DMs Guild [Design Notes] Forgotten Realms Travel Guide: Faerûn, Kara-Tur, and Zakhara

[Epic Meepo]

I think I'm going to bite the bullet and put one of my maps on the cover of the Travel Guide. Stock art would make a better first impression, since stock art was the only part of this project which benefited from a non-zero budget. But a map is more thematic, even if it isn't professionally made.

This probably isn't the best decision. Then again, spending thousands of hours of free time researching and writing a 700-page campaign setting sourcebook no one's going to read was a bad decision to begin with. In for a penny, in for a pound!

 

[Epic Meepo]

Spell-checking several thousand fantasy names is time consuming. Who knew?

Thankfully, I'm still on track to drop the Travel Guide when WotC's newest Forgotten Realms books go live for everyone in a little over a week.

That's all I've got for now. Back to the grind.

 

[Epic Meepo]

Apparently, I've generated over 68 Gb of material while working on this project. That's more than my ancient computer can handle without moving a bunch of stuff to an external hard drive!

Now I just have to cram everything into a reasonably-sized PDF without crashing my computer again.

 

[Epic Meepo]

As of yesterday, the Forgotten Realms Travel Guide is available at the
Dungeon Masters Guild.

I can’t say this project is entirely finished, since I intend to create an updated version of the PDF. The image compression in the original PDF introduced some annoying pixelation to the embedded maps. As a result, I want to swap out some raster graphics and replace them with crisp, clean vector higher-resolution graphics. I’ll probably leave the old PDF available for download alongside the newer one, since I’m told some older PDF readers might have trouble with the new graphics.

Ideally, I’d have had more time to get this done in advance, but WotC releasing new Forgotten Realms books forced my hand. If I released the travel guide after the new books dropped, I’d have to justify not referencing the new books alongside the dozens of other sources I cite. Since I don’t have any interest in pivoting yet again to incorporate new content from WotC, I decided to pull the trigger.

I’m not too bothered that my launch wasn’t flawless. I don’t have an established audience to disappoint, and I wasn’t expecting all that many sales either way. The price point I chose (just under $0.02 per page, which adds up quickly for a 700-page book) will probably scare away most potantial customers, since it puts me in direct competition with high production value products from established publishers.

(At this point, one may be wondering why I didn’t pick a lower price point to encourage more sales. After all, a few sales at a lower price point would bring in more royalties than virtually none at a higher price point. The answer is that I’d rather sell nothing than sell myself short. Royalties from RPG sales won’t be enough to lift me up out of the working class either way, so I may as well keep my pride.)

All in all, I’m pleased with how this project turned out (or, more accurately, I will be once I improve the PDF with some vector higher-resolution graphics). The Forgotten Realms Travel Guide is exactly what I’d want to hand players at my table if they were creating characters for a Realms campaign I was running. I can now print out pages describing backgrounds, cultures, and regions relevant to each player’s character. I'll count that as a win.

---

That’s all I’ve got for now. Thanks for reading. At some point, I may post a new thread about this project, where I discuss what worked, what didn’t, and what I learned. Until then, I’m off to contemplate my next creative writing project!

 

[Cergorach]

Congrats!

The sample looks good, the maps look good enough and $14 is a great price for 700 pages of content. I've wishlisted it for later purchase (currently already working/reading too many thing).

While I do like your maps, I strongly dislike the illustration you showed earlier in this thread. I think it would have been cool if you added reference notes to each section/page (think like providing sources in a textbook).

I already have most of the pre-5e FR stuff and thought that the 3rd edition FR campaign book was probably one of the best products. But I really like how the D&D team organized each region and compressed the information as an introduction to that region. Something that treated the rest of the FR world in the same manner would have been a better companion to those two FR books. As would having the maps in the same style as the FR books. But I understand, you've been working on this for a long time and constantly rewriting just means the project will never be done.

Note on using vector graphics in pdfs for illustrations and maps: Don't! Vector graphics is essentially math transformed into an image, every time you scroll in a pdf or turn a page, zoom in/out, etc. That math is run again, it slows down paging through a pdf, even on faster computers. For a project, many, many moons ago. I rebuilt simple graphics (like icon headers/footers), line art illustrations and maps into VG images, thinking it would be far crisper when you would zoom in, it was but the disadvantages were huge, even when optimizing the VG images, the images were smaller, but the math far harder on almost any system. Even today on something as powerful as an iPad Pro M5 I would expect slowdowns. I went back to the rasterized images instead of the VG images. You can get better compression results if you experiment a bit with different settings (what did you use for layout and pdf generation?).

