Hi there guys,

I have recently gotten into EotE and love how the module books are laid out. I have started to run game sessions at the school which I work at and the kids love it as much as I do. I also like creating new stories that their characters will be able to follow and while I could quickly whip something up in word, I would love produce something that looks like and ties in nicely with the rest of the FF books, much like Maveritchell’s One Shot link.

If anyone has any advice or links that can help they would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

Omega.

You need a DTP app so that you can easily combine words and pictures and have interesting layouts. Something Word is notoriously bad at. What platform are you on?

You need a DTP app so that you can easily combine words and pictures and have interesting layouts. Something Word is notoriously bad at. What platform are you on?

I've pulled off some decent desktop publishing using OpenOffice and Word, but nothing beats having a dedicated DTP application. If you can't afford one of the big boys - Adobe Indesign or QuarkExpress - there's always Scribus, which is both free and pretty feature-rich.

You need a DTP app so that you can easily combine words and pictures and have interesting layouts. Something Word is notoriously bad at. What platform are you on?

Windows 10.

I've pulled off some decent desktop publishing using OpenOffice and Word, but nothing beats having a dedicated DTP application. If you can't afford one of the big boys - Adobe Indesign or QuarkExpress - there's always Scribus, which is both free and pretty feature-rich.

Ironically, if you know what you’re doing with Word, you can produce some good looking stuff. It’s just extraordinarily painful and time-consuming.

Just ask GM Hooly — he did that for the Rancor Publishing Group on the “Spark of Rebellion” book, and he did it with Word.

Previous versions of the book used Scribus, and that got us close, but not quite over the goal line. GM Hooly ended up having to completely re-do all the layout with Word in order to get things to look right. The text transferred over fine, and the graphics could be re-used, but re-doing all the layout was a major pain-in-the-azz.

Personally, I would never inflict Word on my worst enemy. But if you can’t afford to use a real-deal professional desktop publishing application, there aren’t many alternatives out there.

EDIT: And yes, I can confirm that everyone in RPG is pretty serious about achieving FFG-levels of quality for our output.

Previous versions of the book used Scribus, and that got us close, but not quite over the goal line. GM Hooly ended up having to completely re-do all the layout with Word in order to get things to look right. The text transferred over fine, and the graphics could be re-used, but re-doing all the layout was a major pain-in-the-azz.

I don't understand how Scribus didn't get you there. Check out my Tenacious Bounty Hunters write-up. It's not perfect, but I did the whole thing - from writing to layout - in less than two hours of work time. Honestly, with a little more work from someone who knew more about DTP, the layout would have been close enough to FFG's to be indistinguishable at first glance. No offense to GM Hooly intended, of course, but Scribus is a fairly powerful piece of software, especially for the price of "Free".

Then again, if you have the complete MS Office suite, Microsoft Publisher can do a pretty good job, too.

You're going to want Fanggrip's Style Guide wherein Fanggrip has done all the hard work deciphering and compiling all the tidbits you'll need to make it look like a genuine FFG product.

I can help with graphics like background images, art, etc.

I don't understand how Scribus didn't get you there. Check out my Tenacious Bounty Hunters write-up. It's not perfect, but I did the whole thing - from writing to layout - in less than two hours of work time. Honestly, with a little more work from someone who knew more about DTP, the layout would have been close enough to FFG's to be indistinguishable at first glance. No offense to GM Hooly intended, of course, but Scribus is a fairly powerful piece of software, especially for the price of "Free”.

I wasn’t the one who was trying to do things with Scribus, so it may well have simply been an issue with not knowing how to best use the software.

I know that I provided a whole crapton of feedback on the version of SoR that I saw (over 100 items on a document that was about 90 pages long). IIRC, a number of those items were tagged as being something that we could not fix with Scribus.

Then again, if you have the complete MS Office suite, Microsoft Publisher can do a pretty good job, too.

Again, you’d have to ask the guy who actually did the layout to get the details of all the tools he actually used. In this regard, GM Hooly is your man.

I know that I personally spent hundreds of dollars buying various typefaces and other things to get the real-deal versions from the official sources, as opposed to using the free versions that could be easily found from other resources.

I know that Drathen has said that he is using the same professional-grade software that he uses in his “day job”, and I did everything I could to make sure that we could do the same for all the rest of the software we were using for the other aspects of our production.

And now that we’ve spent that money to buy those assets, we can re-use them on any of the other projects that we work on.

We are definitely a negative-profit organization. But, thanks to the team and all their hard work, we’re producing very high quality stuff, and I’m happy to do my part in helping to make this happen.

You're going to want Fanggrip's Style Guide wherein Fanggrip has done all the hard work deciphering and compiling all the tidbits you'll need to make it look like a genuine FFG product.

He’s done most of the work. There’s still a few bits that he didn’t cover, and so we had to go work out for ourselves what was needed to fill the gaps.

But he didn’t miss much.

As the lucky one who got to lay out Spark of Rebellion using Scribus, I can shed a little more light on how that went.

It was my first time attempting to use a Desktop Publishing app, and I discovered it on suggestion from FangGrip's guide that's already been mentioned. That guide was absolutely critical to pointing me in the right direction for many aspects of the style.

There was a bit of a learning curve with Scribus, but it wasn't too bad. I can't remember anything specific that it absolutely could not do, just a handful of things that were a royal pain in the behind, most notably tables. (Which we had a lot of.)

I also went in with the mindset of it being a digital publication, and, to be honest, took a few short cuts in some minor areas for the sake of time and sanity. When there's 90+ pages, making sure there are the proper angles in the proper directions on the corners of every single sidebar can drive someone mad.

When we decided that it might be worth making adjustments to it in order to make it worthy of printing hard copies, GM Hooly volunteered, much to my relief. I gave him the Scribus files and whatnot, but he was more comfortable using Word, so he switched to that.

Soooo, it's not so much that Scribus couldn't do everything as much as I didn't have the patience or time to perfect everything 100%, and the person who volunteered to take it those final few miles preferred a different tool.

I realize this may be a bit off topic, so I'll try and get back on track - Omega, if you have any specific questions or need some guidance, just let me know and I'd be happy to help.