What do you think about the idea of putting all rules and stats at the back, in a sort of appendix? So I'd put my little bestiary somewhere near the middle, and describe every monster etc. But their stats would all be collected in the back. This would be easier for a GM who can just go straight to this appendix, and look up the stats for all monsters at once, instead of flipping through each monster page somewhere in the middle of the book. Also, weapon stats and such could fit back here as well. Is this crazy talk?

Depends on what your game is doing in general. If it's a traditional adventure game of moderate complexity, then I'd like to have the rules not "at the front" or "at the back", but in their own book altogether, set out to maximize ease of reference during play. (Assuming that you're implying a lot of fluff that would take the "front" position, here.) The setting book is used in a very different manner than a rulebook, after all.

Apart from that, it's a good idea in general to put things in the order you assume they would need to be learned. So if your game has a cool setting, but the rules are just an afterthought, then you'd likely want to have the rules at the back. If there are very characteristical rules procedures, on the other hand, and the setting were molded to fit those, then it'd be smart to give the rules first, so the reader can see how he's supposed to use that setting material with those rules. It all depends on what the game is doing, exactly.

Hi

The English-language d20 version of Engel put the rules in an appendix at the back, and I thought it was weak.

Spione puts its whole game for playing espionage stories in cold war Berlin in chapter 6, the last numbered chapter before the afterword, and it works great.

The difference is that in Spione the early chapters are a "one man's journey down the rabbit hole" text that builds a case for the game. In Engel the implication was that the setting was the important part, and that system doesn't matter.

Paul

Engel is weak because the translation stripped out the original rules, and the d20 appendix stayed unmodified.

This approach worked very well for Castle Falkenstein (R-Talsorian Games). By the time you got to actual rules you had a very good foundation of how the world worked and what kinds of role you might take in it.

I have seen it done poorly as well... There is an example in a box somewhere at home, the name completely escapes me as does the publisher (a telling detail?). In that case the rules were so divorced from the setting that by the time you got there you learned that you couldn't really do what you wanted to after reading the story and setting. You were forced into very typical roles in a world that begged for more flexibility...

Or are you referring to reproducing all the rules from the book again in an appendix?

That was not an uncommon approach in the earlier days of gaming and is still used in some cases (like GURPS quickstart section).

Will wrote:
This approach worked very well for Castle Falkenstein (R-Talsorian Games). By the time you got to actual rules you had a very good foundation of how the world worked and what kinds of role you might take in it.