Finishing a scenario is a satisfying moment. Finishing one that another group might actually run creates a more awkward question: what would it take to put it in front of strangers?
I have been asking that about The Head in the Hatbox, the small Vaesen mystery I made from a Dullahan session. It is already a PDF, which makes a DriveThruRPG listing sound pleasantly straightforward. In practice, the PDF is only one part of the job. The more important question is whether I have permission to make and sell the thing it contains.
This is not legal advice, and I am not announcing a product. It is the beginning of a checklist for anyone, including me, who has a scenario, player primer, or other game handout and wonders whether it could become a listing.
There is more than one front door
DriveThruRPG’s guide to creating and selling a PDF separates three routes that are easy to muddle together:
- A Publisher or Partner account is for work where I control the relevant rights, including a completely original game or setting.
- A Community Content Program is for making work with a particular publisher’s game and setting under that programme’s agreement.
- Dungeon Masters Guild is its own Dungeons & Dragons-focused programme, not a general licence for other games.
That distinction changes everything. A Partner account is not a magic key to another publisher’s setting, rules, logos, or artwork. It gives a creator a way to sell their own work; it does not supply the rights that work might need.
For Vaesen, the relevant programme is Free League Workshop. Its public guidance includes Vaesen – Nordic Horror Roleplaying amongst the supported games. It says a normal DriveThruRPG customer account is enough to start, provided the creator accepts the Community Content Agreement.
That makes it a much more promising route for a Vaesen-compatible scenario than assuming a normal publisher listing would be enough. It is also a reminder that the agreement, rather than a hopeful interpretation of a shop category, is the document that matters.
A listing is not just the file
The PDF still matters. DriveThruRPG’s Product Standards Guidelines expect a cover, a useful description, and a product that tells a prospective reader what system it uses and what they will receive. Its title setup guidance also makes the ordinary work visible: author and artist credits, page count, price, categories, cover art, a preview, and a careful description.
None of that is especially mysterious, but it does suggest a useful shift in mindset. I would not upload the first PDF that happens to be on my computer. I would read it as a customer: can I tell what it is, whether it is for my game, and what I am buying before I reach page one?
The standards also say that marketplace products must be human-written. They set specific rules for generative art and require the appropriate creation method tag when it is present. That is another part of preparation, not a small detail to leave until the upload screen.
What Free League Workshop adds
The Free League Workshop rules are more specific because they make use of someone else’s game possible. The published guidance says that creators keep half of the proceeds. It also requires the Free League Workshop logo on the cover and the game’s required legal notice in the product.
Most importantly for my own scenario, it says not to reuse artwork from Free League products unless that use is expressly allowed. Public-domain work, properly licensed stock art, commissioned art with commercial permission, and Creative Commons material that permits commercial use are possible starting points. They are not interchangeable labels: every image needs its own provenance checked.
So the question for The Head in the Hatbox is not merely whether its pages look presentable. Before I could consider a listing, I would need to:
- Read the current Community Content Agreement at sign-up rather than relying only on a summary article.
- Find the Vaesen-specific legal wording and the current programme logo.
- Audit every illustration, texture, font, and other asset against the programme’s permitted sources.
- Check the PDF itself for readability, credits, and a cover that works at thumbnail size.
There is a useful discipline in that list. Marketplace requirements and permission questions belong beside each other, but they are not the same job. A polished file cannot grant a licence, and a valid licence cannot rescue a confusing product page.
The small first step
I find the scale of a marketplace listing less intimidating when I treat it as a sequence of questions rather than a leap into publishing. Is this an original piece of work? Which route actually covers it? Can I account for every asset? Does the PDF help a GM run the thing? Can I explain the answer in a few honest lines?
For now, the answer for my scenario is that there is more checking to do. That is still progress. It gives me a proper next step: read the binding terms, review the assets, and decide whether the result deserves another editing pass before I worry about a price or a product page.
I will keep the source links from this research nearby, because platform terms change. If I ever reach the point of submitting something, I will check the current guidance again rather than treating this post as a permanent rulebook.