I guess finally seeing the pieces of the puzzle concerning a certain chair near the Marsh Keep got me re-reading some lore documents more carefully. Though, in the past, I've done some professional editing and compiling, and it's a great way to learn the material, since if nothing else, you have to read it over more than once.

I'm curious what people think about my interest to undertake a project compiling Elanthian Lore. The task is, no doubt, somewhat daunting; it does, however, match some of my real life skills with my main character's in-game role as the secretary of Beacon Hall Archive. It also might be seen as somewhat superfluous, owing to the official website, Krakiipedia, and now a "Documentation" folder on the forums. I definitely have not considered the scope or limitations of the project.

I did, however, hack together a quick sample for you.

http://www.cns.s.u-tokyo.ac.jp/~daid/bookreader/elanthian-lore.html

Firstly, the OpenLibrary Bookreader is just awesome for presentation (I can increase the jpg DPI, but it'll already be slow being served to you from Tokyo I guess). It makes something digital on a website feel like a book. Now, if you click the link in the upper left of the top drop-down menu, that's a PDF file. To me, online it's a more immersive way to read it, and you can read the PDF offline, too (print it out, stick it on a tablet, whatever). I think, more than anything, the style of presentation is what I find most compelling.

Now of course, there are obvious questions, even with doing A Smuggler's History of River's Rest. These details are the things that take the time, not some copy and pasting of files around on my computer and running some scripts to generate all that stuff you see (which I neither wrote the lore nor the programs, just a little bit of hacking required). Should Part I, Part II, etc really be sections? There's an editor's note, but who is the editor? (It is not the compiler of the volume, me in lieu of my character.) It was easy to get the author of a chapter listed, but then I thought to provide a simple biographical point like his date of birth and death...first check! Editing and compiling is also research.

There's also questions of how to address more OOC matters, like in this case giving GM-Scribes credit somewhere as the ghost behind Casler; a simple index ought to do that. But mention the word index to me and I shiver. As much as it would be amazing, I don't really want to make a real index for this compilation...not at this stage. However, a simple OOC credits index is straight-forward.

Naturally, there would be multiple chapters, and indeed even sections of chapters, in my vision (my eyes are often larger than my stomach, though). I think we can not worry about this for now. I typeset with LaTeX so trivial matters like presentation style are a cinch to fix.

Ideas, thoughts, replies? Please!

PS: If you want a link to a real book on amazon, you can ask, and although it's cheap, I doubt the subject matter is of interest to anyone here.

PPS: Did you think in a book-format (depending on line spacing), the Smuggler's History was 20 pages? I can't imagine how many pages a semi-complete version of this would be, but at least a couple hundred I imagine.

---

>An officer of the Sorcerer Guild arrives and glances around. "Ah, there you are, Vathon!" he says in a slightly agitated tone. "I have come to formally declare that your membership privileges have been revoked."

Thank you. I enjoyed reading it.

In case any one was curious how this project was going, it's the same link as before (be sure to reload the webpage if it doesn't look vastly different):

http://www.cns.s.u-tokyo.ac.jp/~daid/bookreader/elanthian-lore.html

Again, you can click the link in the upper left corner to download a pdf copy, or have fun with this online-style book.

Sarah suggested to do a sort of script font, as well as dropcaps. It took me awhile to the the style of dropcaps working as I wanted, but now it looks really awesome I think. (That Goudy font drop cap is...so sick...)

As far as the layout structure, you might be able to see that I've incorporated samples of 1) Material from the website tomes 2) GM-released documents 3) Player-written material. This means the book will need sections of chapters, which I haven't quite figured out how to do in Latex. (Though this page seems to claim it's easy, I have to play with my class structure and such http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/35782/how-to-split-a-latex-document-using-parts-and-chapters)

Another thing that is lacking in a glaring way is any kind of OOC information. For example, GM-Scribes and GM-Xayle deserve credit somewhere for work contained here, and probably a link to the website (or something) may be a good idea for the Tomes information. One idea I had was a "Credits" chapter at the end. It's not clear to me the balance of wanting to keep the main text IC (which means usually no GM names or website links) versus giving due credit in a reasonably obvious location with the correct amount of prominence.

When I am more-or-less satisfied with the formatting etc, I might make this into a more serious discussion. Like what kind of OOC preface is required for copyright of the material (most of it is belonging to Simutronics I imagine), and so on.

Anyway, those are some of the questions I have with the project at the moment.

And yes, you can see with my selection of the personal essay that I ever plan to include things outside River's Rest in all this.

---

>An officer of the Sorcerer Guild arrives and glances around. "Ah, there you are, Vathon!" he says in a slightly agitated tone. "I have come to formally declare that your membership privileges have been revoked."

Very Cool!

Thank you for sharing!