Creating a Draw Steel Adventure from Scratch

I recently released The Violet Heart: a 1st Level Quest for Draw Steel! Outside of participating in Jams of the Timescape #2 where I designed a new ancestry, the Death Blooms, carnivorous plant folks for Equinox (which I hope to expand into a full supplement soon!) this is my first self published piece of game design and writing I’ve put out into the world.

That’s a terrifying prospect! But I knew I wanted to release an adventure one of these days. There has been so much going on this year that has been challenging me to grow, change, and become a more confident person, so I thought, “what the hell?” Let’s try it out.

When I played through the Delian Tomb earlier this year, I discovered Draw Steel’s adventure design perfectly catered to my personal taste for heroic fantasy adventures. You can see the difference if you compare most d20 fantasy adventures to those made for Draw Steel. Those games were born out of dungeon crawls and their layout of information and detail seemed unfocused to me, full of unnecessary details. It requires a lot for a GM to sift through in order to make something good out of these published adventures for 5E. Of course there are exceptions, I am speaking from my own experience!

Draw Steel’s adventures, however, makes the Director’s life so much easier by focusing on the fun - Cool encounters, straightforward plots that you don’t get lost in the weeds in, NPCs that get out of the way without words wasted on backstory that will never come up. These are all things that made me realize that I could try to write an adventure for this game and it might be half decent, because Draw Steel’s style of play has been the style of play I have been trying to cram into 5E’s rules for years.

I have lots of ideas for crazy adventures in the future but I knew that I needed to get my sea legs first. I needed to get practice writing adventures and refining a process before I make those more ambitious adventures. If you are an aspiring adventure designer, and want to see how a COMPLETE BEGINNER learned, I hope my mistakes and process will help you on your journey.

Let’s get started!

Writing: Get Some Style!

I have been GMing for roughly a decade at this point, and have a fair amount of experience writing my own campaigns. My prep time is significantly longer than I want, because I write my own campaigns with the same style as published adventures might, with regards to how the text conveys information to the GM. They spell things out in full sentences rather than half sentences, outlines and bullet points that you might see in a lot of GMs prep notes.

This is a habit I’m trying to break, attempting to trust in my improv muscles, doing more with less, and internalizing that no one else is going to read my prep notes. However, that sort of default to writing in the “official adventure style” made it very easy for me to adopt the Draw Steel adventure style.

How do you go about emulating that style? I was primarily looking at the Delian Tomb, the Dark Heart of the Wood, and the Fall of Blackbottom (as these were the official adventures out during my writing of this adventure) to see how text is formatted. And it was just a lot of copying their means of presenting information. I wish I could say more, but I wrote something out, then compared it to their style, and made adjustments so it reads the same. I think the biggest lessons in learning adventure writing was text formatting with regards to when bold, italics, and different headings came into play. 

Read those adventures, write something yourself, and then go back and compare how they presented information vs how you did it. Try and understand that you are not the only reader of this information, and someone other than you is going to need to understand what this text is saying. This also comes down to editing, which we’ll talk about later.

If you can give your adventure to another Director and all the information they need is there AND is presented in a way that sets them up for success, you’re golden. Refer to official adventures for inspiration on when to expand and when to NOT write more (see the Narrative section!).

For the future, I plan on reading a lot more third party adventures made by the incredible Draw Steel community. I think there are some fantastic ways some people are presenting information in the writing style and the on page formatting that we can all steal from that are not currently present in the official MCDM products.

Design: Screwing Up Greyboxing

There’s a concept in video game design called greyboxing. I am no video game developer so this information is from an outsider looking in, but my basic understanding is that this is a process in which gameplay and level designers go through and try out aspects of design without any final textures, animations, or art.

The purpose of this process is to ensure that the level flows well, the gameplay sings, before making it look good. All that effort is wasted if the gameplay or level is not fun to begin with. In the case of something like tabletop roleplaying games, greyboxing would look like a word doc with all your design and text. If you are designing some content (like an adventure!) for a tactical RPG like Draw Steel, then it might include some simple maps made in something like Dungeonscrawl.

