Dungeon Full of Monsters secret project!

This is the current big project here at the monthly monsters: a new layout for Dungeon Full of Monsters!

These are pictures of a new letter landscape version: 11 inches wide, 8.5 inches tall. Each of these new pages contains a 2-page spread from the original layout, so along with some new material it ends up being 198 pages (200 if you count the extra page Lightning Source adds at the end).

The downsides to this new layout are mainly that I didn't plan to do this, so it's taken some work to make it happen and I'm not exactly utilizing the format to its full potential.

The upsides, however, are numerous:

1. The POD print costs are much lower, mostly because of the page count, although this format seems to also be slightly cheaper than 6x9. This means I can charge customers a lower price without lowering profits.

2. A 2-page letter landscape spread can hold a lot of information, and they're long enough that the book lies open by itself, even the pages near the beginning and the end. That combo makes it a lot more helpful as a reference during play. Most of the dungeon areas were 4 pages in the old layout, but now they fit on a single 2-page spread, cutting down on a lot of page-flipping.

3. Those larger illustrations look much better on a single large page than they do spread across 2 small pages.

4. It looks like a coffee table book.

5. It also provides more layout options that I can take advantage of in the future, even if you don't see them here. This has definitely become my preferred format for colour work. I want to make more of these.

I still have some corrections to make to this before going public, and I'll need to get another proof after those are done, but you can expect more news before the end of this month.

As always, happy gaming and thanks for your support!