The Demon of Dogwater Gulch Pre-Postmortem

I did it! I published my first RPG module! Here it is: https://gordianblade.itch.io/the-demon-of-dogwater-gulch

That is, it's mostly published. It's still in a WIP/early access/beta stage. Listen, a two week jam is a challenge for anyone, let alone during two of the busiest weeks of the year for someone who has never published an adventure before. The module literally has multiple pages emblazoned with "WIP" and little else, but the bottom line is that it's public, and it's playable from start to finish. (That's why this is a pre-postmortem: a postmortem can only happen after it's done, which isn't the case yet.)

A lot has been written in the RPG blogosphere lately, especially in the indie/DIY/OSR sphere about publishing first drafts, or even unfinished drafts, and as a terminal perfectionist, it's definitely a message I need to hear. Actually, the most important post to me came from Seedling Games's post about what zines really are. As someone who has a lot of exposure to the modern indie OSR sphere, and who has been attempting to make his own Lancer zine, it's really easy for me to get caught up in what a "professional" zine looks like, aspire to that, and compare myself to that, potentially to my detriment. It has been helpful for me to discard that idea and feel comfortable enjoying my own creations and the creations of others.

That said, this entire ordeal has been a profound learning experience, and I'd like to reflect on some of the areas I felt particularly challenged.

Layout

In my earlier post, I remarked how impressed I was with Typst for layout, but suggested that I might explore Affinity Publisher before making a decision. Well, that didn't happen, and I just stuck with Typst. I'm curious what the process would have looked like if I did it in Publisher, but I have to say I'm still pretty impressed with Typst. I copied a lot of layout conventions from Explorer's Design's Classic Explorer Template, which I admit I had some problems with at first, but it definitely grew on me.

The biggest benefit, for me, was just how damn easy it was to write in layout. I had a Google Doc as a scratch pad for random ideas, but beyond that, pretty much 100% of my actual reactive writing happened within a Visual Studio Code window, writing content directly into the PDF. Being able to immediately see how the actual PDF gets rendered in real time was also extremely helpful, especially because it helped me develop in spreads rather than pages.

I realized early on that approaching the book from a "spread-first" perspective was going to be important for structuring the book. One of my few physical doodles I made was a series of spreads with notes on what each spread should hold, which started to really settle in my own vision for the book. I think I'll definitely do that in the future if I keep writing things.

Typst wasn't without its flaws though. I ran into a nonzero number of bugs and missing features. Fortunately, in most cases, I was able to find a workaround, but those were some moments of frustration. The web developer in me would do unspeakable things for an equivalent of Chrome DevTools to explore how and why things are getting laid out on a Typst page.

But the frustrating moments were very much drowned out by the positives of Typst, and I'll probably continue to use it for the foreseeable future, or until it starts being impractical to continue using it for my various artistic visions. I even used it to make printable standees for use in IRL play!

Writing

I don't know that I'd consider myself an especially good creative writer, but I like to think I'm at least a competent one, but I surprised myself in finding the creative writing portions of the project to be refreshingly fun. Some of my favorite bits in the book are the NPC descriptions, which tickled me a good bit. I really love the act of cramming a lot of helpful information into only a few words. It can definitely be a lot of work, though.

When it came to naming things, I was very much inspired by a 2022 blog post from Dwiz on Knight at the Opera, wherein he compared several WotC adventures to OSR adventures. One of the biggest takeaways of that post, to me, was that names can be profoundly important. Sometimes names can just sound nonsense and corny and result in being forgettable, whereas other names can be simple and evocative and much more fun (e.g. "Ilvara Mizzrym" may sound cool, but it feels like it was pulled from a random generator and doesn't make me feel anything; meanwhile, I know everything I need to know about "Helmut Halfsword" just from his name).

