The most hideous layout you've ever seen in an RPG?

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jdrakeh

jdrakeh

Keeper of Tazmodeous, Hound of Heck
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Over the past few months, I've been culling my RPG collection and it has given me an opportunity to pour over many books that I haven't read for years. And Oh. My. God.

The layout of the Bubblegum Crisis RPG by R. Talsorian is abominable.

Every single page seems to have 10+ fonts, multi colored text, and low-resolution artwork all smashed together as closely as possible. To top it all off, it looks like it was all laid out as a JPEG file, then purposefully compressed until it was full of artefacts.

I'm unsure how I ever read this thing. I sure can't manage that feat now. I tried. It gave me a headache.

Have any games been published to rival this? I mean, because, DAMN. If so, I might have to hunt them down just to confirm.
 
The two Conjurers' Guides released for Kult in the 1990s looked increadibly stylish, but the heavy background made the text unreadable. This happened in a few books in the 1990s - remember Aria: Canticle of the Monomyth?

However, the worst layout I have come across, in terms of it's functional purpose is actually Champions Complete. It's so plain and boring that it's actually detrimental to the appreciation of the genre it is supposed to be about.
 
I think a lot of Judges' Guild and other early RPGs like Legacy are pretty terribly laid out but that may be cheating a bit as these are essentially amateur releases. Some of the content in JG is great though, so if we don't excuse poor writing why excuse poor layout?
 
I've seen a few games where the columns aren't straight and it looks like it was typed out and laid by hand, and poorly at that. I don;t remember the names as this was decades ago.
 
Trippy said:
The two Conjurers' Guides released for Kult in the 1990s looked increadibly stylish, but the heavy background made the text unreadable. This happened in a few books in the 1990s - remember Aria: Canticle of the Monomyth?

However, the worst layout I have come across, in terms of it's functional purpose is actually Champions Complete. It's so plain and boring that it's actually detrimental to the appreciation of the genre it is supposed to be about.
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Aria actually doesn't suffer from that issue (the only pages that have backgrounds are the title pages for each chapter). Impenetrable gobbledygook, though? In spades. That said, I had forgotten about the Kult books! Thanks for the reminder! As for Champions, I find that all Hero books suffer from that issue, all the way back to Champions 1e. :smile:
 
Oh yes, and Immortal: The Invisible War....

I could add the nod to the entirely anarchic, hand written and hand drawn HōL again, but actually that is just genius.
 
Voros said:
I think a lot of Judges' Guild and other early RPGs like Legacy are pretty terribly laid out but that may be cheating a bit as these are essentially amateur releases. Some of the content in JG is great though, so if we don't excuse poor writing why excuse poor layout?
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Ooo! I own a copy of Legacy. I think it's in a box someplace but, yeah, it sucks. The layout isn't actually that awful, though, at least when compared to many other games of its vintage (it was published in the late 70s, right?). Judge's Guild, though, I agree on. Even in a world full of RPGs typeset on a.... er, typewriter.... a lot of Judge's Guild stuff was awful (some moreso than others).
 
Trippy said:
Oh yes, and Immortal: The Invisible War....

I could add the nod to the entirely anarchic, hand written and hand drawn HōL again, but actually that is just genius.
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Immortal.... that game was weird. I never played it, but I had some friends who were way into it. I'm not sure which edition they played, though. One edition used a White Wolf-esque system while the other essentially used The Window.
 
Oh yes. 1E Immortal, that was terrible; but its system honestly had some neat ideas, though I'm not sure how usable the system actually was. 3E, I think used a basic D10 system. What was the name of White Wolf's steamtech/zeppilin game? It had gold writing under its normal writing which was pale anyway and made chapters of the book unreadable.
 
There have been a few very creative OSR books over the past few years that used typewriter fonts and very minimal margins. They're such an ugly eyesore to me that they literally give me a headache. I won't name them because I don't want to speak ill of the writers and artists, whom I think are very talented otherwise.
 
Necrozius said:
There have been a few very creative OSR books over the past few years that used typewriter fonts and very minimal margins. They're such an ugly eyesore to me that they literally give me a headache. I won't name them because I don't want to speak ill of the writers and artists, whom I think are very talented otherwise.
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I know who you mean. I'm somewhat in the same boat. I love their games, but have to stick to the shorter ones because of the font issue. It has actively kept me from buying their flagship product, which is a shame as I'm sure I would otherwise like it.
 
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The very first thing I notice in a book is whether the font is ugly or not. If it is, I won’t buy the book.
 
Silverlion said:
What was the name of White Wolf's steamtech/zeppilin game? It had gold writing under its normal writing which was pale anyway and made chapters of the book unreadable.
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The Secret of Zir'An?
That was one of the cases where the layout/readability made me back off despite the topic/genre of the game being right up my alley. Not even the collector in me wanted this book.

Recently I have had to look at two games where the layouter tried to be far too creative and artsy, up to the point of rendering their books unusable:

DeGenesis Rebirth is gorgeous as a coffee table book, but as a rulebook it sucks big time. The index is printed in a spindly type font, in dark red on pitch black.
I'm not saying the rules are bad, only that the physical book can't be used as a reference at a (moodily-lit) game table.

