Is PDF still a good format?

[Lokathor]

At one point, I converted about 90% of the non-monster/non-psionic SRD into a PDF. I didn't end up formatting all the tables in the spells and magic item section to make it readable, so they compile weird, but all the content is pretty much there. It's 704 pages.

The core tomes are, I think, at least 200 pages, mostly without overlap with the SRD, so those two combined would be maybe 850 pages? Plus all the other Tome content that people have written, that I would love to incorperate over time. So maybe 900 pages by the time it's all arranged? It's unlikely that you'd print that as a single book. However, a lot of those pages are things that could be cut from the main book, like the rules on wilderness exploration that people probably never use anyway. To get a version you'd want to print, I imagine that perhaps you'd cut a lot of stuff and re-arrange things so that what's really important is in a "player's handbook", and then a "player's companion" type book can be had as well for the extended things.

Anyway, I've begin work on "revising" the SuperTome, which means going through each chapter, sprucing it up a bit, and trying to make sure this time that there are complete enough rules in each chapter that you have to go check the SRD for missing sections very rarely. Right now I've only got an Introduction chapter, and next is Races, then Classes, and so on through the book.

Right now this is what my Table of Contents looks like:

Table of Contents 2
1 Introduction 3
1.1 What Is This? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
1.2 Things Needed To Play . . . . . . . . . . 3
1.3 A Note About Pronouns . . . . . . . . . . 3
1.4 The Basics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
1.5 Ability Scores . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
1.6 Character Creation . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
2 Races 7
2.1 Aasimar . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
2.2 Drow . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
2.3 Dwarf . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
2.4 Elf . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
2.5 Feytouched . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
2.6 Gnome . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
2.7 Goblin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
2.8 Half-elf . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
2.9 Halfling . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
2.10 Half-orc . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
2.11 Hobgoblin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
2.12 Human . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
2.13 Kobold . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
2.14 Orc . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
2.15 Tiefling . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
3 Classes 9
4 Skills 10
5 Feats 11
6 Equipment 12
7 Background 13
8 Exploration 14
9 Combat 15
10 Magical Theory 16
11 Magic Items 17
12 Character Advancement 18
13 Prestige Classes 19
14 Star Sailing 20
15 Planeswalking 21
Appendices 22
A Spells 23
B Monsters 24
C Advancing Monsters 25
D NPC Classes 26
E The Open Game License 27
Glossary 30
List of Tables 31
Index 32

As always, if you'd care to throw stuff my way I can probably use it. I'm better at formatting words than writing them. I need more fluff submissions than crunch ones though. I have plenty of races and classes, but I'm kinda lite on the cultures, histories, and "your class in the world" sorts of things.

[Prak]

That posits an interesting question, actually- what kind of fluff do we want in Tome? Like, what things do we want to have fluff?

[Lokathor]

To me, what makes Tome so great is the snark, and the embracing of the fantastic, and the blue anime bullshit. There's half a dozen retro-clones that will tell you about mundane sorts of adventures with just a touch of magic here and there. Worlds where the characters are mostly just average people with no special powers unless they're a cleric or wizard. There's a time and a place for that, but Tome is not that time and place. Tome is best when it embraces the fact that E6 was actually mostly right: A 6th level character is a mighty foe to be feared, on par with many comic book characters. And they come in 4-packs. And life also goes up way past 6.

Things that are big, things that are grand, things with a special effects budget. Things that offend grognards.

[vagrant]

The blue anime bullshit is a bit meh, tbh, but I love the exploration of ideas that the Tome does in the Economicon and the alignment discussions and so forth. If we want fluff, it should follow that sort of 'Really critically examine this concept with a view of it being an actual thing in your world' vibe and viewpoint that the rest of the Tome offers." I'd honestly love high-quality fluff everywhere, as long as it was short. (And high-quality. No fluff is better than shitty fanfiction.)

[RadiantPhoenix]

Facts of note regarding book-printing:

• Lulu.com only goes up to 800 page books, so you would have to split 900 pages up.
• Cost-per-page is not flat, so one big book is cheaper than two books half the length (A 300 page hardcover is about $20, and an 800-pager is about $35)
• 800 pages is a huge fucking book, so you might want the smaller books

To me, what makes Tome so great is the snark, and the embracing of the fantastic, and the blue anime bullshit. [...] Tome is best when it embraces the fact that E6 was actually mostly right: A 6th level character is a mighty foe to be feared, on par with many comic book characters. And they come in 4-packs. And life also goes up way past 6.

Things that are big, things that are grand, things with a special effects budget. Things that offend grognards.

[Prak]

....I should write up a bit of fluff for tome Changelings and Robot People.

