This was originally posted back in 2017. It lost the images during my site migration, so I’ve updated it to replace them. This is the first post in a series:

• Part One: Using Random Tables to Write An Adventure
• Part Two: Putting Everything Together
• Publishing An Adventure: Art & Layout on a Budget
• Publishing An Adventure: Pricing, Promotion, & Pre-Release
• Publishing your Work on the DMs Guild

R P Davis also has a really useful video that covers the same material as I go over here, if you’re a visual learner rather than somebody who benefits from written tutorials. You can find that here.

This post is a little late, partly because it became longer than I anticipated it being and partly because I simply ran out of energy this week. I’ve since edited it down to reduce rambling, so it’s actually not all that long now, but anyway. It’s here now, and that’s the important bit.

This was a hard post to write. I’m not a teacher. I have no idea how much use this is going to be, whether it’s condescending and really simple or else it assumes too much and glosses over things that seem obvious to me but aren’t. If any of that is true, I apologise.

If it’s not obvious from the title of this post (and it really, really should be) today we’ll be taking a look at how you can lay out a product that looks professional without much of a budget. Please don’t take this post as a tutorial, or as a set of instructions. As with the rest of these posts, this is simply me showing you what I personally do to get the most from the tools that I have. Hopefully it’s of use to you and will give you some ideas about how you might be able to achieve the results you want, but it’s not intended to be definitive by any means. (What I mean by that, mostly, is that I’m only going to talk about the programs that I use. If you don’t have access to them and want specific tips about how to do things in the programs you do have, I’m not going to be able to help.)

With Bulette Storm I set out to do something new, to set out a proof of concept for how RPG modules could be published. That was a very cheap adventure to put together, too – all it cost me was some stock art, my Adobe Creative Cloud subscription, and a metric shit-ton of time – but a lot of people pointed out that not everybody has that amount of time to throw into production, and that not everybody has access to Adobe products (or the time to learn how to use them if they do have access to them).

I can sympathise wholly. When I released Bulette Storm I was only working 2 or 3 days a week. I had a ton of free time to spend on producing that adventure. Now, though, I’m woking 42 hours a week on top of doing this stuff, so that free time is massively reduced.

My aim with Breaker of Chains has been to prove that you don’t need expensive tools to make a product that looks good (though I’m only talking about the internals, here. Cover art is not in the remit of this post). I wanted to typeset this adventure entirely in Word, a program that – as far as I’m aware – most people have access to. (I’m also pretty sure you could do all of this in Libre Office, too – but as I said a few paragraphs ago, I don’t use that program and don’t know anything about it, so I can’t say for sure).

I mostly succeeded in that. I ended up making my own page background (and one half-part art background) in Photoshop and Illustrator because I didn’t like any of the stock ones I found (and I can put together something of a tutorial for doing that for a future post, if there’s an interest in it), and I reused the table of contents from Bulette Storm over the new background because I wanted to get the damn thing finished, frankly. That required InDesign, but you can put together a table of contents in Word fairly easily. (There are ways to get Word to generate your ToC for you automatically, but I haven’t done it for a long time and I’m not going to try and talk you through it. I do mine manually simply because of the way that I put together my PDFs once everything is ready, which I’ll talk about shortly. It’s not an optimal or efficient way of working. I’m aware of that.)

But anyway, enough introducing. Let’s get to the meat.

The Meat

I’ll start by showing you what the inside of Breaker of Chains looks like.

Ignoring the fact that if you want you make your own page backgrounds – or do half-page art like that first page – you’re going to need some kind of image editor (if you can’t afford Photoshop – and fair enough if you can’t – GIMP will let you do both of those things for free, but you’ll have to learn how), that layout was entirely put together in Word.

The document started out looking like this:

The first page in the final layout was only added in once I’d done most of the layout, so for now ignore it. What you’re looking at here is the content from page 2 to somewhere on page 4 of the finalised layout. I didn’t have a separate typesetting document that I flowed the text into afterwards (like you’d do in something like InDesign). The bare manuscript in this image became the laid out final product in the first image.

Most of it is really basic stuff, and I’m not going to condescend to you by explaining it too thoroughly. I’m just going to cover the key thing you need to know about to start getting good results, and a few RPG-specific cases like good looking text boxes and sidebars.

The first thing to do, obviously, is to change your page layout to two columns. After that, almost everything else is going to be done with Paragraph Styles.

I’m using Word 2010. In this version of Word, the Paragraph Styles box is located here:

Become good friends with it. You’re going to use it a lot.

Defining styles is really simple. Highlight some text that you want to define – say, a title – and make it look the way you want it to look by changing things like the font, the size, the colour, whether it’s bold, whatever. Then simply click the “Save Selection as a New Quick Style” button (or the equivalent in your version of Word – a quick trip to Google will help if you’re not sure) and bam, you’re done. From there on out, whenever you want something to look like that, you simply select the text you want (or simply put the cursor inside the paragraph) and click the corresponding style button to apply it.

The printable version of Breaker of Chains is, for all intents a purposes, a Word document that is split into columns and has paragraph styles attached. There’s nothing really clever going on.

For your main text, there are a couple of useful features hidden inside the Styles menu. If you right-click on one of your styles and click “Modify”, you’ll be greeted by this dialogue:

From here you’ve got full control over every aspect of that style. And for your main body text, take note of the “Style for following paragraph” option. If you want to indent the first line of all your paragraphs except the first one, for example, this is where you’ll need to be. You simply define two different styles – I call mine “First Paragraph” and “Body Text”, inventively enough – and tell Word that “Body Text” should always follow “First Paragraph”, and you’re done.

But we’re not done. The really fun stuff lies under that button in the bottom left. The one that says “Format”. Clicking that will give you this:

Once you start playing around in those menus, you’ll soon find that you can do pretty much anything you want to your text.

When I’ve tried to typeset things in Word in the past and it’s come to making boxed text (for read aloud room descriptions, and things like that) I’ve almost instinctively tried to make them work by using tables. I’ll tell you this right now – don’t even bother trying. You can probably get something that looks good if you really try, but it’s not worth it for the simple fact that you’re going to have to mess around with each and every instance of boxed text in your document to get it to work well. And if it goes over a page or column break, you’re going to be in trouble.

That boxed text is a paragraph style. From the Format menu you can set things like the background colour and the borders. And because you’re using paragraph styles, you can modify an existing style and then save it as a new one. That means you can still use your First Paragraph and Body Text styles, but with added fanciness.

If you’re not doing anything too fancy, you can very quickly typeset your whole document simply by spending some time defining your styles and then methodically applying them to your document. At the end of it, you’ll have something that looks perfectly presentable. But there are a couple of other features I want to draw your attention to, things that will make life easier. And, of course, we need to talk about images – both inline images, and page backgrounds.

Give Me Something to Break

Sometimes you’re going to want to do something a little more complicated that two continuous columns.

The Breaks section gives you control over where text breaks on the page. Simple, right? So, for example, let’s say that you’ve reached the end of a chapter and want chapter 2 to start on the next page. You could achieve this by simply hammering Enter until you drop down a page, but if you then go back and add text to the first chapter you’re going to find that the beginning of the next section no longer lines up with the beginning of the page. If you instead add a Page Break there, then that section is always going to start on a new page.

This is useful for columns, too. There my come a time where you want to vary the number of columns used on different parts of your page. I did this on my Credits page:

The top third (ish) of the page is one column. Then it switches to three, back to one, two, then one. I could have done this with tables, too, but this way is much easier and much more flexible.

Take another look at the Breaks section. There’s an option there under Section Breaks called Continuous. This inserts a section break on the page without forcing the content that follows onto a new page. Each section can be formatted how you like, so you can have one section of 3 columns in the middle of two normal single column sections.

The problem – or the thing that seems to be a problem, until you know how to fix it – is that once you split your text into columns and start typing, you’ll keep filling the first column until you hit the bottom of the page, at which point you’ll jump back up to the start of the next column. That’s where the Column Break comes into play.

If you haven’t guessed already, a Column Break is to columns as a Page Break is to pages. Inserting one will force everything after that point into the next column. That’s how I got those three short columns to list my patrons.

Spend some time playing around with this. If your layout starts to break once you begin inserting inline images – and it will – you’re going to want to know how to use these options. It may feel crude at times, but you can make clever use of breaks to essentially brute force your layout back into line, and nobody looking at it will ever be the wiser. Unless you then write 3000 words on how you’re a hack who’s better at polishing turds than at making good, functional layouts, anyway. (Seriously, “I’ll fix it in post” is something I say unironically way too often).

Which brings us to the next part…

Images

When I set out to typeset an adventure in Word, I was immediately worried about images. I’ve tried inserting images into documents in Word in the past with mixed results that leaned towards the crappy, and I wasn’t confident about how it would turn out. Luckily, I discovered that modern versions of Word have made some improvements with the way images are handled that helped dramatically.

First we’ll talk about the bit that I thought would be hard but was actually very easy. Then we’ll get to the surprisingly frustrating bit.

There are three instances of internal art in Breaker of Chains – one on the introduction page at the top of this post, one on the credits page I just talked about, and this one:

The choice to use very limited internal art was deliberate, because I simply didn’t want to have to deal with the hassle of it. When I’ve tried in the past I’ve found Word’s word wrapping options (that is, the way Word deals with flowing text around images) to be incredibly limited. That’s especially true when compared to something like InDesign. But those options have come a long way, and I was pleasantly surprised by how easy this step was.

The first image, the half page on the introduction, was a cheat really. That’s not an inline image but a background image (sort of – we’ll get to that). The illustration and the background are part of the same image, which I put together in Photoshop and then used as the background for a page split into two columns and then carefully edited until the text only filled the left hand column.

The chain devil illustration is an inline image though. What I discovered was that Word now allows you to edit the wrap points of an image. In the past, Word would use the size of the image as a boundary around which text wrapped. This meant that if you didn’t crop your image carefully you’d end up with big empty spaces above and below it. And if the image had a non-rectangular composition like the one I used, you’d have a really crappy time of trying to make text flow around it and still be attractive.

If you’re not exactly sure what I mean by that, look at the chain devil image again. See how the chain on the left extends into the left column? In older versions of Word, Word would essentially draw a box around the whole image with the left-most point – i.e. the tip of that chain – and the border, and wrap around that. That image would have broken my columns.

Now, though, that’s all changed. Right click on your image and you’ll see this menu:

In that submenu there’s an option called Edit Wrap Points, and that’s where the magic happens. You’ll see when I right click on the image that Word shows you the outer edges of the image. Those are where it wraps the text by default. But I can edit those points:

By shrinking that wrap area, I can reduce the white space on the page and make sure Word doesn’t try to wrap text in the left hand column around the image in the right column. I could even shrink it more to allow the image to sit slightly behind the text, or change the angles of each wrapping line to create an effect like this:

That style didn’t really work with that image, but with the right graphics it can work well, and now you can do it in Word.

This is something you should play around with, especially if you plan to use a lot of images in your product. Word does support transparency in images, so they’re not going to look weird once you add a background.

And that’s where we come to the bit I thought would be easy but that turned out to be frustrating.

Put Him Back In The Ground

I’ve known for a while that Word allows you to set an image as the background of a page, so I thought this would be straightforward. The option is here:

Once you click that, you get this dialogue:

See that tab on the far right? Guess what that does.

So, I thought it would be as simple as opening that up and picking the image I wanted to use. Unfortunately, it wasn’t. No matter what I tried to do, Word always made the background I was using huge. It wouldn’t really be a problem if I was just using a plain parchment texture or the like, since if would still look like a parchment texture. Unfortunately my background has boxes for the page number and bits of decoration, and they weren’t visible on the page at all.

Initially I thought that this was because I was using PNG images. PNGs don’t have any stored image dimensions in them, and some programs don’t play nice with them for that reason. But when I switched to jpgs – which do have the image size contained in the file – I continued to have the same problem, and that persisted even when i made the image incrementally smaller (both in dimensions and DPI). No matter how hard I tried, I simply couldn’t get Word to play nice with my background.

In the end I cheated and inserted the backgrounds with Adobe Acrobat, but in writing this post I went back to Word and figured out a way to insert a background image. And it’s actually quite simple.

First, you’re going to want to insert a Header:

Then, insert an image into said Header:

You’re also going to want to click “More Layout Options” under the Position menu and set the image to wrap Below the text, leaving something like this:

Then, to make the image fill the whole page, simply extend the margins in the ruler at the top of the screen while you’re still in Header mode. This will only affect the margins for the Header. Then, resize your image:

Et voila. A background.