This is something I screwed up big time, and I am kind of kicking myself for not internalizing this earlier. MCDM puts a lot of playtests out for their upcoming products on their Patreon, and in their playtests they tell their audience that they don’t have finalized art, layout, design, and everything else. The key is to test (and we’ll talk about testing later) the text and design without bells and whistles to make it pretty.

I went into layout WAY too early (and we’ll talk about layout later). I wrote up my adventure in Google Docs and then began to learn layout before the adventure was finished, and I became really enamored with seeing how the final product MIGHT look and messed around with my adventure in Affinity for a long time. However, once I got into testing or making changes as I began to edit the adventure, that meant that my whole layout would change. This applied to map making as well - I made some very pretty maps using Dungeondraft I was proud of but some of those encounter changes meant map changes.

All this comes down to a massive amount of wasted time on this adventure. What I should have done is get the text and design of the whole adventure down in Docs, then make some maps using Dungeonscrawl and test all that. Make the changes I need to in the temp environments. Then, when the maps and text is final, move into layout and make it look pretty!

The lesson: Write and design everything first. Test it. Get finalized versions, then make those finalized versions pretty.

Narrative: Focus, Simplify, Reduce

One of the most important lessons I learned when studying screenwriting in college is how to focus a story. Screenwriting is an incredibly difficult medium to write for because of how limited your page count is and the way you must convey information. Every shot, every line of dialogue, every scene matters in the overall narrative. 

You might say “Yes, but doesn’t that apply to just about every medium?” With film, there is no telling the audience, only showing. The golden rule my professor taught us was: Write only what the camera sees. As Syd Field writes in his incredible book on screenwriting, Screenplay, you need to figure out where the dramatic action takes place. In a novel, the dramatic action takes place inside characters’ heads, so they have a much higher word count where they can tell the reader what a character is feeling, remembering, sensing, things we don’t see if it’s on screen. In a stage play, the dramatic action is through dialogue, it’s through characters speaking to one another. In film, the medium of delivering the story is moving pictures. That’s why they talk about film as being a director’s medium vs theater being an actor’s medium. Because you have a much more limited page count and word count (because of standard screenplay formatting), writing for a screenplay must be tight - no wasted words.

To use an analogy with cooking, think about the process of reducing a sauce. You simmer over low heat to evaporate all the water in a sauce to concentrate flavor. That’s what I think the process of drafting a screenplay is like - reducing the narrative to its most potent form. Cut out the extraneous fat, focus the narrative.

The original outline of the Violet Heart was somehow shorter in terms of content (only 5 victories or so) but more convoluted in its narrative with a larger cast of characters. The original attack on Tern had an unrelated expert on psionics captured, and then Memories (who was not psionic during this step of the process) is discovered only at Castrum Cinereus as an information dump. 

The more I thought about it, the more I decided that it was best to cut these unrelated NPCs, focus on Memories and Animus. Introduce both earlier, so every interaction has some relation to these two characters. Make Memories the character that gets captured! Sure, lots of adventures have that Strider character, sitting in the back of the inn and looking edgy, maybe offering a quest. They might even save the day when the shit hits the fan! But how many adventures put the heroes in a position where they have to rescue the guy they thought had this whole thing figured out? That’s Draw Steel, baby!

I think screenwriting is an apt analogy for how to write a Draw Steel adventure too because of its Cinematic keyword. Unlike 5E which is a game about attrition where encounters whittle down your resources, so you end up having more meaningless encounters to reduce heroes’ resources so they don’t go nova and smoke your final bad guy, Draw Steel’s battles build to an epic crescendo of heroes battling villains in their most powerful form - yet also their most fragile, low on Stamina and Recoveries. The most drama possible! And so when I was developing the encounters, I found more opportunities for Victories, but each encounter in a Draw Steel adventure needs to serve the same purpose as a screenplay scene - either to reveal character or to move the plot forward.

MCDM has talked about “using all the parts of the buffalo” while developing Crack the Sun in this Patreon post (you need a subscription to view this but its a great read). It boils down to this: Don’t make up new elements of a plot when something you already have established can fill that place. Take that discipline into your own adventure design. When revising, go back and find those connections and extraneous things you can cut to distill the best narrative out of your adventure.

