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
<https://github.com/rwdalpe/xslt20-stylesheets> of the DocBook XSLT 2.0
Stylesheets <https://github.com/docbook/xslt20-stylesheets> for HTML
output and the DocBook XSL stylesheets
<http://sourceforge.net/projects/docbook/> 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 <http://www.princexml.com/> and print media CSS stylesheets of
my own writing. Calabash <http://xmlcalabash.com/> 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
<http://asciidoc.org/>. 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
<http://asciidoctor.org/> 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