Now, I’ll admit that I haven’t experimented with this as much as I’d like to. The published version of Breaker of Chains has three different background images – the one I’ve used here, one for the title page, and one with the half page illustration. I’m pretty sure that you can set different Headers for different sections of a Word document. If you can, then that’s one way of achieving a similar effect. I know for a fact that you can have a different header on the first page of a document, so you can at least have a different background on your first page.

Again, I haven’t tested this, so I may be talking out of my ass here, but one obvious downside to the sections solution (if it is a solution) is that you may run into issues if you’ve used section breaks to do interesting things with columns. But, again, I haven’t actually tried this, so I don’t know.

In situations like this, though, I tend towards the brute force, hack it together method. If I was only using Word (i.e. I didn’t have Acrobat) and I wanted multiple different backgrounds but couldn’t figure out how to make Word play nice, I’d simply cheat. I’d save each page individually and manually insert the correct background to each page, export each page as a PDF, and then stitch them together with one of the many online PDF creation tools. It wouldn’t be quick, it wouldn’t be easy, but it would get the job done, and nobody would ever know I’d done it.

So, that’s all I’ve got for now. Hopefully this is of some use to you, even if it just shows you some of the things you might be able to do with Word (or makes you think that it’s far too much effort and you’ll just keep using the Homebrewery). Tomorrow I’ll be talking about actually uploading your finished product to the DMs Guild, along with a few tips for things to do post-release to maximise your sales. (I say tomorrow. It’s another long post with a lot of screenshots, so it may well be Saturday. I’ll do my best.)

In the meantime… well, Breaker of Chains is out. You should probably go buy a copy, if you haven’t already.

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This was originally posted back in 2017. It lost the images during my site migration, so I’ve updated it to replace them. This is the first post in a series:

• Part One: Using Random Tables to Write An Adventure
• Part Two: Putting Everything Together
• Publishing An Adventure: Art & Layout on a Budget
• Publishing An Adventure: Pricing, Promotion, & Pre-Release
• Laying Out Your Adventure on a Budget

I went back and forth on whether to update this post or to just archive it instead. Firstly because it’s very image heavy and frankly replacing all the images is a lot of work, but mainly because 3 years after writing this I have huge concerns about the DMs Guild as a platform. Any semblance of “community” that once surrounded the DMs Guild is in tatters. Big players regularly throw their weight around in community spaces, ostracizing and generally bullying anybody who thinks that we should treat our peers with respect. I see new and old creators discouraged on a regular basis, and OBS sees any criticism of the Guild as a direct attack, even when it’s completely justified. Rules are arbitrary, opaque, and selectively enforced, and community spaces that OBS can’t directly control such as the DMs Guild Creator’s Circle group have been forced to shut down.

Then there’s the whole deal with WoTC and Mike Mearls which makes supporting WoTC through the Guild a moral quagmire. I honestly thought I should just take this post down. But it’s still a fact that, for those people who want to write D&D content, the DMs Guild is the easiest place to do it and, quite possibly, the place with the biggest market. Many people who I care for and respect make a sizable chunk of their living from the Guild, and it seems cruel of me to remove a source of information that I know has been helpful for people getting their start in writing RPG content because I disagree with the way WoTC and OBS do business.

So, I’m updating this post in case you need it. But I encourage you to think long and hard about whether the DMs Guild is the right place for you to publish your work before you just throw something up there.

The day has finally arrived! You’ve written your adventure, you’ve sourced art for it, you’ve had it thoroughly proofread, edited, and playtested, you’ve laid it out and designed a cover, you’ve settled on a release date and written all of your advertising copy. Now it’s time to put the damn thing on sale.

Where the last post in this series was very definitely not a tutorial, this post is pretty much a step-by-step guide to publishing your work on DMs Guild. I’ll also spend a little bit of time talking about some things you can do after launch to try and maximise your sales – though I’m definitely not a marketing expert or a salesman, and most of the time with my own releases I just fumble around and hope for the best, so take those parts of this post with a pinch of salt.

This is another image-heavy post. You can click on all of the images here to make them bigger; I’m not going to waste my time putting captions under all of them to tell you that.

The backend of DMs Guild is a little clunky and can sometimes be a bit unintuitive to navigate, but once you know where you’re going the process of publishing content is relatively straightforward. DriveThruRPG gives you a lot more tools to use, because you’ll have a publisher account (seriously, the pub_tools.php page has a ton of features). The way DMs Guild is set up, you’re essentially publishing under the DMs Guild publisher account; I have a suspicion that you don’t have those same tools because they’re available to the people who actually run DMs Guild, and that dmsguild.com/pub_tools.php would allow you to do things to every product published under that imprint, which obviously isn’t ideal.

The first thing to do doesn’t actually involve DMs Guild at all. It involves gathering all the files you’re going to upload together into one place, to make the process of uploading them as seamless as possible. You don’t want to be hunting your PC for the right files and worrying that you’ve forgotten something. You’ll also want to save another copy of your cover image that’s 900 pixels wide.

I recommend setting up a folder specifically for the files you’re going to deliver to your customers, and placing everything there. This is what that folder looks like for Breaker of Chains:

(Yes, I’ve already updated the adventure. No matter how well you have your product edited and proofread, you can almost guarantee a reader will spot a typo that you and your editor missed).

Now, there aren’t many files there, and you may be wondering why I recommend separating them from the rest of your working files. Here’s what that folder for Bulette Storm looked like:

As you can see, there was a lot more to keep track of with that adventure. This step saved me a ton of time when it came to uploading the files.

The second thing you’re going to need to do, if you haven’t already, is make yourself a DMs Guild account. I’m not going to talk you through this bit, mainly because you’re not an idiot and you can figure it out for yourself, but also because I already have one and it’s hard to take screenshots of a process I completed a year ago.

Once you’ve done that, you’re going to want to click on ‘Account’ as the top of the screen (or, alternatively, go to http://www.dmsguild.com/account.php). Then scroll down until you see the ‘My Content’ section, and click “Enter New Community Created Title”.

That brings you to this screen:

This is a fairly long page, and it’s where you’ll do the bulk of the work setting up your product. Be aware that you won’t actually upload the files yet. The first time I published something I had a mild moment of panic once I left this screen, thinking that I’d made the project live without actually including the product. You’re not going to do that, so don’t worry about it.

The top part of that page is pretty straightforward. Enter the title of your product, your name as you want it to appear on the listing, any artists you want to credit on the listing, and the number of pages you want to advertise your book as having. The actual PDF for Breaker of Chains is longer than the 26 pages I entered in that box, but as a rule I don’t include things like the cover and the credits page in the page count.

This is also where you’ll set your price. You may have noticed that Breaker of Chains is now listed for more than the $1.95 I was initially selling it at. We’ll get to that when we talk about post-release strategies that may or may not work.

Scrolling down, you’ll see this:

This is where you enter the text that is going to appear on the listing page. Don’t be fooled by the simplicity of that WYSIWYG editor; it can be a pain to use at times, and doesn’t always work as expected. The best example I can think of is that the paragraph styles (the drop down on the top right of that image) are very inconsistent. Most of the Heading styles seem to me to be the same size, and for some reason Heading 2 is the biggest of all of them.

This step is simple, though, because we’ve already written the text we’re going to include. Simply copy and paste it, and enter any links or formatting you want to include. Bear in mind that the DMs Guild rules forbid you from linking off-site, so you can only link to other products here. That’s why I don’t link to Loot The Room on my listings.

The really fiddly part comes when you want to include images in your listing. [This is actually less fiddly now, because as on 2020 DMs Guild allows you to upload images. I’m letting this paragraph stand for posterity, though.] You’re going to have to host them yourself, since you can’t directly upload image files other than the cover image of each product. I generally host the images myself on Loot The Room, but I’m fairly confident you could use a service like Imgur to do this. The main concern is to choose an image host that you can trust to stay up. You don’t want to have to go back into your listings to update the images if they suddenly disappear from the internet.

Just below the Styles and Paragraphs dropdown menus there’s a square icon with a cactus or a tree or something on it. That’s what you’re going to use to insert images. It’s going to give you this dialogue box:

Enter the URL of your image and a Description and Title. You can use the other two tabs in the dialogue – which I forgot to take screenshots of – to edit some of the attributes of your image. I honestly can’t remember what options you get other than changing the size of the image, which is all I ever use it for. I recommend a width of about 140 pixels if you’re including cover art of your other products (once you have other products). This is the same size as the thumbnails that DMs Guild displays, and it keeps a nice uniform look across your listing which I particularly like. You can obviously display whatever size images you want, though.

With the image inserted, you can right click on it to add a link to it. Do that, if you want to.

Another time-saving tip, once you’re adding a lot of images to your listings (at the time of writing this I’ve got 9 products on DMs Guild, so that’s 8 images in each post), is to keep the URLs of your images and links saved somewhere so you can just copy and paste them as you need to. I use Windows Sticky Notes for this purpose, but a basic text file would serve the same purpose. Since all my images are already the right size, I also don’t need to bother messing around with the Advanced and Appearance tabs either – which is why I didn’t take screenshots of them.

Once you’re done with the product description, scroll down to this:

First thing’s first – upload your cover image. Take note of the highlighted section. I always forget about this. You’ll see Photoshop open at the bottom of that screen – I ended up making my DMs Guild cover image as I was publishing the adventure. Don’t be me. Be better than me.

If your product isn’t an Audio product, don’t click the button that says it is.

Then you add your Filters (which I think of as tags). These tell DMs Guild what your product actually is – and thus, which categories and search terms to display it under. You can select up to three options under each heading. (One thing I forgot to show is that under the Adventures tab you’ll also be able to pick the level range of your adventure. Do that.)

Once you’re happy with your choices, scroll down again to this section:

I mostly leave this section alone, though you can protect your PDF a little if you’re worrying about people copying from it. In my experience that’s not going to happen; plus, under the terms of the DMs Guild licence, anybody can use your work in their own DMs Guild products. Seriously, though, don’t worry about this.

Moving on, we get to the previews. Previews are important. People like to see what’s inside a product before they buy it. That’s just a fact. I recommend enablng both the Flash preview (that’s the one that pops up like a digital book and lets you turn the pages and stuff) and the PDF preview (the one that opens a large PDF viewer and lets people scroll through a watermarked version of the product that they can actually read). 

It’s up to you how much you show in a preview. I recommend giving at least the introduction to the adventure and some of the first encounter. If it’s just your cover art and your credits page, it’s useless. (In fact, I tend to start the preview after the cover page). [A current trend in 2020 is to show the entire product as a preview. Some people tell me that this increases their sales, but I see no way to quantify that. I don’t think it’s needed and won’t be doing it for my products, but you do you.]

The next section is for ‘Optional Information’. I’m honestly not sure how best to make use of this, or if some of these options even do anything:

I imagine that the ISBN and Stock Numbers are remnants of the DriveThru publisher tools, and that they’ll become relevant if and when I start publishing over there, but I honestly don’t know. [I started publishing on DTRPG not long after writing this post. I still haven’t used this fields.]

This is also the first time that I’ve included anything in the Purchase note. I don’t know if they actually display to customers who checkout through DMs Guild or not; I’ve certainly never noticed anybody else using it, but I tend to buy lots of things at once, in which case I probably wouldn’t see it anyway. I also don’t know if the same rules about external links apply here (though there’s no warning to tell you not to use them like there is in the product description).

The next section is the most important one, and it’s the one you’re going to be the most tempted to skip. It’s the DMs Guild Licence agreement.

Read it. Read all of it. Understand it. You’re signing away some very specific rights when you publish on DMs Guild, and you need to be aware of that. I’m not going to break down what those rights are, because I don’t want to miss anything. If you’re going to publish on DMs Guild – or anywhere, for that matter – read the contract. I can’t stress that enough. Understand what you’re getting into, and decide whether you’re happy with the agreement. If you’re not, don’t publish through DMs Guild. It’s that simple.

If you’re happy, check the boxes and click the big red button below that box that says “I Agree, set up my new title”.

There’s a good chance that nothing will happen when you click that button initially. The servers are slow – which you’ll have noticed if you’ve ever tried to download a big product – and there’s a good chance your cover image will take some time to upload. Don’t click the button again, and don’t refresh the screen. Just wait.

Eventually, you’ll see this screen:

This is where you actually upload your files. First, though, you’re going to want to click the “Share” button and copy the link there. If this is your first product you may not actually be able to do that yet – products still need to be approved, but I have a suspicion it’s an automated process. It certainly doesn’t take very long, at any rate.