Of course that doesn’t mean to write in such a way to railroad your characters, but I appreciate that some of the official Draw Steel adventures call out that they are intentionally written to be a linear story. A then B then C. Linear RPG adventures are good! In fact, I think I’m finding some of my players prefer a linear story where they know what they are supposed to do next rather than just an open sandbox!

Layout: It’s More Fun Than You Think!

I do not have a background in graphic design, but after doing a little bit of research I believed I could get a hang of RPG book layout. These videos by Icarus Games and this video by Fari RPGs were the primary inspirations for me. It was a long and brutal process, but I’m really happy with how my adventure layout looks.

Every once in a while, and by that I mean like, once every few years, there’s a new skill I am committed to learning that utterly takes over my life and becomes a massive hyperfixation for me. Learning RPG layout is what did that for me. There were two skillsets I was learning: How to layout a book properly and provide all the critical information a Director needs to succeed, as well as learning the program Affinity - a free and VERY powerful alternative to the Adobe suite. I had a very brief stint back in high school when I was learning Photoshop and considering going down the path of graphic design which taught me some basic fundamentals. But by no means is that a background in graphic design.

Here’s how I did the layout. I went to this page on DriveThruRPG to get a basic layout template, mostly for the guides on where to put columns of text, margins, that sort of thing. After that I did some background coloration with some basic gradients that give the top and bottom of the pages an aged look. I did not put that aging on the fore edge of the page (had to look up that term when writing this!) but I’m considering it. I also put a very light texturing on the top and bottom of the pages to help with that aged look. One of the latest things that got finalized in the trade dress is that geometric page border that I created by layering a lot of shapes in Affinity Vector studio and then making a texture brush out of it. I used the pen tool to trace around the edges of the page. I also created pagination on the bottom of pages with a little geometric shape to keep it inside and smaller page headings that tell which part of the adventure you’re on. All these elements were created using Master Pages, so when you get to a new page of your document, you don’t have to manually recreate the entire thing.

Next, the text. Fonts stayed almost entirely the same for the entire project. You can find a lot of great looking fonts on Google Fonts that are free to use. I used Cardo for the body text and Almendra for the headings. On the advice of Icarus Games, I utilized the swatches feature to keep track of all the colors I was using in this layout. That is a very important and useful tool, utilize it! 

And now we come to one of the most important things I learned when laying out my book: text styles. This is a HUGE topic and I recommend you just go and learn how to do it yourself. The tools in these layout programs to make text look exactly how you want it to are all so powerful. The Fari RPG video above gave me a lot of fundamentals on how to use the text style features, and I think my styles are fairly basic. You can get crazy with them. Just look at MORK BORG.

Finally, let’s talk about the graphic elements. I manually created all the tables for enemies within an encounter, sidebars for the negotiations and Director advice using the shape text tool and some specialized styles, those were easy. What wasn’t easy was making the statblocks. Using a Draw Steel template created by Signals From Beyond you can find here which I recommend as a starting point, I was wrestling with Affinity tables for a LONG time to attempt to make these statblocks look good. Then I saw what other people were doing when I began to ask in Draw Steel creator communities: Specialized text styles as individual blocks that you tie together into one large statblock. That blew my mind. So I scrapped the entire table-as-statblock idea and started from scratch on individual text styles. I think there are a lot of statblocks in the community that look WAY better than mine do, but for my first foray into creating a statblock, I was happy with the result.

The process of creating this layout was long, brutal, but I am satisfied with the result. I am sure at some point I will get bored of this look and make an entirely bespoke layout for new products in the future, but for now, I did the work to make this one, and now I don’t have to do it again for future projects.

Art was fairly easy to plug in using simple clipping mask tools. I’m sure that’s messing with something in the file size to have the entire art piece that is just masked over but it was a simple thing I knew how to do and could perfect a better way of doing on a later project. Don’t let perfect be the enemy of the good.

