For the Winter quarter of the Art and Design; Games & Playable Media senior capstone class at UCSC, I was a part of a team who created a supplemental book for Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition. Our book is a setting guide and low-level campaign module containing information about the desert of Prosgia, new character options like spells and subclasses, and a plethora of monsters.
The full PDF can be found here on itch.io.
Creative Lead: Dany Francis
Writers: Dany Francis, Matthew Hamm, Anthony Alvarez, Ethan Michaels, Dylan Deardorff, Autumn Wolverton
Designers: Dany Francis, Matthew Hamm, Dylan Deardorff, Ethan Michaels
Cover Illustrator: Zoey Laytart
Interior Illustrators: Avery Knowlton, Ethan Chen, Stan Caldwell
Cartographers: Matthew Hamm, Dany Francis
Producer: Ethan Michaels
My main responsibilities regarding this project included designing and balancing game mechanics, rendering the setting map, and copy-editing our final product.
The task that took up most of my time was creating the stat blocks for our monsters.
The ideas for these monsters were done collaboratively with the group. Members would create concept art or lore and describe some of the abilities a purposed monster would have. I would then take the ideas and craft a monster using the Monsterizer tool thanks to the RPGBot website. I determined whether a monster was more offensive or defensive and what kind of abilities it would have to help support its purpose. Through playtests and discussions with my team, the stat blocks went through many iterations.
In addition to the stat blocks, I also was the lead in the balancing of our character options. Our spells, magic items, and backgrounds followed a similar process as the monsters with members pitching ideas to then be polished. As I took the lead in the balancing process, I referenced officially published sources to compare with our mechanics. I would work along with the other designers in meetings as we pitched the notes we had made on our mechanics. As I had the most experience with Dungeons & Dragons, I made sure that the rules and the language used stayed close to the style of the official books.
My final responsibility was to create a map for our setting. I used Inkarnate for this task as I incorporated the various locations that had been written about. Besides the points of interest we had discussed, there had been no decision on what the desert region should look like. This gave me a wide range of creative control when designing the map. I made sure to check in with my team as I progressed for any critique they may have had.
