Change the rules. Keep the layout.
RuleBindery is a structured authoring and publishing system for tabletop game books — built so a fix to one spell, one stat block, or one price never turns into a weekend of manual relayout.
The wall between playtest and layout
Every tabletop designer runs into the same wall. Rules stay fluid through playtesting — right up until the moment they get laid out in InDesign or Affinity. After that, every change is a layout job: a paragraph moved, a table reflowed, a cross-reference chased down by hand across dozens of pages. So designers stall the rules freeze instead, because touching the file after layout costs more than the fix is worth.
RuleBindery starts from a different premise: rules are structured, typed data first, and the printed page is one disposable view of that data. Fix a spell's damage the week before you export, and the layout regenerates itself — page flow, table of contents, index, and every cross-reference included. That's the whole idea. Everything else is in service of it.
What we optimize for
Every product decision runs through the same short list.
Your files are yours
Export your whole project to plain Markdown and JSON whenever you like — free account, paid account, or one you've cancelled. No proprietary container, no export fee, no negotiation.
Reject bad input, don't hide it
We'd rather stop you at a broken reference or an empty table than let it reach a proof. The validator isn't a nice-to-have feature — it's the product.
Layout is derived, never manual
You edit content; the page layout regenerates from it automatically. You'll never place a manual page break in the middle of a chapter.
Same input, same output — always
Export the same project twice on the same engine version and you get byte-identical files. That's a deliberate engineering constraint, not a coincidence.
Losing a laptop isn't losing a book
Your projects are stored on our servers on every tier, Free included — not left in your browser to be cleared. Sign in from anywhere and your work is there.
Human-authored by design
RuleBindery never generates prose, statblocks, tables, or art, and never trains on your content. Not a setting you can turn on — a permanent policy.
What holds when you use it
The validator catches a broken reference or an incomplete table before it reaches a proof. Layout regenerates itself from your content on every change. Your files stay yours — plain Markdown and JSON on disk, exportable on every tier, including a lapsed one.
Who is behind RuleBindery
Munib Ali Laghari
Founder
A rulebook is never finished the day it is laid out. A playtest turns up a broken rule, a stat changes, a price moves, and someone has to chase that one fix through every page it touches.
I build software for a living, and software teams settled this problem long ago: keep one source of truth and generate everything else from it. RuleBindery is that idea applied to tabletop game books. I built it for independent TTRPG publishers, so a rule is written once and the page, the table of contents, the index and every cross-reference follow it.
Before RuleBindery I architected large, scalable applications and built several startups. The work has always been the same at heart: take the repetitive part off someone's desk, so their time goes to the part only they can do.
On the blog I write about the working side of making a game book: layout tools, rule changes, revisions and errata.