Bitching about Alien RPG

This post is bitching about the presentation of RPGs, or more accurately a real bugbear I have with the Alien RPG.

I love the Alien genre, the movies, the books, the comics, and even some of the games. But the layout in this RPG hurts my brain. The cover is wonderful in fact the art throughout the book is wonderful. But the problem I have is the layout of the text in the book. Nearly every page wastes a huge amount of space, in a way that seems to be strictly there to bloat the page count rather than be pleasing to user. That makes it a coffee-table book rather than a usable tool for the role player.

Many pages in the book have only a single paragraph of text, and these are not just in order to present the art. Many times this has vast empty space has art in the background, but its still empty space, such as pitch-black shadows, or distant stars appearing as specs.. 

Even the pages that have the most text are spaced out, often using puzzle piece framing that grinds my gears with its visual effects. It separates the text where normal presentation would use headings, BUT these puzzle pieces actually fracture the text in a way that breaks the flow of the text. It makes reading more difficult to read. the changing colours and contrast between paragraphs actually makes reading more difficult on the Mark I eyeball. It may be visually appealing to run your eyes over the page as its left open on the coffee table, maybe you might even read a paragraph here and there, but its just plain difficult to read as a book.

So that's the bitchin over. Its a good game, but a terrible book for the referee.