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http://sites.google.com/site/chgowizsite/Home/Swords_Wizardry_Quick_Start.pdf
I want to thank you all for the awesome comments and suggestions you've made in helping me to tweak the Quick Start rules. I've made some changes and corrected a great many things. Here are some of the bigger changes:
- Added a character sheet
- Moved the ref's help tips after the dungeon to the ref quick start info
- Cleaned up the grammar, tense, headings and capitalization
- Dumped all references to halflings
- Reworded a lot to remove duplication, unnecessary prattling
So, with that - I'm releasing this second draft. This is the last of the "text only" releases - once I get feedback on this, I'll go to layout, which frankly scares me a bit. I've never done layout before, I don't know the Scribus application. I don't know how much art I'll have in this thing, probably not a lot as I want to keep this under 25 pages. And given my lack of layout skills and desire to put this at 25 pages, it probably will not be in digest format, unless I make it font size 6.
I've come to realize, as I've written this, that the Quick Start is less for players and more for the Game Referee. At the end of the day, the only thing I think I can really give players beyond what I've already done are examples of play and more "options" that aren't needed to play the game. It's the Game Referee that I'm really talking to here, as I have included a lot of examples on various situations. I hope it helps the new S&W Game Ref.
Please, let me know what you think of this. Again, this is less about layout and more about content.
For those of you who've helped out with comments, you will be named in the final release. Least I can do...
Thirty Seconds of Web Tomfoolery
3 hours ago
15 comments:
Great job with this release! The character sheet is very helpful, and I like the focus towards the referee. Not having played it I can't be sure, but it seems open-ended enough that the players can do what they want, and the referee just has to facilitate things and help guide the game (as a referee should). It has interested me in the OD&D or old school games, which previously held no interest.
I don't recognize that character sheet, is that you're own creation? I like it's cleanness.
I've been trying Scribus out lately and it seems to have a steep learning curve. Here's wishing your work with it be productive and enjoyable.
@Will - thank you for those really kind words. That's exactly what I would hope such a document would do - give someone an interest to look and try it out. I hope you'll get a chance to try S&W out.
@Telecanter - You know, sad as this is, I don't know. I *think* this used to be on the old S&W site, but I can't find the original document - I had to scan this sheet from a ton of copies I made at the time. I wish I knew where it came from.
What have you been doing on Scribus and any good tutorials I can look at?
Chgowiz,
Scribus is a "professional" program like the commercial Indesign and is very hard to learn. If you use Windows (either as your main OS or in a VM), I suggest using the free PagePlus SE from Serif. Or you can get version 9 for $10 at the same site, but the free SE has more than enough power for what you want. It doesn't have nearly the power of Scribus, of course -- but it doesn't have the high learning curve either.
I've used Word 2003 to layout the various versions of M74 -- because I'm too lazy to switch programs to my copy of PagePlus X2.
Umm, link not working.
@Knightsky - I confirmed the link in Firefox and IE on Windows XP. I'm not sure what troubles you're having?
Just started my read-through and I'm seeing most of the things I noticed are fixed. Still some odd bits for my taste, but that's a writing thing, so no big deal. I am catching a handful of little things again, and I'll send along an email with them when I'm done again. Though not until next week - I'm off to the IRL race in Watkins Glen. w00t!
I just tried it again (using Firefox), and this time it did download, albeit a bit more slowly than I would expect for a file of this size. Probably something buggy on my end.
This was a great idea and well executed! It definitely will help getting newbies going. Great job, Chgowiz!
Sorry for the delayed response. I'm just getting started with Scribus, so maybe I spoke too soon. These flash howtos spend a loooooong time covering each thing, but that may be a good thing:
http://showmedo.com/videotutorials/series?name=NfUrduNov
For some reason, the downloaded pdf is not working on my computer. I see the first page, and then all subsequent pages are miniscule in size and blank. Never encountered this problem before so I've no idea what could be going on.
Keep up the great work!
@Mark - strange. I downloaded it again to confirm that it's not corrupted and it seems to work fine. What PDF viewer are you using? I'm using the full Adobe Acrobat to generate the PDF with PDF v5 backwards compatability.
Why did you remove all references to halflings? Do some games not use them?
@Age - In the S&W Core, halflings are not as supported as fully as the other classes, having been left to more of house-ruling. Since I wanted to make this quick and simple, I decided to leave them out. It'll make a nice Surprise! moment when they look at the full Core S&W rules.
Hey Chgowiz. Strange, now the download is working just fine. I was trying to open it all along with the latest version of Adobe Reader. Anyway, looks VERY nice, and I'm thinking of using them when I am at Gencon. If I have any thoughts for improvement I'll pass them along.
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