DMs Guild Looking for feedback on Scraps of Divinity (DMs Guild project).

Hi, Moze Howard here.
I've already posted about this in the promotional forum but I also want to get some serious feedback. You see, I'm part of a gaming group that streams on Twitch (CarpeGM), own carpegm.com (not a successful gaming site but we're trying) and have long wanted to get into publishing. Obviously this Guild thing's a great opportunity but the response has been ... underwhelming.
See, my buddy Ryan (who created and ran the actual adventure) and I wrote "The Festival of Lights", the first adventure in a campaign entitled "Scraps of Divinity" and put it on the Guild. Now I knew a lot more people would download it than buy it but it's been a ratio of something like 100 to 1 and nobody's given feedback or done any reviews.
I don't know if there's something I'm missing or if it's just that people don't want to pay for something they can get free but, since it is up there as "pay what you want", I'm asking for anybody who wants to check it out to look it over and tell me what you like, what needs improved and etcetera. We're gearing up to write book 2 and I don't want a repeat performance although that one will have a solid price...

http://www.dmsguild.com/product/177413/Scraps-of-Divinity-Book-1-The-Festival-of-Light?src=slider_view

If you feel like contributing don't let me discourage you but, again, looking for feedback here. Thanks in advance!

Moze.

Hi Moze,

I took the opportunity to take a gander at The Festival of Light. First off, I would like to say that I think the actual content of the adventure is solid and I don't see any problems in it by just reading through it, and the premise works.

That being said, as someone who does graphic design for a large portion of his day job here are a few things that I noticed (these are all friendly suggestions):

• You need to leave more space between paragraphs, titles, subtitles, and well pretty much everything. The content feels very "crammed" for lack of a better word.

• The art you are using is OK, but there are places where I feel like you placed some art just for the sake of it and it adds to the cluttered feel of the document.

• Change the color of the read aloud boxes to something else. That light green does not work very well on the sepia you have chosen to use. Perhaps a light blue to make it pop?

• Rethink some of the content layout for ease of readability. For instance, page 6 feels disjointed with Battle Tactics and Battle preparation where they are and then the skeletons chart feels like an afterthought down at the bottom of the page.

• Lastly, I am not of the fan of the battle map design style you have gone for. I'd rather have clean, crisp maps than what you have presented here. (Personal opinion).

Hopefully some of this helps. I like this adventure, but I wouldn't pay for it as it is right now. Just reading it gave me a little bit of a headache. Don't take any of what I have said too personally as I still think this is a great adventure, and you don't see me publishing any of my work. Keep it up!

Nono, that's all very useful actually. Everything you mentioned I sweated over but didn't have another person with a design background to bounce stuff off of. I was trying to not to let it go too long so, yeah, things wound up clumpy (wasn't sure about it because not enough feedback), simpler maps might be better (though I'm no cartographer) and, well, it's all good stuff.

An e-book is a written product. That means people actually want to read what's in it! I'll be honest, I didn't read the adventure because the PDF is painful to read.

1) The text appears to be one big blurry image. What program did you use to make the PDF? You might want to try Word, Publisher, or (better) InDesign. Anything with an export to PDF option really.

2) The font is too small and unpleasant to read. If it can help, I use Apple Garamond 11.5 pt. There are many other good fonts you can use for the body of your text.

3) The background color is too bright. Reading the text hurts the eyes.


The overall look and feel of your document is nice. It looks more like a Steam Punk/Victorian Age adventure though.

Yikes! Painful, eh?

There was some discussion of what resolution it should be at. I wanted 300 DPI but we settled on 150 because it wasn't intended to be a printed product and the damned thing was approaching 50MB in size. Publisher was used. Given that everyone has broadband now we'll have to reissue with the larger file size.
The font is taken directly from WOTC's own books, both in size and look. Since it is, again, on a screen, I could see it being bigger.
And the color? That's funny because, again, the background's taken directly from the books. I think I will dull it a bit by reducing the saturation though. Maybe that will help.
I think I have enough feedback for a revision but I'll let you all know when it's re-published and maybe there will be more feedback to give! Thanks again.