The reason you’ll want to copy that link is that, unless I’m missing something obvious, there’s no easy way to find the link to your product once you leave this page until it appears on the front page of the DMs Guild and starts showing up in searches, which can take some time. Once you’ve got multiple products you can simply click on your name under any of them to see everything you’ve released, but copying the link at this step is going to save you a bit of time.

Once you click Upload Files, you’ll see this:

I actually forgot to take a screenshot of this page before I uploaded my files, so I had to go back in as though I was going to update the product. Still, this is the same screen (although on initial upload you won’t see that text box asking for details of the update).

If you have multiple versions of your product – a full colour version and a printable version, for example – you’re going to want to be careful here. Your PDF preview is generated from the first file you upload, and personally I always have trouble with this step because the upload tool seems to reorder the files somehow. I’m pretty sure Bulette Storm still previews the printable PDF. [I believe this has changed now and you now have more control over your previews, but I haven’t published to the DMs Guild in a while and can’t be sure.]

My advice, if you want to be sure you’re previewing the right file, is to just upload that file first and let the product go live. (There’s an option on this page to make your product available for sale that I also forgot to take a screenshot of, because I got caught up in releasing the adventure and forgot that I was also meant to be documenting it. Make sure you set it to the right choice so that you can actually sell your product.) Then you can come back in and upload more files, knowing that your preview is going to be right.

And that’s it. You product is uploaded and live on the DMs Guild. Now it’s time to start promoting it in the ways that we discussed in the last article. Make your announcements on Facebook, Twitter, and wherever else is appropriate, and then try not to check the Royalty Report every 5 seconds to see if you’ve sold anything.

Post Release

The first 24 hours are vital for the success of your product. You’re going to be on the front page of the DMs Guild, and you’re hopefully going to experience a spike in sales. The simple fact of the matter is this – the more products you sell, the more products you’ll sell. It sounds like a tautology, but let me explain.

What you’re really hoping to do is to hit the Top 10 Most Popular products list (and, ideally, the top 7, since those are the ones that display constantly on the front page of DMs Guild). I’m not sure of exactly how the popularity is calculated, but I know it’s mostly to do with how much money you’re making. This means that an adventure being sold at $9.95 is going to jump higher up the rankings with one sale than a $1.95 product. It’s hard to get in that top 10, but the products that make it there tend to stick around for a while and tend to achieve bestseller metals.

I’ve never had a product in the top 10, so I can’t really speak to how to do it. Breaker of Chains has been my best performing paid product so far, though, so I think I can talk a little about some strategies that you might be able to use to both get that initial spike in sales and then sustain it, so that you don’t immediately drop out of the rankings once your initial buzz disappears.

We talked last time about the staggered release – i.e. doing a “soft launch” first and then hitting the main traffic drivers the next day. The idea behind this is that you get a spike in sales from your loyal fans and from being on the front page in the Newest section during the soft launch, getting you up the charts, and then sustain it by driving a ton of traffic over the next couple of days.

As I also said last time, though, I’m terrible at following my own advice. So when I released Breaker of Chains on Tuesday, I just shouted about it everywhere. I’m regretting that now that I’m off the front page and sales have slowed down – I can’t really promote the product in the same channels I launched in for a while, because that’s what spam is. Don’t be that guy.

Still, this has been a fairly successful launch. At it’s peak the adventure hit #17 in the charts, the highest I’ve ever been.

At the time of writing this it’s still hovering around #23, but sales are dropping off.

That brings me to a strategy I’ve seen a few people mention but haven’t really used until now. You’ll notice in that screenshot that the price is listed at $2.95, but we launched at $1.95. The idea is that as sales slow down, you increase the price so that the sales you do get hold more weight in the popularity ratings. I’ve never done it before, and I didn’t intend to do it this time – I would have mentioned it in the last post if it was part of my plan – but I can’t deny that it seems to have helped. I have no doubt that it’s helped keep Breaker of Chains hovering around the top 20 rather than simply dropping off the face of the earth.

If I’m being completely honest, I’m not sure how best to continue driving sales at this point. I ran a couple of Twitter competitions last night – none as successful as the one I ran for Bulette Storm, but there’s been nowhere near the same level of anticipation for this adventure as there was for that one – and gave a couple of copies away, but that didn’t translate into any extra sales. Of course, if I’d had a longer release window I could have been sending out review copies – which is something you should do, though I can’t really talk about the process of doing that because it’s not something I’ve ever done myself (again, do as I say, not as I do) – and I could use the resulting reviews to keep talking about the adventure without seeming repetitive.

At the time of writing this, Breaker of Chains has sold 36 copies. I’m genuinely very happy with the initial response, and the fact that people are reviewing it on DMs Guild is fantastic. It’s hard to get people to review things there, and I’m not sure how best to encourage people to do it. If I’m being honest, I often forget to go back and leave reviews and ratings for the products I cover in the Best Ofs. I fully intend to, every single time, but in getting the post itself written it often slips my mind to go and review them on the Guild as well. I’m aware that that makes me a hypocrite, and I’ve been slowly working my way through those posts and reviewing everything, but until I’ve done that and I review things regularly, I can’t complain about people not reviewing my work.

My goal now is to try and maintain those sales. If I can get a Copper bestseller in a week (which I don’t expect to happen, in all honesty) I’ll be ecstatic. As it stands, though, the adventure has already broken even (I spent $20 on stock art for the pregenerated characters, and that’s it), and it’s getting good reviews, so I’m happy. I’m a long way from achieving the sales numbers I’d like to have, but I can’t really complain about this launch.

I really hope you’ve found this series of posts useful. There’s a lot of work involved in making RPG content yourself, and publishing it can be a nervewracking experience. I find it incredibly rewarding, though, and the work isn’t so vast and so difficult that you can’t do it yourself without going bankrupt. We’d all like to be able to commission bespoke art and the like, but you can’t do that right out of the gate.

Oh, and since somebody asked for it, here’s a link to my Google Docs layout template. It’s basic, but feel free to play around with it and see what you can make Docs do!

Breaker of Chains out now on DMs Guild. I’d very much appreciate you checking it out.

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This was originally posted back in 2017. It lost the images during my site migration, so I’ve updated it to replace them. This is the first post in a series:

• Part One: Using Random Tables to Write An Adventure
• Part Two: Putting Everything Together
• Publishing An Adventure: Art & Layout on a Budget
• Laying Out Your Adventure on a Budget
• Publishing your Work on the DMs Guild

Before we begin, let me make it clear that I’m by no means an expert on any of this stuff. The ‘advice’ in this article is made up of things that I’ve done in the past that seem to have worked, and advice I’ve been given by other DMs Guild creators. I should also point out that all of this is ‘ideal world’ kind of stuff, and that – in the grand tradition of me writing advice posts – half the time I don’t follow my own advice, because I’m either too lazy to do it, too impatient to release something, or I simply forget. So, take this all with a grain of salt, and figure out what works for you.

Pricing

First let’s talk about pricing your work. I’m going to ignore talking about free products here – if you want to release your work for free, go right ahead – and I’m just going to treat this as if you want to make some money from your release. Either you want to break even because you’ve paid for stock art, proofreading, etc., or you want to make yourself some pocket money. (Very few people are making a livable wage from DMs Guild. Don’t aim that high unless you want to be disappointed or you have something really, really special and are an expert at marketing, I guess.

If you want the official line on pricing, check out this post by the OneBookShelf people (who run DMs Guild and Drive Thru RPG). The data there is a little outdated now, but it’s still worth a read. Once you’ve done that, come back here.

The first thing to say is that you should pretend that Pay What You Want doesn’t exist. I like the model in theory, I’ve used it to good success in the past for music and other things, but on DMs Guild it just doesn’t work. If you’re going to put a price on your work, put a price on it. If you’re going to release it for free, just have it be free.

So, how do we set a price?

Single adventures don’t really do brilliantly on DMs Guild. I’ve spent the last year [bear in mind this was 2017 and things may have changed] casually observing trends on the DMs Guild (I haven’t done any serious data mining or analysis), and I honestly doubt we’ll see a standalone adventure hit the Top 10 again. These days it’s all about bundling up products at higher price points. But, obviously, you can’t do that without first having released some adventures.

There are a few ways you can handle pricing. The first, and easiest, is to look at similar products on DMs Guild, see how they’re priced, and match them. Looking at the adventures that have done well, the most common price points seem to be $2.95/$2.99, and $4.95/$4.99. Breaker of Chains is a short adventure, so I think $2.95 would be a good price point if I’m matching other people [these days – i.e. in 2020 – I’d never released an adventure for $2.95. I’d set $5 at a minimum] – few people are going to pay $4.95 for a 16-ish page product. (They may well do that on DriveThruRPG and other outlets, but I’m talking specifically about DMs Guild where prices are generally lower).

There’s no real problem with this approach. As I said, it’s straightforward, and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with doing it this way. But I’m going to try and be a bit more scientific about it.

The second way was devised by Glen Cooper of Deadly Dungeon Doors fame, and states that you should charge $0.10 per page of finished product, and that you want your price to end in x.95. I don’t know how long my finished thing will be yet because I haven’t flowed it into layout, but I suspect it will be somewhere around 16 pages. Following this rule of thumb, I should be aiming for $1.95.

The third way to price – and the one that I personally use, simply because I’ve always equated getting paid for creative work with a price-per-word – is to figure out how much you’d like to get paid for writing your adventure, and price accordingly. There are two ways of figuring this out – either figure out how much you’d like to get paid per hour, or figure out your per-word rate, and then price accordingly. Now, I never track how long I’ve worked on something. I should, but I don’t. So I can’t really talk about a wage per hour model of pricing, except to say that it works much the same way as what I’m about to talk about.

So let’s talk about per-word rates. My background as a writer is in fiction – specifically, short stories – and in that world a pro rate was always $0.05 (or 5c) per word when I was actively writing. It may well have gone up now – I’ve been out of the game for a few years – but that’s always been my goal with writing. From what I understand of freelance RPG writing, that’s pretty close to a pro rate here, too (though feel free to correct me if I’m wrong). So, let’s start with a rate of 5c per word and see how that pans out. [There is a movement to normalise higher pay rates in the industry, because $0.05/word is practically robbery.]

The royalty rate on DMs Guild is 50%. That means you’re going to get half of whatever you charge for your product back. Breaker of Chains currently stands at 5,725 words (although I haven’t made changes from the playtest feedback yet). If I price at $2.95 I’ll make $1.475 for every copy I sell. If I’m aiming for 5c per word, then I’m aiming to make $286.25. That means I need to sell 195 copies. That’s a Silver bestseller, though still about 70 copies away from being an Electrum bestseller.

So, is that realistic? Well, at this point in my career, I’m not sure it is. My bestselling product to date (that has a price on it) is Trinkets, which has sold 161 copies since it came out in September ‘16. Of course, it was originally Pay What You Want, so I missed out on any paid sales that would have come from it being on the front page of the DMs Guild when it was initially released, so I don’t know how well it could have done had I priced it from the off. (The caveat to that being that the DMs Guild is much busier now than it was a year ago, and that new releases don’t stay on the front page for anywhere near as long as they used to.)

It gets worse if I decide I want to make my production costs back. I’m producing the map myself, but had I paid someone to do it I’d have spent $26 on it (based on my own rate for black and white maps). If I decide to colour it, that goes up to $46. That means I’m looking to make $332.25, which is 225 copies. It goes up again if I imagine that I’d also paid for typesetting and layout, and for somebody to make a cover for me – but, since I haven’t, and since I’ve never done that, I can’t talk about how much they would have cost, so I’ll just ignore those issues.

So, let’s take a look at how many copies I need to sell to get paid to a satisfying level at some different price points (including a lower point, assuming that volume of sales will be higher if the product is cheaper).

At $1.95 I need to sell 340 copies, making it an Electrum bestseller.

At $3.95 I need to sell 167 copies, making it a Silver bestseller.

At $4.95 I need to sell 134 copies, making it a Silver bestseller.

At $5.95 I need to sell 111 copies, making it a Silver bestseller.

It’s clear to see that I’m aiming for a Silver bestseller here. I have two other Silver bestseller along with Trinkets, one of which is still Pay What You Want, so I’m cautiously optimistic that I can achieve that – especially since my audience has grown since I released all of those products, and I’ll hopefully convert some of the people who downloaded Bulette Storm for free into paying customers.

