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      Wind in the Flowers: Re-inventing a Game


    Editing, Development, and Production

*R. Sean Borgstrom*
March 27, 2002
*Rated an A+ by 24 RPGnet readers!*

Rate this column!

	

The manuscript left my hands after two months of intensive writing and
entered the similarly five-fingered hands of one Bruce Baugh, editor.
The first major change to come out of this was a structural reorganization.

The Pharos edition was, roughly speaking, written in the published
order. I worked on the character creation section first, because I had
to know what the characters could do before I knew what kind of world
they lived in. At the end of that section, I had established a
significant amount of information on the world, which I tidied up to
create a description of the setting. Afterwards, I felt a need to round
this out by describing the major NPC types in the setting. Then followed
a chapter on resolving conflicts, an example of play, and advice on
running the game. Finally, I stuck an introduction in front.

If this sounds somewhat primitive, it was. *Nobilis* was essentially my
first work in gaming, and I had a long way to go before I would polish
any of my craft. And perhaps it is obvious that this needed some
rearrangement. But I hesitated to fiddle with that kind of thing too
much in my own editing, because my job was theoretically cleaning up the
book and adding a few small sections.

(If you're wondering how I got from 'cleaning up the book and adding a
few small sections' to 'writing 130,000 new words for it in two months',
so am I. Please tell me if you ever find out. But when I had written
them, James Wallis told me he wanted them all, so it's cool.)

Bruce, accordingly, shuffled the setting and introductory material to
the front and pushed various rules stuff more cleanly into the rules
chapter. This broke some structural dependencies; that is, it created a
few extra references to concepts not yet explained. He worked on fixing
that too. Then, of course, came long stretches of regularizing
capitalization, cleaving grammar knots, and suchlike. I'm sure he
probably killed great numbers of my semicolons, as I overuse them, and
left the commas and periods bewailing the slain. Editors are
underappreciated; it's finicky, important work.

From there, I think, I shall step to overall product design. Section
header quotes are both frequent and long in *Nobilis*. Many of them are
literal excerpts from game world events, recorded from the thoughts or
copied from the diaries of characters within the setting. A number of
others represent fictional works from the game world that, in some
fashion or other, set the tone for the appropriate section. I'm not
going to go into why they're there; mostly, to keep the reader "in the
world".

In any event, in the Pharos edition, the quotes served as the primary
source of art. The italicized sections, each a word-picture, broke up
the flow of plain black text. The attribution visually set them off.
This was good, because we didn't have much other art to put in.

The original book was also a peculiar, small size, due to limitations of
the print on demand process used. It had no margins, pretty much. James
or Bruce had come up with the idea of the new edition (a) having
margins, and (b) shifting the section-header quotes there. This in
theory would provide some content to the margin, so it wasn't wasted
space and wasted money, and also give some visual variety. Actual art
and the section headers themselves would be used to break up the flow of
black text.

James wanted a visually distinctive book, and, after playing around with
the concept, he developed the idea for an 11x11 book with a photo art
nouveau cover. This would allow two solid columns, room for quotes in
the margin, and a book that would look beautiful sitting on a table or a
shelf. The resemblance to a coffee-table book isn't entirely accidental;
we wanted to make something the reader would be glad to own.

James had originally planned to purchase and reprint *Nobilis*, more or
less, not develop a brand new edition. But by this point---long before,
really---it was clear that this was a new product. This led, naturally,
to a new, longer production schedule, which in turn gave us time to
start a round of serious playtesting. This was a nice thing, all in all,
and led to many changes in the text. The design principle was fairly
straightforward: things that they found that were broken, I fixed. This
is why playtesters get an acknowledgment at the front of the book; and
I'll throw in another one here. Thank you!

Not that much in the way of complexity came up during the layout itself.
James chose a slightly different format for Ianthe's sections (see a
previous column <wind13mar02.html>) and made various game abbreviations
small-capped. The single-column format used for the Ianthe section
appears to me to better mimic the style of a person speaking or writing
a letter. The small caps . . . hm. James told me that it looks better.
If I were pondering this decision myself, I would say that abbreviations
are one of those things that puts the reader very much into "gaming
mode", and by making them crouch in on themselves, he minimized this
impact. We wobbled back and forth on how to do the Example of Play,
which had very few headings and therefore large sections of blank
margin. There are pieces of fiction interwoven with the Example of Play,
showing the perspective of some minor NPCs; at first, these were moved
to the margins. That filled the margins completely and told the story
out of order. Ultimately, we solved this the obvious way: James made me
write more quotes for the margin.

Then came lots and lots of proofreading. And more proofreading. James
proofread many times. I proofread once. (I've been busy.) I think Bruce
proofread. I think there were also some volunteer or professional
proofreaders he sent things to; if volunteers, thank you!

That brings us up to the time of this writing. The printers have
returned proofs and James is looking at them. By the time you actually
see this column, *Nobilis* should be at most a week or two away!

