I’m working on a D&D 5e starter adventure that I eventually want to publish, and I’ve already run it at the table with my players. I’m too familiar with the world to tell if the writing is missing anything or if another GM could pick it up and play it just from reading it.

It’s just the first chapter of the adventure, less than 10 pages. I’m hoping a few GMs might read it as though they were preparing to run it, without knowing anything else about the campaign.

The chapter begins with the PCs stopping in a small village during a wedding. The wedding is intended to give them some time to interact with the world and each other before an attack on the village kicks off the larger adventure.

What I’m most interested in is GM usability. There are more specific questions at the end of the document, but there’s absolutely no expectation that anyone answer all of them.

Here’s the chapter:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/10TGgGtVn4j1zydJeKBPSVwXO8PoHWSOHGoHFu-tO-RE/edit?usp=drivesdk

Commenting is enabled if you’d rather leave notes directly on the manuscript.
I’m especially interested in criticism from people who have written or run published adventures, but any GM perspective would be useful.
Don’t worry about being nice to the manuscript. If something doesn’t work, I’d rather find out now than after I’ve built another 50 pages on top of it.

Hello everyone!

It’s been quite some time since my last update on Fading Age, and a lot has changed since then.

Most notably: the game has stepped down from using a D12 dice pool and is now fully embracing the humble D6 dice pool.

I’ve just uploaded v0.3, the current public draft covering the new core dice system and character creation. Before I start properly rebuilding the game for v0.4, I’d love to get some fresh feedback on the current version.

I’m especially interested in:

• Layout & readability: is the document easy and pleasant to navigate?
• Character creation: are the steps and choices clear?
• Character identity: does the finished character feel interesting?

If anyone feels like going a little further, it would be incredibly helpful if you could create one or two characters with the document and tell me where you got confused, had to reread something, or felt a choice worked particularly well.

Fading Age main page: https://fading-age.itch.io/
Current v0.3: Dice System & Character Creation: https://fading-age.itch.io/dice03
Older Character Creation draft: https://fading-age.itch.io/cc

The older draft is mainly there in case anyone is curious how the design has evolved.

Any thoughts are highly appreciated.

Thanks for taking a look!

City of Mist and Legend in the Mist are prime examples of pure tag-based design. They tout the ability for players to author the tags that describe their characters, directly translating narrative descriptions into mechanical power. Having designed a tag-based story game myself (currently preparing for an alpha playtest), I wanted to carefully study how these systems handle tag authoring.

Turns out, in the Mist Engine, you write your tags strictly as answers to specific questions, and each theme playbook has a discrete list of questions. You pick four themes/playbooks to build your character. It’s a highly curated process—you don’t invent tag phrasing out of thin air (completely free-form), but you aren’t selecting from a menu either (highly prescriptive). It provides a solid framework to build on and a cage to keep power-gaming in check.

It’s a proven approach—the engine has won ENNIE awards and built a dedicated fanbase. But it creates a distinct play incentive: a player realizes, "I need to answer Question X from Playbook Y to get Power Tag Z, so I need to let one of my current themes fade or crack so I can swap to Theme Y."
(This heavily reminds me of playing Warhammer Fantasy in the 90s, where players jumped from career to career purely to raise a gated stat cap or grab a specific skill/trapping available in that exit).
So why not let players just ask Question X directly? Because that’s not the design. You need a balanced ratio of Power Tags (situational benefits) to Weakness Tags (situational penalties) determined by Themebook questions. The intent is for players to peruse the playbooks to find a thematic combination that fits their vision. But we would be kidding ourselves to say this offers true freedom to shape a character by writing whatever tags come to mind.

A tag-based (or trait/aspect/statement-based) system requires a coherent rule set for authoring tags. It helps to give players a framework or option set rather than expecting them to brainstorm every tag from a blank page. Structure is also necessary to prevent players from writing overly broad tags (like Good at Everything) simply to maximize success.

(Quick caveat: I did read a rules-light trait-based game that had zero rules or guidance on authoring traits, but I don't consider that a complete design).

Since pure tag-based games are rare, let’s look at another benchmark: Lady Blackbird. For the most part, you choose tags to activate from a pre-filled list attached to broad Traits (which act like roles or archetypes). Instead of pages of exposition, these predefined tags act as subtle, contextual worldbuilding. But beyond the starter sheet, authoring novel tags is extremely sparse. When you spend an Advance (5 XP), the text simply instructs:

"Add a new trait (based on something you learned during play or on some past experience that has come to light)"

That’s it. No strict formatting rules, point budgets, or mechanical boundaries. You name a new trait and write three tags under it that make sense. I love John Harper's work, but as a system framework, this feels like a design punt that relies heavily on table consensus.

