I want to publicly thank Jeff, Simon, Rick and the fantastic team that they led to publish this product. It's a work I am proud of.
--Greg
On Thu, Dec 10, 2009 at 5:33 AM, Rick <rjmeints_at_MSb6hNSirhVgVTXFTMWoONlU2G1O2OjKblQVLt4XRqVqlaFC5J8o1Q9GFx06Trriab_a9lnQVk1b5vk.yahoo.invalid> wrote:
> Hello all,
>
> 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.
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> ------------------------------------
>
> Yahoo! Groups Links
>
>
>
>
--
Greg Stafford
Game Designer
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