Announce: Tabletop role-playing game materials produced with DocBook

[Winslow Dalpe <rwdalpe@gmail.com>]

Hi, everyone! I'm really excited to announce a project I'm working on: a community-use campaign world and accompanying series of adventures for tabletop role-playing games. And while I'm very excited about its content, I'm also pleased to announce that the project is being published using DocBook and related technologies.

We've only just now released a draft of the player's guide for our first adventure path: Two Graves. You can check out the results online at

http://rwdalpe.github.io/two-graves/player-guide/

or by grabbing a PDF or EPUB from

https://github.com/rwdalpe/two-graves/releases

The project's main page is https://github.com/rwdalpe/two-graves/

So, now for the fun bits!

The materials are targeting DocBook 5.0 and utilize my fork of the DocBook XSLT 2.0 Stylesheets for HTML output and the DocBook XSL stylesheets for EPUB output. For PDF output, I have chosen not to use XSL-FO for the final output, although I do have build targets for it. Instead, I'm trying out some newer CSS features. The PDF is generated from the exact same HTML output using PrinceXML and print media CSS stylesheets of my own writing. Calabash handles the pipelining for the XSLT 2.0 transformations, although I may apply it to the 1.0 transformations as well in the future.

You may notice that the actual source for the materials is in Asciidoc. I wanted to make contribution to the materials more accessible for non-technical contributors. As powerful as raw DocBook is, I don't think I would have very many takers on writing the XML directly or purchasing specialized software. Although the plan is to continue writing the source in Asciidoc, the jury is still out. I don't particularly enjoy writing Ruby extensions to Asciidoctor to give me markup already present in raw DocBook, so if community contribution is not seeing any benefit from Asciidoc then I will have to come up with some other mechanism for accepting contributions.

Like the materials, this project is still early in development. Everything's a little rough, but I heartily welcome constructive criticism on both the textual content and infrastructure. This is my first project using DocBook and many of these other tools and concepts, so I'm certain there's plenty of room for improvement. The code itself is AGPLv3 and the textual content for the book is OGL, so I also welcome contributions if anyone is feeling froggy.

I hope you all enjoy this in some capacity, and thank you for all the hard work everyone has put in before me! I'm truly standing on the shoulders of giants.

Winslow Dalpe