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Aug 18, 2019

Introduction

I’ve started this blog to provide a place for me to collect and share my various ideas about worldbuilding, RPGs, the OSR / SWORDDREAM scene, and game design.

So, a brief biography. I’ve been worldbuilding nearly as long as I can remember, and many aspects of my current worldbuilding have their roots in ideas I came up with when I was 12 years old. Worldbuilding inspirations include:

  • The Thirty-Six Lessons Of Vivec, C0da, and other Morrowind lore by Michael Kirkbride
  • Kill Six Billion Demons by Tom Parkinson-Morgan (AKA Abbadon)
  • Neon Genesis Evangelion by Hideaki Anno
  • Fallen London, Sunless Seas, and Sunless Skies by Failbetter Games
  • The SCP Foundation
  • The Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe
  • Malazan Book of the Fallen by Steven Erikson
  • The Black Company by Glen Cook
  • Monster Blood Tattoo by D.M. Cornish

My interest in RPGs started from reading the tattered AD&D books from my dad’s high school games, then 3.5e, 4e, 5e, as they were released, and finally I stumbled upon the OSR scene. I now tend to gravitate towards lightweight, modern OSR rulesets, such as:

  • Into the Odd by Chris McDowell
  • In The Light of a Ghost Star by Nate Treme
  • KNAVE by Ben Milton
  • The Black Hack by David Black
  • Ultraviolet Grasslands and its underlying SEACAT system by Luka Rejec

My main RPG project right now is the culmination of years of abortive attempts at writing my own homebrew RPG system. It aims to be a lightweight OSR ruleset, designed with rules for dungeon crawling and looting, overland travel within small county-sized areas, and an emphasis on low cognitive load during play.

I have a few other worldbuilding projects that I might pick up at some point. One is a hard sci-fi near-future setting focused on orbital combat between hotshot Lancer pilots. Another is a traditional high fantasy setting, focused on the Ranger of a border March who shepherds a small village through the years, facing varying challenges depending on the seasons. These are mostly a collection of notes at this point, and haven’t been developed hardly at all.

So that’s where I’m at. The next few posts will probably discuss game design, then worldbuilding after having established how the system works. A name would also be good…

Up next Harrow Core Mechanic My first post about my RPG project (Harrow) will cover its core resolution mechanic; the saving throw. I’ve chosen to use the term “saving throw” to
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