Yesterday, I got wrapped up in a debate with some members of the NSR Cauldron Discord, about what makes for a great TTRPG layout. Having years of professional experience in book design, my views tend to differ from some of the popular opinions of the OSR/NSR crowd. One thing that often goes unnoticed by the layperson is the significant impact that meta-level information design has on these books, which ultimately led to some discussion of pagination documents as a tool. In fact, it’s usually my first tool for planning out a book.
With so many people designing adventures as hobbyist graphic designers, discussion is usually focused on how to handle typography, use layout software, or formatting copy. So, it’s not very surprising that most have not used pagination documents before. So what are they and what are they used for?
What is a pagination document?
Put simply, it is a high-level view of an entire book. It is intended to provide a look at each spread in the context of the others, and is usually done to plan the book’s content, following the outlining phase. As an example, here is one that I quickly sketched out on my Remarkable early in the development of Surviving G0:
An early-process pagination for Surviving G0
Originally, when I started the project, I had outlined it as a 36-page zine with a wrap-around cover similar to old TSR modules for the map. The project, however, quickly expanded in the writing phase, and I decided that I would need to change the format. However, it provides a good example of how I originally envisioned the outline being applied to the book.
Looking at it now, a couple of notable things stand out:
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It’s dense. I had sketched in some spots for images, but they would have been really limited using this pagination.
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It’s flat. All of the different sections just run together. This became one of the reasons I ultimately decided to expand the book; it allowed me to add spreads for section breaks that incorporate some more flavorful world-building.
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It’s too constrained. The adventures are a great example of this. OSR Adventures are brief, but there just was no way to fit in the maps I wanted to do and the adventures in the page count I was initially thinking.
If I had just jumped from my outline to writing and into the layout work, it would have been 30+ hours of work before I realized any of these issues.
So, what are the benefits of using a pagination doc?
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You see the flow of a book before you get into designing it.
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It tests your assumptions of content length.
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It allows you to plan the amount of art you will need earlier in the process.
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If you are working with multiple collaborators, it helps get everyone on the same page. In fact, TSR used them for this exact reason.
