Adding Guide Rails for the Reader
When I tried to continue with adding words to Release from the OGL Vault last week, I re-read both the gazetteer to Pentée and the adventure's first part ...and found all the text that already exists a bit overwhelming. Despite my efforts to make the contents very accessible by providing summaries and visual markers, it is, well, still quite a bit of text.
Thus, instead of writing even more text, I tried to come up with additional ways of helping the reader.
Including a Map Snippet for each Location
Looking at the gazetteer, I found that the reader might be aided by adding a clipping of the city map for each location description with the particular location at its center. My hope is that this helps the DM both to find the location more quickly, both on the map and in the gazetteer.
Luckily, with LaTeX, I can easily extend the macro for typesetting a location header such that it looks for an image of a certain name and includes it. This is what the start of a section looks like:
\BGPArea"bent-goblin-inn"{The Bent Goblin Inn}
Here, the bent-goblin-inn between the quotes is the short name of the location, which I can use in other parts of the document to refer to the location via \BGPAreaRef{bent-goblin-inn}, thus adding both a hyper link and a circled area number. The macro's extension now additionally looks into a folder images/locations for a file of name bent-goblin-inn.png -- if such a file is found, it is included as follows (I have used one of Dyson's commercial maps as basis for the city map of Pentée)
This works nicely, but unfortunately the typesetting becomes a bit more brittle: if the type-setting algorithm pushes the section header for the location onto the next page, because there is too little space left, the code that puts the image into the document margin may become confused and put it onto the wrong side. Currently, I have no good remedy for this other than checking all images and forcing a page break manually where this error occurs.
But the result itself I like very much: a single glance at the gazetteer suffices to see, where the description of a location begins. It remains to be decided, how much of the surroundings the clipping of the map should show:
Adding a flowchart
In order to help the reader with taking in the chapter describing the adventure's first part, I added a flow chart. I know about the criticism of flowcharts for adventures as formulated, e.g., by Teos Abadía. He writes:
Flowcharts are at times portrayed in D&D design circles as if they are a big boon to adventure design. I think we give flowcharts too much credit. (...) D&D 5E can keep flowcharts in adventures. That's fine. Just add in useful information and reduce the size of the flowchart from an entire page to maybe half or a quarter. No one will complain about a quick visual aid. Just don't pretend it solves problems inherent to the adventure!
Teos provides a nice analysis on whether flowcharts really add clarity and what meaningful choices in adventures mean (hint: not every bifurcation in a flowchart necessarily amounts to a meaningful choice.)
I fully agree that a flowchart that is nothing more than an enumeration of the adventure's chapter cannot really be called a flowchart. And also for Release from the OGL Vault, parts of the flowchart look quite linear. But the first section of the adventure, where the characters run around Pentée and carry out various activities in an arbitrary order, makes a visual help for the DM worthwhile, I think
Anyhow, I am quite happy with how my original draft flowchart from sometime in February came out with the help of Inscape (I first had tried designing something in Powerpoint, but quickly gave up):
The map in the background of the large pentagram is part of the Pentée city map, based on one of Dyson's commercial maps.
Progress last week
Again, not much movement either regarding the word count or the trello board -- in fact, on the trello board, I added two new tasks for creating the flowchart and coding the macro for adding map snippets and moved these to Done.
Something else I did last week was to publish "Bent Goblin's Companion to 'Dragonlance: Broken Silence' for free on the Dungeon Masters' Guild:
