Building a homebrew GURPS sourcebook for free with LaTeX

An excerpt from my current System51 homebrew GURPS setting book.

If you are like me, one of the things you love about GURPS is all of the pretty books. Like, all, of them. Wouldn't it just be the best if your homebrew campaign also had a book? Well, that's what I've been doing for about a year now.

I regularly use LaTeX, and after recently reading Gaming Ballistic's recent post, I thought it would be a good time to go through what I do to make my homebrew supplements.

There are basically two parts to my process for typesetting sourcebooks: good defaults and the gurps LaTeX package (which I maintain).

Good defaults

I'm a big fan of the memoir package for non-scientific works with the twocolumn option to make maximum use of the space without really long lines. Memoir provides good defaults so I don't find myself doing much customisation.

I also use the microtype package to give my documents that extra clean edge, among other things.

Most of my sourcebooks also double up as my GM notes, so it's useful to have little aside boxes (like in official GURPS material!). For these, I just use an uncustomized tcolorbox. It works straight out of the box, but you can change colour etc. as much as you like.

The gurps LaTeX package

I've also started to develop a GURPS LaTeX package and github and on CTAN. (Wherever possible, its good to get the github version as this package is still in alpha.) Some of the features include:

• Automated character environment for quick sketching NPCs.
• Steve Jackson's online policy disclaimer as \SJGamesOnlinePolicyGameAid{author name}
• \dice macros for GURPS dice notation formatting. 

The macros are not super advanced, but useful for quick prototyping of GURPS documents.

Summary

LaTeX is a good match for sketching out adventures quickly. It's use of macros and environments (like the character environment) makes it easy to get things done. I highly recommend it for any GM looking to make their campaign feel a little more special, without having to splash out on professional software.