As an aside, this is where we see one of the reasons why I’m intending to start releasing some products on DriveThruRPG. Bulette Storm has now had over 3000 downloads, but there’s no way for me to let all of those people know about my new adventure through DMs Guild. On DriveThru I’d be able to directly email all of those readers to let them know about the new release, and I have absolutely no doubt that it would do better as a result. Plus the royalty rate on DriveThru is 70% rather than 50%, making it easier for me to hit the payday that I’m aiming for. But I promised a quick and dirty guide to publishing on DMs Guild, so DMs Guild it is.

It’s tempting to take what appears to be a happy medium and go with $3.95 for Breaker of Chains – but I know from talking to other creators that, for some reason, products don’t really do well at that price point. There’s a reason most of the adventures that gain some traction and achieve bestseller metals are priced at $2.95 or $4.95. I can’t explain it, because I’m not an economist and I’m not in marketing, but I’m wary of $3.95.

Luckily for me, I also have Patreon helping to pay me for my work (because my patrons are amazing). That money pays for Loot The Room’s hosting and domain, pays for me to have access to Adobe Creative Cloud, and helps me support some other creators on Patreon. It also pays me for the writing that I do on this site. But let’s assume that, for this month, I’m going to eat those costs myself, treat the site as though I’m still writing it for free, and take that Patreon money as an advance on royalties from Breaker of Chains.

This month I made $81.49 on Patreon after fees were deducted. If we put that towards royalties from this adventure, then I need to make $251 with this adventure. At $2.95, that’s 170 copies. At $4.95 it’s 101 copies. I’m pretty sure I can sell 101 copies of the adventure – but I don’t feel good about charging that much for such a short release.

At $1.95 I still need to sell 257 copies, by the way. I was thinking that I’d lower the price to that point because Patreon would cover the difference, but I still don’t think that’s attainable. And this is where I reach an interesting dilemma. I want to write RPG content professionally (meaning, as my full time job). That’s why I’m aiming for a pro rate. But if I can’t be sure that I’m going to sell 250 copies of something, do I deserve to make a pro rate?

If I lower my per-word rate I’m going to make less money, obviously – but I might see that aiming for a Silver bestseller becomes more attainable. Maybe I should reserve the higher rate for once I’m putting out work regularly and it’s selling well. So let’s take a look at the numbers with some lower rates.

Looking at that, I’m actually kind of tempted by pricing at $1.95. I’m fairly confident that I can sell somewhere around 140 copies of this adventure. At both $0.03 and $0.04 per word I think I can hit a Silver bestseller, which is what I’m aiming for. $2.95 at $0.03 per word is achievable, but that’s still only a Copper bestseller – and I’ve done that plenty of times. I’m trying to grow my business here.

The added bonus of it being $1.95 is that I won’t feel too guilty about asking my patrons to pay for it, either. I don’t expect them to – they already support me hugely, and my goal is to eventually convert enough customers and readers into patrons that I can release everything for Free and be happy. But at this stage, $1.95 doesn’t feel too cheeky (and patrons, please correct me if I’m wrong there).

By lowering the rate I expect to make I can also lower the cover price, and I think that will net me more sales overall. So $1.95 it is. That’s that settled. [In hindsight I was undervaluing myself here. Charge more than $2 for your work, please.]

Prerelease and Promotion

Now that the adventure is out with playtesters and we know how much we’re going to charge, it’s time to start talking about promoting your work. It’s all well and good to just throw something on DMs Guild and hope for the best, but if nobody knows it’s there then nobody’s going to buy it.

The first thing to do is to take stock of your audience. If this is your first product, you may not have much of one, and that’s fine. Building an audience takes time. But now’s the time to look at where you’re strongest, figure out where you might be able to get eyes on your work, and figure out how best to use those platforms.

For me personally, my main audience is on Twitter where I have 1,143 followers at the time of writing this. Not a huge number, but respectable. Of course, many of them are there for my music, but I think these days the majority are there because of D&D stuff. Engagement on Twitter beyond RTs and people replying is low, though – clickthrough on links isn’t the best. (I’ll talk about how you can track this shortly).

There’s also Facebook. I don’t use Facebook much, but I try to stay active in the D&D communities that I linked to earlier in the week. The two main communities that I use are the Dungeon Masters Guild Fanclub and the Dungeons & Dragon 5e communities, which have 105,900 members between the two of them. The Fanclub page only accounts for about 2,700 of those people, but that’s where I focus my energies because that’s where I’ve been the most active. Clickthrough rates on Facebook are also much, much better than on Twitter.

The third avenue that I use is, obviously, this website and the mailing list attached to it. Loot The Room gets about 5,000 unique views per month at this point, and the mailing list has about 150 subscribers. Clickthrough and engagement rates on both are pretty good. The email list gets around 49% opens and 14.5% clicks, so I can aim to get a handful of sales from there.

For me, that’s about it as far as audience goes. I’m not active on many forums anymore, and since we’re doing this cheap I’m not going to be paying for any adverts. Reddit is another option, but my activity there has died off over the past few months and the few D&D subreddits that I’m known in don’t look very kindly on posting work that isn’t free or PWYW, so I’m going to avoid them.

So these are the channels that I’m going to be using to promote the release. Now it’s time to develop a bit of an understanding about the best times to promote things. Those figures aren’t really available for Facebook – or at least not anywhere that I know to look for them – but I know from experience that it’s best to post things when America is active, and generally on a Friday evening.

The problem here is that my core audience are on Twitter, and trying to promote anything on Twitter on a Friday is pointless, because Follow Friday happens. It’s a sea of people tweeting lists of people they think you should follow, and other people responding to those threads. The signal to noise ratio on Twitter is always a barrier to promoting work, but on Friday the noise is ramped up massively. [This is less true now in 2020, as people have cottoned on to the fact that Follow Friday is a pointless exercise.]

What I tend to do – and I’m sure somebody will tell me I’m getting this horribly wrong – is to release on a Thursday so I can promote on Twitter and get some time on the front page of DMs Guild before the weekend happens and everybody releases their new stuff at the same time, then promote on Facebook on Friday. I think of Thursday as a soft launch, and Friday as the main launch. [If I were releasing a DMs Guild product now, I would do it earlier in the week with the hope of having it featured in the DMs Guild newsletter, which goes out on a Wednesday.]

So, looking at my Twitter analytics, I can see that my best times to post are between 12pm-2pm and 8pm-10pm (that’s UK time). So I’ll aim for a release on 8pm Thursday night, since I’m at work during the day. It’s also Critical Role night on Thursday, so D&D talk ramps up on Twitter a little bit.

This is very crude analytics. There are tools you can pay for that will give you much more detailed metrics, and obviously people you can pay who understand this stuff through and through, but all I want is a quick and dirty method to get more eye on my release. This will do for that purpose.

So, I know I’m going to release at 8pm on Thursday and promote it via Twitter. I’ll put an announcement on the Dungeon Masters Guild Fanclub [This group no longer exists, unfortunately. I believe most of the people who were active in it are now in a DMs Guild Discord server, but I don’t use Discord and so know nothing abou that] at that time, too; it’s a tiny chunk of the total audience I’m targetting, and a lot of the people there will be releasing their own things on Friday night, so I want to get in when there’s not as many people posting. I don’t know yet whether to announce the release on the main D&D page – the one with 100k users – on Thursday or to wait until Friday. I’ll play that by ear, and see what engagement is like on Thursday night.

The next step is to have something to post. Which leads us to…

Pre-Release

We have an adventure. It’s being playtested as we speak. We have a release schedule of sorts. Now it’s time to put our marketing materials together – and that starts with the cover.

Just so you know, this is going to be another one of those moments where I give out some advice and then immediately ignore it.

I’m a big advocate of consistent branding. Take a look at the covers of my first few DMs Guild releases:

They’re in roughly chronological order of release, and you’ll see that while the design changed a little – mainly as I added the corner pieces and then decided that I hated them – that they’re consistent. They’re recognisable as being my products. [These designs are not great, but I was happy with them back when I started out. My sensibilities have changed a lot in the past 4 years.]

My aim with these covers was twofold: to produce something simple and cheap that didn’t rely on expensive art, and to have it look like a D&D product. The first step is easy – the background is a few different paper textures from stock websites that I combined with Photoshop’s blending modes and then put under Color adjustment layers. The gold circle and the corner pieces are simple shapes I drew and then made sort of metalish with blending modes and some of the built in Photoshop effects. All of the artwork is either old public domain art, or else a screenshot of the actual product that’s been warped to make it look like it’s beneath glass.

The D&D look comes from the font choices and placement of text. 5e uses Modesto Condensed Bold for its titles, a font which is available to me for commercial use through Adobe Typekit.

I’ve changed this template recently, but the important thing to note is that I use a cover template. Putting a new cover together takes me a few minutes, because the bulk of the work has already been done.

Recently my covers have looked like this:

If you actually look at them, you’ll see that in some cases I’m still using the same background texture that I made for my initial covers, and I’m still using minimal art. On the Chult cover [not included in that image because I didn’t read ahead in this post before I made new graphics], I simply placed the map itself over that background. Bulette Storm took a little bit more time, but no more than half an hour total. First I found a parchment texture that I liked (making sure it had a full commercial licence). Then I took some burned paper edges brushes and distressed the edges of that parchment. I placed the bulette stock art I’d decided to use over it, and played around with blending options and some Levels/Curves adjustment layers until I was happy with the colours.

I wanted to keep costs to a minimum for Breaker of Chains, so I went poking around in the free art packs WoTC have released for DMs Guild creators. (The existence of these art packs is another reason this adventure is being released on DMs Guild rather than DriveThruRPG). In the locations art pack I found something suitable – not perfect, but suitable – and after placing it into the template and spending about 20 minutes touching up the edges and playing with colours, I had this:

The texture is different – I found a free green marble texture that I liked, because I couldn’t make the texture I had look good in green, but that original texture is still under there and being blended with that marble texture.

And, honestly, I’d be more than happy to release the adventure with that cover. But then I started looking at old VHS covers, and I found a usable bit of art for the chain devil in one of those WoTC packs, and I decided I wanted to do something different. This was also prompted by the fact that this cover doesn’t feature the monster in the adventure, and that the people I showed it to got entirely the wrong idea about what kind of adventure it was going to be based on the cover alone. Plus one of my playtesters told me that he’d pictured the location in the adventure exactly the way I’d intended it to be pictured – something that will be undone if I use an illustration on the cover that doesn’t match my intentions.

So I took the Hellraiser VHS cover as a starting point:

And I went to town. All in all this took about 2 hours to put together, and the response to it from the people who’ve seen it indicates that it’s a winner:

Because it’s in a VHS ratio, it’s going to look a little weird sitting at the top of the PDF – I like all the page, including the cover, to be the same size – so I may tweak it slightly before release, but this is good enough for promoting the adventure.

With artwork in hand, it’s now time to think about how this is going to be promoted. I think it’s a good idea to have all your promotional posts pre-written. This saves time, as you can simply copy and paste things to Twitter, Facebook, or wherever when it comes time to announce the release, rather than trying to write new posts for every medium right when you need them. Now is also a good time to write the copy for your product page, too.

Let’s start with Twitter and Facebook. Twitter gives you 140 [now it’s 280] characters plus an image. Facebook gives you as much space as you want, but hides anything after the 5th line under the Read More link [I rarely use Facebook these days, so I have no idea if this information is still accurate].

With Twitter marketing, you’re going to want to use hashtags. As a minimum, you’re going to want to use #dnd and #dmsguild in every promotional post for your product. Twitter also reduces all links down to 23 characters. With the hashtags in there, you’ve got 102 characters to play with – which includes punctuation and spaces. So let’s write a few tweets, aiming for 100 characters. We’ll start with the obvious and get more complex. (And, obvously, the links in these sample tweets don’t go anywhere.)

In most of these tweets, there’s also room to throw in a few more hashtags – things like #dnd5e, #rpg, or whatever. These will increase the reach of your post a little bit.

Facebook lets you give some more detail about the product itself. You also can’t generally post as often there – groups are pretty anti-spam as a rule (and I’m obviously not encouraging you to spam links), and the main D&D 5e group only allows you to make one promotional post per week, so we only need to write one post. It looks a little like this:

Breaker of Chains is now available on the DMs Guild!

Click here to download now – http://somethingsomethingbuyitnow.com

The shrine on the edge of town has been little more than a landmark for generations – but now eerie runes have begun pulsing across its surface, and rumour has it a dark force is growing. Now the party must investigate the threat, and destroy whatever lurks inside the Hall of Lament once and for all.

