I have toyed with the idea, in the past of making a game with multiple books that have roughly the same information in each, but presented differently.

The first would be “read this to get pumped” and would be art and prose heavy, all about inspiration and tone setting.

The second would be “read this to learn” and would be a procedural text that described the flow and mechanics of play with lots of examples, diagrams, etc., organized in such a way as to be read start to finish to give a total scope of play.

The last would be “read this while playing” and would be a crosslinked encyclopedia of rules, set to make it easy to find both a discrete rule and reference interlocking rules for quick reference in play by those who already know the basic flow.

But, there are two problems. My first experiments with this went badly, as I didn’t target a specific demographic well enough, and as it turns out “gamers” undifferentiated is a horrible group to try to write for, as they all already think they know what a game text should look like, and all disagree about what that is.

Second, it’s just so much fucking work. So. Much. Work.