scribus layout and publishing package available at www.scribus.net. While a less polished and user-friendly offering than InDesign, many publishers find it perfectly suitable for their needs. The software-specific instructions in this document are intended for InDesign but the layout principles described here can be employed with any software you might use. The author should not be mistaken for an authority. I have nothing resembling a formal education in design and doubtless cherish many errors. However mistaken I may be on many counts, a brief examination of certain newer publishers offerings will suggest that I could not possibly make things worse with this document. Before I begin, I must tender special thanks to Guy Fullerton of Chaotic Henchmen Productions, as the publishing articles on his blog formed my chief provocation to systematize some of this hardwon education. I encourage readers to profit from my own troubles, that they may avoid my errors and go forth to make new, more interesting mistakes of their own. see the Body Text style, which is what these paragraphs are using. If you open up the Header Text Styles, youll see the Minor Header style used in this sections header. Changing a style changes every piece of text using that style. If you click on the Body Text style to edit it and change the typeface used or the font size, every bit of ordinary text in this document will change accordingly. You can use this effect to experiment with different alternatives without having to make laborious replacements to every piece of text in your product. Styles can inherit from other styles. Youll notice that the Body Text style is based on the Basic Body Text Style. If you change the Basic Body Text Style, everything that derives from it will also be changed. If you dont care for the Garamond typeface being used in this document, you can change Basic Body Text to alter the typeface of every bit of text in this document, since every paragraph style ultimately inherits from Basic Body Text. You can see that headers also have a basic style which derives from the body text. If you simply want to change the headers to something more fitting your style, you can change Basic Header Style and it will propagate only to the header text. Object styles work in the same way, except that they are applied to the object frames that make up an InDesign page. This page uses the Two-Column Text object. If you wanted a single-column page you could instead apply the Single-Column Text style to the frame. If you wanted to change all the two-column pages to single column, you could edit the style to change it. And if you wanted three columns instead... well, you get the idea. Table styles allow you to define a particular look for a table. By selecting the table and choosing a style, you instantly apply a number of different table cell styles, paragraph styles, and other particulars to get a consistent look. You could apply these individually from the cell styles panel, and in some cases it might be necessary if you have a particularly intricate format, but the table styles automate much of it. Whenever possible, try to use styles. While you can get much the same look from painstakingly selecting and altering individual pieces of text, styles make it infinitely easier to manage your text. Theres little as demoralizing as hand-setting an entire document only to discover that you need to change the typeface or alter the font size. Aside from avoiding the tedium, styles help you keep track of the typefaces and particulars youre using in a document. This introduction to InDesign styles covers only their most crucial functions. Styles are an enormously powerful tool, and if you intend to use InDesign to its full capabilities, youre going to need to spend some time playing with them and carefully reading the documentation. The software is remarkably powerful and comfortable to use once youve spent enough time understanding its capabilities, and this effort is something youre going to need to spend. Your work as a publisher will be hard enough as it is. Theres no call to find yourself wrestling with your tools as well.

How To Use This Document

This document should have been distributed in two parts- a PDF and a raw InDesign CS6 document file. If you have a copy of InDesign available you can open up the document file to see exactly what styles and objects were used on each page and can experiment with alterations to see how they might look. When youre ready to start your own project, you can simply wipe the pages of the document and create your own layout using the styles and objects already packaged with it. You are welcome to recycle anything you like from this document for your own commercial or personal creations.

Basic InDesign Concepts

If youre new to InDesign, a few important concepts need to be covered before we go any farther. If youre already familiar with the particulars of the software, you can flip over to the next page and get started with the basics of laying out a document. The most crucial idea to understand is the idea of styles. Styles are a set of particular rules which are applied to a particular entity. The ones we are going to use most are paragraph styles, object styles, and table styles. Paragraph styles define the details of a paragraph of text. If you open up the Paragraph Styles panel from the InDesign toolbar, youll see a list of folders, each of which opens up into several different paragraph styles. If you open up the Body Text Styles folder youll

Sequence of Work

The Sequence of Work

Theres a particular sequence of work you should follow when producing an RPG product. While this sequence isnt strictly germane to laying out a document, its important that you understand this process if youre to avoid an impressive amount of suffering. Doing these steps out of order is an almost certain guarantee of wasted work, lost time, and the occasional bitter personal disappointment. Write your product first. Before you start doing layout, before you commission any art, before you plot out any Kickstarters, write your product. Produce the final draft. An unpolished manuscript is not good enough, nor is something that still needs playtesting, nor is anything that might conceivably change in any way beyond proofing. You need an absolutely finished manuscript before you can go any farther in this process. Why is it so important to have a finished manuscript? Because the layout process requires you to fit specific chunks of text into specific places on the page. If a paragraph grows by a half-inch between now and the final draft, that layout you made is probably worthless. Worse, if youve commissioned art for that page, the new text bulk might make it impossible to fit the art into its slot, leaving you with the prospect of wasting your money on a piece you cant use, or have to wedge in somewhere else where it may not fit the topic or the slot. Its fine to play around with draft text on the page just to get some idea of how you might do it or how a particular layout might look on the page, but do not even try to turn that interim product into a final layout. It will only bring you heartache and sadness. Once you have your final draft, proof it. By now it should already have received all the editing its going to get, so now you need to go through and find all the mistakes the spell checker didnt. If you want to do this right, you need to get someone else to do it. Given the usual budgetary constraints of an indie RPG publisher, odds are that youre doing your own editing and own proofing. It will not be as good as if you had someone else, but you make the best of what you have. One useful trick with proofing is to do a global font change and possibly change the color of the text. By altering its appearance, you help shake your brain out of its expectation to see sense where the text is actually garbled. Other proofreaders like to work in reverse, reading backwards from the end of the product. So now you have a proofed final draft in plain text format. Youre now ready to do the layout work. You can use the tips and guidelines in the remainder of the document to puzzle out the labor, and if youve got access to InDesign and the raw document version of this file, you can strip it down and recycle it for parts. During the layout design, youll put in slots for art to help balance the pages and make all the elements come out correctly. You will not, however, actually commission that art until you are completely finished with the layout. Just as with an unfinished manuscript, trying to fit art into a layout that is still in flux is a standing invitation to waste your money on art that you cant fit onto your page.

He tried to lay out a draft manuscript

For a novice publisher who just wants to brighten a page, your best resource is stock art, either public-domain images or inexpensive stock purchased from DriveThruRPG or sites such as Fotolia. The quality varies wildly and none of it is apt to fit as well as a commissioned piece would, but its cheap and abundant, and those qualities can be compelling for an indie publisher. If you do commission art for your game, youll want to be very clear about the terms of the agreement and the rights youre buying. I personally prefer to buy art as work for hire, buying complete ownership of the final piece. If you want this, make it clear and be prepared to pay for it. If you dont want this, dont be surprised if the artist later resells the piece for other purposes. If you dont like this prospect, youre going to need to negotiate the use particulars with the artist in question. Once youve slotted the art in the finished layout, youre ready to do a final proof and then upload the finished PDF to your store of choice. If you have any sense, youll have created your layout to be friendly to POD printing, and be able to sell print copies of it at the same time. Unless your product is some function-heavy digital app or a four-page squib, theres no excuse for not producing a POD companion to the product. OneBookshelf has an integrated system for its DriveThruRPG/RPGNow/etc. sites that allows you to sell both the PDF and POD directly from their storefront, and you ought to take advantage of that. Once youve received a print proof and verified that its correct, your job as a layout designer is done. Your job as a marketer, customer support tech, and general cheerleader has just begun, however, but those duties are thankfully beyond the scope of this document. If you get that far, youre on your own.

Choosing Your Project

Choosing Your Project

Before you even begin writing, youre going to need to sit down and make some decisions about your project. Good planning at the start of this process can bring you much more overall success and save you from some impressive amounts of grief later on. As a general rule, that something interesting cant be has exciting new mechanics or does Game X, but better. A few gamer cognoscenti might care about the details of your games elegant new math model, but most players do not pick up a new game so they can have the chance to spend time learning a new system. By the same token, claiming that your game is like Game X but more realistic/elegant/ balanced or so forth is most likely just to irritate fans of Game X. Instead, your game is most likely to win interest if it does a specific genre, or setting, or style of play better than its competition. It really doesnt even have to be better, so long as its clearly labeled for fans of that particular thing. People who like post-apocalyptic transhuman sci-fi are likely to look over your entry in the genre even if they already have Eclipse Phase to entertain them.

Free or For Pay?

The first thing youre going to need to decide is whether or not youre interested in making this project a paying proposition. Your choice at this stage will shape a lot of things, from the topic of what youre writing to the way youll be doing the layout. You need to decide whether or not youre going to make a salable product. Its perfectly fine to write a free product. In fact, if this is your first effort, you probably should save yourself suffering and expense and go with a free first effort. Doing so means that youre going to approach the budget differently, but it lets you write and design without worrying about appealing to any particular audience. If you plan to write a salable product, youve got a different set of concerns to address. Even if your product is a ripping success, your first effort in the hobby is unlikely to do much more than make back its art budget- more significant remuneration requires a different kind of commitment, which Ill discuss later in this document.