[codeGlaze]

To me, what makes Tome so great is the snark, and the embracing of the fantastic, and the blue anime bullshit. [...] Tome is best when it embraces the fact that E6 was actually mostly right: A 6th level character is a mighty foe to be feared, on par with many comic book characters. And they come in 4-packs. And life also goes up way past 6.

Things that are big, things that are grand, things with a special effects budget. Things that offend grognards.

He has a point. The draw of Tomes, for me, was that it :
1) Admitted there were problems
2) Tried to tackle some of them
3) Did it with style and an eye for high fantasy (which grognards duz not wanteth)

[Wiseman]

Much the same. I've never read LoTR, and really only seen like two of the moves to completion.

Also, art does get a book to sell. Is it possible to commission some art for this, or can anyone here draw well enough?

[Lokathor]

I don't wish to be the gatekeeper of all tome PDFs, just my own, but I can say that artwork would generally be accepted and greatly appreciated. As far as I am aware, there is not currently any artwork specifically intended for Tome in any Tome PDF ever released. I have a cover image I used once, but it's just a creative commons picture of an old map.

[OgreBattle]

for artwork, creative commons of cool heroic paintings and historic heroes would be cool.

Like the classic image of anime hero Michael stomping a grognard under his feet

Lots of fun artwork out there. It also help people get out of the 'hollywood realism' mentality and embrace the crazy anime action of historic legends.

[Prak]

[Insert hipster nietzschean rant about that feathered douchbag]

Anyway. That's a good idea, actually, and as much as i hate people trying to pay artists in exposure, you could do worse than to trawl through the lesser known deviant art profiles and ask for permission to use specific pieces in a non-commercial D&D house rule supplement.

[Lokathor]

Yeah, a retroclone called Dark Dungeons used all public domain woodcuts of old art for all of its stuff, and it ended up looking pretty good most of the time. I'm not sure we need to keep a totally consistent theme and art direction, since often part of the point of Tome stuff compared to other things is the Kitchen Sink style.

I don't know of any particular sites that keep a repository of old art. I'd prefer public domain if possible because then 100% of the book can be Open Game Content, but more realistically the art can be declared Product Identiy and then used under Creative Commons (some flickr, probably other sites) or GNU FDL (wikimedia) or whatever else. We'd just need to keep careful track of where each picture comes from so it can all be properly listed in the credits.

Images would be, preferably, higher quality than actually used in the book, because the PDF format stores the complete image and then scales it to fit in the space given at the zoom level viewed; in other words, when the user zooms in above 100%, the image will continue to look good. On the other hand, the size of all the images gets added linearly to the size of the text within the PDF, so we don't want to go too crazy with high resolution or the result becomes excessive I think. Also, cropping and zooming can be done by the compilation process, so no major need for us to bother editing the images ourselves ahead of time there.

On the non-image front, I have an Introduction chapter written out finally. It's mostly just the After Sundown introduction and the "basics.rtf" rules. I need a Character Creation section, if anyone would care to take a crack at that. I'll work on Races stuff on the weekend. I have most of it done, but I'd like to organize things a little bit better and arrange the "todo" markers so that either I can try writing in all the sections for all the races or people can contribute that. My house is pretty busy during the week so I don't often get much work done on weekdays.

[Prak]

As usual, Google is your friend.

(all praise It's holy algorithm)

In case it's not clear- that's a search for creative commons images "free to use, share or modify, even commercially." So you can just plug in keywords, like Samurai, or mage and get a bunch of images you can pillage for use in the pdf, and of course you can always add more filtering words to find a bunch of woodblocks or whatever.

[codeGlaze]

I have the attention span of a goldfish and often have about 6 "projects" boiling at any given time. So I'm probably the wrong person for this...

But what I've always really thought would be nice/beneficial is a clear, concise, breakdown of upgrades that occur in the Tomes rule set vs 3.X.

I've never been able to come up with one that was concise. I always over-explain things. Maybe a text reference for converting melee characters to the new mentality.
That could be worked into a visual flow chart...

Anyway, gotta go roadtrip nao. Bai!

[Previn]

As usual, Google is your friend.

(all praise It's holy algorithm)

In case it's not clear- that's a search for creative commons images "free to use, share or modify, even commercially." So you can just plug in keywords, like Samurai, or mage and get a bunch of images you can pillage for use in the pdf, and of course you can always add more filtering words to find a bunch of woodblocks or whatever.

That's a nice starting point, but you still have to be careful about using that art since a lot of it is fanart that could get you in trouble if used commercially by the actual rights holders. Slapping WoW screens or Black Mage fanart into something you're publishing could pretty quickly draw the ire of powers that would be perfectly happy running your project and you into the ground over it.

