WoE Design Journal 3: A Systems History Brief, in Brief

Since 2016, I've entertained several options for the system that I'd use to run Emberreach games. I spent time considering each of them. Most never even got to the table before being passed over in favor of another. I thought I'd make a stop-over in SystemsTown to marvel at the long path that led me to the rules I crafted for WoE.

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.

WoE Design Journal 2: Situating the Setting

For this installation of the series, I'm going to present a simple overview of the setting that's developed for Wayfarers of Emberreach. I've reached the conclusion that, to truly understand the workings of the game and its rules, you have to understand Emberreach, the setting that is its backdrop—more accurately, that is its foundation.

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 Design Journal 1: Origin Story

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.

Vagabonds of Dyfed (VoD) was written by Ben Dutter of Sigil Stone Publishing, published in 2018. It describes itself as "an unholy union between the OSR and PbtA," which I think is a fair descriptor on a few levels (more on that below). It credits its design to a handful of other games: World of Dungeons, Barbarians of Lemuria, Blades in the Dark, City of Mist, The Black Hack and The Whitehack, and Moldvay Basic D&D. The designer actually provides a very lengthy, thorough explanation of the game and their intentions for it on its DriveThruRPG page. I refer the curious there for details. VoD's central mechanic is the universal move roll lifted from World of Dungeons.

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.

RPG R&D: Wayfarers of Emberreach Series

 <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.

Faint Pulse -- Yet Signs of Life

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. 

• Last September, I released my first, official RPG publication -- a third-party scenario for the Mothership RPG!
• Next on my writing agenda is to rewrite an adventure I recently penned, playtest it a second time, and then lay it out and publish it.
• After that, I want to draft and playtest a rules-lite cyberpunk hack.
• Somewhere amid all of the above, I aim to launch an Instagram account for my game publishing brand, Abhorrent Vaccuum Games -- or maybe adapt my personal account to somehow do double-duty? We'll see what works out. 

Anyway, here goes a new attempt at keeping things active here. Fingers crossed, more to come!

RPG R&D: System Engine

This post is part of a series examining my ideas for a new sci-fi/horror RPG, Red Shift.

One important point that I feel I should lay out, right up front, is that I've recently decided to forego writing the Red Shift RPG. After some introspection, I decided that the world probably doesn't need one more tabletop RPG that badly -- especially with the sheer number of them that are being released in recent years. Even if it had been functional (I hope that I could have ultimately guaranteed at least that much from my design work), it wouldn't have been original enough in a new or challenging way. As a good friend said to me, right now, there are a lot of rulesets out there that aren't strongly supported with adventures or settings. So why would I create one more? That said, I intend to continue this series of posts because I think sharing the design work that I did complete would be useful as part of the overall conversation on RPGs. Plus, it might prove useful to someone who is considering creating an RPG, at least to perhaps provoke some critical inspection. With that out of the way, let's proceed with the first topic...

Hopefully, at the core of any successful RPG is a decently running engine, some kind of resolution mechanic that introduces randomness into and elicits engagement with the game. There are already a number of highly popular and extremely effective systems out there -- as well as a number of less popular ones.

RPG R&D: Existential Questions

It seems it was, in many ways, inevitable. When you've turned a very particular corner in your gaming life and you make the decision to try your hand at designing an original RPG, one question is certain to arise: is it really worth it?

This is most definitely a well-trod path. In fact, I suspect that this is a path winding in close proximity to several other, similar paths within the same wood, all of them converging at the aforementioned corner. In the same way that most people reach a point in their lives when they question if they've made the right choice regarding career path, the RPG game designer almost certainly will -- and definitely should -- call up the specter of doubt to haunt their project. There are, after all, a lot of RPGs out there that bear a much-more-than-passing resemblance to one another.

Originally, I had the idea that I would make an augmented version of an existing RPG, take something that I felt had promise and expand or edit some of the rules, perhaps retool the setting a bit. There was a sci-fi game I found that, at first, seemed right for this treatment. But as I went along, I started to realize that it would really work better if I started from scratch and worked from the ground up. Thus, Red Shift was born.

Crawling (Not Running) Towards Game Design

The more I learn about RPGs, discover new systems and rule sets, read new approaches to running game sessions from the community of bloggers and podcasters, and tinker with mechanics in my own campaigns, the more I come to realize that I'm deeply interested in RPG design. I suppose this is largely true of a lot of gamers, so I'm certainly not lacking for company.

Lately, I've started having that terrible urge -- the one that all gamers who are very interested in design probably face at one point or another. I've been wanting to design my own RPG. 

I know, I know. You're probably shouting at your monitor or your cell phone right now. Don't do it! Knock it off! Take that unexamined notion, pull it out of your brain, sit that nonsense down on the ground, and move quickly in the opposite direction like a hiker who's encountered an angry bobcat on a backwoods trail! 

And perhaps I should. It's arguable that we're living in the time of Peak RPGs. It's easier than every to find and purchase RPGs. There's a new game dropping every few days on Kickstarter. As I recently heard it stated by Ken Hite and Robin Laws in an older episode of their excellent podcast (I'll try to find the specific episode and put a link in here), if you find yourself wanting to design a new RPG, you should ask yourself if it's really necessary. With so many variations of play out there, can there really be anything new under this polyhedral sun? Is there already something out there that does what you want your new game to do? In short: why create clutter?

The Laws of Thermo-dice-namics: Musings on the Potential Heat-Death of Role-Playing Games

Like any pursuit that has existed for a length of time, role-playing games have evolved. During the early days of tabletop RPGs in the 1970's, there was only really one show in town: Dungeons & Dragons. Its designers started with a core rule set and expanded it over the years, adding new content with each subsequent edition. So what began as a single, rough gaming system had grown and refined itself, and found itself no longer alone as other new systems emerged from within the gaming community.

The number of games proliferated as major RPGs established themselves around distinct, central system mechanics -- d20/f20 (Dungeons & Dragons); percentile rolls (Basic Role-Playing, Call of Cthulhu, Delta Green, Warhammer, etc.); dice pools (Vampire: The Masquerade and its kin, Shadowrun, etc.); GUMSHOE/point spend (Trail of Cthulhu, Night's Black Agents, etc.); and, more recently, PbtA/2d6+ (Apocalypse World, Dungeon World, Monsterhearts, etc.). You get the idea. There are, I'm sure, more central systems that could be added to this list, but that's not the focus of my attention here. Suffice it to say there was an expansion, a proliferation of new ways of playing that emerged over the years.