Okay, my meeting with my boss has been postponed by three hours, which is not enough time to start a new work task but too much time to sit around twiddling my thumbs. So I'm making a thread of What Your TTRPG Product's Title Font Says About You: Featuring Only Fonts I Already Own. You just learned about the existence of Google Fonts. You wanted to find something fantasy-ish but with strong generic placeholder vibes because you haven’t figured out your aesthetic yet. Your marketing efforts start and end with 'I made a cool thing, you should check it out because I made it!'
You want to broadcast “medieval” vibes, but it hasn’t occurred to you to look at what real medieval script looked like. Diablo II and Warcraft III were integral parts of your childhood. You have an entire well-developed monologue about why there aren’t more dragons in games of Dungeons and Dragons.
You want to broadcast “medieval” vibes and you don’t care if you sacrifice a trivial little thing like legibility for it. You’re either going to pair this with a carefully-chosen Humanist font as the body text, or you’re going to leave your body text set in 11-point Calibri.
(I should pause to clarify that everything in this thread is for entertainment purposes only and any similarities to real designers' font-selecting tendencies other than my own is entirely coincidental, except in one upcoming instance.) Yes, yes, you’re making an olde-tymey game. Which time in particular? Who knows! Your game might be reminiscent of the 1700s or of the early 1900s, or possibly both?? But by golly you’ve got a font ready for the occasion.
You know exactly when your game is set and you expect the players to research the historical period. You cope with the size of your TBR pile by calling yourself a book collector. You know enough about typography to joke about kerning, but not enough to spot when you should get serious about kerning.
Does it matter when your game is set? You just have to convey that it sure isn’t now.
You're about to spend a non-negligible amount of your life explaining that you like OSR, yeah, but not, like, THAT kind of OSR.
You have a collection of Ren Faire daggers and very strong opinions on “fairies” vs. “faeries” and “fey” vs. “fae”. You probably put way more hours into looking for art assets and doing layout than playtesting. Your marketing efforts somehow always end up involving cosplay.
You have a favorite beach, a favorite chandler, a favorite Instagram template set, and a favorite layout artist for hire.
You think conveying the genre of your game upfront is more important than elegant cover layout, so you’ve reluctantly chosen an unsubtle, in-your-face font. You’re dead set on making up for it with a complex page layout with slanted elements, color-coded terms, and tiny-sidebar text.
You think conveying the genre of your game upfront is more important than the rest of the layout (derogatory).
You think you’re being more subtle than the category above.
You’ve never touched an actual typewriter in your life. You should! Go see if there’s a typewriter store or repair shop near you!
You’re going to use the word “passion” at least twice in your game blurb and your cover art will be a public-domain classical painting. You can't be left alone with a credit card and a device with a connection to Etsy. After publishing your game you will promptly forget to market it anywhere.
You have at least two dozen games on Itch and none of their cover styles match any of the rest. You have vague plans of making a fantasy D&D heartbreaker someday but until them you're just participating in every game jam you see.
You just realized you’re allowed to use sans serif fonts in your game titles, but you’re afraid of choosing a font that doesn’t have enough “presence”. You're about five minutes away from realizing you're allowed to use colors in your game titles too.
You can tell the difference between Liberation Serif and Times New Roman on sight.
You’ve given serious thought to the question “can a font be racist?”
You used to dream of being a magazine editor in NYC, imagining the pristine and pigeon-free subways you'd commute on and the healthy salads and grain bowls you'd get for lunch. You have a favorite Sylvia Plath poem. You haven't worn a suit jacket in a decade and it seems like a cosmic tragedy.
You have strong opinions about at least one of the business cards in American Psycho.
You still half expect to hear the Windows 98 boot-up sound when you turn on your computer.
Oh, you know exactly what you're doing.
[END OF THREAD]