The PMG Stack
This is something I’ve long wanted to actually put in one place and publish, and now that I have this site up and running, I have no excuse to put it off any longer, so here’s what I use, where I find visual assets, etc. This will just cover my actual production, because honestly if you want to know about marketing, social media, and so forth, I am not the person to ask, much less listen to. But I have learned a fair bit about what tools one can use to make a nice-looking RPG PDF.
Writing and Design Collaboration
Google Drive and Google Docs. The industry, or at least the parts of it that I’ve touched, seems pretty well standardized on Google’s drive and doc services. I wouldn’t recommend using the free products of a tech giant for anything you want kept truly private, but for designing your TTRPG content and more importantly, sharing it with your collaborators, you really can’t go wrong here. In particular, Google’s commenting and version history features are an absolute godsend when you’re editing and revising. It also has the advantage of living entirely in the cloud, which means it’s accessible anywhere you have an internet connection, and, even more importantly automatically and constantly backed up in real time.
Layout and Graphic Design
Affinity Publisher. As a general rule (though one of the exceptions is above!) commercial software will come with features that free software doesn’t have. That said, I don’t really like being on the subscription chain for the software I use. Affinity Publisher costs $50 assuming you don’t get it on sale and has so many features that I’ll probably never use them all. I will go over some of those in a later post, most likely, but if you want some professional layout software, just go here and pick it up. If you are just getting started and want to do your own layout, this is the first thing you should get. A word of warning: pasting from Google docs into Affinity strips the formatting off the text.
Affinity Photo. One of the really neat features of Affinity Publisher is that if you have either or both of the other products in the suite, you can switch “personas” while in publisher, getting access to the functions of the other program without ever leaving Publisher. This is incredibly useful for things like making page backgrounds and doing those nice effects around the edges of your images. It’s available here.
Affinity Designer. I’ll freely admit that while I own this one, I have gotten next-to-no use out of it. One of these days, I need to really sit down and go through some tutorials, because it’s extremely useful for things like designing logos and the like. However, I would definitely pick Publisher and Photo up first if you’re just getting started. Still, if you’re interested, it’s here.
Visual Assets and Art
I don’t use AI art for a number of reasons, but the one that you should consider before using it yourself is that there is a certain segment of the TTRPG customer base that will not buy anything that has even one piece of AI art in it and may even never buy anything from you again if you use it. You’re welcome to your own opinions about how fair that thinking is, but just know that it’s out there. You also really can find suitable art for reasonable prices if you’re willing to put in the work looking for it, and you won’t alienate potential customers in the process. The options are not “use AI art” or “commission something.” Spend some time looking through what’s available and think creatively. You really can get by with reasonably-priced commercial stock art.
Stock Art
This is not an exhaustive list. However, I have found the following sources to be useful and/or especially good in terms of “bang for your buck.” There are other useful sources (such as Shutterstock) out there that I can acknowledge as useful but don’t currently have any firsthand experience using.
DriveThruRPG. Good old drivethrurpg.com has a surprising amount of good stock art for fairly reasonable prices and is a good place to start. A few things to keep in mind as you’re shopping, though: some artists allow an unlimited number of uses of the image with your purchase, others allow one use, meaning that if you want to use it again, the license requires you to buy it again. For obvious reasons, I personally stick with the former as much as possible, but I have actually repurchased a few assets so I could use them again. Because the stock art section is a bit daunting, here’s a list of creators I’ve personally found helpful:
Fat Goblin Games. My personal favorite source of art on the site. The license is unlimited use, the image quality is good, the prices are reasonable at the baseline, and they occasionally run a really good sale where they mark a ton of stuff down to a dollar (make sure you get their emails! The sales are usually short). I have built up an enormous library of their images that you will recognize from my products if you start sifting through their pages. The other nice thing about Fat Goblin is they have multiple artists’ work, which means different styles and types of art. Felipe Gaona’s paintings are pretty much uniformly good enough to use as cover art, for example.
Purple Duck Games. Another company with multiple artists and multi-use licenses. I use lots of their material too, and they have a bunch of more obscure or quirky content. When I went looking for an islander when I was working on Fiery Justice, they were the only place that had one. They’re also the only place I’ve ever seen a depiction of vegetable-mounted cavalry (I will find a use for that image some day)! Well worth checking out.
Vagelio. Vagelio doesn’t have quite the sheer volume of content as the creators above, but the quality is unbelievably high. The art has a really nice soft/wholesome vibe to it without being overly cartoony and often has backgrounds as well, which is always nice. Especially good selection of non-human adventurers, too. If you want catfolk or dragonborn, check Vagelio first.