Speaking of art…

Art: Adventures in the Stock Art Mines

I was fairly certain this first product was going to have no art in it besides the maps. Hell, a lot of great Draw Steel community made products have no art! The maps, however, I was committed to getting right.

Several years ago I bought a program called Dungeondraft you can find here and it is a simple mapmaking tool for digital tactical maps. There are a ton of tools and assets in there so you don’t have to be an expert in Photoshop or any digital editing tool to make a Dungeondraft map look great, especially with tasteful use of lighting, paths, terrain, and objects.

However, my problem (along with many people, it seems) with Dungeondraft is that I don’t like how the basic assets look. There are too few of them and I want a better looking style. Thankfully, there are a lot of creators out there that make assets for dungeondraft, but then I ran into another problem: Finding one with a good license. I knew I was going to be charging money for this product, but my budget was not infinite. Some asset packs were gorgeous but expensive, others you could grab a license by subscribing to their patreon as long as you have your product using their assets up for sale. Then I found this creator that’s creating some GORGEOUS looking maps using their own custom assets with a very permissible license. Thanks, Cyclopean!

And so I went about making maps in Dungeondraft that look fantastic now! The more I thought about it, the more I realized I could probably spend a little bit of money on some stock art pieces to fill up the pages. And so I dove into the stock art mines.

The problem with stock art is that a lot of it is crap. So here’s a few resources I found that made my search for stock art way, WAY easier. This work was done by other people, not me, credit where credit is due.

• Hipsters and Dragons’ article on where to find stock art pointed me to some great artists. https://www.hipstersanddragons.com/buy-fantasy-stock-art/
• Explorer’s Design Public Domain Art https://www.explorersdesign.com/public-domain/
• Nico de Gallo’s Human Made TTRPG Resource Guide https://ttrpgresources.com/
• Unsplash has lots of free to use images (check their licenses before using) https://unsplash.com/
• This pay what you want chaos art pack https://chaoclypse.itch.io/chaos-art-pack-pwyw

There’s a ton more resources online you can find to grab great stock art, but those are the ones I used. The stock artists I found the most inspiring and used their assets include:

• Daniel Comerci
• Dean Spencer
• Lore Wise Games & Henrik Karpinen

I bought a lot of stuff I didn’t end up using, but the relatively cheap assets meant that I was still under budget for this project, and so I could spend more money on some bespoke pieces. I saw Vermillion77’s art in some of Jenny[REDACTED]’s products on itch, most notably the cover of the Quar’ri ancestry for Jams of the Timescape #2 and I knew they could make my idea of a cover sing. I’m so incredibly happy with how it turned out. You can find more of their work here!

With all those pieces in place, the layout was mostly done. However, I knew I had some more spaces to fill and so I contacted the amazing Liornogard for some character busts for Memories and Animus that I could not be happier with. I worked with them in the past for some TTRPG character designs, so I knew their style already.

I’m really happy with how the final product looks with all the art pieces and maps in there. Stock art is a lifesaver if you want to make your RPG product look pretty and professional without breaking the bank. That allows you some more cash to make the bespoke pieces you want that you can’t find anywhere else. Don’t sleep on stock art!

Testing: Sometimes, dead more is better.

I already talked above about how much of a grave mistake it was to be happy with my layout before going into testing. That meant that every change made after testing changed the text flow and layout, extending how long this project took to finalize. I know now it was a terrible thing, but I’m telling the process of how I made this, and this is how it happened!

I only ran two playtests of this adventure, and I wish I did more. The reason I didn’t was because there were other big commitments I had made in my life at the same time I was trying to get the Violet Heart out the door and I had given myself a deadline which would not allow for another playtest.

The first group I playtested with was made up of my in person friends, people I have gamed with in some capacity for years. The second group I playtested with was a group of Draw Steel Directors I found through MCDM’s LFG Discord channel and had never played with before. I was running these playtests twice a week while also keeping up with my regular group and another big commitment, so I was swamped during this time with work.

The first playtest each week was with my in person gaming group, and the second test was with my online group. My in person friends got to see the roughest version of this adventure, and the online group saw a slightly more polished version. Both groups gave me great feedback - My in person friends knew this was a playtest and were not afraid to tell me when things weren’t working, but also really supportive and told me what they had fun with. I sifted through their feedback and came back with better designs that my online group, who knew Draw Steel’s design and were more attuned to game design than my in person friends, could give feedback on and dial it in.