Supplements and Adventures

Other creators want to cook up a supplement to an existing system or write an adventure for their favorite game. Most system owners are fine with free supplements passed around online, but if youre going to post it up as a free product on DriveThruRPG, and certainly if youre going to try to get paid for it, you want to make sure you have permission to do so. The Open Game License is a common refuge for OSR games, and if you adhere to its guidelines you can write your own generic OSR supplement or module without worrying about stepping over the copyright line. Advertising compatibility with specific OSR systems, such as Labyrinth Lord or Swords & Wizardry, is something best handled by the specific licenses they offer for claiming compatibility. Other game systems often offer their own OGL systems reference documents that you can use to build compatible products. In all cases, however, you need to make sure youre using the license correctly. As this document isnt meant to constitute legal advice, youll have to feel this one out on your own. Keep in mind that supplements and adventures are usually only of interest to the people who have the base game. Writing a supplement to a supplement guarantees that youre going to squeeze your audience down into the relatively minute number that have the core game and the supplement youre modifying. Aside from this, adventures are usually only purchased by GMs, and there are a lot fewer GMs than players. Calibrate your sales and distribution expectations accordingly.

Choosing a Topic and Form

Presumably you wouldnt even have picked up this document unless you had an idea for something you wanted to write. Thats great, and you should cling tightly to whatever sources of inspiration and enthusiasm you might have. But how exactly you implement that idea is going to depend largely on whether or not you want to get paid for writing it. If youre writing a free product with no particular concern for getting it widely read, then you can write about anything. The project is for you, and if it doesnt suit a reader, well, thats not your problem. Youre not sinking significant money into it and youre not trying to get people to laud your brilliant ideas. Youre doing it for fun. If you want to spread it widely or get paid for it, however, the calculus changes. You need to identify what your product is going to do and the people who will be interested in having that thing done. Its not enough to just write something awesome, it has to be something awesome that specific other people find useful and want to acquire.

Full Games

Everybody wants to write an RPG. And thats laudable- some great things come out of that mass of creativity. If youre doing this as a free product for your own satisfaction, roll on and dont let any naysayers slow you down. If youre writing for a paying market or trying to get maximum interest in your game, however, you need to explain what this game does so well that cant already be accomplished by one of the five million other free and for-pay RPGs already available on the market. Your game needs to do something interesting.

A Thumbnail Sketch

Got your project idea formed? Good. Now try to express it in no more than two sentences. If you cant sum up the thing about your project that makes it interesting in a very brief statement, then your fans and buyers are going to have a hard time doing it as well. Worse, your selling point may be so complex that a reader cant even find it until after theyve put in more effort than theyre willing to spend. If youre going for broad distribution or good sales, make sure your idea is pithy and crisp enough to be understood before you start.

Budgeting and Accounting

Budgeting and Accounting

Before you start working on this project, you need to set a budget for it. Without a clear idea of how much money youre willing to spend getting this to the public, you run the risk of turning a fun free project into a financial millstone, or putting together a for-pay effort that has no hope of recouping its costs. Aside from setting a budget, a for-pay project will also require you to handle the accounting work necessary for tracking tax deductions and payment.

Forming a Business

Note that the advice I give below is germane only to the United States. Youll need to check with your own local authorities if youre operating elsewhere, and even here its likely to be helpful to check local ordinances and state laws regarding businesses. The advice below is also not to be construed as legal advice or the counsel of a proper tax accountant. When in doubt, check with a professional. For most small publishers, operating as a sole proprietorship is their best bet. So long as youre the only owner of the business, you dont need to file any forms or pay any fees- just by doing business, youre treated under that rubric. If youre operating under a business name, such as Sine Nomine Publishing, you may need to go down to the town courthouse and fill out a Doing Business As or DBA form. Where I am, it cost all of five dollars and five minutes. The advantage of a sole proprietorship is its simplicity. You can take in earnings from your games and theyre treated simply as part of your income, without any extra corporate income tax. You can also deduct the expense of producing your products from your taxable income- assuming you actually make a profit. The IRS is not amused by businesses that dont ever actually turn a profit. Claiming a business loss on your income more than two out of five years is a good way to invite an audit. The disadvantage of a sole proprietorship is that there is no separation between the business assets and your own. If you are sued by a customer or partner, you are personally liable for all claims. For most small publishers this is hardly an issue, but you may want to consider turning your sole proprietorship into an S-corp or an LLC before you start cutting contracts or making major deals. Both of these options require substantially more paperwork and expense, however.

Setting a Budget

If you use free software such as LibreOffice to write the text, Scribus to lay it out, public domain art to illustrate it and your own two eyes to proof and edit it, you can make a project for precisely zero dollars. It may not look as good as others on the market, particularly if its your first effort, but if you follow the guidelines in this document its likely going to be respectable enough in its appearance. For every step of the process you farm out to someone else, youre going to have to pay for it. Remember that the average indie RPG product from a new publisher doesnt move more than 50 copies, so budget accordingly. This guide assumes that you are doing everything but the artwork yourself. Its possible to get a basic, simple grasp of the rudiments of layout design in a relatively short period of time. This is not the case with getting a basic, simple grasp of publication-worthy RPG art. In the same vein, a writer can edit and proof their own text if they must. The results will never be as good as if they had a proper editor handle it, but it will cost only time. If you plan to buy help, youre going to need to budget the following: Art. Specific costs for art are discussed later in the document, but at this point, if you want to commission basic black-and-white line art, you can estimate its going to cost you about $15 per page. Editing. Forget about hiring a conventional commercial editor unless youre doing this as a love project and are willing to pay more than youll ever recoup. Instead, youll need to post for those RPG editors who are doing it out of fandom for the hobby. Their prices will vary wildly, but consider yourself lucky if they offer to do light editing for half-cent a word. Heavy editing, where they do more than fix grammar and spot obvious errors, is going to cost you more. Layout. Again, the market for this is so constrained that the market hasnt settled on a standard price. This document is intended to be enough to get you to the serviceably clean level of layout expertise. If you want something more elaborate and artistic, youll need to budget at least four or five dollars a page for a reliable layout designer. Marketing. I wish I could help you more with this, but marketing has always been my own weakest point. Conventional banner ads at gaming websites are one possibility, as are prizes, contests, and the like, but youre going to need to do more research to decide which, if any of these you should be using.

Accounting and Taxes

You must pay taxes on any income you receive from your products. This tends to get glossed by some people on the assumption that the amounts are so small that theyre not worth recording, but betting on the charity of the IRS is not a prudent wager. More than that, if you want to deduct any of your production expenses youre going to need to track and show your profits. To do this, youre going to need a separate bank account for your business income and expenditures and software or a record book to record any business-related income or costs. In most cases, its easiest to just get a Paypal account and dedicate it strictly to business finances. QuickBooks business software is also quite useful for tracking income for a small business, and helps you see your profit and loss at a glance. Keep track of the numbers. In the US, you can expect to pay at least 15% in self-employment taxes plus up to 30% in marginal income taxes depending on your day job. If youre particularly successful, you might need to file quarterly estimated tax payments. You do not want to get to April 14th and realize that you owe hundreds of dollars on that popular little supplement you sold last year.

Crowdsourced Funding

Crowdsourced Funding
It may be that youve got ideas of funding this particular project through Kickstarter, Indiegogo or some other crowdsourcing platform. While this can be an option for some projects, its also perhaps the number one way to get yourself in deep trouble. Stretch rewards should not be physical objects. Even if youre offering a physical book as the campaigns backer reward, you do not want to add additional physical objects to that shipment. Aside from the additional shipping costs, it forces you to hold everything until every physical reward is in hand, leaving you vulnerable to point failure. Stretch rewards should not require you to create any new content or gaming material that you havent already written. Nothing is easier to promise than something you havent written yet. Stretch rewards should not rely on the good offices or assistance of a third party you dont already know. Promising the services of a partner or cooperating business as part of the reward takes its delivery entirely out of your hands. Youll still catch any failure, though.

Should You Crowdfund?

If this is your first gaming project, the answer to this question is simple- no, you should not. You have yet to even demonstrate you can finish a project, let alone get it in the hands of people whove pre-paid you for it. Taking their money without a proven ability to execute is inviting catastrophic failure and personal humiliation. Sure, you might be able to pull it out in the end, but do you really want to gamble your good name like that? If you have at least one successfully-created product behind you, whether free or for sale, then its worth a more careful consideration. Do you need the money to execute your next idea? It can be nice to be able to afford commissioned art or layout help from someone skilled. It can also be useful to find out in advance if that project you want to do is actually viable in the existing market. If you do choose to crowdfund, understand that you are basically signing away the next however-many months of your life to executing this project. Once that cash changes hands, it is no longer a matter of If I feel like it, it is a matter of doing the job. Fees and taxes will make it impossible to return the backers money without taking a heavy loss. Once you are in, you will either deliver the product or you will humiliate yourself. Think carefully before choosing.