Breaker of Chains is a 4 hour old school adventure for characters of levels 6-8, featuring tricks, traps, exploration, traps, and ritual sacrifice. Never again will your players waltz into a dungeon convinced that you aren’t willing to kill them in new and horrible ways!

“It’s good to have an actual death dungeon…They survived but it was brutal!”

“10/10 for making them wary of everything”

“They were all old school gamers, and happy to play in a murder maze”

Click here to download now – http://somethingsomethingbuyitnow.com

It’s straightforward really. You’re saying “hey, this thing is available, and you should buy it. Here’s what it’s about, here’s what other people thought of it. YOU SHOULD BUY IT!”

And honestly, I’ll pretty much use that text as-is in my listing on the DMs Guild page when I publish it.

Depending on the services you have available to you, you could potentially start scheduling some tweets and posts now. If you pay for bit.ly, you can set up the posts with the link in place and then edit the destination URL of your shortened link once the product is published. I don’t pay for bit.ly, though, so I won’t be able to do that. It’s enough to know what I’m going to be tweeting and when I’m going to do it, though.

In an ideal world, you’d have that cover art good to go before you look for playtesters. Putting out a call for testers with the art in the post not only ensures more engagement with the posts – images do well online, that’s simply a fact – it also means that people will recognise the art when you release the product and start shouting about it.

As for building a pre-release buzz… I’m not actually very good at that. Bulette Storm got a lot of attention, partly because people reacted so strongly to the cover, partly because it was free, and partly because I was nominated for an ENnie at the time and some of the bigger names in the industry were paying attention to me. I don’t know if I’ll be able to replicate that with Breaker of Chains.

One thing that isn’t going to work is simply spamming your cover art and a “coming soon!” tweet a few times a day. People will get sick of that fast, and they’ll stop paying attention to you. What I like to do is to be very vocal and visible about the work that I’m doing on a product in the week or two before release. Posts like this help, obviously. And I’ll tweet out in-progress screenshots once I start to do layout, and things like that. Creating a discussion is always preferable to trying to sell to people, in my opinion.

Here’s a little prerelease checklist for you, covering the things we’ve talked about today. It’s not exhaustive – like I said, I’m not an expert – so if you think I’ve missed anything, let me know.

1. Settle on a price for your work.
2. Decide on a release date.
3. Pick the channels through which you will promote.
4. Decide on the best times to promote.
5. Produce your cover art.
6. Write your promotional copy and tweets.
7. Begin talking about your upcoming release on your social media channels.

Big releases obviously go through a much more involved process, but for the hobbyist with no budget – which is what we all are on DMs Guild, really – this is a solid groundwork. Or I’m wrong, in which case you’ll all get to see me fail publically when Breaker of Chains flops.

And I guess that’s the final point. Don’t be afraid of failure. Put your work out there, see what works, and learn from what doesn’t. Then make the next thing, and do better that time.

That’s all for today. On Monday I’ll show you the finished map from Breaker of Chains and we’ll talk some more about internal layout. And, as requested, I’ll give you a link to my adventure writing template, too.

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Image Credit: Market scene, Calcutta, West Bengal. Coloured etching by François Balthazar Solvyns, 1799. Credit: Wellcome Collection. Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

This was originally posted back in 2017. It lost the images during my site migration, so I’ve updated it to replace them. This is the first post in a series:

• Part One: Using Random Tables to Write An Adventure
• Publishing An Adventure: Art & Layout on a Budget
• Publishing An Adventure: Pricing, Promotion, & Pre-Release
• Laying Out Your Adventure on a Budget
• Publishing your Work on the DMs Guild

So this post is a little late. I had it ‘finished’ when I posted the first part, and then completely forgot to schedule it. Since it was already late I decided to take a bit more time to flesh it out a bit more, because I felt it was a little sparse. Then, of course, Saturday rolled around and I was too exhausted to actually type up any of the extra work I’d done, so I decided to push it back another day.

To recap: last time we rolled up a random dungeon using the tables in the Dungeon Master’s Guide, then used Deadly Dungeon Doors and the Random Dungeon Room Generator to create some of the internal elements of the dungeon. When we left off I had an adventure hook, a list of doors to be used in the dungeon, a list of potential room names, and the vague idea that I wanted to include a Chain Devil and the themes of iron, rust, and bone.

That’s about as far as I feel you need to go when designing a dungeon with random tables. If I was building this adventure for my own game, I probably wouldn’t go much further than that. That’s enough information for me to run the dungeon at the table, in all honesty. I might plan a couple of encounters, but I’m pretty good at winging things at the table and these days that’s about all the prep I do for games.

But, as with every project I touch, the scope of this little post on using random tables to build adventures has grown as I’ve been working on it, to the extent where I’m now planning to take this adventure all the way through to publication on DMs Guild. That means that I have to do some more work on it. It means I have to take those elements I generated randomly and put them together into a coherent adventure that people are going to want to a) run for their players and b) pay money for.

In this article we’ll look at how I take those bits of detail that I’ve generated and flesh them out. The next couple of posts – tomorrow, and on Friday – will look at the technical aspects of publication, including laying the document out, sourcing art without breaking the bank, and a rough guide to the DMs Guild publication process. There are a couple of reasons why the last part is coming on Friday rather than Wednesday; the first is that this coming Wednesday is the last one in the month, and thus is reserved for my Best Of DMs Guild post. The second is that proofreading and playtesting are integral parts of the publication process, and that’s what’s going to be happening this week. But we’ll get to that.

The process of actually fleshing out the adventure is something that’s quite hard to document, because so much of the work involved in it is purely mental. This is the part of the process that is fairly unique to individual writers and that can’t really be codified into a simple Step 1, Step 2, Step 3 sort of format. Still, I’m going to do my best to talk you through the process I went through and to illustrate how those scraps of information evolved into a finished module over the course of a day or two. This may not be the most useful guide simply because my writing process is so specific to me, but I hope it will at least give you an idea of the kind of decisions you’ll have to make if you decide to do this, and that it will help you see that there’s no real science to writing something.

You may well be familiar with the following picture:

Using the random tables was me drawing the circles. This is step two.

The Rest of the Fucking Owl

For some reason I find it much easier to do creative work by hand rather than at a computer, so my first step was taking the important information from the last post – the map, the hook, the doors, and the list of rooms – and transferring them to my notepad. This goes everywhere with me, and most of the work I do in it is jotting down very quick notes whenever they occur to me, and writing whatever I can while I’m commuting to work. It’s less like actual writing and more like a running log of the work that my subconscious is doing while I’m going about my day.

In generating the content from the random tables, I’d already had the idea that this would be some kind of puzzle dungeon/key hunt. I’d also decided that I wanted to feature a chain devil in the dungeon. The main ‘problem’ (and I use that term loosely, because I didn’t really struggle with it – the ‘solution’ came very quickly) was to find a way to combine those things into something that a) I’d enjoy writing and b) people would enjoy playing.

Once I generated the doors and realised they were all iron, I started picturing the entire dungeon as being built from iron. I kept picturing a squat iron structure covered in rust, nestled in a ruined, blasted part of some town or city. I knew that this was ancient, that it had lain sealed and dormant for a long time, some kind of crypt or tomb. But a tomb screamed “undead”, and I didn’t want to write an undead dungeon.

The answer came quickly because the answer was in the question. This isn’t a tomb – it’s a dungeon, in the classic sense. That is, it’s a place where prisoners are held. And who is imprisoned here?

That’s obvious, isn’t it? This is a prison for a chain devil. It’s not so much designed to keep adventurers out – although it does that, too – as it is to keep the monster sealed within it in.

Looking at the map, though, it doesn’t really seem to work with that purpose in mind. I’d like there to be some kind of central or final room that the rest of the dungeon flows towards, where the final encounter with the chain devil can take place.

At this point there are two options; I can either stick to the map I have and figure out a concept that better suits it, or start changing the map to suit what I’m building. This is where it’s important not to be a slave to the random rolls. I like the idea of a dungeon built to seal this monster inside it, and I don’t want to start again with that. And since the point of this exercise was to generate something quickly, I don’t want to have to completely redraw the map. So, instead, I start tweaking things on the map I already have. [Originally there was an image here showing my hand-drawn changes and notes on the randomly generated map. I’ve lost that, unfortunately, so I’ve instead replaced it with a side-by-side image of the original map with the one that ended up in Breaker of Chains so you can easily see the adjustments I made.]

That isn’t pretty, obviously, but I’ll redraw it once it comes time to put together the adventure for publication.

I’ve made two major changes here. The first is that the entrance is now located in the bottom left of the map. The second is the addition of another room on the bottom of the map and a secret room at the top of the map. These serve two purposes; firstly, it makes the circular chamber – where the chain devil is sealed (and we’ll get to that) – central to the dungeon, and secondly it makes the outline of the map a little more square. I’ve been picturing a squat, square structure, which the original map didn’t really show. This is a bit better. I’ve also numbered the rooms for ease of referencing them.

So now I go back to my doors. The random doors we generated last time gave me two results that I really liked – the platinum door with multiple locks, and the iron door with six magnetic studs embedded in it. I had already wondered whether the platinum door should be the entrance to the dungeon or (as Deadly Dungeon Doors suggests) the door hiding the boss fight, and I’ve now decided that it should be both. Sort of.

I’m keeping the platinum door with multiple locks as it is, and that’s going to be the entrance to the dungeon. I want to let the players know right off the bat that it takes more than one key to open some of the doors in this dungeon. I also want them to realise quickly that platinum doors are special and require multiple keys; since there will only be two in this dungeon, they should realise what’s going on as soon as they see the second platinum door.

That second platinum door, I’ve decided, isn’t really a door at all. It’s a huge disk of platinum – sort of like a plug, or a cork – embedded in the floor of that central circular room. Beneath it is a deep pit where the Kyton is kept locked up. Its surface is studded with those magnetic disks which are used to activate the locking mechanism; the players will have to search the dungeon to find the multiple disks needed to unlock that plug.

The idea is that even though the final door doesn’t actually look like a door, the players will hopefully realise that the only other big piece of platinum they’ve seen in the dungeon thus far is a door. I’m also going to indicate this through environmental cues and discoveries in the dungeon. Maybe they’ll find an ancient text left by the builders of this place that details the functioning of the prison, or else maybe there’s a mural of some kind on the walls in the entrance chamber that contains clues.

Since the Kyton is imprisoned here, it doesn’t make much sense for me to include chains as hazards in the dungeon; the chain devil can control them, so his jailers would have made sure that there were none in the building. Obviously I need to somehow have chains appear in the final battle, or else we lose out on half of the flavour of the monster and half of the power of the monster, but we’ll get to that.

Instead, I now need to figure out what kind of hazards would be included in the chambers of this dungeon. They need to fit a few criteria:

1. Be long-lived enough to have survived for as long as the prison has been standing.
2. Be able to prevent the Kyton from leaving the dungeon if it ever escapes its oubliette.
3. Be able to prevent would-be looters from gaining the keys found in the dungeon and freeing the chain devil.

The first point tells me that I can’t really use any living monsters in the dungeon unless I use undead. It is a horror module, in theory, so undead do fit, but I’ve already mentioned that I don’t really fancy writing an undead-heavy module.

I can obviously use traps – and I will use traps – but a whole dungeon filled with traps can get a little samey very quickly. I need to vary things a little. So what else could populate this dungeon? What, besides traps and locked doors, can act as a guardian?

The obvious answers are constructs – either mechanical, or else things like golems. There’s also the option of elementals, but they don’t really seem to fit the themes that I’m wanting to play with. I’m also struggling with the bone-handled door, and trying to figure out how that ties into the dungeon. As with the map, I can obviously change this or disregard it if I want to – again, I’m not going to be a slave to the tables – but it’s such a cool image that I don’t really want to.

I’m not sure exactly what to do at this point, so I let those ideas sit, and start fleshing out the bits of the map that I do know about. I don’t necessarily come up with all the encounters yet – vague ideas of what each room contains will do for now. Still, I keep in mind that this is a small side-quest adventure, and this that in mechanical terms it needs to comprise roughly a full adventuring day’s worth of challenge. I tend to ignore this requirement when I build adventurers for my group, but for publication it’s nice to keep things as close to RAW balance as possible.

So, let’s remind ourselves of the rules surrounding the adventuring day. Looking at page 84 of the Dungeon Master’s Guide, I know that most adventuring parties can handle 6 to 8 medium or hard encounters in a day. A chain devil is CR 8, but since I’m using him as a solo boss I’m going to make this adventure suitable for a 7th level party; I want that fight to be hard, and CR gets a little wonky when you throw a solo monster against a full party.