I wish I did this testing period a lot differently, but even with my flawed process, this adventure came out WAY better than if I did no testing at all. Testing is vitally important. Even if I was not actively running another campaign at the time of testing the Violet Heart, I wish I went through one playtest entirely, made changes, and then went through another playtest of the entire adventure.

Each playtest was made up of 3 sessions that were fairly packed with content, and so if your players spend a fair bit of time roleplaying as my groups did, you could comfortably get 4 sessions worth of content out of this quest. The reason I was playing through the entire quest and not just testing combat encounters is that I wanted to make sure the narrative flowed appropriately. By the end of part 2, the heroes should know what is going on and how to stop the villain. But before then, I wanted to make sure that the heroes knew what was expected of them in order to progress the narrative, which worked out well.

I wish I had put the text of this quest out there for some Directors or homebrewers to review. It would be even better if there were more Directors than just the author to run this and give feedback on it. But again, the deadline was approaching, so I worked with what time I had.

I’m really happy with the feedback I got, even if I wish I could have approached this whole process differently. As much as I loved running an original quest for my friends, I think for the future I will not have them as playtesters because I want people more attuned to the math, playstyle, and design of Draw Steel to provide me feedback when the adventure is in its most volatile form. They may still be playtesters, but in its final round of testing where little might change.

After the playtest period, one of my online players pointed me towards the Draw Steel Brewery discord server where tons of designers are playtesting and getting feedback for their own Draw Steel homebrew. I can’t believe I wasn’t in this community earlier. Thanks, Speck!

Side note: In my online group, one of my players was playing the Summoner class, and seeing how that class changed up battles was FASCINATING. They broke some combat encounters, but not in ways I thought needed patching. It was one of those moments I realized I was okay letting a certain class be really good, because they won’t shine in every combat encounter. If you’ve read the adventure, the combat encounter in Part 4 became trivial when the summoner could use their minions to free the civilians. I didn’t think that was a bug, it was awesome!

Side side note: I am currently reading Pesto’s Guide to Testing, which is a great article on how to go about RPG testing. I did not read this before going into testing the Violet Heart, but it's changing the way I will go about the next playtests I am involved with - both my own projects and other peoples’. Give it a read!

Deadlines: Unfortunately, they do work.

For almost my entire adult life I have had some drive for creative writing. Dozens of ideas for stories and adventures have sat untouched in the back of my mind. But at the core of the issue, procrastination and by extension some measure of fear has prevented me from letting those works see the light of day.

I have also struggled with giving myself deadlines for things I want to get done. It is all too easy for me to throw aside a self imposed limitation or deadline. I started this project slowly and knowing that eventually it would get done, I was committed to that. I had a lot of things to learn - how to structure an adventure, how to write it, layout, art, testing, everything. So I had no real deadline to start with.

However, as I got closer and closer to seeing this adventure complete, I gave myself a deadline. By the end of July 2026, the adventure would be out. And on some level, knowing that this was not just a project for myself but a work I was going to put out into the world, that deadline felt much more real, less self imposed and more an external deadline.

I have found that for my own work flow, I need that level of accountability outside of myself in order to make progress on creative projects. Setting that deadline for myself has given me the practice to give myself a limit on time. In the last couple of weeks, it required me to put everything in its place and get the adventure out the door. Which I did a few days early!

I think setting a deadline at the start of a project is going to be much easier now that I understand the full process of putting together an adventure. If you struggle with finishing creative projects, set a deadline, stick to it. If you need to, make sure there is some kind of external accountability you need to stick by - like having something to show your friend after some amount of time that works best for you. You can utilize some kind of shame to your advantage by wanting to avoid telling your friend that you have nothing to show them.

Editing: New Territory to Explore

While writing this adventure, I went over it time and time again with a fine tooth comb myself to edit it. And from what I have read about professionals in the industry, it is generally not a good idea for the author to edit the project themselves.