Backer Reward Fulfillment

Dont plan on doing the fulfillment yourself unless youre an experienced shipper. The customs forms alone on your international backers orders will be excruciating, and mistakes in shipping or packaging are all your problem. Farm it out to a fulfillment house; a survey of existing Kickstarters should give you some current names. Dont ignore shipping costs. You know how much it costs to send a book to Brazil right now? $50. If you dont explicitly make your backers pay shipping then adjust your pledge levels to handle this expense. Get in contact with your fulfillment house and get them to give you estimates of per-item costs for local and international shipping. Fold that into your pledge levels. Fulfill the pledge with POD books. As a small publisher, you should more or less never be doing short-run offset print jobs, as the perbook cost will kill you. POD lets you print exactly as many as you need- but make sure to talk to your fulfillment house about how many over theyre going to need to handle any dropped mail. But Kevin, you say, I can just use the order a copy tool on DriveThruRPG/RPGNow to send books to backer addresses. Yes, yes you can. You can add/edit addresses with the tool 400 times too, and then deal with all the issues that come from shipments that never arrived or that you mistyped. Just price the service and fold it in.

Writing the Product

Im going to leave aside the questions of videos, marketing copy, and concept art that go into the creation of a successful Kickstarter project- at least, successful in the sense of bringing in a lot of pledges. There are plenty of places that talk in depth about topic. Instead, Im going to discuss the thing you have to do to avoid turning yourself into a punchline in the gaming community and permanently blotting your reputation with a catastrophic failure to execute your promises. Youd be amazed how easy it is to get there. Write your damned game first. Whatever it is youre selling, write it before you Kickstart it. A complete draft at the very least, and preferably something layout-ready. Over and over again, RPG projects crash and burn when it turns out the author just cant get it together to put the words on the paper. Projects that seem easy, that seem foredestined even from this side of completion can turn into soul-sucking horrors that scythe down authors in a spray of failure.

A Word on Timeframes and Taxes

Choosing Stretch Goals and Rewards

Everybody loves stretch goals, especially ones you havent actually had to fulfill yet. Avoid this pitfall. Whatever stretch rewards you choose should have rewards that are not physical objects, do not require the creation of additional content, and do not rely on untested third parties to deliver them. Many otherwise successful projects founder when their stretch rewards turn out to be unrealistic.

How do you know how long it will take you to produce the product? Well, the simple way to do it is this; based on your last successful project, and where you are now in this one, estimate a reasonable time with an extra month or two for padding. Then double it. Yes, double it. Youll come down with bubonic plague or suffer a compound sternum fracture or some such- you will need that time. And if it turns out you dont need that time and you get it in early, well, you get to be a hero of alacrity. Its a win-win situation. Regarding taxes, Kickstarter cash is income. If youre using cash-basis accounting- and odds are you are- any cash not spent on the project in the same fiscal year counts as income. If you end the fiscal year with ten grand of KS funds on hand, congrats- you probably owe about $3,000 of it in taxes. Time your production accordingly.

Anatomy of a Page

Anatomy of a Page
Every page of your product is made up of elements. At their most basic level, these elements are things like the chapter heading, the subheads, the sidebars, and the individual chunks of text. In a larger sense, they also include things that should go together- a monster statblock is an element, but part of a dungeon room entry element as well, and that dungeon room is an element in the dungeon level description. An element can be alone or part of something larger. It is a fundamental rule that an element belongs together with its parts. If you have a one-page dungeon, put it on one page. If you have a spell description, put the entire spell description on the same page. If you have a section describing your games combat system, dont split it between two pages, or if you must, at least try to get it on the same two-page spread. This fundamental rule is going to be broken at times. Your elements arent always going to fit neatly into the places appointed for them, and sometimes even your best efforts at juggling cant get it to fit. You can break elements up if unavoidable, but it should always be something you do as a conscious compromise rather than as the result of carelessness. When you do break an element, try to split it along one of its component parts. Thus, if you cant fit your combat system all on one page, break it so that a section starts at the top of the next page rather than running a long column halfway into the next page before starting a fresh topic.

Columns and You

By default, most RPG books use a two-column layout on 8.5 x 11 inch paper. A line of approximately ten words is easiest for people to read, and big pages used with single columns produce lines too long for comfortable reading. Some games go so far as to prefer three-column pages, which can look good if you have many small elements you need to put together. It works less perfectly when you have long stretches of plain text. If youre using a smaller page than the standard US Letter size, it can sometimes be best to use a single-column layout. The popular digest book size is often best handled in a single column. Such a layout is less useful when you have many small elements, as many paragraph breaks in a single-column page tend to make it look half-empty or disorganized.

Spreads

A useful concept for layout work is that of the spread. In a book, a spread is two pages, the left one being even-numbered and the right one being odd-numbered. In a PDF where only a single page is up on the screen at once, a spread is a single page. When putting together your layout, keep in mind what a particular spread is going to look like. If you have a topic that needs two pages to cover, dont put it on the front and back of the same page- put it on a single spread. That way, when the reader goes to consult the book, they can open it up and see the entire topic on the pages in front of them. If you cant hold an element together on the same page, at least try to keep it on the same spread. A dungeon level may be too big to fit in a single page, but if it fits in two then it should all be there on a single spread for ease of reference.

Indivisible Elements

While Ive just admitted that some elements will inevitably have to be broken up to fit a layout, there are some things that should simply never be broken. Orphaned headers are headers that appear at the bottom of a column while their text starts at the top of the next. Dont do this. If you absolutely must start a header at the bottom of a column, make sure that at least a paragraph worth of its text follows it before it skips up to the next column. Widows and orphans are to be shunned. These are single lines standing at the bottom or top of a column, with paragraph spacing above or below them. The paragraph styles in this document automatically stick lines together so that at least two lines always appear at the bottom or top of a column, but even this is a borderline case. If you have to split a paragraph over two columns, try to make sure theres a meaty chunk of text in both of them. Tables are not meant to be split. Dont split them over columns and especially dont split them over pages. If you have a table thats wider than one column then its fine to span it over multiple columns, but dont run a skinny table down one side and then down the other. Statblocks of monsters, spells, or anything else always go together in the same column. If you absolutely must, you can split a spell or monster entry between the stats and the description, but even that is highly undesirable.

Page Headers, Footers, Gutters and Numbers

Youll notice that this page has a section header at the top of the page, one automatically applied by the master page that provides its format. If you have access to the raw document, you can use InDesign to switch the master page around to turn these section headers on or off or re-designate pages for a section. If you choose to use page headers in this fashion, youll need to make sure that you maintain any necessary margin that your print process requires. Many POD black-and-white print options require an empty half-inch margin, so youre going to need to shrink the work area on your page a little to make sure the numbers and headers fit into the available space. Youll also notice that the spinewards inside margin of this page is thicker than the outside margin. The margin closest to the spine is called the gutter, and youll need to make it a little thicker than the outside margin in order to take into account the books binding. If you dont have a wide-enough gutter in your document the text can crawl into it and become difficult to read without flattening out the book and potentially injuring the spine. 3/4 of an inch is good.

Fonts and Typefaces

Fonts and Typefaces

To be pedantic, a font is a specific digital file, pile of lead type, or other specific object while a typeface is the appearance and general identity of a collection of glyphs. If you have several digital files containing different weights and styles of a particular typeface, you have several fonts of the same typeface.

Font Sizes

Choosing Fonts

My personal preference is for a 10 point body font. I find that this size is a good compromise between my failing eyesight and getting a sufficient number of words on a page. Twelve-point font is a little too large and space-wasteful for my tastes, and going down to 8 or 9 points leaves text that I find difficult to read in print. Other publishers strongly favor 8 or 9 point, because smaller fonts do have certain advantages when doing layout. The smaller the font, the easier it is to flow lines and blocks of text, since each individual word takes up less space and the line can be cleanly broken at more points. Small fonts also allow for a greater degree of density in a block of text, giving a more even color to the block. Headers should be sized proportionately to the body text. At 10 point body text, I like section headers at 24 pts, column headers at 12, and other elements in between. Part of this depends on the weight of the header font- heavier fonts will look bigger than thin ones, and the right point size for one may not work for another.

One of the first steps in putting together your product is choosing which fonts to use for it. There are a few basic rules you can use for guiding your search. None of these rules are as iron-clad as the rules on indivisible elements, but youll want be sure you mean to break them before you do so. Use no more than three different fonts. You need a font for the body text, a font for the headers, and maybe a third font for decorative use or accents. This total doesnt count different weights and styles of the same font. A classic preference is something sans-serif for the headers and serif for the body, or vice-versa. Dont mix two decorative fonts. If you have two very distinct and decorative fonts in your document, dont put them together. Two ornate or stylized sets of glyphs in close proximity distract from each other and give the element a garbled look. Dont use a font unless you have rights to it. If a font is for personal use only, dont use it for your commercial product. Many free font sources will include licensing information with their fonts. Make sure you read and understand it before you use the font.

