Hard to believe we're already two weeks into this exciting race!
But today's Timed Release is a little different. Rather than revealing maps or features of the setting, I want to show you how I’m planning to present all of that material in the finished book.
Below is an early layout sample from The Overlords of Steel.
Full color artwork will fill the white space. Fonts, sizing, etc. not finalized.
The second 2-panel section that follows TIMEKEEPING shown above.
One of my biggest goals with Overlords is to make a very large sandbox easy to run at the table.
That means the layout cannot simply look good. It has to help the referee find information quickly, understand it at a glance, and move back and forth between description, rules, maps, tables, and gameable details without constantly hunting through paragraphs.
So this new layout is built around a few principles:
Strong visual hierarchy. Major topics, subsections, rules, and reference material should be immediately recognizable.
Short, digestible sections. Longer subjects are broken into smaller chunks rather than buried inside walls of text.
Bolded interactive information. Important rules, terms, locations, and game elements should jump off the page when you need them.
Tables whenever they make information faster to use. If something can be understood more easily at a glance, I want it presented that way.
Rules next to the material they affect. Setting information should not be divorced from the things characters can actually experience, manipulate, or exploit during play.
Two-page-spread thinking. Wherever possible, material will be organized so that related information lives together rather than forcing the referee to constantly flip pages.
The sample here covers Qa’rood’s timekeeping system and its strange celestial cycles. Even something as potentially complicated as a 384-day calendar, two moons moving on different cycles, and recurring mystical conjunctions can be reduced to a combination of short explanations, bolded reference points, and tables that make the information much easier to use.
And, importantly, those details are not just lore.
The strange movements of the heavens have game effects.
A Black Syzygy weakens light and strengthens the undead.
A Savage Moon drives creatures toward violence.
Other conjunctions affect magic, surprise, wandering monsters, missile attacks, and more.
The goal is for the world-building and the game system to constantly reinforce one another.
Designed for a Big Sandbox
The Overlords of Steel is a very large adventure. The book contains a tremendous amount of material for the referee to work with: a vast wilderness, multiple settlements, factions, and dungeons, plus thousands of encounters within the lost city of Exesed Mordax. And I don't want the campaign's size to become an obstacle to running it.
Instead, I'm trying to take the density and scope of a huge old-school campaign and combine it with the kind of modern information design that makes complex material faster to absorb and easier to reference during play.
In other words: big world, small prep burden. That is my design target.
This Is Still a Work in Progress
The pages shown here are an early layout prototype, not the finished book. Fonts, spacing, graphic elements, table styling, artwork placement, and other details may continue to change as the book develops.
But this is very close to the direction I'm pursuing for the final presentation, and I wanted backers to see it while the campaign is still underway, because these Timed Releases are meant to show you what kind of book I'm trying to make. And I think The Overlords of Steel is beginning to look like the epic adventure that I've had in my head for a very long time.
We use essential cookies and our own first-party analytics to run BackerKit. With your consent, we also use cookies to measure our marketing and share data with advertising partners to show you relevant ads. Accept to allow all cookies, or reject to turn off the optional ones.
Read our cookie policy.
