Design notes

The Greyhawk Grognard is looking at how to organize the various sections of D&D-style rulebooks. OD&D had Men & Magic, Monsters & Treasure, and Underworld & Wilderness Adventures, AD&D reorganized to the Players Handbook, the Dungeon Masters Guide, and the Monster Manual. Why separate the game master book from the player book? Why keep monsters separate as well?

The way I look at it is this: if it’s a rule, it goes in the Rulebook for all players to read. If it’s specialized, it gets its own book. And I like to keep each book that gets used at the table at 120 pages or below and in a format that flattens more easily.

So, I have the Gods & Monsters Rules in their own book; the Arcane Lore magic book, and the Divine Lore prophet book. I separate out spells and spirits because only some of the players need them, and they take up a lot of space. I’m trying to avoid the necessity of looking things up in an index (one of the reasons I’ve avoided even making an index) by keeping each book focused.

I used to make a “big” book available on Lulu¹ that combined the Rulebook, Arcane Lore, and Divine Lore. But nobody bought it—including me. At the table I found it more useful to be able to hand the Divine book to the prophet player, the Magic book to the sorceror, and not have them distracted by the rules that they don’t currently need.

There are a couple of oddities, currently. I have skills in the Arcane Lore book because they aren’t big enough to go on their own; I may end up moving them into the main rulebook since they are far more integrated into the rules than they used to be in previous incarnations. Specialties and psychic powers will stay in the Arcane Lorebook because they’re too small to go on their own. It’s all a tradeoff between playability and just plain having too many books lying around.

Several years ago, I wrote an article about making custom character sheets using downloadable fonts and any modern page layout software. I used Apple’s AppleWorks package to make the examples. I updated it later for Scribus.

It’s fun designing things like that. But when I decided to include these custom character sheets in the downloadable set of gaming sheets for Gods & Monsters, it wasn’t a joke when I added a third, “advanced” sheet that is just a blank page of ruled paper.

College rule, wide rule, graph paper, or just a blank sheet from a sketch book. In my opinion, those are the best custom character sheets.

This is why, even though I’ve started using the “professional” looking character sheets to portray NPCs such as Deanna Carmen in Helter Skelter, I never updated the sample characters in the main rulebook. Those are player characters, and as such they should be scrawled out on whatever paper you’ve got handy. Just like the Moldvay Red Book example. So I left the example characters in boring table format, hoping to someday do them up as if they were on normal paper.

Well, I finally got around to it last week in Scribus, using some downloaded fonts from Abstract Fonts. They look awesome, as you can see above. And each one uses a different font, because, of course, each player character is made by a different player.

I considered doing them by hand, but that would have meant either them all being in the same handwriting, or getting my friends together and then being unable to make changes when necessary without trying to match their handwriting. Also, it would mean scanning them as images rather than as text, which makes the documents less useful for alternative readers.

The only problem with the EPS files is that for some reason, Word really doesn’t like EPS files. Besides not displaying them onscreen, it also makes the RTF file size huge—about 90 megabytes uncompressed, and 36 megabytes compressed. None of the individual files even reach a megabyte; the math there is way off. A quick test with Nisus indicates that when I switch to Nisus, the compressed file size will drop down to a more manageable 13 megabytes. (The PDF, of course, is even smaller.)

The sample character sheets are also a part of the resources file—including the original Scribus document if you want to muck around with it.

One of the things I like to do is steal good poetry and rewrite it for Highland. I did this with The Lady of Shalott in The House of Lisport. I just did it again for a new adventure our group is currently going through, the road to the first city. I stole straight from one of the best: Rome Unvisited from Oscar Wilde’s Rosa Mystica. It turned out even better than the Lady of Lisport. The fifth stanza is probably going to be the highlighted text of the imprint page:

• And yet what joy it were for me
• To trod my feet upon the earth,
• And journeying toward Aira’s birth
• To kneel again at Drasoli!

The rest of the poem undoubtedly still has changes to be made, but I do like those lines!

Here for your enjoyment is Urbana Mystica: The Song of the City.

Northwest

• • The corn has turned from gray to red,
  • Since first my spirit wandered forth
  • From the drear cities of the north,
  • And to the solar mountains fled.
• • And here I set my face toward home,
  • For now my pilgrimage doth yield,
  • Although, methinks, yon blood-red field
  • Marshals the way to Aureum.
• • O Mesiemblé, who dost hold
  • Upon the central roads thy reign!
  • O Mother without blot or stain,
  • Crowned with bright crowns of triple gold!
• • O Meshiaské, at thy feet
  • I lay this barren gift of song!
  • For, ah! the way is steep and long
  • That leads unto thy sacred street.

Southwest

• • And yet what joy it were for me
  • To trod my feet upon the earth,
  • And journeying toward Aira’s birth
  • To kneel again at Drasoli!
• • And wandering through the tangled pine
  • That break the gold of Marsu’s dream,
  • To see the purple mist and gleam
  • Of morning on King’s forty-nine.
• • By many a vineyard-hidden home,
  • Orchard, and olive-garden gray,
  • Till from threaded Edekli’s way
  • The central hill bears up the dome!