How I Make RPG Products with Affinity Publisher

[@DStrormer]

As a solo dev who picked up the Affinity 2 suite on sale recently, this video was like finding treasure. Thank you!

[@kelleroleary9367]

Seriously, great video. I don’t feel like people give enough technical advice in the ttrpg space when it comes to programs and what happens after you finish writing and have to start producing. This is seriously a valuable video for people who might be starting out to be able to learn about publishing themselves. Fantastic and informative through and through!

[@joshuareynolds4525]

Seriously a great find for me and my team trying to put together our game. Thank you a bunch!

[@andrewhawes5541]

12:49 You can do that noise effect with adjustments to the gradient tool alone. Also, if Serif would just allow for scripting/plug-ins, third-parties could figure out ways to provide screen reader support or other equally useful tools. Using the Crop tool + the Eraser tool is a very cool effect that I'm going to steal, thanks!

[@vyper900]

Seriously thank you for this video. I now have a Pathfinder campaign setting I am putting up on Kickstarter and this video helped me get there.

[@IcarusGames]

Glad you found it helpful!

[@Loweves2]

As I'm in the middle of doing just this. This was a fantastic asset. Thank you for taking the time to do this.

[@whitefoxplays]

Affinity is SO GOOD! V2 is amazing! Love this as I'm working on my own TTRPG products, but hadn't thought about custom ones for my players!

[@matoumon]

This was such an amazing tutorial, thank you for being so thorough and detailed.

[@elliottbalding7817]

This is amazing thank you so much! Such a well put together video giving an overview of everything whilst also giving really helpful specifics where needed. Just got the Affinity suite to start making my own products so this has come at such a great time!

[@Weird_Quests]

Thanks for sharing this - I use Affinity a lot and I’ve been trying to figure out how to use that assets tab so thank you!

[@Ghiribaldi]

I'd love to see a video talking about how you make the nice looking tables. I'm working on my own TTRPG in Affinity Publisher and how to make a D&D style "Class" table is weird, since you can't get tables to flow with text as you add new text. How do you do it? Have you made a video that describes that better? Eg: around 27:30 mark you have the Summoned Weapons chart. How did you make that look good? Is it just text with a graphic overlay? Do you format all the surrounding text first and then drop the completed image (text and all) in from something else? Or is this an asset or something? It's one of the few unintuitive things in Affinity.

[@IcarusGames]

So for all my tables, I use the table tool in affinity as normal, I color the cells on alternating rows, and then I drop a graphical border on top as a separate element and group the whole thing together and set it so my body text wraps around it like it does with images.

[@Ghiribaldi]

@@IcarusGames Ah! Thank you!

[@AnnCatsanndra]

Never really considered making one of these before yesterday, but I think I'll try. Thanks for this video, very useful!

[@seekerandroses]

question what did you use for background?

[@Year2047]

Such a huge help. Thank you!

[@charger1369]

Huge asset for my personal development, thanks a lot for this video!

[@BetterMonsters]

This was so incredibly helpful, thank you!

[@IcarusGames]

Glad it was helpful!

[@mrlich]

First - thanks for this - very informative and super helpful! Second - I would love to know more about the way you built the elements in the Master Page that you don't use as a master page. Meaning - how did you build out the tables, artist cred etc? Are they actual tables, or images, or...? Not sure if you're planning to do another, more detailed video, but would love it if you were so inclined! Lastly, do you use it on an iPad at all? I have both PC and iPad versions, and there are some differences that I've found... a challenge, but nothing really limiting. Just curious what your experience had been, if you use it on iPad at all. Anyway - thanks again! This was excellent. :)

[@IcarusGames]

So all the tables and stuff on the graphic dump page are actual tables that fancy borders on them that are made from curves. All of that gets bound into a group for easy moving. I keep it on a master page just so I can quickly grab it as I need it because not all of the elements can be put into the assets bar in affinity. In terms of desktop vs Ipad, I've only ever used the desktop version and never the Ipad version, so can't speak to that experience.

[@mrlich]

That's great information@@IcarusGames - thank you so much!

[@markphilips4568]

I'm a fan of Affinity Photo and Designer... one more reason to buy also Publisher :)

[@PyramKing]

Thank you very much. A helpful and informative guide.

[@jamesb5737]

Well Put together. Very informative. Have you considered using Data Merge for your monsters stats pages? It would save a lot.of time if you have many to do. One thing I am curious about is if Affinity has ways of tagging text Example, [AF:Character style=header1] header 1 text [end] This word be so copy/paste into AF would see the character style to apply and automatically do it. I'll have to research if it works or request the feature. I can see how THAT would save a lot.of time linking text styles to paragraph text. Great video. Thanks for sharing your tips.

[@deedubb118]

As far as font sizes go, do you use a certain "size" font for digital versus print? And if so, what is the standard size you use (H1, body, etc.)?

[@IcarusGames]

I choose font size with print in mind, but it will depend on your chosen font. I'd suggest printing a test page of multiple sizes of your chosen font to see which reads the best.

[@scotthannan8669]

Could have made the SIDEQUEST logo appear to be made of wood and have the torch catching the edge of the T or another letter on fire... starting to char it or singe it.

[@PeterMatthess]

Is there somewhere online where one can go and buy a page layout design or border design for your magazine? I'm looking at producing my first D&D magazine and would love to have some ornate design work around the borders of the pages

[@IcarusGames]

Not of SIDEQUEST's design as that is our specific trade dress, but Drivethrurpg has several stock page templates available.

