Announce: Tabletop role-playing game materials produced with DocBook

Hi, everyone! I'm really excited to announce a project I'm working
    on:
    a community-use campaign world and accompanying series of adventures
    for tabletop role-playing games. And while I'm very excited about
    its content, I'm also pleased to announce that the project is being
    published using DocBook and related technologies.

    

    We've only just now released a draft of the player's guide for our
    first adventure path: Two Graves. You can check out the results
    online at 

    

    http://rwdalpe.github.io/two-graves/player-guide/
    

    

    or by grabbing a PDF or EPUB from 

    

    https://github.com/rwdalpe/two-graves/releases

    

    The project's main page is https://github.com/rwdalpe/two-graves/

    

    So, now for the fun bits!

    

    The materials are targeting DocBook 5.0 and utilize my fork
    of the DocBook
      XSLT 2.0 Stylesheets for HTML output and the DocBook XSL
      stylesheets for EPUB output. For PDF output, I have chosen not
    to use XSL-FO for the final output, although I do have build targets
    for it. Instead, I'm trying out some newer CSS features. The PDF is
    generated from the exact same HTML output using PrinceXML and print media CSS
    stylesheets of my own writing. Calabash
    handles the pipelining for the XSLT 2.0 transformations, although I
    may apply it to the 1.0 transformations as well in the future.

    

    You may notice that the actual source for the materials is in Asciidoc. I wanted to make
    contribution to the materials more accessible for non-technical
    contributors. As powerful as raw DocBook is, I don't think I would
    have very many takers on writing the XML directly or purchasing
    specialized software. Although the plan is to continue writing the
    source in Asciidoc, the jury is still out. I don't particularly
    enjoy writing Ruby extensions to Asciidoctor
    to give me markup already present in raw DocBook, so if community
    contribution is not seeing any benefit from Asciidoc then I will
    have to come up with some other mechanism for accepting
    contributions.

    

    Like the materials, this project is still early in development.
    Everything's a little rough, but I heartily welcome constructive
    criticism on both the textual content and infrastructure. This is my
    first project using DocBook and many of these other tools and
    concepts, so I'm certain there's plenty of room for improvement. The
    code itself is AGPLv3 and the textual content for the book is OGL,
    so I also welcome contributions if anyone is feeling froggy.

    

    I hope you all enjoy this in some capacity, and thank you for all
    the hard work everyone has put in before me! I'm truly standing on
    the shoulders of giants.

    

    Winslow Dalpe