A list of resources, tools, and assets for tabletop role-playing and board game design and publising
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Explorer's Design Design Guides are excellent resources for laying out a game text. (Explorers Design)
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Coding Character Sheets is a collection of resources to use web technologies in presenting and distributing games. (Paul Stefko)
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How to Layout Indie Zines and Tabletop RPGs -- Beginner's Guide an introduction to the basics of game layout using Adobe InDesign. (A Couple of Drakes Design Studio)
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Library of Congress "Free to Use and Reuse Sets" is out of copyright work, grouped into 73 themes. No search capability. Perhaps about 1,400 images. (United States Library of Congress)
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Pixabay is a searchable collection of images under a liberal license that includes commercial use. More than 2,800,000 images. (Pixabay)
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Biodiversity Heritage Library’s albums 310,000 illustrations of the natural world, largely (entirely?) from sources in the public domain (due to expired copyright) (Biodiversity Heritage Library)
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Smithsonian Open Access, 4,500,000+ 2d and 3d digital items, all public domain, mixture of photographs and illustrations (Smithsonian Institution)
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Occult Books at the Embassy of the Free Mind has over 1,600 scanned, out-of-copyright books. Article about the release. (Embassy of the Free Mind)
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NYPL Digital Collections (Public Domain) More than 320,000 public domain images. May be mixed with non-public domain works. (New York Public Library)
- Game-icons.net has more than 4,100 clean black-and-white icons for use in games, all under a Creative Commons Attribution license. (Delapouite, Lorc, and other contributors)
- Felix's List is another list of design tools, mostly for web applications, but has many useful links to tools, fonts, art, etc. (Felix Lee)
- Explorers Design also has a list just like this one only, ahem, better designed. (Explorers Design)
Anyone is welcome to contribute by creating an issue or pull request to this repo. Alternate methods for those without a GitHub account will be made available soon.
Guidlines for links:
- The whole list, including the category list and these guidelines, is open to contributions and suggestions
- The focus of the list is on resources for the creation and publishing of tabletop games. Contributions of resources for players to run and create content for their game sessions will be (politely) turned down. This is an understandably a gray area, but the bias is to not include links of this kind. Links only relevant for video game production will not be accepted
- Suggested links should include a title, a URL, a short (one line) description, and a suggested category. If possible, include the name and link to the author(s) of the resource as well
- URLs should be direct links to the site, article, etc. Please no page redirects, affiliate links, URL shorteners, etc. Any non-necessary URL parameters (such as campaign or tracking params) should be removed. URLs that require a log-in to reach will not be accepted