By me:
- Open Game License stat blocks and Cairn stat blocks
- More free Cairn stuff
- The economics of my first month making TTRPG content
- Converting 5e adventures to 13th age (pdf)
- My first experience itchfunding
- My second experience itchfunding
The rest is basically my bookmark collection, which hopefully is useful to someone
Other similar lists of guides:
- All In One Place, by Liminal Horror, a long list of resources with a lot about zine making + publishing physical documents.
Doing your own layout:
- The Write your First Adventure workshop, offered twice a year by the Storytelling Collective, has a great introductory guide.
- There's an intro to how to layout text here.
- Guide to layout for indie ttrpgs here.
- A collection of links to resources on layout and designing TTRPG textx
- Mork Borg design primer, which also has a bunch of generally useful resources on finding fonts and art.
Accessibility
- The Write Your First Adventure workshop also has a great section on accessibility.
- This PDF gives some useful advice on how to convey information in diagrams and other complex images in a screen reader friendly format.
Finding fonts
- Canva has some great functionality for searching some common free fonts by general style. I've also found canva to be very useful for trying out layout, making covers, making banners for twitter, etc.
- Google Fonts also has a bunch of free fonts with some amount of organization.
- Font Squirrel - search for fonts that are free for commercial use
- A Tweet listing a bunch of cool fonts
- (paid) Some cool fonts suitable for title pages and such
- Fonts that are free to use
- Fontesk has a whole bunch of fonts, some free for commecial use
- More free fonts. Probably not a good website for photosensitive epilepsy.
- 17 open source fonts you'll actually love.
- Elstob, a medieval-ish font
- Dicier is a font for representing dice, cards, and other sources of randomness. The same author has made a font for representing clocks.
- Free, CCO fonts from typewriters - some of them could definitely be used for other stuff as well.
Picking colours
- Paletton - a fancy colour wheel thing. I find it fun to fiddle with.
- Generate random colour schemes. You can pin colours too and get ones that match it based on magic, idk. I've found it useful as someone with no formal training in colours.
Guides for art
- Some resources for doing art - a tweet thread. I have no idea if it's good advice but I hope to be good enough for it to become relevant
- Tutorial on cleaning up ink drawings.
- Tutorial on drawing stylized landforms for maps.
- Map Crow - mostly videos about making TTRPG maps, but often delves into other interesting TTRPG related topics.
Non-PDF options
- The River: tools for minimalist website creation
- HTML and EPUB creation game: a game/tutorial for writing markdown and turning it into more readable formats
- Tiny Tools: Really covers everything, but a bit of an emphasis on software design.
Solo games:
- Styleguide for solo games, compatible with markdown
Misc:
- Monster manual on a business card - the DMG math on making monsters is wrong. Here's the correct math.
- Any Dice - easy dice math visualizer.
- A list of games with physical copies available on itch.io
- A nice interface for the troika! SRD
- Books from AD&D that might still be relevant if you aren't into AD&D
- A thread listing a bunch of resources on solo game creation
- Decolonizing games resource list
- A thread of resources about itchfunding
- Fantasy map brushes which could also be good reference for styles of drawing fantasy maps
- Tool for making printable booklets out of PDFs
Help! I want to make a game but art is expensive!
There are three main approaches. First, you can commission art and maps. This is generally expensive. I've written here about the economics of your first product. You can also try to make your own.
You can also use public domain art. There is a lot online but it can be hard to search. Finally, you can buy stock art. There are a lot of sites for free stock art photos, but usually they aren't fantasy themed. On DriveThruRpg and DM's Guild, you can for a relatively small price buy stock art. Make sure you read the license, though!
Free or low-cost maps that allow for commercial use
CZ has also made a lot of map packs with commercial use allowed.
Two minute tabletop allows for LIMITED commercial use, make sure you're adhering to the terms. Large variety of colourful maps.
Kyle Latino (Map Crow) has made some maps that can be used for free, also has some really great map-making tutorials on Youtube if you want to make your own.
Dyson Maps makes a lot of maps available for commercial use. Generally old-school, black and white, including dungeon, town and 3d.
Perilous Shores is a map generator with a very nice aesthetic and a very permissive license.
Map making tools
If you're willing to put a bit of time into it, Dungeondraft is a tool for making dungeon maps as well as other maps at a similar scale - it can do wilderness and city maps as well. Wonderdraft is more for overland maps.
There's a hex map making tool called Hex Kit with a lot of tiles made to be used with it. There are other hex map tools. For instance, there is a hex map tool for Affinity, which I haven't tried but it seems cool.
- Isle of Lore, a more cheerful, cartoony style
- Perplexing Ruins has made a set of tiles with a kind of darker, hand drawn aesthetic
- Highland paranoia society's more doodley style black and white hexes
- Space themed hexes from NASA photographs
- Watercolor style more abstract hexes
- Hex Noir, modern city satellite image style hexes
- Batts has made a more abstract, surreal tileset
Stock art
Kii has published a few packs of really unique characters.
Vagelio makes some really nice painter-style unique stock art.
Direquest has a lot of templates, layout components, and stock art of items in a pretty cool and distinctive style.
Dean Spenser is a very prolific artist making stock art, including some cover pages.
Daniel Comerci likewise
Tortoise and Hare Creations likewise
Fat Goblin Games seems to publish a variety of different artists' stock art in different styles.
Purple Duck Games likewise.
Castilho makes detailed black and white drawings, including characters, scenes and items.
Feral Indie Studios makes giant collections of spot art for a pretty wide selection of genres.
Perplexing Ruins has a patreon with a lot of art usable for commercial purposes. Great for weird/indie games or just if you want something other than the typical fantasy aesthetic.
Evlyn Moreau is another great patreon with a weird fantasy/sci fi aesthetic, tons of detail, lots of interesting characters.
ThomasNo is another great patreon - also mostly black and white, a variety of different characters, but also a lot of city scenes.
StarshineScribbles has created a bunch of creative commons page backgrounds and textures.
Grey Gnome [Free!] has a bunch of black and white stock art that is free for commercial use so long as it is part of a larger commercial project.
Red Ink Caravan has stock art, currently landscapes.
Roselysiumn has a lot of character stock art, and some objects and landscapes.
Public domain art
A website with a nice interface for searching for public domain art. A Pinterest board of public domain art mostly from the British Library. Maintained by me, I may have made mistakes so double-check before using. A curated pinboard of more public domain art, themed around "Grim fantasy". Old Book Illustrations has a good curated list Artveee for fine art in general. LadyOfHats has made a bunch of public domain art, some of it for fantasy RPGs specifically. A bunch morebook scans, loosely organized Garden maps A book of old maps of Europe
Also, a blog post about cleaning up public domain art:Meta-lists
Meta-list of public domain art from New School Revolution. I'm not paying Nohr for cover art which also covers AI art, which I have not listed myself (since I'm not that interested in it). Another meta-list of public domain and other low cost art.