Any advice on writing and publishing RPG books? I've got a lot of ideas but I'm not sure what to do with them. Should I write a basic dungeon adventure first just to start out?
Here’s some prior advice. And here’s some more. Read this especially!
My advice to people who are passionate about tabletop games and want to self-publish a game or adventure is two fold:
1) Make something unique to you!
Don’t write a “basic dungeon adventure” first. Don’t write a “basic” anything. That sounds boring as fuck. Write and create something you yourself would really want to play and buy.
D&D and Pathfinder and the adventures published with them will probably always be there to outsell/outperform you when it comes to bog-standard generic inoffensive fantasy. They’ve got that part of the industry locked down. So why not do something different? Like, really different!
Write a game or an adventure that’s weird and outlandish and personal and strange. Fill it with your darkest desires and your intrusive thoughts. Write something that you think you and you alone will like, catering to your specific tastes in games, both in tone and mechanics. Don’t censor yourself or hold back in any regard (that comes later, in editing).
Why? Because I guarantee you are not alone in these tastes, and by making something geared to them you will serve an audience that’s hungry for it. Whatever you do, don’t be generic or bland or make something that apes the style of a successful (but generic) game. Making something unique helps you stand out amongst the thousands of other games out there that are generic.
See Fire on the Velvet Horizon. See Yoon-Suin the Purple Land. See BREAK!! See A Red & Pleasant Land. See Día De Los Dinosaurios Muertos. See Slumbering Ursine Dunes. All of these are fantastic adventures and games that have roots in generic fantasy (read: D&D), but do incredibly unique and interesting things with them. Often things that haven’t been tried before.
You are your own unique person with your own preferences and tastes. Trust them, and make a game/adventure that’s true to that!
2) Make your game/adventure LOOK good!
So you’ve made something unique. Something crazy and new and personal and weird. Great. Now you need to make it look good, and make it easy to read/use.
See before how I was all positive, encouraging, and uplifting? This is the advice I give to bring you back down to earth. A unique and interesting new game doesn’t count for shit if it doesn’t have enough art, if it doesn’t have compelling art, or if it’s hard to read and use.
I’ve said this before somewhere that I think that art is one of the most important (and undervalued) aspects of TRPG design. To successfully sell a unique idea to people, especially if you’re not already an established creator in the TRPG community, your book is going to need art. Lots of art. Lots of good art.
The old adage “A picture is worth a thousand words” is especially true of TRPG design. Art can be used convey the following kinds of information (and much more) far faster and easier that paragraphs of text can:
Location details and complexities
Tone and atmosphere of a setting
Intended tone of the game as a whole
The specifics of certain mechanics (movement, actions, attacks, spells, etc).
So few TRPGs do this, and even fewer get it right. It’s understandable why so many books don’t do this (custom art is often expensive, time consuming to produce, and arguably more difficult to make than just using text), but it is still inexcusable to not do it.
Something that goes along with this is having good layout and graphic design. This doesn’t just mean making sure your book looks ‘pretty’ (though that’s important too), it means making sure your book is easy and quick to USE, not just read.
This involves map placement, map design, indexing, hyperlinking, random table and stat-block placement, how columns of text are formatted and placed, and designing a useful table of contents. Your goal should be to ensure the following:
That the reader understands the ‘gist’ of your adventure and what might happen in it after the first couple of pages.
That the reader doesn’t have to swap back and forth between rulebooks when using your adventure.
That at no point should the text take longer to parse and convey that it would take the reader to just “make something up on the fly”.
That the reader doesn’t need to constantly be flipping back and forth through your book to get to the information they need.
TRPG books aren’t novels or magazines or even instruction booklets. They are a special kind of reference document which is meant to be used in the moment, NOT memorized entirely beforehand. Good graphic design and layout can make all the difference in this regard.
Just look at some of the thought and design that went into these LotFP books:
These useful tools are absent from almost all of the big TRPG published books where they are needed the most. As an indie publisher, they’re worth considering and will definitely make your book better.
If you want your game book to stand ahead of all the others, these are some of the best and most needed ways to do it.
I wish you all the luck in the world.
annaxmalina
baratheonpilled
tangentwithtanner
titsay
kaledo-art
vaporwave
andulkaphoto