Using Multiple Fonts

Remember when I said Id be ignoring the distinction between fonts and typefaces? I lied. For this part, it matters. On scanning typefaces for any amount of time, youll notice that many of them have several different fonts available- variations in thickness, angle, or detail. All of these fonts are still the same basic typeface, but theyve all been tweaked slightly for different purposes. If you go with the classic one header typeface and one body text typeface tactic, you can often stretch your options by using these alternative fonts in your document. Since they all belong to the same typeface, theyll harmonize well and you can use them for calling out particular elements or designating them for specific purposes in your text. They let you add variety without bringing in a new font.

Using Fonts

You need to have a plan for the fonts that you choose. Each font should have a role in your document. Each particular weight, size, and style should be associated with a particular purpose and be used only for that purpose. A particular weight and style might be used for the games chapter headings. Another size might be used for the column headings. The third font in the document might be a handwritten script used for interjections in the text- and only used for that. If you start using the same appearance for different purposes you make life harder for the reader, who can no longer just glance over a page to get an idea of what sort of content is on it. It can be useful to mix a sans-serif header with a serif body text, or vice-versa. This document mixes the serif Garamond body text with the sans-serif Calibri header font. The contrast between the thick, crisp angles of Calibri with the refinement and curves of Garamond helps add dynamism to the page and helps the headers to pop out when casually scanning the text. In the same vein, consider contrasting different weights between headers and body text, using a heavier or lighter header to build contrast. Dont take this too far, however- if you bloat up your headers too thick or pare them too thin, the result can look ungainly.

Where To Get Fonts

One of the more popular font sources is dafont.com, which has fonts categorized in a useful fashion and allows you to easily filter out fonts that arent licensed for commercial use. While you can get a great many free fonts here, the quality and completeness of the work is sometimes a little on the amateur side, and the fonts dont always have full glyph sets to cover the more esoteric characters. They also often lack italic, bold, or other font styles that your document may require. I find Dafont and other free font sites best for finding decorative or header fonts that wont need a wide range of glyphs. For commercial fonts, I use Linotype.com. While the fonts they sell arent cheap, you can get exactly the weight and style of font you need for your project. Have a clear idea of the kind of font you want before you start looking, and think carefully about the feel you want to project with it. A scrabbled, scratched typeface might be just what you want for a horror game, while something sleek and stylized might match your science-fiction ambitions. Oh- and never use Papyrus. Trust me.

Fonts and Typefaces

Alignment and Justification
The columns in this document are left justified. The text goes all the way to the right-hand edge of the column, and if it cant cleanly break between words a hyphen is inserted to make it break crisply. This particular trick is trivially easy for InDesign to manage, and the Body Text style is set to automatically apply it to any paragraph using that style. Theres even a slider in the styles hyphenation panel to let you decide how aggressive the hyphenation should be. This particular paragraph is full justified. There are hyphens in this paragraph, but the real point of the spacing is to ensure that every line ends at the edge of the column. The spacing between words and the very size of the glyphs themselves are adjusted so as to make sure that every line ends exactly at the edge of the column, no matter how many or how few words are in the line. This tends to make for a very clean looking paragraph because there are never any short lines hanging over the edge and creating uneven whitespace between paragraphs. It looks quite crisp, so why isnt every paragraph full justified in this document? It is because it is very easy for full justified paragraphs to look awful. Because the spacing has to flex to ensure perfectly even line lengths, you can easily end up with a paragraph that has the words crammed cheek-by-jowl against each other, or strung out with half a mile between them. InDesign does its best to avoid this, but sometimes theres no substitute for going in and adding or removing words until the paragraphs color is better. You also need to watch for rivers, where blanks line up to make streaks of whitespace in the text. One of the easiest ways to check for them is to simply turn the document upside-down, as theyre more obvious from that vantage. For most documents, left justified is fine. Its easy to apply, easy to work with, and it looks good. You will have to keep an eye on the short lines that sometimes crop up at the end of your paragraphs, however. If you only have two or three words hanging at the end of your paragraph, try to think of some way to clip enough from the text to fit it on the line above. If you cant, then you can bulk it out into a full line, but less is almost always more when editing.

Vertical Justification

Several of the pages in this document are set vertically justified in InDesign. This setting is applied to an entire object frame rather than to individual paragraphs, and instructs the program to add space between each line of text until it stretches to fill the entire vertical space of the frame. You can find it along the top toolbar when a frame is selected, a set of spread-out lines next to align top, align center and align bottom. Vertical justification works best when youve got a page that has two almost-matching columns. Rather than let them hit at different points on the page, you can vertically justify it and have them both fill the entire vertical space. So long as theres no more than a line or so of difference between them, the very slight increase in the vertical spacing of one column wont be noticeable. Larger gaps dont work well, however, and it will usually be obvious when a particular column isnt amenable to this treatment.

Buying and Using Art

Buying Art
For a new publisher, effectively buying and using art in their works can be something of a challenge. These brief tips cover the bare essentials of the process, and should not be mistaken for a masters class in art direction. Still, if you follow these guidelines you should be able to avoid the worst mistakes a new publisher tends to make. If possible, point to an example of the kind of style or flavor youre looking for in the image. If you want a particular visual style to your illustrations, point to a picture online that looks like what you want. The artist cant be expected to match this exactly, but it will give them at least some idea of the style youre after.

When to Buy Art

You purchase or commission art after the layout is done. If necessary, you might choose to buy a cover for the piece before its fully laid out but only because you know youre going to need a cover. If you buy art before you know the exact pages, slot sizes, and specifics of what you need, youre just going to end up throwing your money away on material you cant use after the layout shifts during editing.

What and How to Pay for Art

Prices vary wildly with the artist. As a general rule, however, if youre paying less than $25 for a quarter-page b/w illo, youre either dealing with an artist who doesnt know their own worth, or youre dealing with someone whos not good enough to command more. Prices in the average RPG illustrator bracket often go up to $50 for a quarter-page, and known names and hot illustrators can get more. Prices for half and full-page illos are usually just multiples of the quarter-page, though sometimes they scale upward slightly. The more figures, objects, and dynamic detailing go into an image, the more youre going to pay for it. Color work usually costs twice as much as black and white. Cover prices from a reasonably accomplished and reliable illustrator run around $500 for a full-page color illo. Dont expect to get famous names for that amount, however. When paying for art, I personally prefer to pay in two stages- half the payment on receipt of a sketch or rough color, and the other half on receiving the final approved work. I pay by Paypal and I make sure to fork over the cash within 24 hours of receiving the work. Most artists might wait as long as a month in good grace, but theres no excuse for sitting on the money. Pay it, and pay it fast. Also, make clear your payment terms up front and make sure the artist agrees.

Places to Get Art

In my experience, the best place for a hobbyist publisher to buy cheap sci-fi and fantasy art is from the stock art offered at places like DriveThruRPG/RPGNow. Larger stock-image vendors such as Shutterstock, Fotolia, IStockPhoto and so forth may have more images, but very few of them are really suitable for this kind of product. You might find a few gems in there, but it will take a great deal of digging to unearth them. If you want to commission your art, your best bet is to look on freelancer forums such as those at RPG.net. The people who post there have a much better idea of what youre likely to want from them and theyre more likely to be willing to work at the rates a small publisher can afford. Freelancer sites such as Freelancer.com and oDesk are also possibilities, but it can be harder to find people who really know the idiom there. Another source of free art is in scans of old public-domain illustrations. These are free, but sometimes the scan quality isnt so good, and the style can be somewhat jarring when put next to other art.

Rights and Contracts

How To Post an Art Request

There are certain things youre going to have to make clear in your art buy, or else youll just waste time clarifying it with the artist- or in the worst case, not getting it clarified until you realize theyve made something you cant use. Youll need to specify the size of the illo- preferably in exact height and width dimensions. If not that, then as a quarter-page, half-page, or full-page illo, assuming an 8.5 x 11 inch page. You need to specify whether its in black and white or color, and especially if you need it to be in CMYK color for later printing. Youll want to indicate the file format and dpi you want. In most cases, you want a .tiff file in 300 dpi, or 600 if its a b/w line art piece. You also need to note a desired time frame for delivery. Youll want to be specific about what exactly you want the illo to depict. Some artists like to have liberty on this count, but others prefer to have as much set as possible. Make sure you have a clear idea in mind even if youre willing to let them change it as they see fit. A stick-figure diagram or crude sketch can be helpful in this.

When buying art, youll usually want to specifically indicate that you want to buy full rights to the piece. Once you get it, that piece is then yours, and the artist cannot resell it or use it for other commissions. If you do this, however, be ready to pay more for it than if youd just asked for usage rights for your products. Some people like to draw up specific contracts with artists. In practice, these contracts are useful only in laying out the exact terms of the commission and payment details- getting them enforced would cost more than anyones likely to make on the product itself, let alone the art piece. Still, for major or long-term projects, youll want a contract just to spare confusion and uncertainty.

