Balancing Prose Writing & Technical Writing
D&D has a very precarious balance within it (...); the balance of prose writing and technical writing. (...) It is the writer's job to provide the fantasy of prose without ever compromising the clarity and precision of technical writing. (...)
If you are an RPG publisher (...) think of this sort of thing when you want to decide on how you want your manuscript being written. Because it might be the most important thing you have never thought about.
(James Haeck on the Eldritch Lorecast #86)
The past weeks have been filled with knocking the introduction and the first part of the adventure into shape. The first part of the adventure (shown as light-green and dark-green in the thumbnail view below) has expanded from seven pages to fifteen pages in the process.
(Color codes: "Introduction" in red, "Pentée Gazetteer" in orange, "Prelude" in light green, "Preparations & Revelations" in dark green, "The Heist" in blue, "The Heist's Location" in purple, "Ogl's Keep" in grey and "Ogl's Dungeon" in yellow.)
My main concern while working on the introduction and the first part of the adventure was what James Hague expressed so eloquently a couple of weeks ago (see the quote a the start of this blog post) on the Eldrige Lorecast #86 (around the 23rd minute). I want to have evocative writing that is fun to read for the DM, but at the same time supply him/her with a "user manual" that provides optimal support for running the adventure.
For a user manual, it is essential that the layout supports the presentation of the information. This led to some additional coding in LaTeX, which enable me to provide helpful footnotes, markup, and cross references automatically via formatting commands rather than doing everything manually.
Encounters
Encounters are now identified with a letter (or a letter and a number for "sub-encounters"). A marker is automatically typeset in the margin and encounters can be referenced. Also, each encounter comes with a "target sidebar" providing a concise information of what the encounter is about.
Let us take a well-known encounter as example:
The display of the pentagon in the margin and the pentagons with the correct encounter letters in the references is done automatically (the latter are clickable and lead to the encounter's description) -- below is the LaTeX source for this encounter:
NPC Footnotes
The first time an NPC appears in an encounter, it is accompanied by a footnote providing an "abstract" for the DM -- the footnote is auto-generated by the command that inserts the markup for the character's (as well as a clickable link to the full description of the character.)
Consider the following boxed text (taken from Doyle's A Study in Scarlet) that might be part of an encounter:
The LaTeX source looks as follows:
The definition of the NPC is at a different location and can be referenced and reused as often as necessary:
Talking Points
All encounters in the first part of the Release from the OGL Vault are social encounters. I found that a standard way for informing the DM about "talking points" would be beneficial. Hence I created an extra LaTeX environment rather than using the standard itemized lists: this allows me to define and change the typesetting of the "talking points" easily while I work towards the final representation of Release from the OGL Vault.
For example, the talking points for Smaug might start as follows:
The LaTeX source is as follows:
Revisiting Boxed Text
Getting the first part of the adventure "almost ready" (in the sense that I stopped telling myself "I will fix that later" whenever I found something that might be problematic) also meant revisiting my boxed text. The last time I had looked specifically at boxed text was at the end of March, using Shawn Merwin's article on boxed text as primary reference.
For my second pass over the boxed text, I also turned to Chapter 16 ("Frustrated Novelist Syndrome") of M.T. Black's Anatomy of Adventure. There, he provides a thorough analysis of boxed text that is well worth reading. His conclusion is surprisingly simple: keep boxed text (because a majority seems to like it), but keep it short, yet evocative.
My eventual readers (should I find any) must be the judge of whether I managed to be evocative, but I definitely worked hard to keep things short. Though not as short as M.T. Black demonstrates in one of the examples he gives ... I guess it is time to get somebody else to look at a few examples and tell me what they think.