At 7th level, the adjusted XP per day per character is 5,000. Most published modules are balanced for a party of 4 to 6 characters, so I’m going to build encounters for parties of 5 characters as a baseline. That means I’ve got a budget of 25,000 XP for the adventure, split between around 6 encounters. Looking at the tables on page 82 of the Dungeon Master’s Guide, I can see that for a 7th level, 5-character party, the threshold for a Medium encounter is 3,750 XP and for a Hard encounter is 5,500 XP. A chain devil clocks in at 3,900 XP, which is actually still a Medium encounter despite being CR8 (and that’s true for a party of 4 characters, too, despite the threshold for Hard being lower). That leaves me with a budget of 21,100 XP for the rest of the day. If I throw in one Hard encounter and make the rest Medium, I’ll come close to filling that budget and having a ‘balanced’ adventure.

We’re not quite at the stage where that information is entirely useful at this point, but it’s good to bear it in mind as I flesh out the rest of the rooms. At this stage, all I need is a vague idea of what each space holds.

Firstly, that narrow passage between rooms 3 and 6. I had already decided that it was a secret passage, but that doesn’t seem to fit with the concept of the dungeon – why would somebody build this place, lock the keys behind other locked doors, and then build a secret entrance to bypass them? It doesn’t make sense.

What does make sense, though, is that elaborate trap rooms don’t just work by magic. (Well, they can, but that’s lazy). If room 6 contains some kind of whole-room trap, the dungeon needs space to account for the mechanisms that drive said trap. If you can read my handwriting [which isn’t present on the new image because I lost that picture], you’ll notice that this is what I wrote in the secret room between rooms 3 and 6, just above that hidden passage. Secret room – trap mechanism?

So that secret passage becomes a ventilation tunnel of some kind, and it’s going to branch off into that hidden room where the mechanisms driving the traps in room 6 lie. If the players discover this, then they can not only bypass at least one locked door but can also potentially disable – or weaken, at least – the hazard that they’ll face in room 6, and potentially recover one of the keys a little easier. That seems like a good reward for having found the secret tunnel to me.

I know that rooms 4 and 9 don’t contain any of the puzzle pieces, because they’re attached to the central chamber without any locked doors between them. I don’t know exactly what will be in them yet; room 4 should contain some kind of hint as to the solution to the puzzle of the door in room 7, I think – something that indicates where the keys can be found, and maybe gives a hint as to what is sealed here.

7 is fairly straightforward. It’s the giant platinum disk embedded with magnetic plugs, which seals the chain devil beneath it. I’m also making this room the Emerald Oblivion, from the list of room names that I generated earlier. It’s entirely green and heavily warded against the devil – but the wards are breaking, and as a result people have been able to enter the dungeon once again.

I haven’t forgotten that the original plot hook I generated calls for a restless, potentially vengeful adventurer’s ghost. I figure he’s the remnant of the last person who managed to gain access to the dungeon. I also don’t think he ever got past the door in the south of room 3. His corpse is still there, slumped at the bottom of the door where the traps on the lock killed him. I don’t think his finger is being used as the handle, as much as I like that image, but that may change when I come to write up the room. Perhaps he’s a ghast or a wight, and the party have to fight him; perhaps his spirit still remains and can either attack the party or give them a clue that leads to the discovery of the secret vents that will lead to area 6. (See how I’m going back and forth on the idea of undead being in the dungeon? That’s common when I write adventurers; I like to keep my options open until I have a more solid idea of how everything fits together. Plus, I like playing what if?).

Room 1 is also pretty straightforward. It’s the entrance chamber, and contains the first trapped door of the dungeon. It should also contain some kind of story information that gives hints as to what will be found later in the adventure, as well as some kind of red herring to make the party think they really are just trying to slay a restless spirit. Maybe this is where they find the adventurer’s finger bone wedged into the handle of a door, and they find the rest of his body a little later on.

Room 2 gives me pause, since it’s a large space and I’m not entirely sure yet what purpose it serves. It’s big enough to provide room for a large combat encounter if I want one. Perhaps there’s some kind of army of constructs here, the last line of defence if the chain devil frees itself and tries to leave its prison. Looking at my list of rooms, though, I’m also drawn to The Cave of Forgetfulness. It’s not a cave, this room, but it could certainly be the Hall of Forgetfulness. Maybe this is both the last defence against the chain devil and the first defence against anybody trying to free it – a magical effect that modifies memory in some way so that the those entering it forget why they came here.

Of course, if there’s an army of guardians in Room 2, it could also be the Green Guard Post. Maybe the constructs are formed from the same green material that Room 7 is constructed from.

Room 8 is either the Whirling Chimney or the Winter Abreuvoir. There’s an elemental trap of some kind here – either air, water, or cold, I’m not sure what yet – that must be navigated to retrieve the key.

Room 9 is going to be similar to Room 8. It might contain story information, or another clue to one of the traps in the dungeon, but there’s no challenge here as such.

Room 5 is another challenge, and another key. This is the Crooked Trophy Taker. I think the players will face a choice here; give up a part of themselves, or something that grants them power, in exchange for the ke, or else fight for it. Since it’s a horror module, I don’t think asking for some kind of blood sacrifice is out of the question.

And with that, we have most of an adventure. Let’s have a look at it all in a briefer, more intelligible form.

If we treat each of the traps as an encounter, then we have too many encounters – but if we make them Easy, then the budget can hold more encounters and they also don’t take as long/as many resources to overcome. I’m aiming for a constant chipping away of resources before the final battle, so that works nicely.

The only thing remaining to do now is to write up the encounters and redraw the map before getting it out to playtesters and proofreaders, then flowing it into layout and putting the final document together.

Writing It Up

If you want to publish regular content, one of the most important things to sort out early on is your workflow. I’m still struggling with that – that’s the reason I still haven’t managed to put out one new release a month, as I said I was going to try to do. Something that’s been invaluable to me, though, is putting together templates to work from. Not only do these save time, but they help to ensure a consistency in format and presentation across all of your releases that really helps when it comes to building a brand.

I’m not just talking about things like cover templates and InDesign templates for layout, either. Something I find very useful is having a template for writing encounters. If you own any of the official WoTC-produced adventure supplements – Storm King’s Thunder, Tales From The Yawning Portal, whatever – take a second now to flick through them. You’ll notice that all of the encounters are presented in the same way, which looks something like this:

[Alas, this image has gone the way of the dodo, and since I don’t use the same templates anymore I no longer have it. Have a glance in any WoTC hardcover and you’ll get a sense of what I’m talking about here, though.]

This is pretty much the template that I use to write encounters. Once I know roughly what each room will contain, I put together a basic Word document with space for each of the maps on the key. With a template like this in place, writing a site-based adventure – i.e. one that doesn’t require many interactions with NPCs, or a lengthy investigation section – very straightforward. Bulette Storm took a long time to write due to the first section, where the party were encouraged to explore a large area and speak to lots of people.The latter sections of that adventure, which were mostly combat-based, fell into place very quickly.

And really, all that’s left to do at this stage is to write the thing. So that’s what I’m going to do now.

Tomorrow we’ll take a look at the redrawn map, and I’ll talk a little about sourcing art and beginning to think about publication – including laying the adventure out in a more presentable form than a basic Word document, proofreading, and organising playtesting.

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Image Credit: A silver mine: miners digging. Wood engraving. Credit: Wellcome Collection. Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

This was originally posted back in 2017. It lost the images during my site migration, so I’ve updated it to replace them. This is the first post in a series:

• Part One: Using Random Tables to Write An Adventure
• Part Two: Putting Everything Together
• Publishing An Adventure: Pricing, Promotion, & Pre-Release
• Laying Out Your Adventure on a Budget
• Publishing your Work on the DMs Guild

Yesterday I finished talking about how I take results from random roll tables and turn them into enjoyable, coherent adventures. Today I want to talk about how to go from completed manuscript to publication on a site like DMs Guild without breaking the bank. This post will cover internal layout, art, and maps. It’s not intended to be an all-encompassing guide to self-publishing RPG content; think it of more as some quick and dirty advice from somebody who has been operating on little to no budget for the past 10 months or so.

On Friday I’ll discuss how to actually publish to DMs Guild. The reason I’m leaving that until Friday is simple; before you publish anything, you should make sure it’s proofread (and copyedited, if you can afford it) and playtested as much as possible. The adventure we’ve been building over the last week – which I’m calling Breaker of Chains, by the way – is currently with my two proofreaders, and I’m planning to send it out to playtest groups tonight or tomorrow (just as soon as I get that updated map finished).

For a beginning writer, this step can sometimes be the most daunting. If you don’t know many people in the community it can be hardot put together playtest groups. Similarly, proofreading can be a big expense. Unfortunately, though, an obvious lack of proofing and playtesting stands out a mile, and it can be enough for many readers to put your adventure down and never buy it, let alone play it.

The best piece of advice I can give you here, if you’re like me and operating with very little money, is to go and join the Dungeon Masters Guild Creator’s Circle and Dungeon Masters Guild Fanclub communities on Facebook. Yes, Facebook. Personally I hate the place and rarely use it; when I do use it, it’s often for those two groups alone. They’re full of people with a ton of experience writing and publishing DMs Guild content, and they’re very often incredibly generous with time and advice. There’s drama from time to time, as there is on any Facebook group (and I tend to stay out of that as much as possible, as should you), but overall those two groups are incredibly valuable to new creators. You’ll often be able to find a proofreader for a very reasonable – and by reasonable, I mean cheap, frankly – rate, and it’s very easy to get a playtest group there.

Seriously, don’t skimp on proofing and playtesting. It shows.

Once you’ve sent your writing to your proofers and your playtesters, you’re probably going to be eager to start putting it into layout and making it look professional. Don’t do that yet. You’re going to get a lot of suggestions from both the people proofing/editing it, and the people playing it, and it’s much easier to make changes to your manuscript when it’s in a raw form, before you’ve started to make it look pretty.

While you’re waiting, though, you can be thinking about…

Art

There are three kinds of art you’re generally going to need in your product: cover art, internal art, and cartography. And from a financial standpoint, this is one of the biggest hurdles to a new creator. It’s still a huge hurdle to me, and I’ve been doing this for nearly a year now. Art can get expensive. (And before you start – that isn’t a complaint. I can’t wait to be able to afford all the gorgeous custom art I could ever need, and I’ll happily pay for it when I can.)

Luckily, there are very affordable resources out there in the form of stock art. We’ll get to it in a minute, but first I feel morally obliged to say this, in big bold letters:

DO NOT just use that cool art you found on Google Image Search or Pinterest. It isn’t yours, it isn’t licensed to you, and you’re not legally allowed to use it. Don’t be that guy.

Now that that’s said, let’s talk about stock art. I’m not intending for this to be any kind of guide to rights and copyright law, so let’s just take it for granted that before you use any art you’re going to check the license being granted to you and be sure that you’re using it correctly, OK? Good.

There are some great sources of stock art out there, and one of them just happens to be the place where you’re going to be publishing: DMs Guild. Seriously, look. All of that art is available for you to use in your DMs Guild products, and in many cases it’s free. A lot of it has been provided by Wizards of the Coast specifically for use on DMs Guild, too (although you won’t be able to use those WoTC art packs if you’re intending to publish anywhere other than DMs Guild). That means that it’s often art taken from official releases from older editions. Admittedly, some of it isn’t cropped very well, but there’s enough there for you to make creative use of.

Now, stock art comes with one big limitation; it’s stock. It’s not custom to your adventure. That means that you can often struggle to find art that is suitable to what you’re writing. My advice to you, if you’re on a tight budget and can’t stretch to custom art, is to find some art you’d like to use first and then write an adventure to fit it. (That’s advice that I didn’t follow myself with this new adventure; as a result, I’ve spent the weekend trying to pull together art when I should have been doing about a thousand other things.)

As well as DMs Guild, I’ve also found these to be excellent sources of affordable stock art:

• Aegis Studios
• Fat Goblin Games
• Nuelow Games
• Vagelio
• Awful Good Games
• Jeshields
• Dean Spencer
• Adobe Stock (though you’ll need to do some hunting and sifting)

All of these sources are good for both internal and cover art. It’s nice to have full-page art for your front cover, of course, but that is often very expensive and even harder to find what you need. If you’re creative, though, you can get good results with a simple illustration. Look at what I did with Bulette Storm:

That’s simply a textured background that I made about a year ago (which I’ve used on all of my DMs Guild releases thus far), a parchment background placed over it (with the edges removed using a burned paper brush), this piece of stock art from Fat Goblin Games, and some blending styles, plus Curves and Levels adjustments, to glue the colours together and make everything pop.

