I just followed the procedure here to produce my own copy of Swords & Wizardry.

I'm somewhat limited by the quality of my color printer, but it seems like it will be a fairly reliable book. The least professional looking part is trimming off the printer bleed areas (the whitespace...I don't know the name)- I have mad x-acto knife skills, but even so it's not perfect. I think I'll try my hand at Labyrinth Lord next.

Anyone else have some homemade books to show?

I prefer to use three ring binders and page protectors. The book lies flat that way, and when I'm done with the game I can take it our of the binder and put something else in there.

Quote from: Tim;420291Anyone else have some homemade books to show?

Most of what I've been doing is booklet printing.  I have a duplexing (two-sided) laser printer and a long-reach stapler (something like this) and use either Acrobat or booklet printing software to format the pages.  With Acrobat, you can print any sequence of pages so you can insert a blank or picture page in between other pages to get the booklet pages to appear in the right places.  This has let me print out something like the LBBs using the Traveller PDFs, but they look more like little white books because I use the black and white inside title page as a cover.

For example, to print Traveller Supplement 4: Citizens of the Imperium using the FFE PDF as a booklet without the pregenerated character pages (the ideal companion to the currently free Traveller Starter Edition PDF on RPGNow), I'd open it up in Acrobat 8 (I use an older version) and select the following print options:

Page: 3-5,2,6-22,47-49  
Page Scaling: Booklet Printing

(Where page 2, an FFE dummy page, is inserted after page 5 to print as the back of the table of context so that page 6 of the PDF, which is page 1 of the book, starts on the right-hand side of the book.)

Print out the 12 pages of paper (4 booklet pages per page on two sides), fold them in half, and staple twice on the spine with the long-reach stapler and I have a booklet.  You may have to do some experimentation to make sure the second side prints the right way.

Not nearly as ambitious or nice looking as what you've done but the results are pretty good and I like being able to carry little LBB-sized booklets around with me.  Under the Moons of Zoon, at 80 pages (20 pages of paper at 4 pages per page), is about the upper limit for booklets printed like this in my experience.

I'm jealous of your long reach stapler, John. I've been doing the duplex/booklet printing thing for magazines and adventures (basically anything with a low page count). I've had to staple -through- the 'spine,' because of my short stapler, which sucks. And can be painful.

I love digest sized books, as well, and may end up producing some portable copies of S&W or LL.

Aos, I've used three ring binders in the past, but the covers for S&W and LL are so good I couldn't resist!

I use binders that have a transparent plastic sleeve on the front cover so that i can put the book cover in.

I love digest sized gaming books. I printed my Carcosa book digest sized, and i own the Swords and Wizardry White Box set which is also digest size.

Also you all might find this booklet creator useful.

Yep, Tim, it's cool!

Seanchai

Quote from: Tim;420306I'm jealous of your long reach stapler, John. I've been doing the duplex/booklet printing thing for magazines and adventures (basically anything with a low page count). I've had to staple -through- the 'spine,' because of my short stapler, which sucks. And can be painful.

What I'd do before I got the long-reach stapler was I'd put the sheets down on the carpet (don't do this without thick padding under the carpet) or on top of a few layers of scrap corrugated cardboard, open up the stapler and staple through the paper into the carpet or cardboard, and then fold the staples shut by hand.  That's my suggestion for a cheap solution.  I think the long-reach stapler is worth the investment if you are going to do it a lot though.

I made my houseruled Traveller rulebooks in digest format using Word, the high speed paper folder at work, home-made staples and a belt sander.

The doc was laid out in Word and converted to pdf in booklet format.  The covers were created with Corel and printed on cardstock.

Once printed, the pages were sent thru the paper folder at work and then collated by hand.

The staples were made by straightening out paper clips.  I used finishing nails and a hammer to make the holes for them along the fold.

Finally, the belt sander was used to even out the page edges.

I made four sets of the books for my group, who promptly labeled me obsessive and insane.

I need to get a camera again to show them off.

Any time you're using a hammer and belt sander to make a book, you've GOT to have pictures.

Great map, Tim!

Thanks! We actually just had a thread about wilderness maps. There are some great ones to be seen in there.

How I do it:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_HbwxbOtXa4

I'm using a brother laser printer (similar to Tetsubo's) for all my black and white work, and I keep running into the problem of what, I suppose, is the heat from the laser causing the paper to get waves and warbles in it. I assume this is because the paper is not completely dry from the factory. Anyone have any advice on how to avoid this?

If the only solution is to print by inkjet, I'll stick with my distorted paper...inkjet is way too expensive for 'bulk' printing.

In the mid-nineties I took all the booklets that came in the two Midgard boxes and made a hardcover from them (I worked as a printer back then, so I had access to the tools).
Here it is, with the stripped covers of the booklets:



A comparison would be a hardcover made out of the Mentzer D&D boxes, Basic through Companion or even Master.

Since basic and advanced rules were spread about several booklets I made little tabs for easier access to certain rules - green for character creation, red for skill and combat rules, and blue for magic and spell lists (corresponding to the former booklet colors):



Around the year 2000 I did a wire-O-ed version of the working draft of my fantasy heartbreaker.



In Memoriam was an old school kind-of-clone before there was an Old School Renaissance. I did a few playtest sessions at conventions but ultimately didn't finish the design, for two reasons:

When I started the design AD&D2 had become a bloated mess. I wanted a return to the simplicity of Basic D&D. When D&D3 was announced I took part in an early demo session (1999 at Gen Con), and from that glimpse it looked like 3e would be the official return to that playstyle, so I was content, even if that made my game obsolete.

When the game appeared in 2000 I learned that the opposite was true - 3e formalized more and more rules, so I started fiddling with In Memoriam again.
But D&D3 took the market by storm, and I construed from that that my preferred playstyle (or rules style) was out of synch with what the market wanted. I thought there would never ever be enough interest in old school gaming again, so I shelved the design for sure.

(You can imagine that I felt like slapping myself more than once in the past two or three years...)