Conquest of the Heretic God
Cabbage with Dice's ambitious D&D 5th Edition adventure module is remarkable in countless ways. Armed with distinctive worldbuilding and masterful subversions of D&D's combat mechanics, Conquest of the Heretic God brings 5e to its greatest potential - by breaking it, over and over again, with purpose and precision. Needless to say, I just about lost my gourd when Cabbage asked me to do its art and layout.
Below, you can find an excerpt of CotHG containing the first boss encounter. This version of the PDF was designed for digital use only - a print-friendly version with significantly larger margins will be made available with the module's final release.
The Process
From the start, Cabbage wanted CotHG's layout to reminisce of D&D 5e's signature parchment-and-watercolor aesthetics, but diverge from them in meaningful, interesting ways. It had to feel like a 5e document, but one that broke the mold with purpose - just like the adventure itself. That being said, 5e's stat blocks are unwieldly, and wrangling them into any kind of interesting layout is a challenge.
Of course, I've never been deterred by challenges, so off I went! I started by choosing fonts for the project: the flourishing FantaisieArtistique for titles, and the noble, versatile Constantia for the body. A palette of natural greens, leathery browns, and ominous blacks suited the module both aesthetically and symbolically, and visual elements akin to daggers and arrows would suggest closer ties to hunters than nature itself.
The first chunk of layout I did was for the Voice of Hunger, the module's first adversary and the subject of the PDF embedded above. I'd already painted both the Voice itself and the weapon awarded upon its defeat, so all I had to make were supplementary graphics.
I'd painted the splash art with mercy towards the future layout artist in mind, and I'm glad I did! The silhouetes are intriguing but not cumbersome. Affinity Publisher 2's text frame tools made finessing the body text into all kinds of shapes was trivially easy. But the very thing that makes CotHG so special - its complex, rule-defying stat blocks - were also indeed what made the layout a head-scratcher. They couldn't be made longer or shorter, nor reshaped too heavily without impairing legibility. As you can see, though, I figured it out with a little tasteful white space!
Gripes aside, I'm quite proud of myself for how I worked the full extent of the encounter's content into four beautiful pages. Future stat blocks are going to be even larger, but I already know exactly how I'll be arranging them to ensure a perfect balance of navicability and aesthetics. All in due time!
Postmortem
Conquest of the Heretic God is an adventure worthy of its grandiose name, and deserving of equal visual splendor. It's been a privilege to work with Cabbage With Dice on bringing the module to life, and I personally can't wait to share more of it with the rest of the world!
The module will be released on itch.io in May of 2023.