Idraluna Archives

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.


  1. Nabokov called them "rogue's galleries of words" -- how apt for the OSR!

  2. 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.

  3. 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.

  4. From module G1: Steading of the Hill Giant Chief by Gary Gygax.

  5. From CAS-2: Rise of the Blood Olms by Yochai Gal.

  6. 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.

  7. 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.

  8. 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.

  9. I do NOT endorse the use of nested footnotes.

  10. And there's a handy footnote hotkey plugin for Obsidian if you're working in markdown!

  11. 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.

#LaTeX #Typst #game-design #musings