Whilst experimenting with layouts, the last release of Hack100 was formatted in a “classic paperback” style. This was intended to emulate the likes of the Fighting Fantasy, Maelstrom and Dragon Warriors books of the 1980s.
As an experiment with a different style of layout, I’ve written up the recent blogs on character improvement drawing inspiration from the “Old School Essentials Rules Tome” by Gavin Norman.
What I particularly like about Old School Essentials is the clarity of the presentation. The text is concise and all the information on a given topic is contained within a single page or two facing pages for quick and easy reference.
One of my original design aims was that Hack100 should be 32 pages or less. However, I was already up to 37 pages in the latest release using the “classic paperback” style. By using a layout similar to Old School Essentials, the new character improvement chapter (here…) is just a single page. This is promising. I may now look at converting some of the earlier chapters to this new format to see if I can bring the overall page count down without compromising on the clarity of the rules.