 

[Zeromaru X]

The price is indeed a bit high for me (taking into account that I have to convert my money into dollars first), but is definitely more accessible than the official books.

 

[Epic Meepo]

Congrats!

The sample looks good, the maps look good enough and $14 is a great price for 700 pages of content. I've wishlisted it for later purchase (currently already working/reading too many thing).

Thanks for the kind words! And no rush. The travel guide will be there when you want to check it out.

While I do like your maps, I strongly dislike the illustration you showed earlier in this thread.

Based on that, I'm afraid you'll probably be disappointed in the artwork. Sadly, I was limited to stock art available for bulk purchase. To stay on budget, I could only pay $0.33 per image.

That being said, I don't regret any of the book's unapologetically silly gnome and korobokuru illustrations. Those are spot-on, and I would use them again.

(Side note: I'm very glad I downloaded most of my stock art back in 2019 or so in anticipation of starting this project. I tried searching for stock art a couple years later, and it was almost impossible to find anything usable under the trash heap of AI slop that's buried every large stock art marketplace in recent times.)

I think it would have been cool if you added reference notes to each section/page (think like providing sources in a textbook).

I don't provide inline citations, but I do provide end notes! You'll find sources listed by section in Appendix D.

I already have most of the pre-5e FR stuff and thought that the 3rd edition FR campaign book was probably one of the best products. But I really like how the D&D team organized each region and compressed the information as an introduction to that region. Something that treated the rest of the FR world in the same manner would have been a better companion to those two FR books. As would having the maps in the same style as the FR books. But I understand, you've been working on this for a long time and constantly rewriting just means the project will never be done.

The 3e FRCS is one of my favorites, as well! The travel guide started as an expanded version of the Character Regions section in that book. I later added trade routes as a framing device so a player or DM could reasonably explain how a character from Kara-Tur, for example, ended up adventuring somewhere else in the Realms.

Note on using vector graphics in pdfs for illustrations and maps: Don't! Vector graphics is essentially math transformed into an image, every time you scroll in a pdf or turn a page, zoom in/out, etc. That math is run again, it slows down paging through a pdf, even on faster computers. For a project, many, many moons ago. I rebuilt simple graphics (like icon headers/footers), line art illustrations and maps into VG images, thinking it would be far crisper when you would zoom in, it was but the disadvantages were huge, even when optimizing the VG images, the images were smaller, but the math far harder on almost any system. Even today on something as powerful as an iPad Pro M5 I would expect slowdowns. I went back to the rasterized images instead of the VG images. You can get better compression results if you experiment a bit with different settings (what did you use for layout and pdf generation?).

That's very good to know, thank you! I'll look into reducing the compression a bit to see if I can get higher-resolution maps without bloating the file size too much.

(To answer your question, the layout was done in an older version of OpenOffice running on a 2017 MacBook. That set-up was too ancient to handle the pdf-conversion for a 700-page file, so I acquired the latest LibreOffice release for that step of the process. I did most of the image compression manually before inserting images in OpenOffice. LibreOffice compressed the images a bit further when I created the pdf.)

 

[Epic Meepo]

The price is indeed a bit high for me (taking into account that I have to convert my money into dollars first), but is definitely more accessible than the official books.

That's certainly fair. I would completely understand if the Travel Guide doesn't fit your budget.

Edit to add a targeted sales pitch: To sweeten the pot, I'll note that the Travel Guide portrays Tymanther at the height of its glory. Also, the narrator is the Chronomancer from Netheril, who provides an explicit, in-universe justification for ignoring any timeline which says Tymanther is no more.

 

[Cergorach]

That's very good to know, thank you! I'll look into reducing the compression a bit to see if I can get higher-resolution maps without bloating the file size too much.

(To answer your question, the layout was done in an older version of OpenOffice running on a 2017 MacBook. That set-up was too ancient to handle the pdf-conversion for a 700-page file, so I acquired the latest LibreOffice release for that step of the process. I did most of the image compression manually before inserting images in OpenOffice. LibreOffice compressed the images a bit further when I created the pdf.)

What you could do is make a separate pdf with just the vector maps for printing.

You might also want to look at Affinity (previously Affinity Designer/Photo/Publisher), that's been released for free (previously paid) and it's got a 'Publisher' mode that will act as DTP (DeskTop Publishing) software. I don't know if it'll take your LibreOffice files though.