ALL ABOUT STYLE

Post date: 21-Aug-2014 16:15:06

Covers for my forthcoming Marvel Super Heroes: Nth Edition books.

In formatting the Nth Edition books, I wanted to keep with the theme of "what was old is new again." By that I mean that, while I wanted to give the books a fresh new look, I also wanted to have the game feel like the rulebooks we remember.

Thus, like in the Advanced Set, the books of the Nth Edition are, for the most part, formatted in a 3-Column page setup. The sole exception thus far is the second half of the Resources and Constructs chapter of the Adventure Book, which goes into the different types of Constructs. For that section, I just felt that a two-column format felt less crowded.

Another aspect that I kept was that the Adventure and Character books have the Universal Table on the back cover. That is the way all of the published books did it, and so that is how I handled it as well. The Roster Book will have the character sheet on the back cover.

However, in order to keep things crisp, I elected to not have a colored background to the pages nor to the covers. This also makes the book much more printer-friendly than the original books.

I also chose fonts for the title and headings that felt more like they were for a comic book game. The title font is called Heroes Assemble and the majority of the headings are in Komika Glaze or Krungthep.

I also use a lot of Marvel Comics art in my books. I do this to contribute to the feel of the books as comic book RPG material, and because the source material, the TSR books, used art in their publications as well. However, since this is a fan book, I want to make it clear that the use of this art is under the terms of Fair Use. I am explicit about that in my books. If I ever get a complaint from an artist whose art I used, or from Marvel Comics, I will remove the art.

All in all, I wanted to make the game feel like the original game, despite all of the functional changes I made to it, and still feel like a new game. I wanted it to be like the latest Iron Man armor; it pays homage to what came before, but it is definitely new off the assembly line and ready for action.