A few months ago, I mentioned an abandoned project of mine, the Dwimmermount Designer’s Edition. Among other things, it was meant to include extensive commentary on the megadungeon from my perspective as its creator. Unsurprisingly, I have a lot to say about Dwimmermount — why I created it, what influenced it, and how it actually functioned in play. From what I’ve been able to tell, at least some readers were interested in hearing those reflections. The challenge, though, was figuring out how to present them in a way that felt appropriate.

I didn’t want the result to be just another series of blog posts or stand-alone essays. Then, as now, my thoughts about Dwimmermount feel inseparable from the dungeon itself and I was reluctant to divorce the commentary from the text it was meant to illuminate.

I experimented with a number of formats. Footnotes or endnotes were the simplest solution, but also the least exciting. Another idea was inspired by ancient and medieval books that employed marginalia. During graduate school, I sometimes worked with medieval law texts surrounded by dense layers of commentary arranged around the main body of the text. They could be awkward to use, but they were often beautiful objects in their own right. Indeed, there was something compelling about seeing interpretation and source material coexisting on the same page.

With that in mind, I asked Paolo Greco of Lost Pages to produce a test page using marginalia. I wasn’t convinced it would work, but Paolo is enormously talented and has created some wonderfully strange and elegant books in the past. If anyone could make it work, I figured it would be him. The result is what you see at the top of this post. Visually, I think it’s striking. The lingering question, though, is whether it’s actually usable. Could someone reasonably referee Dwimmermount from a Designer’s Edition laid out this way?

I remain skeptical. Even though not every room would require marginal commentary, enough of them would that the book would quickly balloon in size, perhaps to the point of requiring multiple volumes, an option I did briefly consider.

And so I went around and around on the problem, as I so often do. “The perfect is the enemy of the good,” they say, but that hasn’t stopped me from endlessly chasing the perfect way to present my work. In truth, presentation has probably been the single greatest bottleneck in my productivity. How do I share my ideas in a way that’s not only coherent, but genuinely useful to others? I always know what I mean when I write, but does that meaning survive the journey from my head to the page? That’s the perennial question for me.

As you may have noticed from my posts over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been increasingly preoccupied with questions of presentation more generally. This isn’t limited to dungeons or commentary, but extends to nearly everything I’ve been working on since the summer. It’s especially vexing when it comes to the Grognardia anthologies, which involve a large body of material originally written for an entirely different medium. Add new material to the mix and the result is a familiar stew of frustration and indecision — old companions of mine, I’m afraid.

As always, I’d welcome any thoughts you might have on this, whether general or specific. Getting outside my own head can be difficult at the best of times, and lately it feels harder than usual.