I see all these awesome community-made trifold playbooks. How do I lay out my own custom playbook as trifold?
I don’t know where to start. I can’t find any trifold templates or what program to use. I found fonts that look right and a bunch of folk cursing about Scribus being hard, but I’m no graphic designer. Is there hope?
It’s funny you should ask this as I’m in the middle of editing a trifold at the very moment you posted this. (PROTIP: You can edit a post. Every time you delete it and then re-post it, it sends an email to those of use who are subscribed to the comm.)
I’m using Scribus. And yes, it’s a beast. It’s crashed on me twice and it’s not easy to edit with. I just realized that measurements I was using for the first panel don’t align with the 2nd and 3rd panels properly, but the program doesn’t give any clear indication how that works and I basically have to eyeball it until I print.
Long story short: Scribus is free, but it sucks to work with.
You could drop about $700 on Insight or Adobe Acrobat and get all the slick tools, but I don’t know if you want to go that route if you’re just going to make custom playbooks for yourself.
In the meantime, here a couple of links that helped me get to where I am right now:
http://apocalypse-world.com/forums/index.php?topic=1877.0
http://rpg.stackexchange.com/questions/8706/whats-a-good-way-to-design-and-layout-an-apocalypse-world-playbook
http://rpg.stackexchange.com/questions/1955/what-free-software-can-i-use-for-laying-out-my-own-rpg
Cheers for the links and the tip.
So are you starting from scratch building the trifold or are you basing it off something?
Well, I had two templates that I started with but eventually I got so frustrated not knowing how Scribus worked and having half of the template not do what I wanted it to do that I eventually just said “Fuck it! I’m building this thing from the ground up.” I spent about 4 hours tonight just doing the first 3 panels for one side of the playbook and when I printed it off to see what it looked like, but the first 3rd was off-center. So it’s frustrating, but definitely workable.
Let give you some more advice and an offer:
Take a look at some of the stuff that’s already out there.
http://nerdwerds.blogspot.com/2012/12/all-of-playbooks.html
If you’ve got a good idea for a playbook that doesn’t fit in with any of those, post it to the community and see what people say about it. If you’ve got a decent idea that hasn’t already been created then I would gladly make a trifold for you and spare you the headache I’m subjecting myself to.
You’re very generous. But I’m surprised that there isn’t a simpler way. I mean, there’s plenty of trifolds out there already, as you can be seen on the webpage you pointed to. Did everyone go through such trauma?
I’m playing in a game that’s basically Apocalypse World in Space. There’s no real options for playing artificial beings, like robots or replicants. So we’ve been tossing around ideas for The Made. It ended up having striking similarities (and differences) with The Synthetic (http://apocalypse-world.com/forums/index.php?topic=594.0), which I only came across this playbook tonight so I’m pretty sure the similarities are coincidental.
Nice! I’ve never heard of that playbook. (The page I linked you to is from my blog.)
I’m sure there is a simpler way, but I don’t know what it would be. I can only imagine it would be from using Insight or Acrobat instead of a free program. Most of the people making trifolds seem to be authors of other games so I imagine they already have the tools to just tinker with a file and can make a new playbook pretty easily.
I thought it was your blog. Let me say, I applaud your making a place for the playbooks to live.
Thanks again for your offer. Rather than burden you, I’ll keep exploring my options and chat with the other players in my game just in case one of them happens to be a monster layout demon. They are getting harder to spot these days.
Keep your eye on this community because once I have a finished playbook I’ll probably share it here. Once I get the generic spaces filled in I think it’ll be pretty easy to edit text and images.
I think the canonical “easier way” is to impress one of the layout guru’s in the AW community with your playbook and get them to lay it out for you.
Some of those guys may be willing to share templates and such, but I think they’re all using fancy expensive software.
When I made the witch playbook, I used MS Word. I don’t recall the details of what I did, but I think I told it I was using 8.5×14 in landscape and told it three columns while tweaking the values until it seemed like the other playbooks. When I was done with it, I uploaded it as a Google Doc and allowed Google to convert it. Then I had to redo a bunch of crap to get the spacing right. It was a little cumbersome but not rocket science. And I know you have access to Google, so even if you don’t have MS Office, you could just start with a Drive Doc.
A couple people over at Something Awful mentioned using a program called Inkscape. I think the idea was that you use an existing playbook layout and then can just swap in the unique content (pictures, moves, etc) for your new playbook. I have not tried it myself.
Barac Wiley Inkscape is the first program I tried to use and it was really unwieldy. Scribus is slow and buggy, but at least it’s straightforward enough that you can easily understand what tool to use for what you want to make. IMO.