Footnotes in RPGs
I claim that footnotes1 are an under-utilized typographical tool for TTRPG texts, one that I have increasingly adopted2 for my forays into DIY elfgaming. I find it strange & surprising that almost none of the RPG books I have read make significant use of these eximious addenda.3
The main utility of footnotes for RPGs is to implement a two-level 'information hierarchy' in a way that doesn't inhibit the natural flow of prose. Consider two established extremes of dungeon keying: At one end, we have the dreaded Gygaxian wall of text.4 For its antithesis, I've chosen the Cairn house style -- well-organized but with all the attendant charm of a machine-readable json file.5
Oddly, both of these suffer from a choppy reading experience. The former is overloaded with parenthetical details, and the latter excessively partitioned.6 I contend that footnotes embody the best of both worlds: the humanity of prose wedded to the utility of hierarchical information. With footnotes, one can wax eloquent on the salient features of a location while discreetly embedding cumbersome game mechanics & explanatory glosses in small text at the foot of the page.
In the AD&D example, the Keeper's HP & inventory could live in one footnote, stats of his pet apes in another, and the contents of his treasure cache in a third.7 The resulting paragraph would convey the essential features of his room in a few sentences, with complex features unobtrusively tagged -- available for reference if prompted by player actions. For the Cairn adventure, at least the historical note about the mud sieve could go in a footnote, with the opening sentence & first level of bullets reworked into a simple prose description followed by the bulleted contingencies.8
One might object to the fact that footnotes are limited to only two levels of information hierarchy.9 This is fair, but I think it's worth questioning whether one ever really needs more than two. I don't have a good way to argue this point, but I strongly suspect that a room or hex entry with three or more levels of bullet points can either be rewritten with two levels or would be better off shunted to the higher-level hierarchy of subsection headers. As noted in the Cairn example above, excessively partitioned information can leave one with a vestigial 'top' level denuded of meaningful detail.
With all that said, I acknowledge that the scarcity of footnotes is not without reason. For one, RPG texts are usually laid out in GUI desktop publishing software that requires some level of pre-planned layout. Alongside sidebars, boxed text, & bullet points, footnotes would add a superfluous level of complexity to the page & disrupt standardized grid layouts. Furthermore, footnotes are 'academia-coded' & probably strike writers as being incongruous with 'game' aesthetics. They would certainly look out of place in the highly stylized layouts that are typical fare in the hobby today.
I can't really hope to convince anyone that these shouldn't be deal-breakers, but it seems like the space for footnote appreciators should be larger than it is. LaTeX & Typst make footnote layouts trivially easy to work with,10 and I can't be the only one for whom the mystique of obscure academic tomes & Byzantine knowledge systems evokes feelings of enchantment & wonder apposite to elfgames.11
If you share this sensibility & are interested in writing prose-forward adventures, I therefore humbly submit the footnote as a potential tool for your repertoire.
Nabokov called them "rogue's galleries of words" -- how apt for the OSR!↩
Granted, the 3.4/5 'layout' ranking of my heavily-footnoted Appendix N jam entry did not exactly ratify the arguments I am making here. Nonetheless, I believe that I am correct & it is the philistines on itch.io who are wrong.↩
Notable exceptions: the WIP new version of Delving Deeper, the margin notes in Halberds & Helmets, possibly others? I'd love to hear about others I've missed. Edit: Luke Gearing mentioned that Wages of Sin uses footnotes. Per Houndmoon on Purple OSR, the Eureka beta apparently also uses them, even nested(!!).↩
From module G1: Steading of the Hill Giant Chief by Gary Gygax.↩
From CAS-2: Rise of the Blood Olms by Yochai Gal.↩
I think that the bolded keywords are intended to essentially act like footnotes. However, I find that adventures using this keying style often put too little into their introductory paragraphs, forcing one to dive into the nested bullets to get relevant information. As I note above, the fact that footnotes only accommodate one sub-level of information forces one to be more judicious.↩
Both of these only become relevant after players decide to take some action (fight the Keeper or search his room while he's gone) and aren't strictly necessary for scene-setting.↩
The details of the 'carnage' entry could as well, though my preference would be to simply say that there are dead olms, worms, & bats rather then pointlessly embedding them in a flavorless generality.↩
I do NOT endorse the use of nested footnotes.↩
And there's a handy footnote hotkey plugin for Obsidian if you're working in markdown!↩
Not to mention the wonderful expressive capacity of glosses. The use of footnotes in literature to introduce irony & tension through secondary narratives is nothing new, but I think it has untapped potential for RPGs.↩