Grognardia reviews Tower of the Stargazer here. Yes, I had to look up "tyros." He's right about the layout. I was so darn insistent on it being a 16 page adventure and there wasn't a lot of time to consider things. If I could go back a couple months I'd go ahead and make it a 20 page module so all the artwork got its own space and everything could breathe a bit more. Still, I made the text the priority so some of that 'watermarked' art is unrecognizable because I wanted to make sure you could read what's over it.
I probably still would have had the black border though.
I like some of the layout tricks I tried out with the newer material, but going forward I'll keep it as simple as possible and not invade the text space with anything. Maybe a nice header and footer for page decoration but not much else.
Other lessons: Always have multiple editors. The material with multiple editors (the vast majority of the box) is getting little in the way of typo comments. The stuff with one editor (just the Weird New World module in the box) had stuff slip through. Also, have someone else look over the final layout too. A couple of tables have traveled a line or two from where I put them. Someone else looking at stuff after layout would have caught the hard-to-read text on the back cover of Hammers as well.
Geoffrey McKinney reviews the free PDF material for the game here.
The new Like Real Life blog talks a bit about the game here. For the record, the answer to "Who is this game for?" is "Me now and the me that got into RPGs by buying it at the store without knowing anyone else who played."
You can see what RPGNow reviewers think of the latest stuff here.
I probably still would have had the black border though.
I like some of the layout tricks I tried out with the newer material, but going forward I'll keep it as simple as possible and not invade the text space with anything. Maybe a nice header and footer for page decoration but not much else.
Other lessons: Always have multiple editors. The material with multiple editors (the vast majority of the box) is getting little in the way of typo comments. The stuff with one editor (just the Weird New World module in the box) had stuff slip through. Also, have someone else look over the final layout too. A couple of tables have traveled a line or two from where I put them. Someone else looking at stuff after layout would have caught the hard-to-read text on the back cover of Hammers as well.
Geoffrey McKinney reviews the free PDF material for the game here.
The new Like Real Life blog talks a bit about the game here. For the record, the answer to "Who is this game for?" is "Me now and the me that got into RPGs by buying it at the store without knowing anyone else who played."
You can see what RPGNow reviewers think of the latest stuff here.
I like the way you post your reactions to the reviews here. It avoids you looking defensive by posting as a comment on the reviewer's site, but still provides a bit of context and insight as to how you are thinking about the issues raised in the reviews.
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