R. Sean


      What do you think? <http://www.rpg.net/pf/list.php?f=88>

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 Topics 	Author  	Date 	Latest Reply
 James and the Small Caps
<http://www.rpg.net/pf/read.php?f=88&i=81&t=81> (2) new 	Kibo 
08-20-2002 16:29  	02-10-2003 01:23 new
 Art <http://www.rpg.net/pf/read.php?f=88&i=77&t=77> (1) new 	Lxndr 
04-26-2002 07:36  	04-26-2002 07:36 new
 The Original Nobilis Club
<http://www.rpg.net/pf/read.php?f=88&i=76&t=76> (3) new 	Bret Gillan 
04-17-2002 11:28  	03-17-2003 17:48 new
 Questions & Thoughts
<http://www.rpg.net/pf/read.php?f=88&i=64&t=64> (3) new 	Pyske 
03-20-2002 18:31  	05-01-2003 13:03 new
 Noble Buddhism?
<http://www.rpg.net/pf/read.php?f=88&i=61&t=61> (9) new 	Tlaloc 
03-20-2002 12:17  	12-10-2004 01:20 new
 Noble Suicide <http://www.rpg.net/pf/read.php?f=88&i=58&t=58> (9) new
Eric Christian Berg  	03-20-2002 07:43  	01-18-2005 16:27 new
 Art Notes <http://www.rpg.net/pf/read.php?f=88&i=54&t=54> (4) new 	R.
Sean Borgstrom  	03-14-2002 16:31  	03-21-2002 03:44 new
 Ack...you just lost my sale
<http://www.rpg.net/pf/read.php?f=88&i=45&t=45> (10) new 	SteveD 
03-14-2002 04:06  	03-15-2002 06:29 new
 Onomastikon working URL
<http://www.rpg.net/pf/read.php?f=88&i=36&t=36> (4) new 	Jorge
Hernández  	03-06-2002 12:51  	08-20-2002 16:10 new
 Why do angels change names ?
<http://www.rpg.net/pf/read.php?f=88&i=33&t=33> (10) new 	philippe
tromeur  	03-06-2002 10:13  	12-10-2004 01:34 new
 R. Sean, some examples?
<http://www.rpg.net/pf/read.php?f=88&i=32&t=32> (3) new 	Arref 
03-05-2002 08:17  	03-13-2002 20:28 new
 Sounds great, BUT...
<http://www.rpg.net/pf/read.php?f=88&i=28&t=28> (2) new 	Kane 
02-27-2002 16:43  	02-27-2002 17:30 new
 Sort of backwards?
<http://www.rpg.net/pf/read.php?f=88&i=21&t=21> (8) new 	Eric Finley 
02-20-2002 14:25  	02-28-2002 09:35 new
 Programmer nature slips out!
<http://www.rpg.net/pf/read.php?f=88&i=20&t=20> (2) new 	Sean
McCarthy  	02-20-2002 13:18  	02-21-2002 10:30 new
 Object Lesson Damage
<http://www.rpg.net/pf/read.php?f=88&i=15&t=15> (1) new 	Darren
Miguez  	02-13-2002 12:45  	02-13-2002 12:45 new
 How about this?
<http://www.rpg.net/pf/read.php?f=88&i=12&t=12> (2) new 	Kristian
Lund  	02-13-2002 11:30  	02-14-2002 01:17 new
 Now, this was strange!
<http://www.rpg.net/pf/read.php?f=88&i=9&t=9> (7) new 	access.denied 
02-13-2002 07:44  	02-16-2002 21:44 new
 Briefs on the other two?
<http://www.rpg.net/pf/read.php?f=88&i=5&t=5> (5) new 	Eric Finley 
01-31-2002 18:39  	02-13-2002 10:36 new
 Forum now works <http://www.rpg.net/pf/read.php?f=88&i=4&t=4> (1) new
Sandy Antunes  	01-31-2002 17:36  	01-31-2002 17:36 new
 limited series <http://www.rpg.net/pf/read.php?f=88&i=1&t=1> (2) new
Sandy Antunes  	01-21-2002 17:41  	01-31-2002 17:36 new

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------------------------------------------------------------------------

    * Editing, Development, and Production
      </news+reviews/columns/wind27mar02.html>
      March 27, 2002
    * Affiliations </news+reviews/columns/wind20mar02.html>
      March 20, 2002
    * How to be a Hollyhock God </news+reviews/columns/wind13mar02.html>
      March 13, 2002
    * Naming Conventions </news+reviews/columns/wind06mar02.html>
      March 6, 2002
    * Art Notes </news+reviews/columns/wind27feb02.html>
      February 27, 2002
    * Dynamic Nobilis </news+reviews/columns/wind20feb02.html>
      February 20, 2002
    * Systems Change </news+reviews/columns/wind13feb02.html>
      February 13, 2002
    * Treachery </news+reviews/columns/wind06feb02.html>
      February 6, 2002
    * The Emperor to Come </news+reviews/columns/wind31jan02.html>
      January 31, 2002
    * The Changing of the Guard </news+reviews/columns/wind21jan02.html>
      January 21, 2002 


      Other columns </news+reviews/columns.html> at RPGnet

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