If you’d prefer custom art, you could do worse than to check out Daniel Walthall, Luiz Prado, and Daniel Jones.

Maps can be trickier, but they don’t have to be. You have two options, really; write your adventure, then have a map custom made for it; or else find a stock map you like, and write an adventure to suit it. Purveyors of quality stock maps include the following:

• Elven Tower
• Dyson’s Dodecahedron
• Arcana Games
• Dave Zajac

When it comes to custom maps, things get a little more complicated – and more expensive. For playtesting and proofreading, of course, you can simply draw it yourself. You may find that you’re good enough at it that you can get away with using your own maps in the final product, too. In that case, you’re good to go. If not, there are tons of affordable cartographers working on DMs Guild products. I’m one of them, of course, but I’d also advise you to check out the following (some of whom I’ve already mentioned in the art section, but who cares?):

• Elven Tower
• Daniel Walthall (axebane@gmail.com)
• Dean Spencer
• Halfling Gypsy
• Simon Crowley
• Patrick E Pullen

Expect to pay more for custom maps – I currently charge a minimum of $30, as just one example. The benefit, of course, is that the map can be suited exactly to your purposes, and that you don’t have to invest the time and effort in doing it yourself. You will have to wait for it (my turnaround time is generally about two weeks, depending on how busy I am), but that’s time that you can spend on other parts of the publication process while you’re waiting for cartography.

And what are those other parts of the process, I hear you ask? Well, the next step is the big one, isn’t it?

Layout

I’ve written about layout before, and it ruffled a few feathers. My opinions on that matter haven’t changed, but I appreciate that a) layout can be hard, b) not everybody has access to InDesign, and c) not everybody has time to put together something like Bulette Storm, even if they wanted to. I won’t be doing it for The Breaker of Chains.

If you’re reading this article, chances are you’re new to RPG publishing. The best thing you can do is to keep things simple. This is the kind of situation – i.e. new to the game, short on time and money, and feeling like you’re in over your head – where there’s absolutely no shame in copying from WoTC and the bestsellers on DMs Guild.

I’ve been promising to release some Word templates for RPG layout for free at some point, and I really wish that I had them ready to go now so that I could include them in this post. They aren’t done, though, and I don’t know when they will be. That said, it’s possible to get good looking results with something as ‘basic’ as Word.

In my opinion, the two most important parts of any RPG layout are clarity and consistency. You don’t need a complicated layout – as I said in that post about layout, there’s a reason the two column format has endured for so long. You don’t need to mess around with sidebars and fancy lines dividing sections and all that kind of stuff. You can do a lot with a plain white background and occasional art to break up the text. For example, even though I went all-in with interactive PDFs and the like in Bulette Storm, this is what the printable PDF looks like:

It’s not fancy at all – but it’s clear, it’s easy to read, and it’s consistent. And it’s trivially easy to set up in Word, too. I’m not going to give you a tutorial on how to actually use Word, or Open Office, or even Google Docs – just know that you can absolutely use those tools to get professional-looking results.

I know you might be dubious about me including Google Docs in that list. I was as well. After I wrote that sentence, I debated whether to delete it or not. Before I did, I decided to open a new document and see what I could do. You decide if this would be acceptable in a DMs Guild product or not – bearing in mind that this is the result of literally 5 minute’s work:

Unfortunately this image disappeared during my site migration and I have been unable to recover it.

Again, it’s not exactly fancy – but it gets the job done. In doing that, I discovered that Google Docs does have some limitations. You can only have one main paragraph style, for example – so I had to manually add idents to following paragraphs, and mainly change the font size and capitalisation on the first sentence. I also struggled to make an attractive-looking text box that was more than the simple box you see on that page. (I hear you can do all of the above with certain browser extensions, but I didn’t have time to play around with them). It would be nice to be able to add a page background, too; you can’t do that in Google Docs as standard, but it’s easy to export the file as a PDF and add a background in any image editor that can handle PDFs and layer transparencies:

Unfortunately this image disappeared during my site migration and I have been unable to recover it.

I will admit that I thought this step would be easier. I hadn’t realised that Google Docs exports their PDFs with a solid white background (because I’m stupid sometimes), which made it impossible to simply add a background to the page in Acrobat. Instead I had to open this in Photoshop, place the background on a new layer, and then adjust the blending mode of the original PDF to knock out the white. That would obviously be very slow to do across an entire release. You can easily add a background in Word, and it’s much more versatile when it comes to layout than Google Docs, too.

The background on that page, incidentally, is by Corey Johnston, and it’s a piece of stock art available on DMs Guild specifically for DMs Guild products. Which brings me to my next tip: a lot of this work has already been done for you. Just as you can buy stock art and maps on DMs Guild, you can find a ton of resources like backgrounds, layout elements, and cover templates there, too. With those, you can easily put together a good, professional product for very little cost.

My main piece of advice would be for you to spend some time learning whatever piece of software you’re planning to use to create your products – be it InDesign, Word, Google Docs, Libre Office, or even LaTeX if you’re a fucking masochist. Play around with it, figure out what you can and can’t do – and then make a template.

I can’t stress enough how valuable having good templates is. Not only will you save yourself a ton of time on every subsequent product you produce, you’ll also be able to develop a consistent look across all of your products. Don’t underestimate the power of branding, even in something as seemingly simple and (in some eyes) trivial as layout and internal design.

And that’s really all there is to it. You’re obviously going to want to create a copyright page, and probably a table of contents. You’ll need a cover, too. All of those things I’ll go over in Friday’s post, when we look at how to actually publish the product. Realistically, you’re going to want your cover art done by the time you send your manuscript off to proofreaders and editors, at the latest. That’s a good time to start promoting the product prior to release, and a cover is invaluable when it comes to that. (And in the grand tradition of me giving advice and immediately ignoring myself, I still don’t have a cover for Breaker of Chains.)

Of course, if all this seems like too much effort, you could use the Homebrewery. That will give you a product that looks remarkably similar to official WoTC products. Personally, I don’t like using markup and find I can get results like that in Word much easier, but your mileage may vary – everybody’s skill set is different, and everybody has access to different tools. From what I remember of the Homebrewery it’s difficult to get images to play nice, but I could be wrong. Still, it’s a valuable tool, and one that many people use.

That’s all for now. On Friday I’ll talk you through actually releasing your work on DMs Guild, and you’ll get to see the final product that came out of the random tables I was playing with last week.

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Image Credit: An artist is painting a picture at an easel in his studio. Woodcut. Credit: Wellcome Collection. Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

This was originally posted back in 2017. It lost the images during my site migration, so I’ve updated it to replace them. This is the first post in a series:

• Part Two: Putting Everything Together
• Publishing An Adventure: Art & Layout on a Budget
• Publishing An Adventure: Pricing, Promotion, & Pre-Release
• Laying Out Your Adventure on a Budget
• Publishing your Work on the DMs Guild

Right up front I’m going to say this: this post got much bigger than I intended, so I’m splitting it up and shunting aside my regular content over the next few days to make use of it. Today I’m talking about how I use random tables to generate ideas. On Friday we’ll be putting those ideas together into notes for an adventure. And on Monday, I’ll show you the finished map from this adventure, as well as talking you through how I prepare an adventure for publication and release it on DMs Guild.

Let’s get in to it.

It’s no secret that I like random tables. I publish quite a lot of them here, and a number of my better-selling products on DMs Guild are random tables. Today I want to talk a little about how I actually use these tables in my own games, and to provide you with something of a case study of how I use various random tables to design adventures when I’m short on either ideas or time.

One thing I see a lot of people mention when it comes to random tables is that they often roll results that they can’t use. The problem seems to be that once they roll something, they feel like they’re somehow forced to use it. This applies to DMs generating random dungeons or rolling for random encounters just as much as it applies to players rolling on tables of trinkets or trying to generate their character’s background.

I’m not going to belabour this point. I’m simply going to say this; as somebody who writes a lot of random tables, I never intend for people to slavishly follow the first result they roll. Instead, what I hope for my tables to do is to spark ideas for the person who uses them, to help unblock you when you’re feeling stuck. I can only assume that that’s how other people who write random tables view them, and so that’s how I use them; I prune and twist the results I roll to fit my purposes, rather than adjusting my aims to fit the results (though I do sometimes do that, too, if it feels right).

Basically, when you’re using random tables, just remember this; it’s your game, and you’re the boss. If you’re rolling things and suddenly have a great idea of your own, go with that instead. If you roll an 82 and hate the result, but the thing written in 81 looks really cool, take 81 instead.

That’s how I use tables, every time I use them. And now I’m going to spend a couple of thousand words letting you watch while I do it.

On Monday I posted this map:

I used the random tables in the Dungeon Master’s Guide to generate it, and I said when I posted it that I intended to flesh it out using some of my favourite random tables from DMs Guild. And that’s exactly what I’ve been doing.

I generate a lot of adventures using tables for my own group. The process I use is fairly straightforward. First, I draw the map. We did that on Monday. But you know that, because I literally just said that 100 words ago, and you’re paying attention. Plus the map is right above this paragraph. Really, a good editor would drop this paragraph entirely – but I don’t have an editor, so here it is.

After I generate the map, I need to know what kind of adventure might take place there. That’s when I generate…

The Hook

Sometimes, of course, the hook comes first. But usually, if I already have an adventure hook, then I can draw map to suit it and design an adventure the traditional way. When I have nothing, though, I start with the map. I can’t say why, other than to say that it works for me.

Since I’m using DMs Guild products, I thought I’d start with one of my own: Strange Tidings. It’s a rumour generator in the form of four 1d12 tables that will generate a person who is rumoured to be doing a thing, with a thing, in a place. I rolled some dice, and generated this:

An adventurer’s ghost has awakened with an insatiable hunger that has lain dormant for ages.

At this stage, I don’t make any real decisions about what the adventure will be. I’m going to let the results on the rest of the tables guide the design, rather than settling on something concrete now and trying to force things to fit later. This is where I find random roll tables to be the most valuable; even though I’m writing this, and therefore I can do whatever I want with it, I find that once I have an idea I like I tend to cling to it. This is where I often get stuck on larger projects; if I commit too early then I get frustrated because for some reason I can’t allow myself to be flexible later in the process when things aren’t working. The flipside, of course, is that it’s easy to simply never nail any specifics down. This is how projects end up fizzling out and never being completed, lost forever in a sea of vague ideas.

Incidentally, this is what I’m trying to avoid with the campaign setting posts, which is why I’m not forcing myself to knock out an article per week when I haven’t done enough work to justify a post. I don’t want to lock myself into something that I’ll struggle to bring myself to change later – but having the vague structure (mostly) of weekly posts underpinning the project forces me to keep working and keep progressing, rather than running out of steam. Or at least that’s the theory.

Anyway. All I know at this stage of the process is that this is probably going to be some kind of horror adventure. There are other directions to go with a ghost possessed of an insatiable hunger, of course, but it’s prime horror material and I don’t want to overcomplicate things. The aim is to turn out a quick and easy adventure, so we’ll settle on what immediately feels right and worry about ridding it of horrendous cliches later.

So, for now, this one sentence is all we need. We’ll come back to it later, once we populate this structure. And the first thing I’m going to decide on are…

The Doors

Set dressing in dungeons is one of the best ways to sell your theme, and there’s no item of set dressing that players interact with more than doors. There’s a perfectly functional table of random doors in the Dungeon Master’s Guide, of course, but they’re just that – functional. They’re not interesting. And since we’re using this to help us develop the theme and story of the adventure, we want them to be interesting.

With that in mind, we turn to DMs Guild and the only book of random doors you’ll ever need – Glen Cooper’s Deadly Dungeon Doors. There are plenty of ways to use this book, and Glen spells out quite a few of them in the introduction. You can’t go far wrong buy using one of the pre-generated sets of dungeon doors at the end of the book, but that’s not what I’m going to do.

The first thing I like to do is to generate the final door of the dungon – the door behind which the boss fight or the loot haul or whatever lurks. Looking at my map, there’s one small final chamber – but that also branches off of the much larger chamber above it, which is accessible via either one door off the entrance rooms or by the narrow passage off of the central room at the top of the map (which I’ve decided, just now, is a hidden passage). I don’t know yet which room the final battle will take place in, so I don’t really know where that final door is going to go, but that’s fine. We’ll get to that.

