Inchoate Nuggets of Questionable Interest

Not too long ago, a friend mentioned a quirky little role playing game to me - a fantasy RPG made by a guy publishing it himself. I went to the webpage and discovered the phrase "TSOY resembles HeroQuest as written by Emily Bronte".

How can you not be hooked at that point?

The guy had a web version of his ruleset, which I appreciated - in a weird way, I was convinced to buy this guy's rulebook by the mere fact that he had put his rulebook up to be read for free.

ASIDE: I've been noodling with an idea for a book that I'll probably chatter about more in this space in time. My short-term audience for the content of the book will be friends and family that have specific questions about topics related to Game Development. Consequently, it'd be nice to be able to write an article, a chapter, a couple of paragraphs here and there, pull them together into something presentable, and publish on the web in the short term, and as the gaps fill in, pull the same content together into a PDF, and then into a printed, bound, volume. And Clinton R. Nixon seems to have found a way to do the same thing, for what one would assume were slightly different motivations.

This article covers the pipeline in some detail. Briefly, the text was composed in vi, a line-oriented text editor (not a word processor, mind you). This text was formatted in a barebones format called reStructured Text. This format treads an interesting middle ground of being computer readable while still being fairly human readable. It does a good enough job of this that you might not even know you're reading something meant for machine input.

Nixon was able to use the DocUtils package to convert his rST content into HTML. He was then able to read that in in OpenOffice's word processor. And from there into Scribus, an open source Desktop Publishing program.

Nixon reports that he's able to keep the rST as the (mostly) authoritative document, but he mentions that he did do some tweaking in Scribus - if he were to add a new chapter to the book, he'd probably have to reapply those tweaks.

I'm happy to patronize indies, so I did not hesitate to order the printed version of the book from Indie Press Revolution. It looks as professional as many of the games I've bought over the years. Is it fun? That'll have to wait for another post.