MY TWO CENTS (probably what it's worth)
There has been no one who has praised the skills of @chrisroberts & @carrieallen over the last week or two (early access) more than me and I'm super happy you have them there to help format future templates and make them look as beautiful as theirs. I hope they get paid well for their wonderful skills.
READABILITY
With that said I hope that the guides are pretty AND also "readable"... like in the sense that a normal player says to themselves "I really want to understand this splinter let me go check out the guide and read about them and get a sense of them". A smart player will read a few pages and understand the foundations and then the details become like "common sense" ... they keep saying to themselves "yeah that totally makes sense because I understand not just their values but their motivations and what made them who they are"
And once they understand who the splinter really is with the most important foundations of that splinter set forward then they can go reference the glossary like format.
I personally don't have this format in place in my template and now looking back I'm excited to give that a try... but i've learned a TON from looking at the green after the contest ended both the extremely strong points of design but also realizing there was something that changed after the first few pages of reading their document that made it hard to consume the document. It's because the foundational story to understand them ended too quickly and went into glossary mode and I wasn't prepared for that, i didn't understand green and now I was being thrust into the details of green.
LOOKING FORWARD
Part of what I learned is we all need to improve. In my draft 1 I spent way too much time getting the reader into the head of my splinter and should have worked to do that quicker. I've realized the benefit of quickly establishing the foundational elements and then moving into more of a glossary format with lots of details.
So i just personally hope that these guides can help the players (and writers) to understand the races better and are compelling for us to want to consume them voraciously (at least the foundational parts... but if the definition/glossary stuff is also enjoyable all the better).
I think we'll also see that there are different topics that make the different splinters tick. So the splinters should have a big say in stating which aspects of their society are most important for that table of contents... Black for example is so completely opposite of Green that half of what they spend time talking about just isn't even slightly important to my splinter. haha
NEXT UP
Looking forward to taking what I've learned and applying it and doing the table of content and establishing a strong foundation of the splinter then leaving a lot of details for a quicker glossary like section that fills in lots of the less foundational details.
I think similar to you in some questions that you propose, the green faction is completely opposite and an enemy of ours, it was an important fact but we have taken into account that we are in a global game and although we are like that with green there are other factions that also interact . Especially what I agree with you completely is that it must have a meaning and be consistent, death is not about marriage or cultivating lettuce. Jarvie
@jarvie
Yeah there will be NO table of content entry for marriage in our splinters. Actually hoping they don't expect quite a few of these same table of content entries with Black Splinter. haha
hahaha, it would be nice a wedding in black, we should have been in the same team, I think we would have fun, lol, a hug Jarvie
@jarvie
Haha isn't most of your team spanish speakers? Did you do a spanish version as well. I speak spanish well but my writing skills are horrible.
Yes, we are a group from Spain, we really did almost everything in Spanish but a member of our team put the batteries with translations. Something similar to English happens to me, but my writing is bad. Hey, I've seen your photographic works, they're excellent. You know that in the south of Europe you have your house, you are welcome, thinking head in black, lol.
@jarvie