[OgreBattle]

where did Dark Dungeons get their artwork from? Is there an archive of paintings and woodblock prints so old they have no copyright somewhere?

Here's Gustav Dore's woodblock prints for Dante's Inferno, great stuff:
http://www.worldofdante.org/gallery_dore.html

Here's his complete works:
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/8710/8710-h/8710-h.htm

Henry Justice Ford is early 1900's, does classic looking fantasy illustrations:
https://www.pinterest.com/verenalewis/h-j-ford/

If this was what a D&D3e or 4e Paladin looked like I would've played one

Pinterest is also filled with goodies:
https://www.pinterest.com/ironandy/demo ... ern-world/

[Lokathor]

As usual, Google is your friend.

I was hoping for a source more... centralized (perhaps?) than just a google search. Something with perhaps a little more oversight than a webcrawler program. And, as Previn says, it's sometimes hard to be sure even then.

where did Dark Dungeons get their artwork from? Is there an archive of paintings and woodblock prints so old they have no copyright somewhere?

I could ask, but their forum is so slow that they don't have a single post in 2015 >_<

[Yugo]

Lokathor,

I have only used LaTex once, and it was for an undergrad class long time ago. What simple program do you recommend for converting Tex to PDF nowadays?

[Lokathor]

Yugo: I'm on windows, so I use TeXWorks, which is apparently a wrapper around a specific compiler called MiKTeX. In addition, to build a glossary you'll need a helper program that relies on Perl called MakeGlossaries, and there's a little guide for that here (though it's not TeXWorks specific).

More Generally: I've got races organized a bit, and come to the conclusion that each race should consist of the following segments

Tagline
Intro Paragraph
Appearance:
Culture:
Names:
Mechanics:

So we've got mechanics pretty much down (though there's always room for a little improvement here and there). Right now the race list (and some one-liners on them as currently envisioned by most):

Aasimar - People with beautiful outsider ancestors (usually good, though possibly evil)
Drow - Dark elves that live deep underground in a spider-queen worshiping matriarchy
Dwarf - Short people that live in hills and mountains doing mining and smithing
Elf - Tall people that live in the woods doing swords and magic
Feytouched - Humanoids kidnapped at birth that have adopted fey qualities
Gnome - Very short people that live in the woods doing illusions and alchemy
Goblin - The smallest goblinoid, I need help on this one... they get murdered a lot?
Half-elf - Not actually interesting but required for backwards compatibility
Halfling - Very short farmer folk that live in an idealized English countryside
Half-orc - Also not generally interesting but required for backwards compatibility
Hobgoblin - The middle-sized goblinoid, they usually live in very organized and militaristic clans
Human - The "average" humanoid, with a greater cultural diversity than other races
Kobold - Very short dragonkin that get by with traps and sorcery
Orc - Rough and tough humanoids that usually lose wars and then have to live in the worst locations
Tiefling - People with bizarre outsider ancestors (usually evil, though possibly good)

There are three races that are obviously missing from this list that we'd want for sure if someone did a writeup on them: Lizard-people, Cat-people, and Robots.

Now given that writeup sectioning list for this race list it's clear that some of the sections for some races already are pretty much written for us (Tome has some compelling Dwarf, Elf, Orc writeups that I can recall), but that most are not at all. So if people want to throw that in that'd be amazing.

[RelentlessImp]

Goblins: Tribalistic shamans and tinkerers, scavengers that take everything, supreme mechanics.
Robots: Techno-alchemic constructs that gain sentience for one reason or another.
Lizardpeople: Warrior culture swamp people that cleave to the old ways.
Catpeople: Live in trees and get high on catnip. A contrast to the hobbits who live in the ground and get high.

[Prak]

As usual, Google is your friend.

I was hoping for a source more... centralized (perhaps?) than just a google search. Something with perhaps a little more oversight than a webcrawler program. And, as Previn says, it's sometimes hard to be sure even then.

Well, you can try the Creative Commons search.

There is also The Public Domain Review, which catalogues public domain material. Try Collections>Images, Content>Ghosts & Occult; Religion, Myth & Legend, or War.

I will also be seeing a couple friends who make a living dealing with old books, appraisals, and stuff like that, so I'll ask them if there's a good repository of public domain woodcuts that might be useful.

I definitely want to write up Changelings and Warforged for Tome, but both will probably see some rules changes. But the way I'm looking at things-

Changelings- Left in cribs as decoys when the fae stole an infant, natural form almost unknown, can look like anyone, naturally non-binary and intersex.
Warforged (need ip scrub)- Artificial soldiers for some forgotten war. Naturally sexless, primarily pre-occupied with figuring out what it means to be an artificial person. Like Data but with magitech upgrades.