The German edition of The Sprawl is similar, with green type on black pages. But this one doesn't even do double duty as coffee table book because of the size and the artwork not being that ... artful.
(I don't know the layout of the original. I coudn't be bothered to check. What message should I learn from a publisher who doesn"t want me to read their rules?)
 
Trippy said:
The two Conjurers' Guides released for Kult in the 1990s looked increadibly stylish, but the heavy background made the text unreadable.
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That's probably the absolute worst case I have encountered. When people use the term "unreadable" to describe a layout, they usually mean it is headache-inducing, but you can extract the information if you really, really want to. Those Kult books were literally unreadable in sections, with important text completely obscured.

The '90s were the golden age for this kind of thing. Cheap desktop publishing was still relatively new, giving people tools to terrible, terrible things to their layouts.
Bashere said:
I've seen a few games where the columns aren't straight and it looks like it was typed out and laid by hand, and poorly at that. I don;t remember the names as this was decades ago.
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Voros said:
I think a lot of Judges' Guild and other early RPGs like Legacy are pretty terribly laid out but that may be cheating a bit as these are essentially amateur releases. Some of the content in JG is great though, so if we don't excuse poor writing why excuse poor layout?
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I'm much more forgiving of primitive attempts at basic layout with nothing but a typewriter, an X-acto knife, and a photocopier than I am of ones where someone had some fancy DTP software of their era and took what probably started as a prosaic but readable Word file and turned it into a disaster.

But hey, thanks for the opening to work in a plug! Rob Conley is has redone all the maps for the Wilderlands setting in color, and he is in the process of revising the classic guidebooks with new layouts, and I have been editing. The first book, Wilderlands of High Fantasy, Revised Guidebook is done and linked in my sig. Fantastic Wilderlands Beyonde is in layout at this point.

Necrozius said:
There have been a few very creative OSR books over the past few years that used typewriter fonts and very minimal margins. They're such an ugly eyesore to me that they literally give me a headache. I won't name them because I don't want to speak ill of the writers and artists, whom I think are very talented otherwise.
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Back around 2009, there was a certain charm to putting out a book that looked like it came from the '70s, but it has been done enough at this point that the magic of that has worn off, and it just makes it a pain to read.
 
Baulderstone said:
Those Kult books were literally unreadable in sections, with important text completely obscured.
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The first book where I noticed this was Chill (the Mayfair hardcover edition) that had dark purple "blood splotches" on the pages.
 
Baulderstone said:
Back around 2009, there was a certain charm to putting out a book that looked like it came from the '70s, but it has been done enough at this point that the magic of that has worn off, and it just makes it a pain to read.
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Yeah, there was a similar thing in the early 90's where everyone insisted on producing handwritten/cut and pasted music fanzines. Fun for about ten minutes but annoying to read after that.
 
Dirk Remmecke said:
The first book where I noticed this was Chill (the Mayfair hardcover edition) that had dark purple "blood splotches" on the pages.
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Mayfair had some interesting (and I don’t use that word favorably) design choices even in their DC stuff in the late 80s and early 90s. For instance, in the Batman Sourcebook, the chapter headings used lettering that someone would use if they sent a ransom note using clipped up newspapers. Doesn’t really do the superhero vibe very well.
 
Black Leaf said:
Yeah, there was a similar thing in the early 90's where everyone insisted on producing handwritten/cut and pasted music fanzines. Fun for about ten minutes but annoying to read after that.
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The only times that worked was when the person doing it was a cartoonist/artist, and doing things by hand allowed them to do their thing more freely. A modern example of it done right in the RPG scene is the zine Black Pudding.
 
Endless Flight said:
Mayfair had some interesting (and I don’t use that word favorably) design choices even in their DC stuff in the late 80s and early 90s. For instance, in the Batman Sourcebook, the chapter headings used lettering that someone would use if they sent a ransom note using clipped up newspapers. Doesn’t really do the superhero vibe very well.
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Don't forget the nearly illegible choices they made for the New Teen Titans sourcebook:
20180717_083455.jpg 20180717_083439.jpg 20180717_083430.jpg
 
I haven't looked at the books in a while but I seem to recall Eclipse Phase 1st edition having the "style over good layout" problem. The (very nice) art intruding into text spaces, text on top of art.

R. Talsorian's games are awful about this. Votoms, BGC, Cyberpunk 2020 2.0, Castle Falkenstein, etc.
 
Necrozius said:
Holy shit yeah I forgot about that. Soooo zany! Sooo... frustrating to read.
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Isn't that also the book to went from Malkavians being cursed with mental illness to being the "wacky" kind of crazy.
 
Baulderstone said:
Isn't that also the book to went from Malkavians being cursed with mental illness to being the "wacky" kind of crazy.
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Yep - it was similar to the HōL book inasmuch as they turned it into a scrapbook - all jumbled up in no discernable order with handwritten annotations and sketches throughout.
 
Endless Flight said:
The very first thing I notice in a book is whether the font is ugly or not. If it is, I won’t buy the book.
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Hey, you guys remember Mage: The Awakening's 1st edition with its swirly header fonts rendered in unreadably pale gold and silver? You'd end up checking the index just to figure out the name of the section you were reading.
 
I'm not overly fussy about layout but seem to recall the D20 Gamma World (6th edition) matched the dull, dry, text with dull, gray background just in case the reader forgot that this edition of Gamma World wasn't meant to be fun.
 
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