YearOfMonsters VS itdr

I made some supplements for the TTRPG Monster of the Week; this is the template I created. Here are the finished products. The style is designed to mimic the original MotW books, so it's not directly useful for a Shadowrun-type game. But maybe it can give you some ideas.

The previous (bi-)weekly mystery was Kindergarten Cult, and all my mysteries so far can be found on my google drive. The LaTeX template I use is also available on github.

Last (bi)week's mystery was Nyctophobia, and like this mystery it was made with my free template. You can find all the past mysteries I've put out on my Google drive.

Last Week's mystery was The Bone Collector. As usual, they've been made with my LaTeX template using only open-source tools, which you can use too.

As usual, it was made with my free LaTeX template that you can use to format your own mysteries using open-source tools.

Elvis Has Entered the Building is my second mystery for Monsters of the Week, and while that's a long way from a Year of Monsters, as the name of my free LaTeX template for formatting your own mysteries hints at, it's a solid start. And speaking of that template, it's what I used to make this mystery. It's also free and uses only free software.

You can get the template here, along with instructions on how to use it with your own mysteries and a basic example. It doesn't require anything that isn't free (except time.)

> Creating a theme for tabletop role-playing games would take some elbow grease

The article links to several, including a convincing reproduction of basic Wizards of the Coast house style for D&D 5E:

https://github.com/rpgtex/DND-5e-LaTeX-Template

Here's another 5E one with additional sidebar styles:

https://github.com/anoderay/DND-5e-LaTeX-Template/

Also 5E-inspired, with a template for card accessories:

https://github.com/Krozark/RPG-LaTeX-Template

A 5E-compatible character sheet:

https://github.com/matsavage/DND-5e-LaTeX-Character-Sheet-Te...

CTAN also has packages for Basic D&D-inspired typesetting (rpg-module, also linked from the article), GURPS (gurps), generic hex boards (hexboard), and wargame hex boards with counters (wargame).

There are also indie TTRPGs that've shipped using custom LaTeX templates; this one has CC-BY licensed source: https://github.com/ludus-leonis/nipajin

And the blog author's own, with a more restrictive CC-NC-SA license: https://github.com/Vladar4/itdr

From personal experience, the biggest struggle is non-rectangular text wrapping around images.

Of course, see charsheets.zip at itch.io, or release page.

Into The Dungeon: Revived is written in latex, and is CC-BY-SA. Additionally, the Cairn Bestiary is written using a tex template.

That's certainly an option. Games like Liminal Horror and Into the Dungeon Revived host versions on GitHub. You can then render it to a GitHub.io page using something like Just the Docs.

There are Scars in Cairn (just like in Electric Bastionland) but for advancement specifically it would be simple to use Into The Odd or Into The Dungeon: Revived advancement rules!