Rereading it after its release, I am still finding some things that could have been worded a lot better. Hiring an editor (or multiple editors) will be new territory to explore on the next project I work on. I don’t regret this decision though, because it allowed me to get a good feel for the process of adventure design. Now that I have the process down, I can hire professionals and invest more deeply in this.

Refining the Process: The Most Important Lesson

Now that I’ve published one adventure and made tons of mistakes, I can learn from them on the next one. And the most vital lessons I think I have learned over the course of making this adventure is a process that will make for a better adventure on a faster timeline that will be more refined and smoother than before.

A lot of this advice comes from these two videos here and here. These videos are an interview between Teos Abadia and Scott Fitzgerald Gray in two parts about the process of creating an RPG book. There is an incredible amount of wisdom from two industry pros. Their focus is on creating RPG products but there are some nuggets of wisdom in these videos that pertain to any creative writing pursuit.

This is by no means a comprehensive guide, but this is a rough outline of how I will go about producing new adventures going forward with everything I learned from my first foray into adventure design as well as Teos and Scott’s interview. I am no industry professional, I am an independent game designer just starting out, and I hope if you are in my shoes as I was starting out, this may help you to some degree.

Step 1: Brainstorm

Get words on paper. Nothing solid, just rough ideas, half formed plans. Themes, plots, characters. They are all just mush that will be sculpted like clay into a beautiful final product. This is the gathering of elements, a mise en place of all the things you may use in the adventure. Don’t be critical of any idea that comes to your mind during this stage. There is plenty of time later to throw out what is unnecessary.

For me, the inspirations for adventures in my doc of ideas mostly come from looking through Draw Steel monsters and reading their lore. I think to myself how fantastic the story opportunities are in each of the monster's lore and can create a whole adventure just featuring one monster. I’ve also gotten huge inspiration looking through stock art, thinking that I can create an adventure that uses this image or that image in the layout as a jumping off point for narrative inspiration.

Step 2: Outline

Now that you have all your elements that may or may not be used in the adventure, create the outline. For me, the brainstorm is just a rough smattering of ideas, but the outline is a more complete map of the plot of the adventure and encounters that will be inside. I might write what kind of monsters and objectives each encounter will contain. Which parts of this narrative might be a negotiation or a montage test? What unique mechanics might I need to develop?

This is also where I set down where I might need maps and art, but these are very rough ideas. The plans for where art might end up and what kind of art will be finalized when moving to layout. I will definitely put down what sort of maps I might need in the outline, however, especially for a tactically complex game like Draw Steel.

Step 3: Write the Damn Adventure

This is the hard work: writing the manuscript. Keep in mind the kinds of information a Director might need in order to be successful in running this adventure. Refer back to official adventures for references on style and formatting.

When you’re done writing the adventure, on the advice of Scott Gray, give the piece to someone else to read. Not an editor that you might pay, but someone you trust that can give you critical feedback on what’s not working so you can revise. Once you think the adventure is playable, you can playtest!

Step 4: Playtest and Playtest Again

So much might change during playtesting the adventure that you need to be flexible about. Playtest as much as your deadline allows you to. Send the manuscript to others to get their feedback from running it or just reading it. Any and all feedback is helpful.

However, be mindful of the kinds of feedback you might receive and where you want to stick with your own guns. If you mindlessly follow every person’s suggestions, the adventure stops being your own. Filter the feedback through a lens of what you are trying to achieve in an element of the adventure.

Step 5: Editing

I don’t have much to say here other than this is a step of the process you might take after the playtesting phase is finished. When you think the adventure is in a good place, you need someone to go through and ensure the language is right for everything.

In the video I linked above, Scott Gray says that text should not change significantly after an editor has gone through it, which is why I think you should be playtesting before editing. Once you have a solid grasp on how unique mechanics or narrative elements might work in your adventure, but just need to be cleaned up, then you can hire an editor to come through.

Scott Gray also says that if you’re going to hire one type of editor to work on your RPG product (because there are multiple types!), it should be a developmental editor who not only cleans up language, makes sure the flow of information is correct, but also knows the game well enough to clean up the writing of game mechanics in your adventure or product. Again, I highly recommend watching those videos on how an RPG book is made, they are invaluable resources for indie creators. I look forward to putting this advice into practice in my next product.

