January turned into a whirlwind for me shortly after Wizards of the Coast announced its partnership with One Book Shelf to launch the Dungeon Master’s Guild.
And as quickly as I could manage, I had uploaded the DM’s Kit: On the Trail of Tyranny to the site.
One Book Shelf, which you probably recognize from its flagship digital marketplaces DriveThruRPG and RPGNow, also manages the DMsGuild.
DMsGuild is like those other stores, except the content must use the Fifth Edition rules of D&D, and if it includes setting material, be about the Forgotten Realms campaign setting.
As it happens, I had been keeping good notes while my gaming group took part in the D&D launch adventures, Hoard of the Dragon Queen and the Rise of Tiamat. And not being content to run the adventures simply straight from the books, I had, over the course of time, created quite a few handouts, props and side quests.
Some of those campaign adventures I had shared with Facebook posts or in related articles here on Gnome Stew. From those, some folks had suggested that I collate that material and make a pdf product for the DMsGuild.
Scrubbed clean
Though I had kept digital backups of everything, I had one big task ahead before I could publish. Namely, I had to scrub the documents clean of anything — mostly images — I didn’t have the right to use in a published document. (Hey, it’s OK to snag stuff off the internet and print it out for your personal use. But putting it in a product to sell, that’s another matter.)
And that included, strange as it may seem, a lot of related maps and images (such as the wonderful illustrations that Bryan Syme produced for the books) from Wizards of the Coast. It would have been wonderful to have Bryan’s portrait of Frulam Mondath, for instance.
I did scour the free artwork resources Wotc has provided to jump-start the DMsGuild. As wonderful as the selection is, few of them really applied.
And for those images that were in the public domain, I had to go back and properly cite them. While nothing requires this, it does seem like good manners.
All told, that was the most time-consuming. If I were to do this again, of course, I’d keep a closer eye on such things. But who knew that something like the DMsGuild was even in the works?
Assembling the document
This production process is two-fold. I own a Mac, so I use Pages for creating documents, including pdfs. Pages is not as snazzy (or as expensive as, say, using Adobe Creative Cloud), but it has the basics. Nor does it have a clutter-free bookmarking tool that many Adobe products can insert, but for a breezy 50-page document, it will suffice.
Maybe it’s a matter of perspective, but I look at DMsGuild as the place where enthusiastic GMs can self-publish. In other words, it’s a place for amateurs as well as professional publishers. Not everything there has to have the bells and whistles of professionally published documents. Sure, you should do your best to make it look neat, but hey, if your “art director” is an amateur artist with a box of crayons, don’t let that stop you.
The Big Proof
As with anything, proofing a document can make a difference in its readability. So, what came up from my page proofs? A lot of sentence fragments that had to be fixed, for one thing. Misspellings of one sort or another. (So help me, it doesn’t matter how much of Lords of Waterdeep I play, I will never be able to spell Laeral Silverhand correctly). And paragraph construction that were fallacies in logic (the sort of snags our own Gnome proofer often catches in my posts).
Uploading files
The document uploader is fairly straight-forward, though I went through it twice before I got it right. Some things to have in mind before you start the uploading process: a) set your price; b) have your product description already written –Â and proofed; c) have a separate file that is just the cover of the document; d) and patience with the uploading sequence.
Publicity
Lastly, it doesn’t hurt to shake the bushes and tell people that you’ve just uploaded your first DMsGuild product. Social media can be great at that, especially if your friends can refer the product to their friends. That starts a word of mouth chain. It’s the best kind of advertising.
One of the side benefits is the fact that you’ll widen your own circle of contacts in the process. Â
Hi Troy I’m slowly but surely adding artwork to DM’s Guild that you might find useful look under RPG MEDIA > RPG ARTWORK or http://www.dmsguild.com/browse.php?x=0&y=0&author=Matthew%20Richmond
Thanks for the link.
It sounds like it was a pretty good experience for you. Out of curiosity, did your sales come mostly in a big wave when you first announced it, steadily build over time, just hold steady?
Now that you know the the DM’s guild is an option going forward, do you think you’ll write up your notes for upcoming sessions in a format that will be easy to update and publish–or will use at the table still dominate your prep? Or is this something that makes the most sense tied into an existing adventure–so you no plans on doing it for homebrew scenarios?
Good questions.
Sales: I caught the tail end of the first wave when there was a lot of enthusiasm for the site. (It’s shiny!). Nothing has approached the sales level I had in the first week — when it reached the copper level quickly. (I’ve since released two other products on the DM Guild, neither has even approached the initial offering in terms of acceptance). My read is that overall, sales are still modest compared with OneBookShelf’s other sites. The product has moved from copper to silver over the intervening 2 1/2 months, and has been on a pace of 1/day since. I have watched other products released at the same time and have sort of drawn my own conclusions as to what their sales have been like. One advantage my product did have is that it came out the same day as an adventure released by Kobold Press also pertaining to a section of the Tyranny of Dragons storyline. So I think it got a bump from that association. In addition, Wolfgang Baur has been awesome in mentioning my releases in his Kobold Courier newsletter, which was really appreciated.
I wrote up a sequel adventure, Palace of the Red Pasha, which my table ran and which is now up as a product. That makes three products in the Tyranny of Dragons storyline — which is probably as far as I’ll take it. The product includes my DM screen overhangs and NPC crib sheet and the randomized tables I made — so in essence, it includes the handout accessories I found useful around the table. So, it’s an original adventure with the same sort of accessories that made On the Trail of Tyranny a silver level seller.
Homebrew: One of the rules of the DM’s Guild is that the setting must pertain to one of the storylines they’ve released (Rage of Demons, Elemental Evil and Tyranny of Dragons were all Forgotten Realms; Curse of Strahd is Barovia) — or be completely generic. So if I want to do home-brew, I’d have to use the SRD and the OGL and publish in another venue.
As for those other storylines, I’d have to make a thorough review of the adventures before I decided whether a product would fill an unmet need. Misdirected Mark’s What’s Down With DND has already done a thorough look at Rage of Demons and made good suggestions on shoring up some sections. Whether one of my DM’s Kit approaches would serve that purpose effectively, I can’t say until I really delved into the material.
Excellent advice! I especially appreciate the explanation on what images you can and cannot use. I’m too close to the artist side of the nerd community to not be sensitive to copyright issues, so it’s nice to see a simple explanation included along with advice like this.
The art issue has been an eye-opener for those in this burgeoning community. One of the lessons still being learned is creators just can’t Google a term and then grab any artwork — even artwork that’s previously appeared in a Wotc product and given a “preview” release to the public — in one of these documents. Most of these instances of treading on intellectual property rights have been innocent enough, but it’s a side of publishing the groundwork really wasn’t laid out very clearly for all these novice publishers.
On the other side are a segment of consumers demanding original art in these product. The issue there, as many people have learned, is one of Econ 101. If you contract for a single piece of artwork at most artists’ going rates, it is unlikely sales of these small $1 and pay what you want products can justify the outlay cost of the artwork. There is affordable artwork out there (see first post) on the clipart model, but that’s about it.