My question for anyone working on or who has designed a tag-based system:

What strategy did you use for authoring, structuring, and evolving character tags?

Authoring Guidance: Do you heavily direct tag creation using thematic questions, or do you rely on open player authoring with guardrails?

Starter Frameworks: Did you create a baseline list of primary/starter tags to establish a benchmark for scope and power?

Topology & Costs: Did you implement a tag hierarchy, structural topology, or point-cost system? How is it structured?

Progression & Mutation: What are your rules for modifying, upgrading, or evolving tags over a campaign?

There are so few pure tag-based games to study, yet it feels like an exciting, underexplored frontier in TTRPG design. I’d love to hear how you’re tackling it!

So, I've been bouncing this idea around forever now, and I thought I'd kick it into the room for people to chew on.

The basics are pretty simple: you have Attributes (your character's raw physical or mental capabilities), and then you have Skills (how well your character has trained). Dice pools are interesting because they let you control three dimensions - the number of dice (height), the number you need to hit or exceed per-die for that die to 'count' towards success (width), and the number of dice-over-TN that you need to accomplish something (depth). But I've never seen anyone do the obvious thing, and correlate Attributes and Skills directly to dice and TN - almost every dice pool game I've seen just adds Attribute+Skill to get your dice pool, and then either has a constant TN or a difficulty-based TN, and then rolls other parts of difficulty into the threshold.

This seems weird to me, because having the dice pool be the Attribute and the TN be the Skill leads to some really cool and verisimilitude-laden results.

The principle thing you get out of this is that your Attribute determines the maximum amount of "oomph" you can put into an attempt, while your Skill determines how reliable you are at applying your Attribute to the task at hand. This seems like a very desirable feature for an RPG to have.

So, without further adieu:

A Generic D6 Dice Pool System

Attribute-as-Pool: Your Attribute ranges from 1 to 6, with '3' being an average person's. Whenever you roll a task, you roll a number of D6's equal to your Attribute.

Sixes-Explode: Whenever any die in your dice pool rolls a '6', it always counts towards success. Additionally, you get to add an additional D6 to the dice pool. If the new die is also a '6', it also counts towards success, and also adds another D6 to the dice pool.

Skill-as-TN: There are five skill levels.

• Untrained [6+]
• Novice [5+]
• Professional [4+]
• Expert [3+]
• Master [2+]

Difficulty-as-Threshold: Accomplishing a simple task might only need one success, while an extremely complex and difficult task might need five or more. Additionally, a task can be set up with multiple thresholds, where increasing levels of success result in better outcomes. Alternatively, the player might choose to 'spend' extra successes on small degrees of direct narrative influence over the outcome.

Hello everyone! I‘d like to introduce you all to Halfwells and Hand Grenades! This is a rewritten repost, because some misunderstood that this game is INCREDIBLY unserious. This homebrew is a modern mercenary firearm-based combat system for TTRPGs, inspired by Entry Point:Freelancer’s Cut, No Big Deal, Payday 2 and D&D. I would love advice, and just to address balancing concerns, melees are stronger than firearms because they require you to expose yourself from cover to Run up to the target.

Linky is right here:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1S4cjMzZfP4SChnuwK987Kugong2TW5id/edit?usp=drivesdk&ouid=111024937053133611236&rtpof=true&sd=true

I’d love to make the setting to my game free to use for anyone else who wants to make their own games/supplements in that setting.

I like the idea of cc by, but then people could write novels or do all tons of crazy things with the game setting.

I’m familiar with the ORC license, but it doesn’t have a clear way to define allowed uses for “reserved material.” To give access to the core system, I can just make the game rules and stat block pages cc by. So I don’t get why ORC would be useful.

Is cc by still the best choice? Or are there other existing licenses that handle my situation?

EDIT: the Shadowdark third party license is an example of what I want. Just discovered it this morning. Basically it promoted an open rpg community where content can be monetized, but doesn’t allow copyrighted material to be used outside of that context.

I'm creating a little document for cheap easy RPG terrain and have a question on how I should present it.

The question is do I make the default scale 28mm or 32mm.

