graphic design and book layout
Went to PAX Unplugged. Came home. Ate a turkey. Thought about the show.
It was odd. Thousands of people showed up for the show and it seems to have been a success. But there were some strange things that don’t seem to be similar to other gaming conventions. As an exhibitor, I found the convention to be strange. As a gamer, I thought it was fun. As a professional attempting to network, I thought it was fantastic.
There’s this “12 RPGs for the 12th Month” thing that’s going on G+Â right now, where there’s twelve writing prompts about games, one for every two days in December. This co-incidentally winds up ending on December 24th, and feels a bit 12 Days of Christmas-y without dropping the word “Christmas” in anywhere. ((And also, let’s not forget that the 12 Days of Christmas actually start on Christmas Day, running through Three Kings Day/Epiphany.))
It’s a bit like the #RPGaDAY thing that happens in August. Writing prompts about gaming. Paul Mitchner started the thing with a graphic. Below I’ve written them out (and cleaned up the prompts a touch) for use of cutting and pasting into future writings.
When I first started doing layout for RPGs, I was given marked up text and I tended to use that early on. The copy would come from the editor or author and be full of what looked like HTML in brackets or angle-brackets: [em]this would be set in italics[/em], <dice>8</dice> would mean to put in an 8-sided die graphic, while [ih]this could be an inline header (and it took me forever to find out what “ih” meant). The work would consist of taking this plain, unstylized text, and doing several grep searches inside InDesign to replace the markup copy with stylized copy.
For projects like The Fate Codex, I had this pretty much down pat. It worked for that because that project was a series of documents, all using the same paragraph and character styles.