Author Topic: A More professional looking fan world  (Read 3953 times)

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Offline jasonbrisbane

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A More professional looking fan world
« on: January 14, 2011, 08:10:47 PM »
Hello All,

With the rebirth of ICE I am getting inspired (again) to releasing my own Fan created world.

Just a bit of a background:

When Cyradon/Gryphon World was announced, it was released with the phrase similar to: a gem in the middle of a courtyard glows and people pour through from a world unknown to this new world.

That inspired  me to write me campaign world and epic story campaign form level 1 through to what ended up as level 14, but could end up being level 15 plus.

I constructed a Players guide, Gods guide, GM's guide, Towns guide for the Southern and Northern Kingdoms as well as several adventure areas involving Giants and Orcs and even a corrupted and desolate dwarven stronghold filled with Demons and (when I convert them) Elder Worms from RM C&T II (I never needed them but I was always wanting to and will one day convert the Elder Worms). I even created and used several online tools for creating taverns and drew from scratch temples and other generic areas that PC's would use that give examples of the culture and style of the people/clerical temples.

But looking back on it now it is a little primative and I want to make the entire think look rather a lot more professional, including my own primate artwork. Basically, just to reformat the entire lot... I will obviously reword and rephrase some sections but I want to make it look a bit more professional first.

Eventually I may submit it to ICE as a setting (there is a LOT of it, which I feel fits together very well using ALL of the HARP core races and leaves a lot of room for HB races, etc). Before i do I want to have a book that looks like it needs only very little work to be ready for submission (the artwork examples will give clear indications of the pictures I want and will involve only an artist to redraw in his own style).

My questions are thus:
- What program is suitable for creating books (pagemaker?) Is Word, Openoffice suitable?
- What tutorials, or examples, if any would people recommend as good examples on how to format the books and get started in the editing process?


Thanks for the assistance of the ICE fanbase.

--------
Regards,
Jason Brisbane
HARP GM & Freelancer
Author of "The Ruins of Kausur"
http://roleplayingapps.wordpress.com

Offline markc

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Re: A More professional looking fan world
« Reply #1 on: January 14, 2011, 08:47:53 PM »
 IMHO you can use anything you want but if you want it profession I would use Adobe InDesign to finish it off. It is what they use to publish magazines, books and news papers.
 The Adobe Class Room in a Book Series will teach you how to use the program and IMHO is almost as good as a one on one instruction but only around $30 US last time I checked.


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Rule #0: A GM has the right to change any rule in a book to fit their game.
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Offline pastaav

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Re: A More professional looking fan world
« Reply #2 on: January 15, 2011, 03:36:45 AM »
I think GCP might have good suggestions when they successfully have made some books available for print-on-demand. At the root of it any editor can be used to create material, but the consuming persons/applications determine what editor that gives least problems.
/Pa Staav

Offline craggles

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Re: A More professional looking fan world
« Reply #3 on: January 15, 2011, 06:02:54 AM »
If it is your intent to submit it to ICE/Guild Companion Publications then I wouldn't have thought you'd need to make it into a book layout yourself as that'd be something the layout designer would be doing if they picked it up. The same for the illustrations.

I'm not sure how they'd respond to another setting as there's several for ICE already including Shadow World. They may want to stick to the various settings they already have for the time being so as to not over extend themselves (baring in mind that the HARP SF also comes with a new setting).

If, however, you're going to self publish, then InDesign would be the one for you and as MarkC mentioned, the Adobe Classroom in a Book series are a great start but if you're starting form scratch, it's going to be a steep learning curve. I'm not sure if you can get PageMaker anymore as Adobe stopped development of that when they released InDesign. The current version of InDesign is CS5 but you certainly don't need the latest and you'll probably be able to get InDesign CS1 from Ebay quite cheaply. Quark Xpress is an alternative but I switched to InDesign early on and haven't looked back since!

Word is no good for professional print projects but I'm sure it's very good at editing the manuscript. Or Microsoft Publisher either but club newsletters and the like are it's target use (and although I use Macs, I'm not saying this because I'm anti-Microsoft). It's all about the language it speaks and we need Postscript for professional jobs which also drops OpenOffice as being a contender.

You mentioned that you've used HARP Fantasy races (and presumably HARP Stats too) but you may want to think about multi-stating - adding in RM2/Classic and RMSS/RMFRP stats into the mix as well. Extending that thought, so as not to restrict your audience, you could stat it for a variety of systems.

I would like to help but I'm somewhat busy currently with the layout of HARP SF Xtreme. I've finished the Shadow World Player's Guide illustrations and layout PDF, HARP SF layouts (and some supplementary illustrations). There's some reformatting for the Shadow World Player's Guide for the Print on Demand system next on the list. I'll then be working on the illustrations for the Shadow World section (and cover) of the Guild Adventurer which is followed by the Illustrations and layout for Emer 3.

It's going to be several months until I can directly help but I'm happy to give  advice as you're going through InDesign if you like (my contact details are in my sig below).

Good luck! :)
Logo Rolemaster (Unified). Illustration of 2 Covers.
Logo Re-Vamp of Shadow World.
Illustration, Page Design & Layout of Shadow World Players Guide - The World.
Illustration of various other Shadow World products
Logo Design, Page Design & Layout of HARP SF & SFX
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Offline Thom @ ICE

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Re: A More professional looking fan world
« Reply #4 on: January 15, 2011, 06:49:15 AM »
There are multiple options available for "publication" of the setting.
1 - You can do it all yourself and publish it either on the web yourself, in The Guild Companion as articles, or submit it to the Vault.  Each has different pro's and con's, but generally the ownership/control and the amount of ICE content that can be included go in opposite directions.  As you give up ownership/control you increase the amount of actual ICE IP that can be included.

2 - You can negotiate with Aurigas Aldebaron to gain a license for it, and working with GCP (for rules alignment) you can produce it yourself and even sell it on sites like RPGNow or elsewhere. You get to keep most of the sales and the non-Rules IP and can develop it as you see fit - but you need to handle all of the production work yourself and would need to ensure the rules customizations are approved by GCP.   We need to ensure that we don't end up with lots and lots of new versions of HARP.

3 - You can submit to GCP and see if there is any interest. GCP would then publish the material for you under their name and you would get a portion of the sales.

As to whether or not Aurigas or GCP may be interested, that all depends upon the setting material, how much work there is to do with it, what other projects would be impacted by this project and of course the negotiations themselves.
Email -    Thom@ironcrown.com

Offline jasonbrisbane

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Re: A More professional looking fan world
« Reply #5 on: January 15, 2011, 08:35:30 AM »
I suppose I want to produce a manuscript that looks professional and not simply a collection of documents that made sense to me at one stage (The Gods Guide has a feel of Harn to it, whilst the Players guide - an obvious Harn reference, has more of a definite HARP feel.)

Ive created Taverns which are generic and some as a direct download from the irony.com website.
Ive created adventures from Rm creatures and Harp creatures and some as modifications (some small some large modifications :) ) of DND adventures of various types.

At first I would like to simply release the core settings book and my first issue would be how to segment the book - what should I put in the table of contents and thus how to structure the setting.

This is important as it will give the setting a feel all of its own.
--------
Regards,
Jason Brisbane
HARP GM & Freelancer
Author of "The Ruins of Kausur"
http://roleplayingapps.wordpress.com