I’ve thought about adding some kind of cheat sheet to Beyond the Hearth since day one, but I could never find an elegant way to do it.
The idea is simple: Give something to each player so the Narrator doesn’t have to constantly look things up and pause the whole table. It would also allow players to easily get their Cheeto-chip-dirty fingers on the rules without having to pass around the massive main rulebook.
The board game Root uses small playing cards explaining what each character wants to achieve, allowing you to tactician around them.
Scythe has a DIN A4 quick-glance rules sheet shared between players.
But neither approach is really sufficient for the vast rules of a TTRPG. Even though Beyond the Hearth doesn’t have 200 pages of rules and exemptions, there are still more rules than would fit on a single, double-sided DIN A4 sheet.
But I also think informed decisions are the only way to properly play a TTRPG. So players should know what they can do in any given situation.
So I was really happy when, yesterday, I stumbled across this video podcast featuring Evan from Nimble RPG. In it, he showcased a small booklet that each class receives so players don’t have to share the main rulebook during character creation.
And I thought: This is a really cool idea!
Why not make a Player Booklet for each player, a Narrator Booklet for the Narrator, and one booklet for each Archetype as well, to cover character creation and level ups?
Creating the First Beyond the Hearth Player Booklet
So, after finishing work for the day, I set out on a mission to write and lay one out. And here, I proudly present the first test version of the Player Booklet, which we’ll be testing this Sunday during our weekly session.
I had to learn InDesign and figure out how to print and bind a booklet at home, but everything I needed was only one Google search away.
I wrote the text in Notion, just as I do with everything. Then I “placed”, basically imported, the text into InDesign, which, after a little setup, automatically created all the necessary pages, columns, and even column breaks.
I formated the texts to make navigation and readability easy, added negative space to make it a little more elegant and then exported the whole thing into Adobe Acrobat.
Why Acrobat? I found out that it has a booklet-printing feature. You basically print the first side of the entire stack, put the pages back into the printer, and then print the other side. After that, you just stack them together, bind them, and cut off the small amount of excess caused by the thickness of the paper along the spine.
On the first print, I didn’t realise that my printer prints from back to front. It spits the pages out from bottom to top, meaning it already flips their order internally so the first page ends up on top.
Because of that, the first booklet was completely mixed up.
The second one, however, came out perfectly. I also added those little chapter markers so you can quickly flip through the booklet and find the right section.
All in all, I’m really happy with this addition to our board game elements.
A shout-out goes to Evan from Nimble RPG, who is currently doing an insane amount of innovation in the TTRPG space by rethinking basically everything.
This also nudged me towards printing the core rulebook in DIN A5, as it handles really well at the table, where space is already at a premium. But that’s something we’ll have to decide further down the line, based on how many pages we end up needing and whether we choose to split the rules into a Player Book, Narrator Book, and Foe Book or keep everything together.
Preparing for the First Public Alpha Playtest
Also a quick update on the playtest: In less than a month, our first alpha playtest adventure will be played at a local table with entirely new players and even a Narrator who has never GMed before.
This will be a great stress test for the system’s ease of use and a chance to see whether our goal of making it beginner-friendly really holds up.
After that we’ll refine the Adventure one more time, layout it for ease of use and then send it off in late summer to all our waitlist members together with the Core Book PDF.
In case you haven’t already, you can sign up for the waitlist to bring Beyond the Hearth to your table.
I’ll see you next week, when we’ll be talking about the Warrior Archetype and its first Path: The Art of the Blade, my take on the elegant, anime-like swordmaster.
Cheers, Jonas
