i decided to teach myself indesign, and as a learning project set out to lay out Dark Dungeons as an A5-size book. this proved difficult, as DD was written and laid out in MS publisher, and converting/placing the content would've required more hours of table-munging and text-cleaning and blah blah blah than i felt like spending on the project.
so i downloaded the LL/AEC MSWord files and set to work laying those out instead.
THANK YOU dan proctor for sharing these. smart and generous. btw, i'm surprised at how pleased i am with the writing in LL -- it's pretty well pared down but has some flavour!
the result of a few day's labour is a 290-page paperback volume, nicely proportioned, 25% thinner than james kramer's (fantastic, cheap) OSRIC A5 edition -- indeed, copying james's font choice (Myriad Pro SemiCondensed) since i didn't want to think hard about the font. some typos and laziness remain but i don't particularly care; it's a reference document, nothing more.
my printed copy's on its way from lulu. here's what the interior looks like. (right-click the image and open in a separate window to see the full 2-page spread; i dunno how to shrink embedded images here.)
i know that other folks are interested in this kind of edition, but it's not mine to sell. my question is, am i allowed to distribute the pdf? for that matter, what do i have to change in order to sell it at cost on lulu?
anyhow, i'm mainly here to gloat.
that said -- it's not hard to make your own, and i encourage you to try! it took me a lot of hours but it needn't, and you could get 80% of the way to a decent layout with Publisher or even (ugh) Word itself. Office docs will never look beautiful but that's not the point, really.
i still wish someone super-dedicated would do a straight-up A5 conversion of the Cyclopedia itself, and do the same for the 1e DMG. OSRIC is a great resource but it has no flavour at all. but the thought of going from the old 1e pdfs to indesign gives me hives.
best,
wa.