The Forge Studios. Mostly black-and-white, but really good black-and-white, especially if you’re looking for something a little bit more “new school.” They also have a multi-use license. I have used a bunch of their art in my Thematic Toolkit products; their “clash” series has been good for B&W cover art.
John Latta. Unlike the creators above, John Latta’s art is a bit pricier and it’s also single-use. However, it’s also of extremely high quality. He’s another one, like Vagelio, who has a lot of good non-human characters.
Daniel Comerci. Another single-use licensor, and also worth it. Daniel Comerci has a good mix of color and B&W art, and I’ve used his material in Thematic Toolkit releases, notably as the cover for Cultist.
Dean Spencer. The guy everyone mentions when talking about stock art. Dead Spencer has a very “classic fantasy” style that would look right at home on the cover of an 80s fantasy novel or a 2nd edition D&D rulebook. He’s also a single-use licensor, but it tends to be reasonably-priced too. Always worth a look.
This is by no means an exhaustive list of the good art you can find on DTRPG, but it should be enough to get you started, and should also illustrate the point that there’s quality stock art available there if you go looking.
Freepik. I have to credit Rachel “Steampunkette” Williamson for pointing me to freepik.com. The name of the site is a bit of a misnomer; the really good material is gated behind their premium membership. There’s also an irritating amount of AI art on there, and some isn’t even obvious until you check the rest of the poster’s portfolio. The “exclude AI art” feature is basically useless as well. Despite these criticisms, I still think it’s worth the subscription cost, though. Why? Tithi Luadthong and Liu Zishan. Between just the two of them, there are literal hundreds of amazing pieces of fantasy and sci-fi artwork. There are slightly better selections for both of them available elsewhere, but nowhere with license terms as favorable as Freepik. They also have a nice selection of fonts, page decorations, and so on. You also get access to Flaticon as part of the same subscription. It’s not nearly as useful as freepik, but you’ll see a few icons from it in upcoming PMG releases.
Itch.io. It’s not as easy to navigate as some of the sites above, but itch.io has some fantastic bargains to be had. In particular, if you like pixel art, you could probably do a really cool supplement with just pixel art. Two notable specific things to be aware of:
This bonkers asset pack. Yeah, a bunch of it isn’t super useful for TTRPGs, but there’s a huge number of icons and inventory item packs that could be used for small spot illustrations, magic items, etc. You’ll see some content from this pack in a future PMG release.
Feral indie Studios. They have some fantastic art packs from Charles Ferguson-Avery. It’s a very specific style, but high-quality and a good value. I have other (very positive) things to say about their supplements too, but that’ll be another post someday.
Pixabay. Pixabay has one huge advantage: everything on there is free. That also means that there is a lot of junk (and a growing amount of AI art) but I found the cover image for Mortalist and the art for the Atonement destiny on there. You will spend a lot of time searching, but there are some quality images on there. There’s also a decent amount of corner and page decorations, which can be nice to have.
Fonts
Myfonts. I have only purchased one commercial font so far, but it was from here. A solid selection of commercial fonts good for logos and headers.
Fontspace. Another good place for fonts that has a feature I absolutely love: the ability to filter by license type. I found the font I use for most of my covers now here.
Google Fonts. Not a place to find more “novel” fonts, but if you want a nice, clean body font, look no further. I got the fonts I used on this site (and in my most recent products) from there.
Brushes for Affinity
You don’t have to be making your own illustrations for brush packs to be handy! In particular, they are good for making custom backgrounds (often a dust, smoke or fog brush can give you amazingly attractive results there) or texturing the edges of the images you use.
The Official Affinity Site. Lots of interesting brush packs to be found here; I particularly like this one, this one, this one, and this one. That last one has an eraser brush that’s worth it alone, IMHO. It’s really useful for making the kind of borders you often see in game products. Be sure to grab the free brush pack from Dreamphotography down at the bottom of the add-ons page, too. It has some dust brushes in it that I’ve found very useful.
Creative Market. If you want more brushes than you’ll ever know what to do with, look no further than this massive collection. I’ve barely scratched the surface of these, but I have plans for some of them in an upcoming release.
Final Thoughts
This is probably a daunting amount of content for a new creator, so I want to stress again here at the end that you needn’t dig into all of it right away! However, as you continue to make more and more content, you will find the use for more and more assets, and I’d have loved to have a curated list like this as I was finding things out. If you’ve got a strong idea of what you want to do for your first TTRPG product, I would suggest buying an affinity license ($50), getting Google Docs going (if you don’t already have it) and buy a little stock art as needed.