Managing the Buy

Be ready to cope with flaking artists. Most are great, reliable people, but at the wages youre paying youre not going to get fanatical zeal. Be willing to cut your losses if they go silent and blow deadlines. Dont give them a dozen revisions. Youre not paying them enough to do a half-dozen major changes before you approve it. As a general rule, one revision pass is okay. If you want more, pay for it. Dont ask for freebies. If youre not certain if they fit, pay them for a small piece and see how it works. Spec work is extremely bad taste.

Buying and Using Art

Using Art in your Product

The exact type, quantity, and style of your art is going to vary a great deal depending on the kind of product youre writing and the sort of audience youre addressing. Presumably youve spent enough time in the fandom of the particular field youre writing for to understand what the expectations are of your fellow enthusiasts. Do they demand color interiors? Are they okay with scanty or simple art? If you arent sure, pick out some popular products in your intended line and check out the type and density of art that they used. The following guidelines are pitched toward people writing for an OSR, or Old School Renaissance audience. This market has certain expectations for small indie publishers, but its fairly kind and forgiving. Other audiences may not be so tolerant. gaps that youve left for illustrating a piece of text, and others will be leftover spaces that you just need to fill to make the rest of the page come out right. Theres no reason you cant make the latter serve your purposes, however, if youre in the market for commissioned art. Art should preferably relate to the text its near. Some strictly atmospheric pieces might fit anywhere in the book, but unless youre talking about something really boring, you might as well have the art depict something interesting or engaging about the text. This can be a challenge if youre using stock art, but theres nothing for it but to do the best you can under the circumstances. For small pieces less than a quarter-page in size, you can use spot art- small, somewhat generic illustrations that fit in awkward spaces. Spot art can be flavorful and useful, but dont try to do complex scenes with it or convey particularly intricate images.

Art Styles

The OSR sometimes goes so far as to fetishize crude, simplistic drawings and indie-amateur aesthetics. If you stick with the same kind of line-drawing styles you find in B/X D&D, first edition AD&D, and works of a similar time frame you wont go far wrong. You also wont surprise or intrigue anyone, but for your first product you probably want to worry about basic competence before you start getting creative with your marketing. If you have a different market in mind or want to get more adventurous, youll need to make sure that your chosen art styles are sufficiently complementary. A heavily stylized anime-inspired color cover does not gel well with grittily naturalistic interior black-andwhite line drawings. In the same vein, cartoon characters in one quarter-page shouldnt be keeping company with something that looks like it came out of Frank Frazettas sketchbook. For the most part, youll know this clash when you see it. Two artists may be great on their own, but put next to each other they just dont look right. Part of your job as an art director is to make sure the artistic theme of the book isnt too badly disjointed. You dont always have a lot of luxury on this account, however, because many small publishers are forced by economic necessity to use stock art or public-domain illustrations. In those cases, the best you can do is avoid buying art of extremely different visual idioms. Particularly when youre using scans of old illustrations, the particular style of these old works can clash sharply with the more modern flavor of much stock art. People can tell at a glance that youre using old illo rips, and those dont do so well with stock line drawings next to them. If you do use old illustrations, try to use all from the same artist, or at least from those with the same flavor.

How Much Art to Use

As a rough guideline for OSR products, a quarter-page illustration for every two pages is an adequate, respectable amount of art. You can do less and many people wont mind, but they may remark on it. Doing more is nice, but there are a lot of buyers in the market who honestly dont care that much about small-press art density. For other markets, the rules are different, but even in those cases a quarter-page for every two pages should be enough to spare you from obloquy. Try to match the expectations of your audience, however, assuming thats within your initial budget. This art ratio is somewhat fungible- a half-page illustration for four pages might work, but you probably dont want to put in a full-page illo as the only art in an eight-page stretch of text. The key is to give your pages some visual variety and interest. Tables, creative use of whitespace, and artful placement of headers can break up the monotony of consecutive columns of flat text. Illustrations also serve as easy visual bookmarks for users flipping through a paper version of the product. Ensuring that they have something to do with the text beside them can help make that easier for the reader.

Page Backgrounds, Textures, and Layers

Some designers like to use full-page textures as backgrounds for their text, or use elaborate page borders along the margins. Unless you know exactly what youre doing, you should avoid these. Background textures tend to make it much more difficult to read the text, and even those designs that only encircle the text block tend to become tedious after the first fifty pages. Its important to remember that a layout that looks impressive at first glance can become irritating in actual use. For a simple project like the ones this guide addresses, elegant simplicity is something to be desired. One useful trick for all layouts is to put the art elements of a page on their own individual PDF layer. With that in place, an end user can simply turn off the art to save on printing costs.

Where To Put Art

Where does art go? It goes where it serves three purposes- to illustrate a particular element of your product, to contribute to the overall flavor of the book, and to fill space so that layout elements fit nicely. Ideally, the same piece of art will serve all three purposes at once. In the process of laying out your book, youll have come up with a number of slots that need filling. Some of these will be intentional

10

Printing Your Product

Printing Your Product

You should always design your layout on the presumption that youre going to print it. Even if its a free product, making the layout print-friendly will allow you to sell printed copies to those fans who really want to give you money anyway. got your spreads all neatly arranged on that assumption, sticking the cover on the PDF is going to throw everything off by one page. The simplest solution to this problem is to insert a blank page behind the POD title page, allowing it to serve as a verso. Then use the same file for the PDF, but just put the cover page as the first page and delete the blank. This way, relative page numbers wont change.

POD Printing and You

This is not to say that you should actually print your product before someone specifically asks for a copy. Short-run offset printing is a terrible idea for most small publishers. By the time youve paid for a short run, paid for storage, and paid for fulfillment, you have virtually no chance of ever making back your initial investment. Just say no to short-run printing. Instead, use print on demand. Youll want to get a copy of your particular POD providers document guidelines for preparing your layout, and stick to those rules when designing it. In particular, pay attention to the minimum margins for black-and-white products. Many POD printers require at least a half-inch margin between the paper edge and the nearest element on the page, and this includes things like page numbers and section headings. This particular documents layout is friendly to OneBookshelf s POD printing guidelines, and if you use the accompanying InDesign file youll be safe on that account. Still, you should read and understand the guidelines before you start fiddling with things if you want to save yourself some grief.

Artwork in Print Products

Always get your art in a lossless format, like TIFF. Never use JPG files for a print project- and really, you shouldnt for PDF either. Black-and-white print products require 300 dpi illustrations for grayscale and shaded work. That same dpi total can also work for line art, but 600 dpi is better in those cases, as the sharp difference between black and white in those illustrations can sometimes result in blockiness at lower dpi densities. Color artwork should also be provided in 300 dpi, but more importantly, it should be composed in the CMYK color space. A color that looks very good in RGB can suddenly turn into mush when converted to CMYK. If you have your artist do your fancy $500 cover in RGB there is no guarantee that the end result will look remotely acceptable when you print it in CMYK. Some covers hold up acceptably in the conversion, but dont take the risk. Make sure any color work in your product is created in CMYK.

Gutters and Spreads

Bleeds

Another point to recall when designing a layout for print is the necessity for a gutter. I briefly mentioned these spaces earlier in the document, but its necessary to underline them once again. If you dont give yourself a little more margin on the spineward side of the page, your text is going to crawl into the spine and be very difficult to read without flattening the page out. I prefer a 3/4 inch gutter, but others have their own tastes. In InDesign, you can set the gutter when you first create a document, though be careful to unlink the inner margin size from the other margins. Note that you need to make sure the gutters are on the right side of the page, too- the gutter is on the left-hand side of odd-numbered pages and on the right-hand side of even-numbered pages. If you simply stick the gutter on the left of every page, youre not going to be happy with the results. Along with gutters, you need to think more about two-page spreads when youre designing a layout for print. With a PDF, most viewers are only ever going to see it one-up, with one page on the screen at a time. In print, theyre going to be looking at two- an even-numbered page on the left and an odd-numbered page on the right. This gets tricky when youre making a file thats meant to serve both PDF and POD. With a PDF file, the first page in the document is usually the cover to the product, then the title page, and so forth. With a print product, the first page is the title page- and if youve

The bleed of a printed document is the part that is trimmed off during the process of printing. A full bleed document is one where the ink on the page can go right to the edge of the paper. For most POD services, black and white products dont have full bleed; youll need to keep the ink in your layout about a half-inch from the edge. Color printing options usually allow for full bleed. Where this is apt to be most important to you is in the color cover allowed even to black-and-white products. In the case of Lighting Source, a template generator on their website will give you a template showing which areas of the page will be trimmed off or folded over on the cover. Keep this in mind when positioning title text. When designing your cover, be certain that you dont have any important illustration elements closer than a half-inch to the edge of the cover. It can ruin a whole cover if some vital piece of the illustration is over the edge of the trim line necessary to print the book. You can sometimes cheat around this by padding the edge of the image with some dark color that you expect to get cut off or folded over, but its best not to court disaster this way.