[@PeterMatthess]

@@IcarusGames thanks! I’ll look there

[@sologemeni]

incredible video bro thanks a lot very grateful

[@aaronbeedle941]

You metioned issues with the lack of screen reader, which might cause problems when using columns, but then show a project in which the column seem to fill out without issue. This has left me confused about what the issue is? Thanks for the video, was very helpful.

[@IcarusGames]

@@aaronbeedle941 if someone who is visually impaired is using a text to speech tool to access the document and you haven't tagged the order in which the columns should be read, that can cause issues. You can tag the column order in Adobe InDesign, but not in affinity publisher.

[@aaronbeedle941]

@@IcarusGames Ohhh so it's specifically text to speech related. Thanks for the clarification! I'm mostly going for publishign tabletop rulebooks so I suppose it's not a big concern for me, though it's unfortunate and i'm really surprised it's not automated to piggy-back off the function that populates the pages with the overflowing text. It presumably would just need to guide the screen reader along that path.

[@IcarusGames]

@@aaronbeedle941 If you plan on publishing PDFs it will come up eventually. It's really frustrating that Serif haven't addressed the issue because it's something the community has been asking for for years - hell, I've been pestering them about it directly for years! The problem boils down to without specific instruction on how to read the page, some screen readers will read across a two-column body of text as though it was one. So they will read aloud the first line from the leftmost column, then then first line from the right most before going to the second line from the leftmost column. It doesn't seem to always happen, which in some ways makes it worse because it's not predictable so you can't really account for it. But Serif have added other accessibility tools to Publisher (like alt tagging images) that the community has been asking for for a long time so I'm hopeful we'll get this eventually too.

[@aaronbeedle941]

@@IcarusGames I suppose the closest work around is to release screen-reader friendly version that doen't have images or columns. I'll have to keep that in mind, I've never heard anyone mention it in tabletop production.

[@eilyawen]

Fantastic tutorial. Thank you.

[@nurkltoy]

Fantastic video!

[@simen4613]

Hey, I’m currently making a supplement for Mörk Borg, this is super helpful! 👍👍

[@MrNhoj509]

Can affinity do ink limits for DTRPG printing? This is one feature that wasn't there last time I looked, so I couldn't leave InDesign. But, that was years ago.

[@IcarusGames]

I don't *think so. It's not something I've used, but Affinity it what I've used to produce my stuff for DTRPG printing, which has worked fine (once you get through the inherent headaches of the platform)

[@DiceLegenz]

Thank you soooo much. Very helpful

[@ArielLothlorien]

How do you do your data tables?

[@Klausiiiiable]

Hey Icarus, im a bit late to the party but can you maybe also make a tutorial how to make the monster statblock and textboxes like the additional conditions one? Or does anyne have a scourse on this :)

[@IcarusGames]

They are basically colored rectangles for the background with multiple individual text boxes on top for all the text elements. Each one gets built by hand pretty much.

[@AvianDnD]

I just use Homebrewery. Its dope

[@princeofstars]

any idea why exporting into pdf, jpg the exported file is blurry on ipad ( on jpeg ) on pdf loses too much quality even though my settings are for print. i have tried both in mac and ipad and the quality is very poor compared to my import. ( on ipad the jpeg xl works fine but it cutes the mb of the file in 1/5 if it is 5mb i get 1mb )

[@IcarusGames]

In the export settings there's options for rasterizing images above a certain DPI, this might be out of whack.

[@princeofstars]

@@IcarusGames Thankyou so much for the reply! i didn't find that option on ipad pro but on the mac i found it and it does still exports an awful quality compared to the file inside . The jpeg on mac works but low quality ( i tried on making bigger the document setup to match the image i'm using and the result got better but still there was a loss of quality. on ipad everything on jpeg section comes out blurry as hell 🥲 Is it maybe that i have to export on a certain dimension and dpi from procreate ? maybe a tif would work better ? or any other file ( exported file was jpeg, 6923x9686 at 600 dpi ) and place it on A5 cover !

[@LeopoldoManuelRamirezMena]

Nice, very clear :D thanks!

[@IcarusGames]

Glad it helped!

[@astralbard]

So helpful! Thank you so much

[@IcarusGames]

Glad it was helpful!

[@JTMC93]

Wait... Where are the DriveThru templates for Affinity?

[@IcarusGames]

They are linked in the video description 😊

[@JTMC93]

@@IcarusGames Guess you are referring to the Adobe InDesign templates and using them in Affinity. Though I will mention that they don't work perfectly and have some issues.

[@IcarusGames]

@@JTMC93 Looks like they've updated the help center since I made the video and the affinity template is gone. I suspect so they could rebuild it in Affinity 2, so hopefully it'll come back eventually.

[@JTMC93]

@Icarus Games Hopefully. Though from what I have seen, there isn't anything really to change in a template.

[@solomani-42]

TY

[@streetsurgery]

I don't know if I'm just failing/stupid but for the life of me I can't find the margin info on drivethrurpg

[@IcarusGames]

This page should have all the info you need help.drivethrupartners.com/hc/en-us/articles/12780800178583-Quick-Specifications-for-Print-Books#h_01HFVSQQNE7CNT9CBGDAMQC835

[@dolphinplaygames3106]

the link to the template does not work anymore

[@IcarusGames]

Thanks for the heads up. DTRPG have changed their support pages. I've gone ahead and changed the link!

[@jimmiddletonnixa]

First

[@micahinnerarity9563]

Second

[@micahinnerarity9563]

Take that Jennifer

[@mtm7031]

wow Thank you very much. A very helpful and informative guide.