Thread by @rdonoghue

Re-mentioning: @affinitybyserif has a 50% off deal going at the moment, which means Affinity Designer, Affinity Photo and Affinity Publisher are available for something like 25 bucks each. If you are an RPG publisher, you should at least look at this. affinity.serif.com/en-us/

These applications are functionally comparable to Photoshop, Illustrator and Indesign, and not in a "watered down knock off" sort of way, but in a "fully functional and super powerful" sort of way, but do not require a subscription.

They're not perfect. They're power apps, so there is a learning curve. And there are definitely benefits of buying into the adobesphere which you are passing up (especially on the photoshop side) but they are a reasonable, solid alternative, and I personally use them a lot.

They offer Windows, Mac an iOS support (Though publisher's not on iOS yet), and they have a deep bench of documentation and tutorials to help address the learning curve.

If you are in the budget space where you can afford tools, but can't afford Adobe (which is where a lot of us small publisher are) then I cannot recommend these strongly enough.

Even if you can afford only one, it's worth it.

(If you can afford only one, I would recommend you get Designer - the Illustrator equivalent - unless you explicitly need it for books, in which case, get publisher. Learning to use a vector art app is a game changer.)

This deal has also inspired a really neat RPG bundle - itch.io/b/775/layout-l… - Every two purchases buys an RPG publisher a copy of Affinity Publisher, which is a SUPER admirable goal that I'm enthusiastic to get behind.

And I want to emphasize a point. I'm not recommending as the cheaper alternative to Adobe - there are a number of things that qualify as that - I'm recommending them because they're REALLY GOOD and because as much as I respect Scribus, your life could be easier.

That said, if you are looking at this, and even on sale, the price is a barrier, there are other alternatives:
* For images - GIMP
* For Vectors - Inkscape
* For books - Scribus

These are all powerful, fully functional tools, and if you master them, they will serve you well.

In this case, the tradeoff for price is generally one of simplicity and support. In these cases, the support absolutely exists, but you'll need to do a bit more work yourself to get there.

Or you could say to hell with it all and just use what you've got. No shame there. I'm not sure there's a better tool for screen-focused RPG design than Powerpoint. :)

But it's good to know you have options.