So, I roll on the tables, and I generate a strong platinum door with and arcane lock and multiple sliding bars with padlocks on it. My mind immediately says “make this a Zelda-style key hunt”. I don’t know if I’ll do that yet, but the idea is there.

The next thing to do is to generate the rest of the doors in the dungeon. In a big dungeon I’d probably use one of the themed sets of pregenerated doors, but since I only need to make 5 more doors, I’m happy to generate them all individually.

The first thing I did was to roll on the door materials table for each door – and I rolled ‘iron’ every single time (which means I rolled between 16 and 18 five times in a row, which will probably never happen again in my life). So now I know that, besides the final platinum door, every door in this complex is iron. I like the idea of covering the whole place with a patina of rust; I also like the idea of making the entire building, walls and all, iron. I don’t know what I’ll do yet, but again I jot those ideas down.

Then I roll up some doors, and I end up with this selection:

1. A locked iron door with 6 magnetic studs embedded in it, surrounded by 4 lit torches.
2. A normal iron door, though the lip is slightly higher than normal and may trip people stepping through it incautiously.
3. A regular iron door.
4. A regular iron door with a handle made of bone.
5. A barred iron door, trapped with a magic missile trap.

My immediate thought with the bone door handle is that the original handle has been snapped off – possibly rusted away? – and that a shard of human bone has been used to force it open. Possibly this is something the dead adventurer did before he, well, died.

So now I have my doors, and a vague theme of iron, rust, and bone. The next thing to is to figure out where those doors lead. That brings us to…

The Rooms

My go-to book for constructing interesting rooms on the fly is Kent Kelly’s Random Dungeon Room Generator. Some of the results from this book can be unusual, to say the least, but there’s a whole chapter devoted to making use of seemingly nonsensical results. Still, part of using random tables is knowing when to stick with what you’ve rolled and knowing when not to be a slave to the dice.

In this case, I’ve only got 7 (or 8, depending on how we divide that strange shaped room on the left of the map) rooms to generate, plus a long corridor that we could possibly also consider a room. With so few, I want them all to ne unique and interesting in some way – with such a small map, there’s no need for filler. I already know that I want to emphasise the image/theme of iron, rust, the vengeful dead, and – possibly – bone, so I’m going to keep an eye out for anything that seems to fit when I start rolling.

The first thing I need to do is to figure out what size rooms I’m looking for. There’s one that’s obviously larger than the others, but the rest are all roughly evenly sized. I’m fairly happy to call it one large room and have the rest be medium.

The book’s method begins with generating room names, so we’ll do that. I’m going to generate 20 names – more than twice the number I actually need – and see if anything seems to fit our existing theme. The first thing the book asks you to do is to generate the naming conventions to be used for each room – which take a form similar to (Adjective 1) and (Adjective 2) + (Locale) – and to then roll 1d1000 for each Adjective or Locale and plug in the results. 

[Originally there was a screenshot here of the list of names I generated, but unfortunately I have no idea where it’s gone. Rest assured that most of them were rubbish, as 2017 Chris stated in the following paragraph.]

Now, there’s clearly a lot of rubbish there, but that’s to be expected when dealing with random roll tables. As I’ve said, the art is in sifting through the chaff and cleaning things up in such a way that you end up with a coherent finished product. So let’s do some cleaning.

1. The Insect Men’s Roost
2. The Crooked One’s Trophy
3. The Crooked Trophy Taker
4. The Vengeful Beastman
5. The Beastman’s Trap
6. The Whirling Maelstrom
7. The Whirling Chimney
8. The Inquisition
9. The Inquisitor’s Stricture
10. The Door of Shrines
11. The Shrine Door
12. The Shrine of Doors
13. The Mausoleum
14. The Cave of Forgetfulness
15. The Forgetful Ogre
16. The Forgotten Echo
17. The Mist
18. The Misty Gauntlet
19. The Stinking Cinerarium
20. The Hewn Cinerarium
21. The Hewn Stone Stench
22. The Healer’s Hole
23. The Healing Hole
24. The Maggot Hole
25. The Healing Maggot
26. The Gilded Underworld
27. The Winter Abreuvoir
28. The Abreuvoir
29. Emerald Oblivion
30. The Green Guard Post
31. The Oubliette
32. The Oubliette of the Behir
33. The Deep Behir
34. The Study of the Aboleth
35. The Headman’s Well
36. The Nefarious Well
37. Drake
38. The Drake’s Trash Heap

I’ve expanded some of the options out into multiple possibilities, pruned incoherent words from the options, and in a couple of cases – where I couldn’t see any interesting use, or I had utter nonsense – I’ve pruned entries completely. Some of them still don’t make much sense (The Hewn Stone Stench, anyone?) but they’re evocative enough – to me at least – that I left them in the for the time being.

There’s still some rubbish there, but I now have nearly twice as many ideas as I started with – and some of them I like. Bear in mind, these aren’t necessarily going to be the names of the rooms in the dungeon. Instead, I’m treating these as prompts for deciding what each room contains.

A few things that I like immediately: that long corridor on the right of the map could be referred to as the Chimney, and have some kind of elemental, wind-based encounter in it; similarly, I love the word ‘abreuvoir’ (which is a watering basin or trough) and that corridor could also function as some kind of water feature; I also love the word ‘oubliette’, and I love big pits in dungeons, so maybe there’s one of those here in the main central chamber; Emerald Oblivion is cool as hell, and if the whole dungeon is iron and one room is, for some reason, entirely green, that could be very interesting – especially if that room is green because it’s not iron but copper or bronze, and it’s covered in verdigris, and the fact that it isn’t iron is related to the room’s purpose; I like the idea of forgetfulness, and of tying that into the theme of the adventure somehow, but at this point I don’t quite know how to do that.

As I was putting this list together, my subconscious was also beginning to put things together while the rest of my brain was distracted. One of my favourite monsters – and something I don’t get to use very often – are Kytons, or chain devils. I like the idea of this dungeon being a prison for one such beast. They exist to do nothing other than to cause and receive pain, and they’re the closest thing to Hellraiser’s Cenobites that D&D has to offer. If I want to go full horror, I could do worse than to channel Clive Barker, and I’d love to write a Kyton-themed adventure.

At this point, we’ve pretty much got enough to go on. Once I piece these things together I’ll make use of random treasure tables, trinkets tables, and the like to fill the dungeon with appropriate loot, but I won’t be using any random encounter tables or other random means with which to populate the dungeon. Personally, I like to build encounters specifically for my party, and I always do that manually. As I said, I use these tables more to get the juices flowing than anything else; once that happens, the rest of the adventure falls into place easily, and that’s the point where you transcend the tables and create something that’s truly yours.

Soon on Friday I’ll show you how these elements – a map, some doors, and some rooms – come together into a cohesive whole. In the meantime, I’d like to hear from you; how would you put together the elements I’ve generated here into an adventure for your group?

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Image Credit: A man dicing with death, as a skeleton, 1764. Credit: Wellcome Collection. Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

Last week my friend (and awesome DMs Guild writer) JVC Parry posted an article on his blog in which he discussed his process for writing his adventure Beneath The Sands. I liked it a lot, and knew I wasn’t going to have much time to produce anything of substance for LTR this week (though there will still be a small post from me), so I reached out and asked if he would write something similar for me.

I’m pleased to say he accepted, and he just sent me the post – a look at how he wrote the Platinum-bestselling Shore of Dreams for Poison Potion Press. I’m always interested in seeing how other people work, and I was doubly interested in this because I’ve never worked on a project with a budget like the one for Shore of Dreams.

Enjoy!

Deconstructing Dungeons: Shore of Dreams

by JVC Parry

Welcome to Deconstructing Dungeons! This is a blog post in which I take a look at adventures I have previously written for the DMsGuild or a 3^rd party publisher, talk about how they were made, what inspired me, and what resources I used to help me in the writing process.

In this edition I’m going to take a look at what is arguably my most successful adventure; Shore of Dreams. I wrote SoD for a new DMsGuild publisher called Poison Potion Press. They approached me asking for help with adventure writing, as English is not their first language, and they had heard my name from previous clients. I accepted, and got to work! Eventually, the title was published on January 25^th 2018, although I completed my first draft in August of the previous year.

Writing for someone else is not always easy. In my experience, you’re likely to see more money for your work in the short-term, but obviously you’re constrained by what the publisher wants for their adventure, and by their work schedule. If I had written SoD for myself, it’s likely that I would have used only stock art from the DMsGuild or DTRPG, made my own maps, got it edited by my usual editor and had it on the market by September 2017. It would probably have made Copper Bestseller within a month or two, and then would slowly generate sales over the coming years. As it stood, PPP commissioned not only a cover, but also a load of internal art and cartography, professional layout work, as well as teaming up with Trash Mob Minis to create custom paper minis and doing a huge marketing campaign over all the social media platforms. In addition, SoD was one of (if not the) first adventures on the DMsGuild to become Print on Demand. For most writers, this amount of work is almost impossible. For me certainly the funding just isn’t there. Because of all this additional work, SoD is a platinum best-seller.

So, where do you start when writing for someone else? In my experience, a publisher normally sends me about a page of text relating to the adventure they would like. It’s normally bullet points about major NPCs or locations, and talks mostly about the general themes of the adventure. Working with PPP was different. From the beginning I was provided with an ‘adventure bible’ which contained nearly every scene of the adventure already written out in some form or another. It was my job to take these notes, weave them into a cohesive storyline, flesh out the mechanics, add some appropriate flavour text and descriptions, and create (roughly) balanced encounters and rewards. Because of the more structured ‘bible’ I was able to get to work straight away, rather than having a consultation with the publisher (which is often the case). Although this meant the writing was done quickly, it also meant there was a lot of to-ing and fro-ing between myself and the publisher on certain aspects of the adventure, all the time trying to balance the original idea of the piece with the practicalities of running it in 5^th edition D&D, and writing it in a comprehensive manner.

The adventure itself is a twisting narrative about lost treasure which (SPOILERS) turns out to be a ruse constructed by the owner of a tavern, Pisca Ahlorsath, who aims to lure adventurers into a trap. Pisca needs the adventurers to help her uncover a legendary magic item hidden within a partially submerged tomb not far from the tavern. The first half of the adventure sees the characters arrive at the island, interact with its inhabitants, and get a feel for the place. The publisher was very attached to the ‘wuxia’ style, a mix of oriental fantasy cultures. After taking the time to investigate possible links to the treasure, they are guided to the Shore of Dreams tavern where Pisca begins her plan to kidnap them. This plan involves the bar staff, all of whom have their own agendas to mind too. Depending on the actions of the characters during their stay at the tavern, they might manage to avoid capture, or awaken in a cell in the cavernous entrance to the temple. Either way, trouble ensues as they try to take out Pisca or uncover the secrets of the littoral cave. Although the adventure is relatively combat-light, I created a new monster, the Tempest Beast, to guard the temple and designed a deadly trap to protect the magic item (which I also created).

One of the biggest challenges in writing the adventure was the timing of everything. There are people already working down in the temple to clear rubble, Pisca has her own plans, several other members of Shore of Dreams staff have things going on, and who knows what the characters will end up doing! Trying to make all of these things mesh together into a consistent timeline wasn’t easy. In the end, I ended up having the timeline be mostly narrative driven. Pisca doesn’t come looking for the characters, she waits for them to come to her. Her plan only goes ahead if the characters are enraptured by her and stay. The prisoners in the cave only keep digging at the temple if the characters are there to witness it. This goes against a lot of advice about immersion in games, and the suspension of disbelief. It’s common practice to try and keep the world moving even when the players arn’t watching, but in published adventures, where each group will tackle everything differently, I feel it’s best to give a more freeform timeline, and allow DMs to tinker with it at their own tables.

Overall, I was happy with the adventure I wrote, and felt like I’d done the original ‘bible’ justice, whilst changing enough of what was there to ensure characters weren’t railroaded to a final destination, and wouldn’t have to endure a huge info dump at any point during the adventure for it all to make sense.

What I did well: I think my biggest achievement for this adventure was turning it from a very NPC-centric adventure to one in which the characters have real agency. It was clear from the off that PPP was in love with Pisca, and it was no easy job to keep her as a star NPC without her stealing the show entirely.

What I did poorly: More than anything, SoD reflects on my ability to produce my own adventures. I think it’s a testament to dedication and holistic publishing. It’s not enough just to have good writing, you need to do what you can to add that little extra spice. Incredible custom artwork, professional layout and cartography, solid marketing. If you want a platinum best-selling adventure on your first time around, you’ll need all of these things to be a success.