Calling Upon The Bright Blizzard

I submitted a Cairn forestcrawl to Appendix N Jam! So it’s time for another jam reflection session.

Affinity Is Easy Actually

As it turns out doing a proper layout with a desktop publishing software is easy when you know what you are doing mostly. Clayton Notestine put out this great post with the basics of layout that taught me 2 very important lessons; how to design with grids and that you can manually set those grid guidelines. Don’t ask me how I didn’t know the second one was a thing, I couldn’t tell you. That one shift in my thinking made a designing a trifold go from a test of my limits to trivially easy. The pamphlet that resulted has a pretty effective control panel layout for the main forest crawl and aesthetically is my best work.

Hirohiko Araki Is Right

In Manga in Theory and Practice legendary mangaka Hirohiko Araki outlines the importance of the first page. The first page (and by extension the cover) should tell the reader everything they need to know to tell if your work is worth their time. Now more than ever people’s attention is at a premium, you need to make it absolutely clear why they should bother reading your module over someone else’s. I did this in two ways.

The first was to set the scene as part of the cover. I gave the setup of a forest on a mountain in a perpetual blizzard allowing communion with the dead as a lead in to the title. The cover image itself is of a cold isolated mountain, that I coloured an icy blue and cathode green hinting at the nuclear angle. Then the inside flap of the pamphlet explains the central conflict between the forest and Taipan the atomic robot puppeted by the ruler of the land of the dead. Almost every comment about my module had mentioned how much they like Taipan. If I put him on the interior I think he would have attracted far less attention and the pamphlet would be worse off.

Pick Art Early

Last time I learned to do layout way earlier¹, this time I learned the same thing about art. Early into the jam as I was ideating I looked through Mark Felp’s public domain packs and I found the art I used for Taipan. Until that point I wasn’t going to have an atomic robot in the forestcrawl. That find not only changed my writing but the visuals of the end product. In future unless I decide to throw around some money for an artist, get good enough to be my own artist or fulfil my dream of having a pet artist for all my projects I need to go look through the public domain first. It makes a big difference.

Be Annoying

I have posted about Appendix N Jam and my submission way more than any other jam. Hell I have pimped this thing way more than any other module I have made. It’s my most successful piece of TTRPG writing and all it took was a bit of presentation and being ok with being annoying. Part of this is playing into the mask of Danny Fist², leaning into the bombastic personality that would come with such an absurd name. You can get away with just about anything if you’re funny about it, including demanding attention. Even then I am probably testing a bit of patience but that’s what you have to do to compete with the open sewer pipe that is social media. Even the parts of it I like are kind of annoying.

And Now For The Lesson I Didn’t Learn…

I am once again participating in two simultaneous game jams³… and I have two kids… and a pretty demanding job… and I am running a 5e game for charity this month… It’s an combination of TTRPGs and sado-masocism not seen since Dark Sun. Wait Dark Sun is back again nevermind. Alexa, how do I unpost a blog? Google, how do I buy an Alexa and how do they work? Siri, how do I end a comedy bit? Before or after it stops being funny?

1. Read my post about Frontier Scum’s Summer Jam to learn about that dear reader. ↩︎

2. Yes, Danny Fist is not my real name; shocking. It’s not even Danny. ↩︎

3. The jams in question are Liminal Horror’s Summer Jam and Minimalism Jam. I might add a third if I enjoy it too much. ↩︎