Acquiring Proofs

You must order and inspect proof copies of your book before you activate them for POD sale, and you can expect most vendors to enforce this with their software. Dont be surprised if the first proof has errors; consider it an opportunity to fix any errata that you missed the first time around.

11

Sales Strategy

Sales Strategy
Now that you have your painfully-fashioned product ready and the POD file all prepped, where do you go from here? There are a few basic steps you can take to ensure the widest possible sharing of your work, whether its a free item or one for sale.

Convention Sales

Pricing

For a full-fledged game of 200+ pages with respectable production values, price the hardcover at $39.99 and the softcover at either $29.99 or $34.99. Price the PDF at half the cost of the hardcover and bundle it for free with a print purchase. For a supplement of at least 64 pages, provide a softcover for $19.99 and a PDF for $9.99, or free with the softcover. For an adventure of approximately 32 pages, offer it around $12.99 for a softcover, $6.99 for a PDF, again with the free bundling. Never price something less than $4.99. If its cheaper than that, give it away free. Beneath five dollars is the shovelware zone, largely occupied by three-page PDFs on utterly trivial subjects whose authors still want seventy-five cents for them. You dont want to associate your work with this kind of material. Now available on OneBookshelf sites is the pay what you want price setting for PDF products, which can be useful for marketing purposes. If you have a flagship free product that you want to use as a lure to bring in business for later works, you can put it up as PWYW and invite the curious to try it for free. If they like it, they can come back later and either buy the POD print product or throw you some PWYW money. Always give the customer a chance to pay. Dont assume that PWYW is going to actually increase your sales on a product you would have otherwise sold, however. The RPG market is narrow. There are only so many people interested in buying your product, and selling cheap doesnt necessarily expand that market by much. If you leave money on the table by PWYW-ing an otherwise salable product, you might not see that cash again.

Ive only sent books to one convention thus far, and that done casually, so take this counsel with a grain of salt. Despite that, what I hear from other publishers is that cons are a marketing tool, not a sales tool. Most of them come out in the red, but theyre useful for building buzz and alerting people who dont haunt RPG forums. Sell your stuff at cons if you like, but dont expect to turn a profit on it.

Friendly Local Gaming Stores

In brief, this is a marketing tool for most small publishers. FLGSes normally expect about a 60% discount off the cover price, and by the time you peel off the POD printing cost and the distributors cut youll be lucky to get a dollar or two off that $40 hardback. Run the math for yourself, but dont expect great things on this front.

Sales Expectations and the Long Tail

So what should you expect? Assuming you sell through OBS and perform the basic exertions of marketing on forums and through gaming circles, a new publisher with no existing audience might make 50 sales of their product before it goes into a long-tail trickle. If you simply leave it at that, thats all your product is ever going to move. There are simply too many other options and too many competing games out there for a new publisher to rely on much enthusiasm for their first effort. If youve run an exemplary marketing effort and have a really great product, you might have more success, but even then a thousand copies sold over the first year of games availability would constitute a roaring small-publisher success. If you mean to make a serious business out of this hobby, the only counsel I can give is to apply yourself relentlessly and incessantly to the work. You must constantly build on past successes, producing new material and adjusting your work to appeal to the audience that is responding best to your creations. Because POD books and PDFs never go out of print, each month you spend grinding on new material is a new chance to introduce people to your existing body of work. As you add to that library, each new customer has a wider variety of choices to attract them and existing customers get fresh chances to sample your efforts. In particular, Ive found success in making my initial game free to the public. Stars Without Number is a complete game, free to download. Those who like it can buy POD or print versions of the core edition, which is expanded by 40 additional pages. Those who want to sample my work can pick it up at no cost, and fans who want to point people at my offerings can recommend it with no obligation to buy anything. Aside from this, each person who downloads one of my free products goes on my OBS mailing list, assuming theyve permitted such mailings. By mailing no more than once a month and ensuring I have something free or newly-published to offer each time I mail, I cultivate the interest of existing customers and remind them of my products existence. This tactic hinges on regularly creating new content for the game, but you read that part about incessant work.

Online Sales

Assuming you havent already done it, you need to get a publisher account with OneBookshelf, the company behind the DriveThruRPG/RPGNow store fronts. Its trivially simple to arrange, free, and the terms they offer are about as good as any youll get online. More importantly, theyre the biggest channel for small publisher RPG sales online. Lulu and Amazon CreateSpace move an order of magnitude fewer sales for most small publishers because the people who visit those store fronts arent necessarily interested in RPGs. The clientele at the OBS sites want to buy, and it shows in the sales. You can set up accounts at other sites if you desire, if you take the non-exclusive OBS contract, and you can put together a website storefront for your own site regardless of the contract. This work may be more than you want to handle, but if you have the technical chops to run your own web store, it can bring you a healthy slice of sales unencumbered by a cut given to anyone else.

12

Example Layouts

Example Layouts
The next several pages include a number of very simple example layout elements for some of the pages most often needed by a publisher designing an old-school game or adventure module. Along with the full-page layouts there are a number of loose tables provided that you can use to fill in where needed in your own products. The table styles provide for easy swapping of most of these to whichever look you prefer, but it is sometimes necessary to do a little manual tweaking afterwards. One InDesign trick that is especially useful is the ability to stretch a table to hit a footer margin. Just hold Shift, hover over the bottom or right edge of the table until the resize arrow appears, and drag it to its proper place. The entire table will proportionately resize to match. You may need to go back and click-drag to tighten up header cells afterwards, however, as it can look a bit odd if theyre unusually tall.

1d10 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

Generic Table
Result Result Result Result Result Result Result Result Result Result

An Example Sidebar
This is a simple sidebar box you can use to call out tangential information for your readers. Sidebars should never contain anything vital to the topic youre discussing. Instead, you should use them for examples, special-case handling notes, and possibly for in-world text blurbs or authorial interjections. This sidebar uses a 15% fill. If you want to make the page as print-friendly as possible, you can adjust the Sidebar Object in the Object Styles panel to deactivate the fill. The only visual marker for the sidebar will be the stroke around the object, however, so you may need to use more whitespace than usual to set it off.

1d10 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

Generic Table
Result Result Result Result Result Result Result Result Result Result

1d10 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
Result Result Result Result Result Result Result Result Result Result

Generic Table Result

13

Example Layouts

The Exemplar
A perpetual font of noble example, the Exemplar serves to embody the virtues of minimally adequate page design and production values sufficient to avoid public shame. They also are big fans of lots of ipsum lorem in their class description. Hit ut laut acerepere demque niscitium id estios aut qui quibusamus etusae num quam qui del expeliquidus duntios sunt prestibusae ad modis dem fugiaecto cuption sequam hit, sam alit quam eumquia sae essitatent quae cum lamet harchic aboremped et essuntu stiat.

Class Abilities

The arcane and mercantile class abilities of the Exemplar rely on their ability to remain in good standing with their public. First ability goes here, such as allowed weapons and armor.

Second ability goes here, such as their ability to sell things to an avid public. Third ability goes here, where you might add that they cast spells as a cleric of their level. And this bit is where you mention the sort of things that could put them out of favor with their public, thus depriving them of abilities two and three.

Class Overview

And here you can put the details of how this class fits in your products campaign setting, or else use this space as overflow to handle abilities that run longer than the space given above. Try to make sure that the heading doesnt start too far down, too close to the table below, however. Also, notice how the bottom of the class illustration hits exactly at the top of that paragraph above? It helps even things up a bit. Youll often find yourself making tweaks like that when you use stock art. Ignam sanduciis escimilis eum serferi asitaspe inulparum ad quuntetus id quasita vent, sit aut officab ipsusam fuga. Maximperum

alignam utatem reressumquam rera nulpa dolut perese estis as et liqui sectur? Offici acesti rempore ictem. Us plati blandae nonsed quisi occae volupti volorerum qui blaboreperum evenduc iducimus experiore remporepedi voluptaquam utaturit volut occus dolores tianda dolupta tinvelit, conectas sam quatemp orepudanis nis exerese dionsenda incidelit est que por modis cus, ommo cusae. Ut utecear ibusdam volorem labo. Ut qui beria aut et faciminciur alit odi dia solore, id ex est, omnihicime qui coriat aditiae omnim ipsuntur, ut volorro expellis volorem identio. Et facipis autem con es sus sectem ut fugiaspe exceriatur aut assequiandae aboratur, totatur? Qui ipicietur?