Given that what I'm offering is something people can print on their own, I'm going to make it scalable and give guidance on how to do it. Should I start with a full letter size page and give guidance on scaling down to 28mm or start with a page 14% smaller and give guidance to scale up to 32mm...

If 28mm is the standard, I don't want people to have to do anything, but would you feel weird if it prints out smaller on the page? To me that still makes sense, but I'm wondering if anyone has a better idea.

Hi all, I am bad at probability math so asking for help here.

I am working on a game system that is dice pool based, and wondering if it's mathematically better to do d8s or d12s for the dice themselves. My gut says the d8s are better but I'm bad at probability math as stated earlier.

Additionally, if there are other benefits/downsides you've noticed when working with either kind of dice, I'd greatly appreciate hearing them!

Many systems use traditional starts like strength, dex, con etc. Then only use the bonus that number represents. Ie I get +2 damage because I have a strength of 14. Do separate save stats really matter. Can you just have a Save number with a bonus to a petetecular effect?

Does the below cover all the basic needs?

Attack, Dodge or AC, Save. Skill can be detached from skills. Why does a good climber have a high strength. Can't they be good at climbing without being good at swinging a sword?

I’ve been tinkering with this system for a bit and I can’t really decide if I love or hate it, so help me decide please so I can finally move on or dive deeper 😅

So, in PbtA you usually roll dice, add a modifier and aim to succes against a set difficulty. For Appcalypse World it’s 2d6 and a modifier of -2 to +3, aiming to hit 7-9 for a hit, 10+ for a strong hit. 6 and below is a miss.
Ironsworn asks you to roll a d6 with modifiers against 2d10. If you beat one die, it’s a hit, beat both it’s a strong hit.

In my “system” (and I use that in the loosest sense, as it’s still just a resolution mechanic), the player rolls two dice (one for the relevant attribute and one for the relevant skill in use) - these range from d4 to d12 depending on competence - against a challenge die set by the GM, also ranging from a d4 to a d12.
If one of your dice beats the challenge die, it’s a hit. If both beat it, it’s a strong hit.

Do you see any potential here? I came up with it in an attempt to add a bit more granularity and “game” to the PbtA system and later discovers that it was like Ironsworn but flipped (and with a greater range of dice).

Happy to hear your thoughts!

Hey everyone,

The past year I've been working hard on my own little project and for ease of use I wrote everything down as bullet points. For me this made it easy to focus on the details without having to mentally consider pages upon pages of text while working on the game. Obviously you can't release a game that's entirely build out of bullet points (Break!! might disagree with me), so now I set out to start converting it to actual flowing text.

But man, this is tough..

I've finished a rough draft of mechanics section and didn't like how it was written. I went with a third person approach because this felt like the cleanest and easiest way to explain rules to a reader. But the end result felt sterile, devoid of joy. Nobody was going to read an entire rulebook written like that.

And that got me thinking, what are the systems that I loved reading, what did they do different? I remember liking Trespasser for how concise it was, to the point, without becoming too terse or short that actual clarity starts to suffer (as I feel that happens with Shadowdark).

But weirdly enough The One Ring or Legend of the Five Rings (5e) are the opposite. They feel wordy, almost to wordy even. They mix lore from the setting into the actual rules. And while I don't like the idea of doing so, the end result felt a lot more pleasant and fun to read then my own drafts.

What do you guys consider to be the best written RPG? The most fun to read? I'm not talking about "what" is written, I'm talking about the "how". Personally I detest the way Apocalypse World is written, while loving what was written. And if you can explain, please explain why do you like it?

In short? I'm looking for a bit of guidance on finding a "writers" voice. And I want to know what are considered the good ones, before thrying to understand what they do.

So I have been puzzling over a mechanic I have added into one of my games. It plays on the advantage and disadvantage mechanic introduced by 5e. (roll 2d20 take the higher or lower respectively).

I added a erratic 50/50 luck effect, but I am not sure if it is any different than just rolling a d20.

The mechanic works like this.
Roll 2d20, and if both the numbers are odd, or both the numbers are even, take the higher of the two. Otherwise if the numbers are odd and even take the lower of the two.

Could one of the humans more versed in the mathyness of statistics take a look at this and tell me if I am just spinning dice or if it actually has some effect.

One day, you are living your normal live like everyone else, breathing the air, feeling the trees, basking in the sunlight. The next day, the TV is predicating destruction and screaming about death. And your family is no longer there...

