LABORATORY
GREY
Standalone Campaign Guides Project
A graphic design project to create documentation uniformity across a product line.
last updated: 2024/10/20
When a product line develops over many years, it can change hands and adopt different approaches. Fantasy Flight Games has produced a series of scenarios for Arkham Horror: The Card Game intended to be played outside or within the game's typical campaign structure. Each of these products provides documentation in a different style to meet unique packaging constraints.
As a player, I find that inconsistency in documentation increases complexity. Additionally, two products lacked any digital documentation in any form. This project addresses both issues.
As a creative, I enjoy print layout projects, and I've done many-both personally and professionally. This seemed like a fun service to provide for players in the community.
The first two standalone scenarios exist only as cards. To this day, my project provides the only digital version of their documentation. Future releases began to include a small 3.5" x 5" booklet, diverging from the larger 7.5" x 7.5" format that accompanies most other campaign releases.
The goals were straightforward:
- Recreate the 7.5" x 7.5" template in Adobe InDesign.
- Lay out the text and diagrams for each of the 11 standalone scenarios.
- Update styles as needed to create consistency across the releases.
- Provide both digital and print-ready versions for each document.
The process was extensive. The first two card-only releases required manual transcription. Meanwhile, the templating styles became increasingly sophisticated as the game's complexity expanded. Each release contains more text, and layout adjustments were crucial for maintaining printability. Because I completed the guides in sequence, I was able to progressively refine the template.
After the initial card-only releases, the workflow included using Adobe Creative Cloud to extract artwork and text from the official PDF versions of the postcard booklet documentation, then applying them to the new, larger format.
Conclusions
While it required significant focus to finish the full set, I'm pleased with the results. The guides are included in the "official unofficial" Tabletop Simulator mod for the game, as they're far easier to read on-screen than the original documentation.