So there's this great little module that Skerples over at coinsandscrolls.blogspot.com just put out called "Tomb of the Serpent Kings." It's designed around teaching new players the basics of dungeoncrawling by repetition and clear examples. It's got art by the ever-wonderful Scrap Princess. Best of all, its free, so you've got no reason not to check it out.
The reason I'm advertising this here is because, after version 2.0 was released, I read some negative reviews that made a point of criticizing the layout of the document. Now, layout is one of the hardest things in the world to do well. The perfect layout is one that nobody notices, because to do any more is to detract from the information on the page. So I can hardly fault an independent game designer, releasing a passion project solely for the benefit of the community, on something that tabletop RPGs have been doing wrong for decades. But still, I didn't like the idea of a perfectly-usable adventure being pushed to the wayside for something so small, so I decided to lend a helping hand.
I have a particularly nerdy hobby, even among devotees of 40-year old fantasy elf games: I love learning about typography and typesetting. And ever since Kevin Crawford released his Brief Study of TSR Book Design (free!) I've been itching to put some of that information into practice. So I booted up LaTeX, reached for my printed-from-pdf copies of Blood in the Chocolate and Maze of the Blue Medusa (two of the best-laid out adventures I've ever seen), and got to work.
Here's the finished product. For anyone interested in what I actually did, it was fairly simple.
First, I decided to give the entire document a once-over, looking for typos. This is important! For anyone looking to do any sort of layout work in the future, whether for others or simply to save some money on their own published stuff, make no columns and adjust no margins before ensuring your document is error-free. After that, I started separating the text into more manageable chunks. Each room got its own write-up, like any classic module; this allows for the DM to more easily scan text to get to what they need, greatly improving the adventures ease-of-use at the table. I eschewed the use of box text, because I hate being told what to say when I'm DMing and I'm sure you do too.
Next came my favorite part, adjusting the typeface. I went with a classic serif for the body text and sans serif for the section headers. This is a good idea for multiple reasons that are better explained in Kevin Crawford's booklet. I set the margins to a reasonable width, and used two-column text to allow me to place pictures and maps pretty much wherever I wanted. On that topic, maps! I wanted to make sure that everything a DM needed to run a room was on the same page, so I added mini-map cutout pictures that detail the rooms on each page and help illustrate how they all connect to each other. It may not seem like much, but it makes a huge difference when players are running or fleeing from room to room in a short amount of time.
I already had the artwork, so now all I had to do was put it back in. I sent the completed document to Skerples, and the deed was done.
All in all, formatting the entire module probably took about 6 hours of honest effort, but the end result is, in my opinion, a great improvement. Go check it out.
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