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A successful DM& #39;s Guild designer recently tweeted love for the DMG over its low bar to entry. While it& #39;s true that you could just slap some words into a document and put that on the Guild, it takes more than that to have a product that makes you $ or gets you a rep. #DnD
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As the DM& #39;s Guild has become a central hub for people to find their favorite expansions to D&D, competition for eyeballs has pushed production values. At the time of writing this, here& #39;s the DM& #39;s Guild most popular titles.
Notice a few things in common.
Notice a few things in common.
All of these titles have (or appear to have) color covers, and many have trade dress that& #39;s very close to the official D&D trade dress. All of them are pretty hefty - the shortest is the Complete Arcanist at 51 pages. No little 10-page one-offs here.
Let& #39;s talk about the work you have to do to get to that level, which is not a low bar. I& #39;ll use my recent freebie release, "Distant Sister," a DARK SUN 2e mini-adventure - which can& #39;t be released on the Guild because DARK SUN isn& #39;t open content - as a counter-example.
First off: No real cover page. This is really a credits page and should be one of the interior pages. Ok, some DM& #39;s Guild titles also do this, like Adventurer& #39;s League modules, but if you want to actually make some nickels? Gotta have a cover and it has to look good.
Note that it& #39;s black and white. Again, if you& #39;re doing a very short piece, you can get away with that. Or maybe a color cover with a B&W interior, like many books from the & #39;90s. But increasingly, people look for color art. And this is stock art - not contracted art.
Check out this corner layout. This was done in Word, not in a layout program. It uses a stock border with no background gradient, and the title is in the ubiquitous Papyrus font.
Contrast with an actual DARK SUN product from the 90s, which has a color gradient, chapter-specific art, and then a clean text field.
Now I& #39;m lucky because DARK SUN itself used the Papyrus font, probably because it& #39;s free. But you can& #39;t really get away with that in a professional, competitive DM& #39;s Guild product. You need to find a font that is clear, readable, and distinct.
You need your font to either look like an official D&D font, or be one that is specific to your game. And you need to worry about accessibility: A font that& #39;s readable to you might not be clear to readers with various visual or reading challenges, especially on a background.
So now you& #39;re either spending a lot of time to find those fonts, or spending $ on them.
Now check out this dead corner space in "Distant Sister." In a professional-looking product, you fix this in layout with a combination of art and spacing and kerning.
Now check out this dead corner space in "Distant Sister." In a professional-looking product, you fix this in layout with a combination of art and spacing and kerning.
Having these kinds of empty corners, or paragraphs that split across pages like the one pictured, make your product look less professional. Bad breaks are harder for people to read, while white space makes them feel like they didn& #39;t get their money& #39;s worth on the product.
How about this art that& #39;s in a clean, perfect box? This is a stock picture with a filter. But a good layout artist will put your art into the text so that words wrap around it and it doesn& #39;t occlude the entire column. I& #39;m not a layout artist and I& #39;m not using layout software.
Ooo, a portrait! In a Guild-competitive book this would be either be an illustration (which you do yourself or hire an artist to do), a painting, or possibly a photomanipulated picture. Possibly color - esp. if you want top tier.
This is an AI-generated face with a filter on it.
This is an AI-generated face with a filter on it.
Final page: p. 22. No outro and no advertising. Folks who are establishing a product line might wanna have a color advert page here, to sell their other products and have teasers for upcoming ones, then a back cover as well.
Official D&D books have color art on the cover, usually a wrapped piece covering front and back. DM& #39;s Guild books can probably get away with a simple black back cover, but it needs to be there in case your book ever goes Print On Demand.
"Distant Sister" is about 10,000 words long, which is tiny. I can do that kind of writing in a few days, but not everyone can - and that& #39;s not including having to look up rules, make sure that your stats are right, and formatting your blocks like the official ones.
An incorrectly-formatted stat block throws the reader, who& #39;s been trained by official books to look for information in a certain way. So you have to do those, and pregenerated characters, in a way that follows a familiar, official format. Which takes time and effort!
"Distant Sister" also features a trans woman as a main character. That means I brought in consultants to assist with the material. While games desperately need more content centered on marginalized identities, you can& #39;t do it safely or well without help if you aren& #39;t one of & #39;em.
If you want a professionally-competitive product, you may need consultants, and you need editing. You can only edit your own work to a certain degree. And if you don& #39;t know how to do layout or art, then you need someone to do those, too. For big projects, a producer, too!
PDFs sold on DM& #39;s Guild also need to fit formatting guidelines, especially if they& #39;re ever going to be POD. So you need to be able to turn your finished document into a PDF in the right format.
Now you& #39;ve gotten all that done, you need to upload it to the Guild, get placed, and then... advertise. Because Guild competition is a thing now. If you just launch a product onto the Guild and leave it, you might get lucky - but people will see ads for other products instead.
Having a successful Guild product is a feedback loop. You get on the front-page placement of most popular/best reviewed products, which means that people see your product immediately, so more people buy it, so it is more popular.
But if you can& #39;t crack that top tier, people have to go looking for your product. So you wind up advertising for it on social media, podcasts, and maybe trying to get an actual play on Twitch or a mention by a big leaguer.
All of this is to say: You can and should make your own game material. Explode your ideas out there and share them with the gaming world on a platform that you choose. But there is a difference between a low bar to entry, and the threshold for a profitable or popular product.
