Looking back, it's hard to believe that I started doing the layout for Gloranthan related publications back in 1995. David Hall was looking for someone to help with Tales 14 and I was eager to lend a hand. A few years later Colin Phillips and I undertook publishing the Gloranthan Classics and Moon Design Publications was born. In many ways, the layout used for the Sartar book is the direct offshoot of what Colin and I came up with for our first publication: Pavis & Big Rubble. It's been adjusted and refined a bit over the years, but the core concept has stayed the same. With two columns for the main text and a slim supplemental sidebar column we manage to pack a fair number of words onto each page. Many RPG books these days take a different approach, and I thought I would write a little about the differences.
With the size of our current print runs full color interior pages are not an economically viable option so we focus on what works better in black and white. Many RPG books chew up a lot of each page by using large ornate borders that try to make the book look like some sort of ornate ancient tome. A few years back I played around with the idea of doing something similar, but couldn't find anything that really appealed visually, or added anything substantive to the book. Instead, we have focused on the word count per page. This creates a slimmer book that saves a little on printing and shipping costs while freeing up pages for a more extensive index without bloating page count.
The Sartar manuscript consists of approximately 240,000 words (excluding the index and TOC info/pages). For a bit of nostalgic reference, Griffin Mountain is 150,000 words and Pavis & Big Rubble (combined) are 220,000 words. We average 666 words per page (no joke on the number). Many RPG books published recently average closer to 500-600 words per page. We are happy to get 10-20% more information, on average, onto each page while also providing you with at least as much art as found in other RPG books. Most of our images, to do the artist justice, average out to 1/3 of a page each as opposed to the smaller 1/4 page ones found in other books. Quite frankly, any smaller and in many cases you would miss a lot of the detail that our artists pack into each image. That's why we also did more full page maps, and even increased their sizes in the Campaign pack.
I'm looking forward to continuing our refinement of the layout for our books. We wanted to stand somewhat apart from previous Heroquest publications because the Sartar book is a departure from what published to date. I believe we accomplished that goal - a different approach, a different range of content, with a different look.
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