Thus, I was resolved not to do the thing I often do, where I try to draw on real-world animals, myths, and places, and instead try to think of names that made me feel something. For example, I spent a lot of time trying to think of a good name for the monster. Obviously the sandworm from Dune is an inspiration here, as well as the sandsquid from Desert Moon of Karth. My default process would be to look up names for snakes, or the names of mythic snakes or snake-gods, and try to come up with some sort of secret pun. However, even if I went down that road, I might come up with a name that was meaningful, but it wouldn't be a name that is evocative. So instead, I ventured into the thesaurus mines to find words I liked related to earth, tunnels, and rocks, as well as things that are colossal, monstrous behemoths. I'm pretty happy with "borehulk", and I'm kind of surprised to see that word pretty light on Google search results.

Names can also be worldbuilding, too. While I don't feel like the name "Porthull" turned out to be especially evocative, I did enjoy how it tells you something about the world (it's literally built next to a huge chunk of port-side hull of a ship). I also thought it was a fun play on the word "port", which, when naming a location, usually refers to a ship port, but this time I was able to use it in the "port side of a ship" sense.

Art

I knew that I wanted to have some custom art in the module, but I felt pretty lost as to how to go about that. The Lancer community has a lot of artists, and there's even a giant Google doc full of their commission info, but I had a hard time picking one, or even knowing how to start the conversation.

For a while, I thought I might try doing art myself, and looked very hard at buying some digital art tools. However, being realistic with myself, I don't think I could come up with something I would be happy with in such a short amount of time (and time consideration very much turned out to be important!). I think the idea of learning art will be useful for the future (especially if I make a zungeon), but I settled on not doing art myself, even if it would really be True DIY Zine Energy.

I could have gone the public domain route, but I've never really personally been happy with the tone that public domain art provides for sci-fi modules. It feels like it would fit in a lot better with fantasy modules, since the "old-timey" vibe is already present there.

Meanwhile, free art felt like it was in a similar boat. I imagined myself getting stuck spending hours trying to find the perfect image, or getting stuck with something that is almost cool and then having to spend time modifying it. It just didn't sound fun to me, so I put it to the side. Maybe in the future, but I really had it in my head that I wanted custom illustrations.

The thing that took me too long to realize about commissioned art is that, even if I have the money to pay for it, that doesn't mean it's a good idea to do it. I can get tons of custom art and spend $500-1000 on commissions to get something that looks rad, but if I only ever move 50 copies of the module for $5, that's not a terribly sound use of money. I decided it would be much more judicious to stick with one piece: the cover, which would be the main attention-grabber to people browsing for adventures.

I asked in a local Atlanta RPG server if there were any artists around, and it just so happened that there was a local artist who has played a good amount of Lancer already (having dome some art for his own home game). I ended up talking with him quite a bit I and I pulled the trigger on sending him a commission. I'm really happy with how it turned out! It has a fun pulpy vibe that I wanted to communicate to readers, and has a lot of action drawing the eye around. I hope it does a good job of drawing people in and telling them what the module is about.

The biggest mistake I made in that process was not giving extra mind to where text would end up on the final image. The image ended not really having a good place to put the text that I wanted with proper contrast ratios, even after several back-and-forths, so I game up and just slapped a stroke on the text. Sometimes you just have to ship. I don't love it, but I take full responsibility for that mistake – the artist was great. You should give him a follow at https://peoplemaking.games/@q_bit

Pricing

I spent a lot of time trying to figure out if I wanted to charge money for my module, or how to go about pricing in general. When it comes to industry advice, you'll find it everywhere on the spectrum of "Yes, definitely sell your stuff, because it has value, and creators terminally undervalue their own stuff" to "Nah man, just put your stuff out there for free and let people enjoy it."

Going into this jam, I was pretty set on charging $4-5 for my module, which I think is a pretty fair price. However, several thoughts gave me pause:

• Is it bad form to put a price tag on a game jam entry? Half the fun of the jam is going through and downloading stuff once it's done, seeing what everyone else did with the theme, and putting a price tag on my work puts up a wall between my work and that fun.
• Is there value in putting stuff out there for free to build a reputation? Maybe it's worth making my first thing free, as a proof to people that the rest of my stuff can be good, and use that to build an audience of people who like my work.
• I would love if my module joined the ranks as a go-to recommendation for new GMs who want to try out Lancer, and putting a price tag on the module makes that prospect a harder sell.
• Is my stuff even really worth paying for? This is my first time making something like this, and I don't know if it's even any good, or if it's anything people would actually want.