Step 6: Layout and Art

When you think the text is finalized, you can move to layout and art. You might start commissioning art or looking for stock art earlier in the process, but you also may not know specifically where you might need pieces or how they will fit in the rest of the layout until the text is finalized.

Gray says in the videos above that you can do this in a linear process (IE, don’t get art commissioned until you are in the layout stage because you may not know where the pieces might go or what dimensions they will be), but that might extend the timeline of producing the adventure. Your mileage may vary, there is no wrong way to do this. For me as a one person team, I think I’d rather do it in a more linear way even if the timeline gets extended so that I know where I need art. But if you have a larger team and people specifically dedicated to each discipline, certain steps of the process will become more simultaneous. Producing art almost certainly happens earlier than going to layout in these larger projects.

Step 7: Finalize Layout, Text, Art

Go through your adventure a few more times to ensure everything is in its right place. Ensure the layout looks good. Another editor can step in during this part of the process: the proofreader to make sure that all the text is correct. Ensure all the art pieces are where you want them to be. This is the final pass before publication.

Step 8: Publish!

When you have the final product, you can get to publishing. If you are producing an adventure for Draw Steel, make sure you have maps and Director sheets bundled with the PDF. Ensure that your product also doesn’t violate any licenses you are utilizing!

I am not touching print publishing with a ten foot pole until I have the means of doing so, but publishing digital PDFs is fairly simple on itch.io. You need to set up tax info and payments but after that’s all squared away, it's very easy to put a product on there. I opted for direct payment, along with many others who swear by it.

Make sure your product page on itch looks good! Some people make theirs look beautiful and mine was fairly simple. Ensure you have screenshots so people can see the layout or maybe some art, and put a brief description of what your audience can find inside the adventure. I also included an announcement video describing the adventure because I thought it was important to get face time with the creator. I had to invest in a little bit of equipment to make that video look halfway decent and my friend edited that because she has video editing expertise that I don’t! I had a deadline to meet!

You can also use DriveThruRPG or RPG Trader to distribute your product. I have not used these marketplaces myself, but I hear good things about RPG Trader, less so DriveThru for independent creators.

So What Now?

This was a colossal amount of work. I am so grateful for all the people involved in this project - the artists that brought my vision to life, the stock artists who are kind enough to provide their incredible artwork for the masses to use. The testers, both my friends and the complete strangers who I gathered online, who were kind enough to volunteer their time to test a volatile draft. They were all so kind and thoughtful with their feedback and the adventure would be way worse without them. All the resources I linked throughout this blog post were vital in this production. My friend Grace edited my announcement video and made it much more fun and engaging to watch.

I’m so glad I got a feel for the process and the next one’s going to be a lot better and a lot smoother. But for now, I have a few goals before I get back into the work.

First, read more Draw Steel adventures, especially made by the community! This page on adventure lookup has a huge list of Draw Steel adventures made by the community and I’d love to see what kinds of crazy plots, unique mechanics, and interesting layouts/ways of conveying information other creators are using. If time allows, run some more Draw Steel! But currently I am close to the end of a long Curse of Strahd campaign, and I want to finish that strong.

Next, read some of the guides the community has put out! In particular, Pesto’s Guide to Testing and GubDM’s Theory of Mapping I’ve heard great things about and can’t wait to try out their methods.

Get more proficient using Affinity for layout and graphics. TechnicallyTrent’s videos were fantastic resources for me to get some fundamentals on how to use Affinity.

I just finished working on some treasures for Jams of the Timescape #3, which is a set of leveled treasures that are themed after the seasons. You can find my entry here! Once time allows, I will begin the next project that will either be a full blown supplement featuring the Death Bloom carnivorous plant people I made in Jams of the Timescape #2, or one of two level 2 quests for Draw Steel: either a prison break from a dwarven stronghold or a race against a rival party of treasure seekers. Stay tuned for updates on what’s coming.

Until next time!