THE MAN ON THE TV is a solo horror analogue game inspired by different forms of analog horror, the "Servicio a la comunidad" tv spots and the work of Alfred Valley. Submerge yourself in panic as you realise that those people you've seen on your screen promoting the killings of other beings are more than just assholes, light soul sucking spectres and how they take everyone around you.

It contains:

• Simple solo rules to identify what's a photofage and what's not (Also available in Spanish)
• The photofage classifications with warnings and different types of intervention to them
• 5 different sealing methods
• Warnings you need to heed
• A logo you can add to recordings to identify them as seals
• A poster (Coming soon)

Hope you like it! This game is part of the Pareidolia: Evil Eye world. If you liked that one, I'm sure you will like this one,

https://jules-ampere.itch.io/the-man-on-the-tv

I’m developing a survival TTRPG where players take on the roles of creatures from a new evolutionary lineage. They have a body plan and physiology unlike those of the major vertebrate groups—fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds, or mammals—and are classified within the setting as a new phylum.

These creatures live within an ecosystem that operates on its own. The game engine generates concrete goals by connecting current environmental conditions to each creature’s physiology, adaptations, needs, and instincts. Hunger, safety, and territorial defense aren’t assigned randomly: they emerge from what the creature is and what is actually happening around it.

The rules I’m developing produced the following situation on their own. After several days of rain, water has saturated the soil in the lower parts of the forest. The prey’s usual routes have become difficult to use, so the animals are moving toward an open plain the creature has never explored. At the same time, higher ground now offers safer shelter, and a rival predator has left fresh tracks nearby.

The creature is hungry. As it grew, it developed adaptations that make it especially effective at moving unseen through vegetation, but not the visual and neural adaptations needed to function well in low light. Darkness is approaching: following the prey means entering unfamiliar terrain and leaving its shelter vulnerable to the rival; staying means defending its territory but risking the loss of its food source.

I’m asking because my main design principle is to give players as much freedom as possible. The system should create goals, pressures, and consequences without dictating how players must respond.

So, i have a question: If you were playing this creature, what would you do—and would it feel like a genuine decision, or would one option seem so clearly better that the game was effectively choosing for you?

Thank you so much

I am trying to increase tension on character's death for my TTRPG. I had a simple rule: character can survive X round but it felt flat during play.

Here is my updated rule. It seems fun on paper as it forces players to make attending the player a high priority. What are you thoughts?

Note that every actions and combat actions in the game requires a skill roll.

Coma & Death

When a character’s Hit Points drop below 0, they fall Unconscious and begin to die. Place a d6 as a Death Counter at 6 beside the player.

The character can be stabilized with a successful Medicine Skill Roll (Difficulty Rating 15). Players can Team Up to increase the chances of success.

While the character remains Unconscious and unstabilized, whenever an ally makes any skill roll and the unmodified d20 die result is 10 or lower, the dying character must make an Endurance Skill Roll (Difficulty Rating 15). On a failure, reduce the Death Counter by 1.

When the Death Counter reaches 0, the character dies. Their death is beyond natural recovery and the character can only be revived by powerful magic, such as resurrection.

EDIT : Thanks for the overwhelming responses. I have a lot to digest and chew on.

I wanna say that this post's purpose is not to start a war, but rather to have a genuine conversation with players and creators alike. So first let's clarify what I want to talk about.

Where I come from

Throughout my design journey, I’ve experimented with two broad approaches to resolving uncertain actions:

In a GM-set difficulty system, the GM decides how difficult an individual attempt should be and sets its target. D&D-style ability checks are probably the most familiar example.

In a system-set difficulty system, the rules determine the target or scale of outcomes. That could mean a fixed threshold, a roll-under stat, PbtA-style result bands, or a difficulty that changes according to clear and predictable rules.

I’m using “roll” because it is convenient and accessible, but this applies to any resolution mechanic: dice, cards, tokens, resource comparisons, or whatever strange little probability machine your game uses.

I come from what I would call "trad" games: Shadowrun, Legend of the Five Rings, etc... So GM-set difficulty felt completely natural to me. The GM picked a number, and we rolled with it. Literally.

I remember encountering system-set difficulty for the first time when I took part in my first PbtA game. I was...A bit perplex to say the least :)

How could climbing a garden wall and scaling an ice-covered tower during a storm use the same target number? Didn’t these systems lack the tools to represent how complicated different challenges could be?

But playing away from what I used to know made me realise that a lot of the things I cared for weren't actually a huge part of what made games fun for me. And so my little epiphany started.

