First draft of my cover for the new version of The Green Scar. All the handy info at a glance on the back cover. What do you think? Anything I’ve missed? Would this be useful for your GMing, do you think?
(I know the logo’s wrong – not quite finished that yet….)
Very nice!
Looks very useful and intriguing – great job 🙂
A. Awesome appearance! GJ
B. Do the wierd treasures do anything, or is that GM disctretion?
Daniel Lugo GM discretion. There’ll be more magical effects in the book proper, but in my experience its handy to have a list of interesting objects at the table – helps minimise giving out things which are just combat boosts, or too one-dimensional.
At first blush I was like “there’s so little content” then I slapped myself and thought maybe I’ve been playing too much with traditional role-players.
I love it. The jungle descriptors are evocative and engaging, I can’t wait to run into the people, the places belong on a hastily drawn map, and the treasures are just enough to spark the imagination.
Further note on the treasures. I’ve run a couple of dw games now where at some point I’ve given out magical items with nothing more than a cool name a description of what they look like and players gobble that stuff up! One player runs his own games now and The Smoking Pipe of the North Wind never fails to show up somewhere in his games.
Cheers!
I love the concept and the general layout.
Personally, I’d prefer the space for Player Moves to be used for something else. We’ve pretty much always got player moves handouts floating around, because everyone needs those. And a GM will pretty quickly internalize those moves.
(I’d almost argue the same about the GM’s agenda & moves, but I can definitely see the value in those being there, even for an experienced GM.)
Thing’s I’d like to see added: dangers, grim portents, stakes questions.
Also: if the People, Places, and Weird Treasures are more thoroughly detailed in the book, page references would be great.
Dangers, Grim Portents & Stakes (fronts in general) are in the book, along with a LOT more detail on the factions – I finished that today, in fact. They won’t be duplicated on the back cover, as fronts are something to be handled between sessions (ie when you have time to actually open the book!) That’s a good idea to add the page references, though.
We’ll have to agree to disagree on the player moves – Playing more of a different system recently (Blades in the Dark) reminded me how annoying it is to try and recall which stats go with which moves when you’re starting out. Besides, I forget the Discern questions, Hirelings rules, and who does what for Perilous Journeys all the time! (True, there’s always handouts on the table, but this book is for the GM only so it’s a handy reference they can always keep close.)
As a side note, I’d intend for the people, places and treasures to almost be like a list of contents for the book. Green Scar v2. is going to be a lot less “here’s 3 jungle adventures and a compendium class” and more “here’s 9 warring factions, 4 locations and some weird objects – make some monsters and fronts with them using the DW rules, then play to find out what happens.”
Joe Banner regarding the Player Moves: fair enough!
Not sure I agree about the fronts/grim portents only being referenced between sessions. I know I like to have mine handy during play, for inspiration when I need to move the story along. Of course, that’s usually for adventure-level fronts. Campaign-level fronts are definitely slower burn, between-session types of things. (Also, depending on space, you might simply not be able to fit them.)
Maybe consider putting outlines of campaign fronts on the inside back cover? Or on the last few spreads of the paper documents?
Jeremy Strandberg Yeah, I like that idea. Annoyingly DTRPG don’t let you print on the last page or inside cover, I think, but they could certainly go in an clearly-marked place near the end.