Level XP Required
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10+ 14
0 1,500 3,000 6,000 12,000 24,000 48,000 96,000 200,000 +200,000

HD
1d6 2d6 3d6 4d6 5d6 6d6 7d6 8d6 9d6 Recto

Title
Guide of Lines Fontsmith Leadwright Typeface Pedant Style Warrior Artiste Head Scribe Van de Graaf Canon

THAC0
19 19 19 18 18 18 17 17 17 16

Saving Throws
Death Wands Paralysis Breath 11 11 11 11 11 11 11 11 11 11 12 12 12 12 12 12 12 12 12 12 14 14 14 14 14 14 14 14 14 14 16 16 16 16 16 16 16 16 16 16 Spells 15 15 15 15 15 15 15 15 15 15

+1/level Tschichold Holder

Example Layouts

The Hoodooist
You can use this outline for a class with non-standard spellcasting abilities. Sometimes you can get away with simply saying casts spells as a magic-user of their level, but other times you have to make room in their class description for a full-fledged spell table. Try to avoid splitting parts of a characters information up between different sections of your product. A player should never have to flip through the book just to fill out a new PCs character sheet. Its sometimes necessary to compromise on this for casters with a large spell list, but even then there are ways to mitigate the issue. If it turns out that you do need more than one page to write up a class, give it a full two-page spread. You dont want to mix in any outside elements anyway, so you might as well use it all.

Class Abilities

Stick the particular abilities of the Hoodooist here. Dont go into the spellcasting so much- we can take care of that on the next page. First ability goes here, such as allowed weapons and armor.

Second ability goes here, such as their ability to sell things to an avid public. Third ability goes here, where you might add that they cast spells as a cleric of their level. Cap off the bulleted list with a couple of lines of something, so as not to leave the list hanging at the end of the element. ibusdam volorem labo. Ut qui beria aut et faciminciur alit odi dia solore, id ex est, omnihicime qui coriat aditiae omnim ipsuntur, ut volorro expellis volorem identio. Et facipis autem con es sus sectem ut fugiaspe exceriatur aut assequiandae aboratur, totatur? Qui ipicietur? Atis sintum aut dendist, sus ant audit, nos delit aspieturia conse consed magnis ex esed eos enisit fugit aut ea cum am es quia corum dolupta tiaspel lestem. Liant, iunto magnimi, corepre quod mos eum quost ad minimus re providelis cus evel mo con cus, qui quissum experferiori officid itendellupta con none imaximu sandantia sequas dolupti im fuga. Torum atur?

Class Overview

And here you can put the details of how this class fits in your products campaign setting, or else use this space as overflow to handle abilities that run longer than the space given above. Try to make sure that the heading doesnt start too far down, too close to the table below, however. olupta tinvelit, conectas sam quatemp orepudanis nis exerese dionsenda incidelit est que por modis cus, ommo cusae. Ut utecear

Level XP Required
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10+
0 1,500 3,000 6,000 12,000 24,000 48,000 96,000 200,000 +200,000

HD
1d6 2d6 3d6 4d6 5d6 6d6 7d6 8d6 9d6 Recto

Title
Guide of Lines Fontsmith Leadwright Typeface Pedant Style Warrior Artiste Head Scribe Van de Graaf Canon

THAC0
19 19 19 18 18 18 17 17 17 16

Saving Throws
Death Wands Paralysis Breath 11 11 11 11 11 11 11 11 11 11 12 12 12 12 12 12 12 12 12 12 14 14 14 14 14 14 14 14 14 14 16 16 16 16 16 16 16 16 16 16 Spells 15 15 15 15 15 15 15 15 15 15

+1/level Tschichold Holder

15

Example Layouts
Hoodooist Spell Preparation
Heres where you fill in the details about how the hoodooist prepares spells and any unique quirks to their magical disciplines. To the right is a list of their available spells by level, on the principle that all the class information should be there in front of the reader. If thats less to your liking, you can slot a half-page art piece in there or a smaller table listing the available spell choices for a 1st level Hoodooist along with a thumbnail of each spells effect. Such details allow the end user to roll up their PC without having to flip to the magic section of the book. Unt autatiu ndigent officto est miliqui con num ut et, inctis repudam et aut est, sed eliquis aut omnimin rerestiunt. Incimaxim es sinctati bla volorestrume eat resequi totae nulpa nam et et quis eum res esciae. Santotata quibus. Bearum quatur? Ita porrum labo. Et ilicid molecto doluptibus. Natemporum et verit, quat qui cus andi doluptas autat facium ut expla quis natibusdam volupid min nobitio nsequi doluptiis rem re, odi as etuscium numquas maxim fugia doloreius apiciet alisque re con consequi occum quid ut eaquamu sament reictiam restionse et dolestem que perum expliqu atquunt qui arum alitemquibus perovita eum volorro eiur simillupis aut accabo. Loribus aceperfero velenim haris quunt, iducim estio. Pudi ulpa doluptios enienda eptaturibus, quament molore, ut voluptae nus magnis iunt quam etur sitem quam con presciur, cor aut et lantis re sin porum doluptam apident velique nonestiis ullam fugiate mquidestibus ania consentet

Hoodooist Spell List

First Level
Protection from Evil Light Et cetera. Et cetera. Sleep Hold Portal Et cetera. Et cetera. Sleep Hold Portal Et cetera. Et cetera. Sleep Hold Portal Et cetera. Et cetera. Sleep Hold Portal Et cetera. Et cetera. Sleep Hold Portal Et cetera. Et cetera. Sleep Hold Portal Et cetera. Et cetera. Sleep Hold Portal Et cetera. Et cetera. Sleep Hold Portal Et cetera. Et cetera. Sleep Hold Portal Et cetera. Magic Missile Et cetera. Et cetera. Et cetera. Magic Missile Et cetera. Et cetera. Et cetera. Magic Missile Et cetera. Et cetera. Et cetera. Magic Missile Et cetera. Et cetera. Et cetera. Magic Missile Et cetera. Et cetera. Et cetera. Magic Missile Et cetera. Et cetera. Et cetera. Magic Missile Et cetera. Et cetera. Et cetera. Magic Missile Et cetera. Et cetera. Et cetera. Magic Missile Et cetera. Et cetera.

Second Level
Protection from Evil Light Et cetera. Et cetera.

Third Level
Protection from Evil Light Et cetera. Et cetera.

Fourth Level
Protection from Evil Light Et cetera. Et cetera.

Fifth Level
Protection from Evil Light

Lvl
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17+ 16

1
1 2 2 2 3 3 3 4 4 4 5 5 5 5 5 5 5

2
1 2 2 2 3 3 3 4 4 4 5 5 5 5 5

Spells Per Day 3 4 5 6 7

1 2 2 2 3 3 3 4 4 4 5 5 5 1 2 2 2 3 3 3 4 4 4 5 1 2 2 2 3 3 3 4 4 1 2 2 2 3 3 3 1 2 2 2 3

8
1 2 2

9
1

Et cetera. Et cetera.

Sixth Level
Protection from Evil Light Et cetera. Et cetera.

Seventh Level
Protection from Evil Light Et cetera. Et cetera.

Eighth Level
Protection from Evil Light Et cetera. Et cetera.

Ninth Level
Protection from Evil Light Et cetera.

Example Layouts
Alternate Table Styles for the Hoodooist
Some designers prefer a lighter, more print-friendly flavor to their tables, and so the Hoodooists tables are provided here in a different idiom. To switch them in InDesign required nothing more than selecting a cell of the table, opening the Table Styles panel and clicking on a different style, then a little cleanup to make sure the cell strokes were in the right place.

Hoodooist Spell List

First Level
Protection from Evil Light Et cetera. Et cetera. Sleep Hold Portal Et cetera. Et cetera. Sleep Hold Portal Et cetera. Et cetera. Sleep Hold Portal Et cetera. Et cetera. Sleep Hold Portal Et cetera. Et cetera. Sleep Hold Portal Et cetera. Et cetera. Sleep Hold Portal Et cetera. Et cetera. Sleep Hold Portal Et cetera. Et cetera. Sleep Hold Portal Et cetera. Et cetera. Sleep Hold Portal Et cetera. Magic Missile Et cetera. Et cetera. Et cetera. Magic Missile Et cetera. Et cetera. Et cetera. Magic Missile Et cetera. Et cetera. Et cetera. Magic Missile Et cetera. Et cetera. Et cetera. Magic Missile Et cetera. Et cetera. Et cetera. Magic Missile Et cetera. Et cetera. Et cetera. Magic Missile Et cetera. Et cetera. Et cetera. Magic Missile Et cetera. Et cetera. Et cetera. Magic Missile Et cetera. Et cetera.

Second Level
Protection from Evil Light Et cetera. Et cetera.

Third Level
Protection from Evil Light Et cetera. Et cetera.

Fourth Level
Protection from Evil Light Et cetera. Et cetera.

Fifth Level
Protection from Evil

Lvl
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17+

1
1 2 2 2 3 3 3 4 4 4 5 5 5 5 5 5 5

2
1 2 2 2 3 3 3 4 4 4 5 5 5 5 5

Spells Per Day 3 4 5 6 7

1 2 2 2 3 3 3 4 4 4 5 5 5 1 2 2 2 3 3 3 4 4 4 5 1 2 2 2 3 3 3 4 4 1 2 2 2 3 3 3 1 2 2 2 3

Light

8
1 2 2

9
1

Et cetera. Et cetera.

Sixth Level
Protection from Evil Light Et cetera. Et cetera.

Seventh Level
Protection from Evil Light Et cetera. Et cetera.

