I have wanted to design my own roleplaying game since I was a child pouring over my collection of Dungeons and Dragons 3.5 books on my grandparents’ kitchen table. For a decade and a half I’ve nursed and nurtured that desire. My failed attempts are numerous, spread behind me like irregular milestones I look back towards fondly despite their terrible cringe. I hope this attempt will be successful, but even if it becomes yet another stone along my path, I intend to still get something from it.
But before I start brainstorming stats and skills or tearing my hair out over what dice to use, I need to know exactly what I want from this project.
What Am I Making?
I tend to get ahead of myself. Let me start, then, by explaining exactly what I want to create.
I want to create a fantasy “big game” tailored to my GMing needs.
A “big game” is what I’ve been calling it in my head, but what do I mean by this exactly? When I close my eyes and think back on the video games, movies, manga, and especially books and short stories and poems that have inspired me, I am overwhelmed by the sheer variety of experiences they depict. I want my game to handle a wide array of potential activities. It will not just be focused on 3-6 heroes stopping evil and saving the day, though that should remain possible. I want a game where player characters can do that, but also join armies, lead armies, pilot a ship through storm and battle, run a tavern or a farm or a barony, mingle and scheme in royal court, win an election, lead a caravan, create new magic, build up a settlement, uncover conspiracies, orchestrate conspiracies, and more.
Fantasy is a broad genre, and one I love dearly. There are many different kinds of fantasy, and I want my game to touch on many of them. I want it to have elements of planetary romance (Mailanka’s Psi-Wars is a huge inspiration for me), gothic dark fantasy (I’m a big FromSoft fan), romantic fantasy (in the vein of Lackey’s wonderful Valdemar books), and more.
The two biggest fantasy subgenres I intend to draw from are ‘sword and sorcery’ and what a friend of mine calls ‘elves and spells’, that nebulous subgenre created by Dungeons and Dragons and occupied by many of its descendants. I dearly love both genres. From the former, I most often look to Conan the Cimmerian, Elric of Melniboné, Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, and Solomon Kane for inspiration; from the later, beyond DnD as a game itself, I draw a lot from Record of Lodoss War and Dragonlance.
While I would be remiss not to also mention Berserk, the Black Company, and Nix’s Old Kingdom series, I intend to write a full “Appendix N” article at a later date.
Finally, what does it mean for a game to be tailored to my GMing needs?
Well, I want to create a game that does not have those little places (or sometimes big places!) where I feel like I have to fight the system to run what I want to run. I love GURPS as a game, but it also drives me up the wall sometimes. For example, I struggle to manage PC disadvantages as a GM. So, when creating this game, I will look at what I like about how other systems handle flaws and make something based on what I think is best.
So, to summarize:
I want to create a system for easily creating diverse fantastical experiences inspired by my favorite stories, using bespoke mechanics.
Now comes the hard part: making that a reality. But first, some addendums.
Nice To Haves
While the above is all well and good, I also know some other things I want my game to have. Some are due to my personal quirks. Some are due to the quirks of the people I game with and our life situations.
I want this game to be personal to me. Not just in the mechanics, but also in its aesthetics and writing style. I have a terrible tendency to write too formally when trying to explain how rules work. I think a part of this is taking myself too seriously. For this project, instead, I want to push myself to be more honest in my style, to write, as it were, like I am really there speaking to you.
This game will be queer. How could it not be? I am queer, and I include queer elements in my stories and games. So, expect to see a lot of bisexual women.
Most of my friends play games online. Since I want to run this game for them, I need to make sure that the rules work at least adequately with online play. Minimizing the amount of back and forth needed to resolve conflicts would be one option, but that is really a conversation for another day.
Character creation has to be streamlined while still allowing for a wide variety of characters. Ideally, it should not take more than half an hour to make a character if you know what you are doing. If I can drive that down to even less, that would be excellent.
So, those are my goals when setting out on this project. I look forward to sharing more with you all!