For my novel, I wanted to have a different style for conversations (or events) that are happening simultaneously. And I wanted to use Markdown. Rather than sprinkling TeX commands throughout the document, I use annotations, which were introduced by pandoc. Annotations resemble:

    ::: {.concurrent title="Hacker News Thread 1"}
    I'm writing in an HN thread.
    :::

    ::: {.concurrent title="Hacker News Thread 2"}
    This is a separate thread.
    :::

This gets styled in the PDF as:

Later, I could opt to format the concurrent threads as two-column text ... without changing the Markdown source file.

Various styles are packed in themes, which the user can select when exporting to PDF. At present, there are only three themes:

https://github.com/DaveJarvis/keenwrite-themes/tree/main/exa...

There other styles in the Boschet theme, such as speech bubbles, TODOs, and so forth:

    ::: bubbletx
    Speech sent from the device.
    :::

    ::: bubblerx
    Speech received by the device.
    :::

Here's a video showing how they appear in the preview window:

https://youtu.be/7icc4oZB2I4?list=PLB-WIt1cZYLm1MMx2FBG9KWzP...

Creating a theme for tabletop role-playing games would take some elbow grease. When finished, it'd mean people could write their documents in Markdown and reuse the same theme, without having to know how TeX commands work. Knowing TeX commands is a barrier to entry for a lot of people.

> Creating a theme for tabletop role-playing games would take some elbow grease

The article links to several, including a convincing reproduction of basic Wizards of the Coast house style for D&D 5E:

https://github.com/rpgtex/DND-5e-LaTeX-Template

Here's another 5E one with additional sidebar styles:

https://github.com/anoderay/DND-5e-LaTeX-Template/

Also 5E-inspired, with a template for card accessories:

https://github.com/Krozark/RPG-LaTeX-Template

A 5E-compatible character sheet:

https://github.com/matsavage/DND-5e-LaTeX-Character-Sheet-Te...

CTAN also has packages for Basic D&D-inspired typesetting (rpg-module, also linked from the article), GURPS (gurps), generic hex boards (hexboard), and wargame hex boards with counters (wargame).

There are also indie TTRPGs that've shipped using custom LaTeX templates; this one has CC-BY licensed source: https://github.com/ludus-leonis/nipajin

And the blog author's own, with a more restrictive CC-NC-SA license: https://github.com/Vladar4/itdr

From personal experience, the biggest struggle is non-rectangular text wrapping around images.