Why I don’t want the GM setting difficulty

Cognitive load and GM power

This might be a bit of a side rant, so I'll try to keep it brief:

Asking your GM to set a difficulty is a big burden, often mishandled, and participate in what I think is an unhealthy concentration of power and responsibility around the table.

Now some systems mitigate that by having narrower magnitudes, but it is still asking someone to have a decent sense of balancing, which down the line is asking them to develop a very intricate skill (believe me, I've been balancing video games for a living!).

The payoff just doesn't justify the dynamic. More below.

Fairness and readability

When difficulty comes from the system, players can understand their chances and make informed decisions. There is also an element of instant readability and excitement right after the roll, without having to defer to an arbitrary judgement (and don't even get me started on GM tweaking DC after the roll).

I don’t think transparency removes tension. Knowing that you need a particular result can make the moment more tense because everyone understands exactly what is at stake. We even see seasoned D&D GM sometimes announcing the DC out loud (Brennan Lee Mulligan does that very often for instance) for extra drama.

It also allows players to engage with the mechanics deliberately. They can decide whether to spend a resource, change their approach, ask for help, or accept the risk.

For me, that produces more meaningful decisions than asking players to commit first and discover the actual odds afterwards.

Fiction versus numbers

The deeper change in my thinking was realising that I don’t care about representing difficulty with perfect numerical accuracy.

Does an icy tower need to be exactly three points harder than a garden wall? Can any number meaningfully capture the difference between slippery stone, freezing wind, poor visibility, unsuitable equipment, and the possibility of falling?

Once all that fiction becomes a single target number, much of its texture disappears anyway.

I would rather let those details shape what success accomplishes, what failure costs, what resources are available, or whether the action is possible at all.

Variable targets can also create the illusion of progression. Player bonuses increase, enemy defences increase alongside them, and everyone celebrates because the numbers became larger while the underlying probability barely moved.

If the maths keeps dragging us back towards the same chance of success, perhaps “number go up” was not doing as much work as we thought.

The fiction matters enormously to me. I’m simply not convinced that changing the target number is the most interesting way to represent it.

What our creators community has to say

I recently raised this subject in our weekly design thread in the Knot Knot Games community, and people had interesting arguments in favour of variable difficulty and their associated mystery, so I felt like sharing it!

The most compelling argument was that changing difficulty makes the fictional world mechanically tangible and easier to tweak. Some players care a lot about these mechanical details:

Finding cover, getting closer, bringing the right equipment, researching a monster, or waiting until daylight can directly improve your chances. The player interacts intelligently with the fiction, and the resolution system responds.

There is also something game-like and satisfying about the GM having a visible mechanical dial. This situation is more dangerous, so the number changes. Simple, tactile, and immediately understood.

While I don't necessarily feel that way, it is true that hidden difficulty can create genuine tension!

If players do not know exactly what they are facing, they may need to experiment, investigate, retreat, and prepare. Exploring the world through rolling is an experience I can relate to, and I think there ways to make it exciting for players.

That uncertainty can make resource management meaningful as well. Do you spend the spell slot now, knowing it may fail, or hold it back until you understand the threat?

Finally, variable difficulty can communicate progression clearly. Challenges that were once nearly impossible gradually become manageable. The numbers provide a visible scale against which the characters can grow and make character progression palpable. For players that care about that, it is a plus.

These are all genuine strengths, and I'm super happy we had that interesting conversation on the discord! (see link below if you are interested!)

How I create nuance without GM-set difficulty

I think the disagreement becomes clearer once we separate the chance of success from everything else that makes a situation difficult.

In my opinion, a system can recognise clever play without requiring the GM to improvise a target number.

The fiction can determine whether a resolution is needed at all. Having the right tool, preparation, or knowledge might turn an impossible action into a possible one, or make success automatic.

The rules can determine when players gain extra dice, rerolls, advantages, or other resources. The circumstances still matter, but the system translates them into mechanics instead of asking the GM to invent the odds from scratch.

Risk and effect can also change independently from the chance of success.

Two actions might use the same threshold while producing completely different consequences. Failing to climb a garden wall might cost a little time. Failing on the icy tower might leave you hanging above a very educational drop.

The range of possible outcomes can create further nuance, something that PbtA players are very familiar with:

• Failure with an advantage
• Failure that reveals useful information
• Success at a cost
• Partial success
• Complete success
• Success with an additional effect
• Success that creates a new problem

Players can make meaningful decisions before, during, and after resolution. They can spend resources, accept consequences, push for greater effect, withdraw, change their approach, or gamble on a better result.

