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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Daztur" data-source="post: 6100001" data-attributes="member: 55680">Sanglorian:The main reason I’m thinking gazetteers is to get people over “gaak! It’s longer than Moby Dick! I don’t have time to read THAT, I’ll NEVER use all of that in my campaign!” shock because, well, we’re going to hit Moby Dick word count soon. Something like, say, a 64-page doc on an enchanted elf forest might be easier for people to swallow. As far as locking stuff in place just keep the main document trucking for everything (using more of less the format you use for the Gore one see below) and cleave some gazetteers off it every so often. When they’re all done circle back to the beginning to add updated stuff. They’d also have stuff our current compilation is missing like random encounter tables. Impressions reading through your version of Gore:-Table of contents for hexes at the beginning of each region or all in the beginning of the book? Note that page numbers would have to be redone with every update as adding even a page throws all the numbers off.-I like the ADDED and CHANGED notations.-Instead of yanking out the Sir Theanor hex entirely and similar stuff, maybe reduce it to a stub and link that stub to the main chunk of content?-Looking over the Flying Fish entry it’s hard to tell what’s the best way of organizing stuff in Shuttered itself. A lot of stuff is backstory that can get stuck in a “stories of Shuttered” entry but even that bit describes something that’s still in the city (some of the fish are still there). Hmmmm…-OK, I like how you’ve yanked famous people and whatnot out of the hexes and put them in their own place. I’d probably put things in a slightly different order but what I’m in agreement here about what you’re doing. It puts some important things front and center. -One big general issue. Right now all connections are done by noting the hex that someone is mentioned in. That means that noting the connections is really easy but it means that things are a bit disorganized (important information essential to understanding a region is buried in the middle of a random hex). Once we yank bits of stuff out of hexes how to note these connections? For example if Lady Natala is one of the Sanguine Lords and one of the other hexes mentions Lady Natala how do we direct people to the Lady Natala entry that’s part of the Sanguine Lords list? For stuff in the Gore region that doesn’t matter too much since people should read the general stuff (which includes her) before diving into the specific stuff, but what about mentions of her in the Thring write-up? We could have a bunch of notations like see G1.02 (meaning something like the region is Gore and it’s the second entry in the first part of the Gore overview) but that sort of thing could get opaque pretty fast. Similarly with hex notations it’s pretty easy to jump to another hex using Word (just search Hex XX.XX and you’ll get there immediately) but those kind of searches take a while to run with the PDF file, but having people DL the doc file is a pain since it’s so big (150 megs now due to all the art which Word doesn’t compress) and has non-standard fonts. So maybe go through everything and add cross-reference links. Basically make all mentions of “Lady Natala” a link and when you click them the PDF sends you to that section. I’ve never done this before but poking through word I can do it with the “bookmark” and “Cross-reference” features. Seems simple enough. Let’s see if it works after I convert this to PDF… Yup, still works. I guess put in standard blue font with an underline for links and make it so that any time you click on a hex number you get sent there. Hmmmm, if we’re going to note connections by using links instead of having people search for them (is more user friendly) do we want to note connections with the names of the hex things connect to or the hex number, in either case people can look ‘em up by clicking on the link. Hmmmmm, if we’re linking everything to everything else anyway, maybe just port everything to a wiki using the same basic format you’re using here. It makes it easier to people to collaborate and might be more user-friendly than one big document? For example there could be one page for “orcs” with a bunch of links to everything that mentions orcs and a bunch of different index pages for finding things. The main downside of that (aside from the work of converting it which we should do now rather than later if we're going through all of the effort to convert the format ANYWAY) is that you can't get on it while not online. Thoughts?</blockquote>

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