My fondness for PDFs is pretty well known. But I love books, first and foremost. Hardcovers especially. Thankfully I grew up in a town that had a book bindery so I managed to get this done:
It's not great, but it is a hard cover of the old Realms of Horror "super module" of the S series.
The nice thing is it has lasted me nearly 30 years. So I guess I should not complain.
Today we have Lulu.com and DriveThruRPG/PRGNow (and I assume others) for our PDF or physical book needs. We just have to provide the digital files.
Since I already was providing the files for the print copies of The Witch and Eldritch Witchery, I thought I would make my own hardcovers as well.
I like the hardcover a lot. I generally like the hardcover Witch better than the softcover one, but prefer the softcover Eldritch Witchery to the hardcover.
Since I was at I thought why not round out the whole collection.
I am not selling these. You can still find my old netbooks online somewhere. But these were for my own collections.
You might see where I am going here.
So what am I supposed to do when I have this:
But my Rules Cyclopedia looks like this:
Sad. I know.
Well. I love the RC, but cover never really struck me as being "D&D" enough. But you know what is D&D enough? Uriah Heep's "Demons & Wizards". So some scanning. Some work late night when I couldn't sleep and I have this:
I will freely admit I am unsure of the legality of this. I mean I will never sell it (I have my name in it now anyway). It looks like if I own the PDF I can print it for my own use. Of course I don't own that cover art. This would be a "table copy".
That aside I think it looks pretty sweet.
It has been a nice little challenge to put together versions of book I have physical copies and pdfs into something new.
My favorites are this combined Basic and Expert hardcover and a combined World of Greyhawk one.
Again, just my own private use at the game table. But I think they are pretty nice.
I have done something similar to some print outs I made of the Basic and Expert PDFs, which can see here: I Cut up My B/X books! I think I am going to have to print out the B/X Companion as well and stuff it into this binder.
Now we just need Wizards of the Coast to start giving us more POD options for classic D&D books.
3 comments:
Holy cow! I need to make the trek over to my town's locally-owned print shop; I've got quite a few PDFs that would make nice hardcover books, if this place does that kind of thing.
Speaking of which, is the new Rules Cyclopedia PDF accurate? I have an older OCR'd file that has some of the usual goofs (random periods, mixed up 1s and lowercase Ls), which would be kind of distracting in a homemade print copy; does the currently available PDF release fix these? If so, I'd happily shell out $10 for a better file, to print out my own copy like you've done here.
The legality is pretty straight forward: If you are making it for your own personal use and not trying to profit from the work then you can do as you please.
That Rules Cyclopedia has some mileage to it! PODs are a great service, my stopping point is the covers. I prefer hard-covers and so far the price points seem a bit too steep.
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