Issue #4. Design in Progress (DIP) + Thoughts
This is experimental to see if it is doable to post without a product. I’ll try to remember and include a product if you’re interested in my stuff - just leave a comment here!
Hands are placed on a laptop and a small tablet to indicate that the person’s currently working. The coffee is next to the left side of the laptop. The background is wood and both pictures are provided by Pixabay.
I spy a mention of the ID4-inspired project from Root’s latest issue.
As Root explained earlier, we put our Project Hunger on hold to focus on our other project, Untitled, using an upcoming system, Mothership 1e (MoSh 1e). This project draws inspiration from the 90s movie, Independence Day (ID4) and we thought it was cool to have some retro stuff going on with some alien fighting.
There are several Design in Progress (DIP) projects I’m going through and naturally so, I move slowly at my own pace. I do have two things to share with you: Past session report about the Untitled project and the now-completed Liminal Horror Rules Summary with new updates.
The session report is overdue from July 4, 2021. Yikes, almost 3 years since then!
When Root and I were in the brainstorming phase, we discussed how the setting should be and we picked two playtest scenarios. In my case, I picked the closed large dungeon - it will be shared when it’s finalized.
The closed large dungeon contained several rooms for the players to explore, but also filled with mind-possessing creatures. The initial design was straightforward with two puzzles involving the language translation. I created a rough box-and-label map to track the players’ whereabouts though I did not share the map with them at that time.
The simple goal is to destroy the closed large dungeon with a stroke of hacking. Yes, that’s right, it’s about going all out with a big bang!
I decided to host a session by posting the text-based ad with basic information since it was last minutes on July 4th because why not? Four players signed up for the session and there were one teamster, one scientist, and two marines. This session was conducted with the MoSh 0e before MoSh 1e was formally announced.
For the purpose of playtesting, I did not hold back on throwing out a couple of alien fighters and attempted some body possessions. Two marines did have a few deaths and respawned by reusing their character sheets not to waste some time. The reason was to keep the game running under 4 hours with the party goal of beating the map. There were a couple of close calls, which were amazing. For example, the long hallway with a weak flooring started collapsing as soon as the party successfully destroyed the mainframe and began escaping from the imploding mothership. A surviving teamster with zero death and no respawn nearly fell through the collapsing floor but managed to hang on the metal wiring with their crowbar with a too-close-on-nose roll.
Puzzles ended up being not used at all and the language translation proved too time-consuming to figure out that it got handwaved instead. Creatures like alien fighters were good except the mind attacks and mind possession proved too strong. I didn’t work out on hacking the mainframe since I was relevantly new to the concept of hacking that needed some sort of procedure. Despite that, I did feel that incorporating the hacking procedure might be interesting in the high-tension situation - included in my notes.
The total number of deaths was estimated since it has been almost three years so I would say that two marines had 4 or 5 deaths, the scientist had two deaths, and a teamster had none.
This lesson helped me tweak more on the map design along with the room descriptions, which will be included in the current project. All that was left was to figure out how to tie this scenario with the rest of the scenarios. We’ll see. :)
As far as I remembered, I haven’t seen anyone showing the process behind the making of the cheatsheet. Or maybe I missed somewhere.
Regardless, I thought I’d share my thought process behind the design of the rules summary for Liminal Horror by Goblin Archives.
To update the rules summary, I revisited the recently updated Liminal Horror: Investigator Edition to see new changes. While there were not many changes, I focused on the key information that will be used a lot such as ability scores, saves, etc. My original goal was to keep a one-page summary with all rules like the former rules summary with legacy information, but attack modifiers, item tags, wounds, and few new information were too important to ignore that led to the second page with the severity of wounds table and equipment list. Layouting also came in the factor that 10 font points is the minimum font size that anyone can read without needing a magnification. Note that this minimum font size was suggested by my graphic designer - feel free to let me know if the minimum font size has changed.
Then I decided to keep the fallout tables more simpler by not including the headings such as # and “Fallout Table” since they are now under Legacy area. I relabeled the fallout table to reflect the Investigator Edition and added two more tables for the Bureau and Bloom. They seemed worthwhile to refer back at any time if the Legacy fallout table is not what the Facilitator looks for. I used the font family, Glacial Indifference, because it’s modern and sans-serif to read digitally and on print. Some of the information was copypasted and condensed to fit the important rules.
This is done in Affinity Publisher v2 and the Legacy rules summary was originally done in Affinity Publisher v1. There were little differences between their interfaces to navigate and compare the differences. I tend to start a new blank template so I can look back to the old template for better comparisons such as setting up margins to 0.5 inches and bleeds to 0.25 inches.
I hope that this process provides some insights for some people who want to give the layout design a try.
I’d like to emphasize that:
Liminal Horror Rule Summary (Print version) is an independent production by fleetingXe and is not affiliated with Goblin Archives LLC. It is published under the Liminal Horror Third Party License.
If you’re interested, feel free to download the updated Liminal Horror Rules Summary from my itch store. I labeled the former rules summary as the LH_Rules Summary_Legacy and the current one will be the LH_Rules Summary_Investigator.
I found out about Substack’s stance on the Nazis last year. I’m not comfortable knowing Substack’s decision toward the Nazis, but I have done my research on the email newsletter options in the last two weeks of 2023.
My research showed me that a few favorable options such as Ghost, Medium, MailChimp, etc. are all involved with the pricing for better services. I can understand the reasoning behind these pricing though despite that fact, Substack’s services are what made this email newsletter accessible. Being a newcomer designer with little or lack of marketing needs, I don’t have any choices but take advantage of Substack’s features that work better with the audience engagement or even resharing blogs.
With that in mind, I maintain my stance to keep this platform free of the subscription requirement though the exposure will continue supporting Substack. I will continue looking for more alternatives until I am ready to depart Substack.
For those who are still interested in alternatives, itch’s feature seems to allow us to post a blog without needing a product to be included. I intend to test that feature until I feel it’s worthwhile to use it instead of Substack. So if you notice my post being identical to my itch’s updates, you know why.
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