That last one is not a good reason, but I tossed it on there just because it's a thought that keeps resurfacing. I think asking myself if what I made is "good" is a trap – I'm very happy with what I made, because I feel like I've been successful in making something that I've wished existed in the Lancer community for a long time now. And I do think it's good, and I think people will have fun running it, if my playtests are any indication.

Another consideration here is that I did pay a commission for the art on the cover, so if I didn't charge for it, it would ultimately be a net loss, which doesn't feel great. I'm not getting into TTRPG publishing for the money (lol), but it would be nice to at least let it help fund my TTRPG-buying hobby, if nothing else. Paying for art is fun, but it's not sustainable if I want to keep making stuff.

I think I'm currently going to keep the module free until it hits v1.0 (which will include a copyediting pass, which will be another cost). After that, I'll put it at $5 with some number of community copies, so that people who can't buy it can still get access to it if they really want it.

Playtesting

I have another blog post stewing about running Lancer in person, but setting that aside for now: playtesting was absolutely helpful in my development of the module.

I performed two playtests (one at LL0 with five brand-new players, and one at LL3 with one experienced player and two new players). While the adventure largely worked as-written, there were a handful of mechanical aspects that I was glad to catch (e.g. in earlier drafts, I allowed players to Overcharge in narrative to gain +2 Accuracy on dice rolls, and nobody ever took the bait, so I had to shift burning Overcharge into a harder consequence for failure). The LL3 test was particularly insightful, as I had wildly undertuned the opposing force, though I also forgot some extremely important NPC features (look, it's been like a year since I ran Lancer...).

The playtest with new players was a really insightful look into the act of teaching Lancer to new players, too. I went out of my way with this module to keep the lore-dumping to a minimum, because I wanted anyone to be able to join the game without feeling like they were missing out having not read Lancer's huge lore section. There were a couple moments where players asked me questions about some of the lore, and before I had a chance to answer with a quick high-level introductory answer, I was interrupted by some excited Lancer lore fans who were more than happy to go into more detail than I would have liked by way of answering. Look, Lancer's lore is great and all, but it's a lot. Having an easy-to-understand adventure touching on more broadly-known genre expectations helps a lot with the baseline worldbuilding.

And finally: hot damn, Everest is a terrible frame for new players. "Ok, so you can take one Full action or two Quick actions. And then once per scene – uh, that means once per combat – you can take another Quick action on your turn. But only once per scene. Meanwhile, you can also Overcharge, which lets you take another Quick action. That you can do any time, but you gain heat... which is like a reverse health bar I guess? Anyway, if you activate your core power, you can take another free action, but just a Boost. And you have +1 Accuracy on all your rolls, so don't forget that. You will definitely forget that."

I swear, man. I made a pregen LL3 Monarch for the newest player at the LL3 playtest (he literally walked in and thought he was going to be playing D&D), and he had a way easier time picking that up than the LL0 Everest newbies. Everest is a real challenge for new players.

What next?

First, I still have to actually finish the module! I have 3 pages of writing to do, and I have a very rough outline of what will go on those pages. After that, I want to do another read-through for editing mistakes, and then send it off to my copyeditor for a pass from them. I expect I'll have more changes to make after that. I may be tempted to make some tweaks to the hex map or combat maps, but I think I may just need to learn to leave well-enough alone, put up the final version at v1.0, and move to the next project.

As for the next project, as I mentioned, the idea of making a zungeon sounds very fun, possibly for His Majesty The Worm. The time scale on the Zungeon Jam is much more forgiving, so I think that could give me enough time to bang out some art practice. After that? Who knows! A full-length Lancer mission? I certainly have one in mind...