Surprise: Standardcat 55x85 template + New UVG Location (Patreon)

Dear heroes,

Besides triggering many reflections on my insecurities as a designer, getting Uranium Butterflies 0.87 out of the gate also provided a chance to reflect on something much more basic about design:

How to make the process of making games (and books) easier?

After all, I'm planning a whole series of products that should also be available in print on demand (e.g. Brève [Free]Seacat, UVG playbook for heroes, the AKZ) ... and, ideally, I want others to also design pretty books with as little effort as possible.

After all, a layout and design like Uranium Butterflies, while both good-looking and efficient in its use of space ...

... is also very slow and onerous to layout and design. Editing becomes more difficult with such a layout, costs go up, and it's much easier to slip up and create something that's hard on the reader's eyes.

Expecting a third-party game designer—or myself!—to do this kind of layout for every book is just not reasonable.

Opting for a single column-layout and smaller book format is easier in almost every way for anyone starting out in book or game design, as well as anyone who is short on time.

The other thing I mentioned is print-on-demand. The big dog in the ttrpg market here is DriveThruRPG (dtrpg). When I started making games, for various reasons,* I didn't have the head-space to tackle setting up a book for POD**. Now I do, and one of the things I had to tackle was which dimension to pick that was both easy to use and cost effective.

So I compared the prices (as of May) of all the different formats available on DTRPG. Now, one thing jumps out: premium colour is extremely expensive, and available only in limited dimensions.

For various deep reasons*** I picked 5.5x8.5 as the dimensions for the "small WTF books and zines" going forward (EDIT: I also added an A5 dimension template today). There are a few reasons:

• The narrower format looks nice with a single column.
• It's slightly taller height makes it tower over A5 booklets.
• It's sized in inches, which makes using type (sized in points, at 72 points per inch) a little easier.
• It's a common size in the US, which is the largest rpg market, which means local printing is easier and cheaper.
• It's close enough to A5 that, if the layout is made with sufficient margins, adapting a 5.5 x 8.5 book to A5 is trivial.
• It's a small size, which means easier postage.
• Finally, it's a size that is easy on the eyes when read on a tablet as a .pdf.

So, yeah, uh, as usual, I overthought this!

Now, the first book in this size is probably going to be Brève Seacat - the free seacat rules + MVP character options. But I'd already tried to dive right into making that, and choked after a day or two as I realised my layout wasn't ready and copying different text styles directly from UB into BS was total bs.

Folks, don't try this many text styles at home ...

So, I did something else. Once I had Uranium Butterflies content complete, I could finally be quite sure that I was done with all my basic styles. I knew how stat blocks would look, what kind of styles they would need, what kind of lists, and so on.

And, from my scientific study of a softcover book I liked, I knew how many lines I wanted per page (enough for a d30 table with some spare space for longer entries).

There was one last thing I wanted. For years, I've been annoyed by one mighty challenge: how to make a multi-cell table (a spreadsheet) to line up with the rest of the text in a book. For various reasons, this is surprisingly hard to achieve in layout software.

Success!

Now, here it is. A simple 24-page booklet, showcasing a simple one-column (with an option for two-columns), with everything neat and ordered and aligned in that most punctilious style you've come to expect.

But, because I couldn't know if it worked without, you know, actually using stuff ...

New UVG Location

I rewrote and adapted a few things I had lying around, creating a new UVG location, down south of the Cyan Sea! For your delectation, behold the Wan River Region and the Pink City.

• A place of living rocks running simulations to train ghosts for a mysterious, far-off purpose.
• A misfortune table compatible with the UVG.
• An encounter table, as desired.
• A desirables table, of things to be had in the location.
• Three sights (previously discoveries), including a new section - experiences - that clarifies what characters can do in a location (and how much xp the player can earn).
• One of the sights includes a mapped out mini-dungeon.
• And another is, potentially, a planescape-ready void-hopping megaship.

Also, a d66 table of "backgrounds" for the Wan River area, but that's a bonus bonus :D

A v1.0 license

Finally, the template comes with a draft v1.0 license if you want to use it for your own projects in any way shape or form. The TL;DR is: not for hate speech and such, yes for all forms of non-commercial and PWYW, a license fee if your project earns over 3 kilo-dollars, and a request to include an attribution.

Use, Share, Care

I hope you will enjoy this template. If you know anyone who might find it useful to study or adapt, feel free to share it. If you do find it useful, consider contributing to a charity of your choice to pass on the care.

I'm probably going to tweak it a little bit more, then post it to itch.io at some point in the next week.

Take care everyone,

As ever, peace and health,

—Luka

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*experiences of workplace harassment at previous employer, where I worked as design manager, overseeing digital and physical assets, left me with a horror of digging too deep into the guts of preparing multiple complex assets for print. It also left me experiencing anxiety whenever I used email or online banking. Let me tell you, those stresses trip you up in weird ways at weird times!

**Exalted Funeral made it possible to turn my first books into physical products.

***I picked a softcover book I own and liked and measured it with a ruler. That's the truth.

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Post Script: Added A5 version of the template, so you don't have to fiddle with margins. The content space is exactly the same as for the 55x85. Because the 55x85 is the base template, the A5 doesn't look quite as perfectly proportioned, but all the lines still line-up. I call it "good enough".