Yagsbook XML Format

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Copyright

Copyright 2005, Samuel Penn.

Redistribution and use in source, binary and printed forms with or without modification is permitted. See the full license text for details.

BSD style license
Summary

Yagsbook is an XML format loosely based on Docbook. It allows rules for roleplaying games to be written in XML, which can then be rendered as more human readable formats such as HTML or PDF.

For an example of what the end result looks like, have a look at Yags which has used Yagsbook for a while.

Documentation

Helpful scripts

Text2Book

Articles

Bestiary

Index

<advantages> , <article> , <body> , <back> , <character> , <characters> , <e> , <front> , <header> , <import-characters> , <itemlist> , <note> , <para> , <s> , <sect1> , <sect2> , <sect3> , <sect4> , <sect5> , <targetlist> , <tm> , <vehicle> , <warning> .

Author

The author of this software is Samuel Penn.

Versioning

Version numbering for Yagsbook has never really been defined. For this reason, the first release has been randomly determined to be 0.5. Yagsbook is still in alpha.

Namespaces

The basic namespace for Yagsbook content is http://yagsbook.sourceforge.net/xml. Currently this is unversioned, but this URL will always point at the most recent version of the namespace.

Game specific content is supported by the use of other namespaces. For example, for Yags or Ars Magica. Character or beast descriptions can be written up with system neutral descriptive text, then followed with structured information for each desired game system.

Yagsbook is an XML format similar to Docbook. Initially is was going to be a few addons to Docbook, but it was soon decided that Docbook was too tied to its own domain (technical documentation) to be useful for a roleplaying game. There are some similarities between Docbook and Yagsbook, but these are for historical reasons.

There are three types of top level documents in Yagsbook and many more support documents which may be included by the top three.

Articles

The principle type of document in Yagsbook is the <article> . Articles are designed to be the top level holder of all other document types, and as such is the only document type which contains extensive header information.

Though besteries and character documents are also considered top level, these can be referenced from an article and inlined. No other document type can currently inline an article.

Articles are the basis of the Encyclopedia and are the main elements of Yags rules.

Bestiary

A <bestiary> document contains one or more <beast> elements and nothing else. Basically, it is a collection of animal and monster descriptions, which may be used to generate a standalone document.

The contents of a bestiary may be referenced and included from an article, or it can be used to generate a standalone document. In the latter case, each beast may be rendered as a single full page.

Characters

The third type of top level document is the character repository, which may be used to generate either a character sheet for a single character, or a booklet of character descriptions.

Character repositories may contain actual characters, character templates or character packages. All follow a very similar format, differing only on what content is required and how it is presented.

A <character> element is split into a system neutral section (the description) and game specific sections (statistic blocks). A single character can be described using several statistic blocks, one for each system.

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