Initially, I planned to run it using Labyrinth Lord. It had a lot of appeal for me, in no small part due to the layout and design of the rulebooks. The chaotic, black-and-white ink drawings. The grisly, faux-Medieval, and old-school fonts. It had the just the right amount of rules granularity, but still kept itself minimal enough to feel light in execution. Somehow, it felt the right match for a grim setting that leaned into an emergent play style.
First, a little meta-history. Back in 2016, I was daydreaming at work. (I assure you, that's never happened since.) Engaged in one of my favorite pastimes, I was making a list of the various campaigns I wanted to run sometime for a group of players, the different specific RPGs and broader genres and tones that I wanted to explore as a GM. Previously, I had also discovered the Dungeon Synth Archives YouTube channel and was making my way through its contents, listening to every album in the order it had been posted to the channel. And it's got a lot of albums. So my mind at the time was steeping in a lot of old-school dungeon synth minimalism while I worked and periodically daydreamed of imaginary worlds.
Wayfarers of Emberreach (or WoE, as I'll refer to it going forward) is a hack of the Vagabonds of Dyfed role-playing game -- which is itself built on the chassis of World of Dungeons and a few other games.
For those not already aware: World of Dungeons, written by John Harper and published in 2012, is a distillation of the Dungeon World RPG. All of Dungeon World's many moves are boiled down to one core "move" set up around the Powered by the Apocalypse (PbtA) engine's resolution system (roll 2d6 and add a modifier; 6- = fail with a complication; 7-9 = succeed with a complication; 10+ = succeed). Rather than providing specific outcomes and consequences prescribed by each move, World of Dungeons leaves the outcome for its core roll to the GM, who reads the scene and narrates a likely outcome based on the roll result. It's highly interpretive. It also puts primary focus on narrative by generating a lot of scene complications from that core mechanic.
<click of a switch, and a few stark lights illuminate patches of cavernous dark>
I've come back to this old place to (maybe) breathe a little life into it, and to clear my mind of some thoughts. It's been years now since the last post—but I've done a lot of design work during that time. Very little to publicly show for it, of course, but trust me when I say I've been putting in the hours. Burning viscous oil. Grinding the gears. And now I want to lay all of it out in detail for an audience. Ha! I'm pretty sure I'm still just talking to myself here—even more likely after all this time. So, anyway...
I made an RPG. Or I hacked an existing one. Not sure where the dividing line is between the two. But that's part of what I'm hoping to sort out as I hash through all of this. Sketch out my thinking about this project in detail. Impose order on the inner whirlwind.
The game I designed is called Wayfarers of Emberreach. Not the greatest title, I'll admit. I wrestled with that for a long while. The name itself is pretty new when you consider the span of time that the game has crossed and the multiple iterations its been through. It's had other names before this one. And this one's got a little nod in it to its predecessors, plus (hopefully) some reflections of its own unique character. It's not the most elegant choice; could certainly be snappier. But, like a lot of names, it's idiosyncratic, and the game will, I hope, come to own it soon.
But that's where we'll start: with the title. Next time, I'll talk about the ancestry and lineage; its design roots. And from there, since the game is written and largely finished being revised, I'll do a detailed delve into the rules and other aspects of it.
Oh, almost forgot something important: this game will never see the light of publication day. It's purely for use in my home games. I'll get more into the 'why' of that soon. But I feel that the effort and thought I've put into it warrant some discussion.
More soon. <puts finger on the light switch, pauses> Ehh...I'll leave the lights on. I won't be gone long.
I've recently rolled out a new Instagram account for Abhorrent Vacuum Games!
Huzzah!
I'll use the account to do some basic promotion of my publications, as well as periodically sharing pics of my RPG print collection and dice sets.
Ooo, marketing adverts, book covers, and polyhedral still lifes -- that sounds like the kind of excitement you'll definitely want to be a part of! I can hear you clicking on the "follow" button even now...
No, wait -- don't go! Your initial assumption that I'd abandoned this blog for dead was hasty and incorrect!
I'm still here. OK, yeah, there was a hiatus, a stepped away for a bit. In my defense, the world seems to have no shortage of existential threats to share, so...
OK, so, with that said -- I wanted to share a little list of updates and to-do items that lie ahead for me. Each of these will likely have a post that elaborates on the details.
But it's going to be a very generalized kind of shade, I swear! Because, as I said, in my heart, I truly like these games.
That said... [OK, here it comes.]
I feel there is a baseline, conceptual pitfall with Mythos RPGs: to have an ideal play experience, everyone involved should be fairly well-versed in Mythos lore, or at least familiar with lots of the Lovecraftian horror tropes. Not having these conditions present can possibly set a limit on player enjoyment under best conditions, and can potentially frustrate players and derail fun under worst conditions.
When you've spent any amount of time running RPGs, you inevitably learn a lot about yourself as a person, as an improviser, and as a project manager. Or at least you have some suspicions about yourself confirmed through play. So it came as little surprise to me when, after running one-shot sessions of Low Fantasy Gaming, Colonial Gothic, and The Sprawl for one group and starting a longer D&D 5th Edition campaign for another group, I realized that I wasn't so great at storing and juggling a large number of system rules in my head while also presenting and arbitrating over a fictional environment. Giving me access to the rulebook during the sessions didn't help; I struggled with trying to do more than a quick, cursory search for a piece of information.
I thought back on my younger years. Did I really do that? Spend a lot of time just paging through myriad D&D books, searching for all the detailed rules? Did I derail a few dozen immersive moments each session to check on minutia? The memories are hazy and I'm left unsure. Maybe I wasn't tuned in enough to the dramatic potential of immersive gaming to notice; maybe I didn't look much up then either.
[Edit: I changed out one fantasy game for another, as I concluded that I preferred the more streamlined system of Vagabonds of Dyfed over the more complex, move-based system of Freebooters on the Frontier 2e. 4/27/21]
Recently taking a moment to reflect, I've found myself hip-deep in middle-age. It happens to a lot of us. I realized that, in a likelihood, I've probably got as many games ahead of me as I do behind me. (It's possible this is inaccurate, as I did take ~20 years off from RPGs, but in the interest of an introspective post, let's just roll with that estimate.) I looked back at past campaigns, thinking, They were numerous, but the variety of RPG systems across them was very limited. Like many RPG hobbyists, I tend to collect a lot of game systems -- but, if I'm being honest with myself, there's not a very high chance that I'll actually spend much time (if any) playing those systems.
Admittedly, it's fun to simply collect RPG rulebooks, even if you're not going to necessarily play them all. And, if you're like me, you also get enjoyment out of reading them and expanding your awareness of the variety of rules and mechanics across the hobby. But, that's not ultimately why we're here: we're here to play or run them at the table. So this pause for reflection got me reading. I decided to read through all the rulebooks that I owned (in some cases, it was a quicker read, closer to skimming) so that I might identify my personal "core" games -- those that I turn to as favorites and that I'd be most likely to enjoy running for others. I began a survey of my collection to help me wrap my brain around exactly what I had, how each worked on the simplest level, and how much I valued each personally.