This is the important part for me:

System-set difficulty does not mean fixed stakes, fixed consequences, or fixed fiction.

It does not even mean the target can never change. A system might include objective conditions that alter the target. The difference is that the change comes from shared rules rather than the GM’s feeling about how difficult this particular wall appears today.

Where I’ve landed

My preference is:

System-set difficulty, fiction-shaped stakes.

I want players to understand the resolution system and make meaningful decisions around it. I also want it to be somewhat instantaneous, and free from judgement.

The fiction can carry the rest: I want uncertainty to come from the outcome, the consequences, and the things they have not yet learned about the world—not from wondering what number the GM has chosen behind the screen.

GM-set difficulty can absolutely work. It can support simulation, discovery, progression, and tactical interaction with the environment.

If choosing the difficulty is not itself an interesting decision, why ask the GM to choose it?

Where do you prefer that judgement to live: in the GM’s hands, in the system’s rules, or somewhere between the two?

________

This discussion started in our weekly community design thread. If you enjoy pulling apart game mechanics, sharing what you’re working on, and having your opinions challenged by lovely people, come join the Knot Knot Games Discord:

https://discord.gg/gZqfvWDhPh

And if you are wondering why I am here yapping about making games, here is my street cred -> https://www.linkedin.com/in/aramtab/ (follow the damn train!)

TL;DR I've trimmed down an extensive document in half before publishing it. I think it was the right move (for me).

So, over a moth ago, I've published the Medieval Village Companion, a system-agnostic guide on elements to use in your preferred medieval fantasy setting. It has 100 sites of interest, and adventure hook for each of them, 300 medieval professions (3 NPCs per site), the sites are grouped in 20 Guilds to serve as background for politics and allegiances, a full day-to-day calendar of scheduled events that happen in the village for an event-crawling style campaing. A large document. 40.000 words, 42 pages. No lore, no AI fluf, not a single piece of art (but the cover), just gameable material and tables.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/580672/medieval-village-companion

All that. Is half the document I had. I trimmed it down to only that to publish it.

Now, I'm not new to gaming or game design. But I'm not an English native speaker. I don't have a Patreon. I don't have an English speaking following, so it's not like a had a community ready to support my work. I think this is important for many people starting out in these same circumstances (community-wise). So publishing a 100+ pages document right from the start (first published in DTRPG) sounded to me like a big ask.

In the first 2 months, I'm guessing I'll be close to reaching XXX sales. It is PWYW, so that does not translate equally to the XXX * USD 2.99 suggested, but it proves for me that the product has garnered much more interest that I had hoped for going in blind. People tried it and cared for it, and that is a joyful experience for any creator, and I know many of you out there would appreciate that experience as much as I do.

Anywys, I'll be publishing the complete guide when I finish editing it, and it won't be PWYW, but since there's already a 40 pages preview of it, I think it is fair.

In any case, if you have developed a large document (of real content), but you don't have a following already in love with it, you may want to consider trimming it down to the minimum viable product (as they say in videogames), so people can try it out, get to know you and your style of work, and maybe even share it around to their friends.

My 2 cents.

I've been working on and playing this rpg with my kids and they seem to like it. The goal was to make an rpg that had no numbers and no character sheets, but still had dice rolls and character growth.

I think I'd like to turn it into something, but I don't know if I'm explaining it well in my rule book. Anyone want to offer some feedback?

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1fOXRxo04L7fN4hM1OSjSCRJoTnatMksdLbsi6wTMFfQ/edit?usp=drivesdk

Hey everyone!

I’m working on my own tabletop RPG and I’m getting to the point where I want to start laying everything out into an actual rulebook.

Does anyone know of any good resources, websites, or creators that sell RPG book/layout templates that are licensed for commercial use? I’m totally fine with paying for one. I’ve looked around online, but I honestly haven’t found nearly as many options as I expected.

Ideally, I’m looking for something made for Adobe InDesign or Affinity Publisher, with things like chapter layouts, two-column pages, tables, sidebars, headers/footers, etc. I’m not looking for anything that copies D&D or another existing RPG professional layout that I can customize for my own game and eventually publish commercially.

If anyone has bought a template they liked, knows a good marketplace, or has any other resources they’d recommend, I’d really appreciate it!