Sunday, 18 January 2015

From the Vats: Monster Layout

Firstly on the topic of From the Vats (the community-sourced vivimancer supplement): I feel really bad that it's still not finished! I've had all the material for ages (a year?) and have just not been able to find the time to collate, edit, and layout. Mea cupla.

But, the good news is that it's not forgotten and is indeed progressing!

Today I had a little play around with possible layouts for monster stat blocks. The bulk of the supplement consists of adventures (including Ben L's wonderful Submerged Spire of Sarpedon the Shaper) and monsters (around 20 or so, I think). I've never been that keen on the "standard" monster layout -- a big, vertical block of stats, usually with a lot of dead space on the right, followed by the description -- so wanted to try out something a bit different for the stats.

Here's an example of what I'm playing with.

I'm quite pleased with the readability, relative compactness, and exhaustiveness of it.

Any thoughts?
Posted by Gavin Norman at 18:31
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3 comments:

  1. Scott Anderson18 January 2015 at 18:52

    It looks better than the monster manual.

    The general layout we have all inherited from the monster manual is both page count hungry and less than maximally utilitarian. More experiments will lead to better results.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Gavin Norman19 January 2015 at 06:36

      Yeah, I think the vertical stats block is especially space-wasting for a single column layout, like I'm using in this project.

      Delete
  2. David Baymiller22 February 2015 at 08:34

    Very good.

    ReplyDelete

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