I like the layout on post # 26.  No canned flavor text and also no wall of text to sift through. Nicely done.

As far as all the art being in s separate booklet, I'm not sure ALL module art is suitable for player handout material. Stuff that shows the detail of an object or area can be useful, but action scenes featuring figures that may or may not represent anyone currently in the party can detract attention from the game rather than enhance it.

I am currently in the process of designing a few site-based adventures for eventual publication, and reading through this thread has been very useful. There are some great ideas here for what to do and what not to do, and it has inspired me to start reworking my material to make it more useful for whoever ends up running it.

I agree with Exploderwizard. Post #26 is exactly how I would like a published adventure to be organized if I were the GM. nice work!

First looks vastly easier to run; second will take a lot of prep reading, underlining etc to be useable. Definitely prefer first.

Quote from: Sacrosanct;743192Second question:  What about just omitting interior artwork, and instead putting them all as handouts in an appendix? I already have about two dozen specific handouts (puzzles, etc), but I'm on the fence about including all artwork as handouts so when the encounter happens, the DM isn't the only one who sees a visual reference.

I hate it when companies (eg WoTC) do this, turning reading the adventure into a dreary slog. It's actually easier to show a pic in the main body, while covering up the text, than it is to remember there's a pic in the appendix, locate it and show it.

Just a few observations on post #30's layout. I like that one the best of them, but there are a few points I'd tweak.

1) You've got indents and following space after each paragraph. Indents and following spaces are like belts and suspenders; choose one. For the purposes of module design, I'd recommend following space, as each paragraph deals with a fundamentally different topic and it's easier for the eye to catch on each separate section.

1a) In the earlier layouts, your first paras were indented. First paras after heads never get indented; they should be flush left with the heads. To easily get this effect in InDesign, make a "Body Text First Para" style with no indent, and set its "Next Style" option to "Body Text Indented" or whatever style you're using that has the indent, so that after you hit return on the first para it'll automatically shift to the indented style.

2) My eyesight is bad, but that looks like Helvetica you're using for body text, and that you're using oblique for subheads within the room element. Oblique grotesks are hard to notice and don't have much visual pop. For heads, it's better to use a bolded style, particularly given your major heads. You've indicated the room title's importance by putting it in a heavier, bolder font that looks like bold Souvenir. You're implicitly telling the reader "Bold stuff is for heads". If you then use an oblique or italic for subheads, you're confusing your language.

3) I have issues with that recurrent crossed-swords image. It's splitting the element. You've got the room number and title on top of it, the room details below it, and the room summary to the right of it. Nothing hangs off of it or on it, so it's just sort of sitting there in each room element. I'm not sure what good it's doing. I'm also dubious about the way the Feature/Monster/Treasure notes are stacked, since they end up looking ragged.

Here's a random suggestion. Insert a table- two columns, four rows. Put the room name in the top row. Put "Feature" in the second, "Monster" in the third, and "Treasure" in the fourth. Left-justify everything. Now add a column to the left. Shrink it until it's about a quarter-inch wide. Now merge the top row so the room title is flush left and the lower three lines are still indented by the unmerged column cells. Now add a column to the right. Merge all the cells in this column. Put a right-justified room number here in a large font, maybe even stretched vertically a little in the paragraph style you use for it. The room number is going to be your visual eyecatcher for the room element, and the three callout lines are going to be slightly tucked in by it. I don't know how good this will look, but it saves you the repetition of a visual icon with no real functionality.

4) You've got "Descriptive" right underneath the room title, essentially. (Did you mean "Description"?) It's usually not a positive thing to stack a head right on top of a head. If the first paragraph of every room element is the description, then you're probably better off just dropping the head and letting the paragraph stand alone.

5) You've got a runt line in "will crash back down". Paragraphs that end in lines that have only one or two words need to be removed by trimming the wording earlier, or if that can't be done, then bulked up a little more.

6) Your margins are equal on all sides. As a general rule, your bottom margin should be noticeably larger than your top margin, both to give a little breathing space to the page number and to give the page a "sound footing". Inside margins also need some extra space to breathe for print purposes, as the binding of the spine will eat up some amount of space, and if there's not at least a 2/3 or 3/4 inch margin on the inside you run the risk of having your text run into the crease of the spine, forcing the reader to flatten out your book to be able to read the inside columns comfortably.

7) Your text hits the foot unevenly, with columns of different length. This takes some editing to fix, but you generally want your columns to be the same length without resorting to shenanigans such as vertical justification or breaking a few lines of one element into the next column.

Souvenir is a font only B/X enthusiasts can love. I admit to having a soft spot for it myself, and it can be good if you want to make an explicit reference to the B/X era rules and modules, but it was notoriously overused in the 70s. I won't say it was the Comic Sans of its day, but there are perhaps better choices if you're not making a conscious B/X reference.

This page reminds me to get my analysis of TSR typographic styles and formats done. There are a lot of things they did that might be useful for people to see laid out, if only to choose differently or make choices that specifically evoke a design period.

I think this is the final version I'm going to go with.  Yes, I know there are a few minor things that may still be there, but I think as long as I avoid orphans, the column lengths are acceptable.  Also, since the superdungeon is to pay homage to TSR D&D, I will be keeping the souvenir and TW cent fonts.  I did get rid of the crossed swords icon because I didn't feel they were necessary to call out the key features of each encounter; I think the reader can easily get to those points without having an icon to leap out at them.

*Edit*  Disclaimer, the text hasn't been edited yet, so don't worry about any issues you see with grammar or repetitiveness (I can see two issues right off the bat.)