Eighth Level
Protection from Evil Light Et cetera. Et cetera.

Ninth Level
Protection from Evil Light Et cetera.

17

Example Layouts

Monster Page Elements

Most bestiaries need a convenient monster stat block. The tables below provide for some of the most commonly-needed data, but youll probably need to tweak these to fit the particulars of the system youre targeting. As with spells, be careful not to break monster descriptions over multiple columns, or if you must, then dont break them over pages. Keep in mind any illustrations youre using and dont hesitate to leave some whitespace at the foot of a column if its necessary to get the monster entry to fit neatly. There are times when a monsters particulars dont fit so neatly in a compact space. In that case, youll need to use a taller stat block to fit in all the details. This format can also be useful if you want to maintain visual uniformity when a lot of your entries have multiple variants as described below.

Monster Tall Block

Armor Class: Hit Dice: Move: Attacks: Damage: No. Appear: Save As: Morale: Treasure: Alignment: XP Value: 6 1+1 30 bite/bite/claw 1d4/1d4/1d6 1-6 (3-30) Fighter 1 7 Q Neutral 7.22

Monster Short Block

Armor Class: Hit Dice: Move: Attacks: Damage: 6 1+1 30 bite/bite/claw 1d4/1d4/1d6 No. Appear: Save As: Morale: Treasure: Alignment: 1-6 (3-30) Fighter 1 7 Q Neutral

Some module designers like to put their monster stats in-line with the rest of the paragraph, but others like to set off the enemies visually in the text to give it a bit more distinction. You can use this style with a paragraph to indent it automatically, but youll need to manually bold the monster name. Mercenaries (5): AC 7 leather armor, HD 1, hp 5/5/6/1/3, Move 30, Atk by weapon, Dmg 1d6, Morale 8, Alignment Neutral

Multiple Monster Variants

A lot of monster types have multiple similar varieties- ones that dont merit a separate entry, but need statistical distinction. Heres a sample of such a table. Note that this example assumes that youre spanning an entire page with these variants. If you only have two or three, you can often fit them into a single column by carefully narrowing individual columns.

Monster Wide Block

Armor Class: Hit Dice: Move: Attacks: Damage: No. Appear: Save As: Morale: Treasure: Alignment: XP Value: 6 1+1 30 bite/bite/claw 1d4/1d4/1d6 1-6 (3-30) Fighter 1 7 Q Neutral 7.22

Type A

6 1+1 30 bite/bite/claw 1d4/1d4/1d6 1-6 (3-30) Fighter 1 7 Q Neutral 7.22

Type B

6 1+1 30 bite/bite/claw 1d4/1d4/1d6 1-6 (3-30) Fighter 1 7 Q Neutral 7.22

Type C

6 1+1 30 bite/bite/claw 1d4/1d4/1d6 1-6 (3-30) Fighter 1 7 Q Neutral 7.22

Type D

6 1+1 30 bite/bite/claw 1d4/1d4/1d6 1-6 (3-30) Fighter 1 7 Q Neutral 7.22

Type E

18

Example Layouts

Module Elements
A few components are commonly needed by designers inclined to create an old-school adventure module. First up, we have the classic boxed text room description table. 1. Boxed Text Room Note that the cell insets for the above table have been turned up very slightly to increase the amount of whitespace between each room. You could get the same effect by simply click-and-dragging the bottom of the table to stretch it vertically, but cell insets provide a good minimum-height assurance for those occasions when you dont want to bother hand-tweaking it. Heres another alternative style, with just a room number, title, and then table cell space for the description of the room: A1 Bedroom

The actual boxed text goes in here. Note that boxed text is not universally loved- some people find it largely useless, and prefer a plain description of an areas particulars. After the boxed text comes the details of the area that arent obvious at first glance, along with the monster stat blocks for any potentially hostile inhabitants. As with any unified element, you should try very hard to keep all these things in the same column. If you must break the room description, make sure that at least some of the text appears in the same column as the boxed text, or else the reader may not realize that theres more to be read.

This is a completely nondescript bedroom without even the dignity of a few scraps of linen. If you do have multiple columns of these numbered lists on a page, it can be worth your time to make sure they all hit the same level on the page with their footers, giving each column the same vertical height. This wont work if the size difference is too great, but small amounts of stretching are almost unnoticeable.

Numbered List Areas

A few modules prefer to use a numbered list sequence to describe their areas, usually setting off the room descriptions from the left margin slightly. In that case, you can get much the same effect with tables- though remember that tables will only break over columns along cell boundaries A1 B7 Bedroom: This is a completely nondescript bedroom without even the dignity of a few scraps of linen. Kitchen: The kitchen is desolate and forsaken, redolent of the aromas of failed curry experiments.

Module Cartography

Keep maps as close to their keys as is possible. Old-school saddle-stitched modules could print the maps on the interior of the cover, thus allowing the DM to prop it open in front of himself and have the map key open behind the screen. POD doesnt allow that kind of luxury, so youre going to need to keep the maps in-line. Avoid the temptation to put them at the back of the book. Take advantage of a PDFs layering capabilities. By putting a maps legend and numbering on a separate layer, you allow the GM to turn it off and print just the map for his own use. This is particularly convenient when you want to let the GM print a players version map of some outdoor area that omits the labels and key. Also, think about putting in print-friendly maps with much of the background texturing or black fill removed to save on ink use.

C30 Wombat Kennel: Lacking the services of a trained wombat wrangler, the inhabitants here have turned savage. Wombats (5): AC 7 thick hide, HD 1, hp 5/5/6/1/3, Move 30, Atk by claws, Dmg 1d6, Morale 8, Alignment Neutral

Wandering Monster Tables and Monster Summaries

Many modules have need of a wandering monster table. While you can have a short single-column table and then put the stats and particulars in text blocks afterwards, it can be more convenient to have the full statline on the table itself, as its easier to find in play. Other designers like to have a full list of foes assembled at the back of the module for quick reference during play. 1d4 1 2 3 4 1d4 1 2 3 4 Wandering Monsters 1d6 Orcs Wandering Bard 2d8 Kobolds Angry Wombat Wandering Monsters 1d6 Orcs Wandering Bard 2d8 Kobolds Angry Wombat AC 6 7 8 7 AC 6 7 8 7 HD 1 3 1/2 1 HD 1 3 1/2 1 Move 30 30 20 30 Move 30 30 20 30 by weapon cruel jape/electric axe pitiful spears fearsome claws by weapon cruel jape/electric axe pitiful spears fearsome claws Atk. Atk. Dmg. 1d6 2d10/1d8 1d4 1d8 Dmg. 1d6 2d10/1d8 1d4 1d8 Morale 8 12 7 7 Morale 8 12 7 7

19

Example Layouts

Magic and Spell Elements

A few tables can be convenient in putting together a magic chapter. As with class descriptions, avoid the temptation to put spell text into a table cell- if it overruns the column, the entire cell will pop to the next column rather than breaking. You should also take care that the tabular part of a spell description doesnt get orphaned in a column, with the text description all ending up in the next. Ideally, every spell should be complete within its own column. If you cant do that, then it should all be on the same page. If thats too much, then at least put it all on the same two-page spread. If you cant do that much, then think hard, because splitting a single page element over two spreads is not a thing that works too well in use. When doing splitting, make sure that at least two or three lines of the text description is still with the spell header itself. The text styles automatic keep-together options should ensure that, but if youre using your own styles make sure that a suitably meaty chunk of the text stays stuck to the header. For spells that use a slightly more involved system of magic and casting, you might prefer the table below. Note that the cell insets have been decreased somewhat to pack the lines more closely. You may want to experiment with different tweakings to get the right balance of compactness with ease of reading. To do so, select the cells in question, right click, choose Cell Options -> Text and adjust things accordingly. When shrinking insets, you may need to click and drag the row lines to snug them up closer to the text.

Basic Spell Name

Level: Range: Duration: Area of Effect: 1 360 1 turn One wombat Components: Casting Time: Saving Throw: V,S,M 1 round None

Basic Spell Name

Range: Duration:

360 1 turn

Spells can often use level-by-level listings. The table below presumes twelve spells for a level, but you can add or delete rows as needed. It can be handy to keep the number of spells per level the same as a major die type, so as to make it easier to randomly generate a spell of that level.

And heres an alternate format that adds a bit more specificity to the spells effect.

First Level Wombat Wrangler Spells

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. Spell Spell ... ... 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

Basic Spell Name

Range: Duration: Effect: 360 1 turn One wombat

Class Spell Tables

It can be convenient to have a single master list of class spells at the front of a magic chapter rather than inserting level-by-level summaries at the front of each level of spells. Given the length of spell names, you cant usually fit more than five columns of text on a given line, so you may need to make two tables. If you do so, click-and-drag the shorter of the two to stretch it out proportionally to match the longer table.

Class Spell List

Level 1
1 2 3 4 5 6 Spell A ... ... ... ... ...

Level 2
Spell B

Level 3
Spell C

Level 4
Spell D

Level 5
Spell E

20