Starting Out On a Heartbreaker

The party conversation usually starts with a friend excitedly dragging someone over to me, saying “Do you know Levon? He’s a huge D&D nerd. You’ve got to meet this person, Levon. They love D&D just like you do.”

I know D&D. I’ve loved D&D. But my love affair with D&D is over. We’re still friends, I think, but sometimes D&D makes me so angry, and the bad memories come rushing back. I’m a different person, now. D&D has changed, too. Extremely popular with a young and enthusiastic crowd. In the spotlight, happy in ways I could never make it happy. I’m truly happy for its success. I really am!

I recently bought the new essentials kit to try out. I really liked the essentials red box that came out for 4th edition back in the day, so I grabbed this thinking it'd be boiled down, refined 5e but with maybe with a Moldvay twist. But nah, it's just same old homework-feeling, arcane tome except instead of a tome it's thinner like a magazine. As I sat with my daughter rolling a beautiful elven wizard, I couldn't help but think the familiar thought: How would I make this better?

John Harper's Blades in the Dark is my favorite RPG, and from the first actual play I ever watched, I knew I wanted to hack it. Since then, I've made an 80's B-action movie hack called Streets of Passion, and a complete mini game based on an old game called Rifts. I always figured the ruleset for Blades isn't suited for a straight D&D adaptation, but after playing Band of Blades, I realized how flexible the system could actually be.

And that is the story up til now. 

How my new High Fantasy TTRPG got underway. This blog is to chronicle my journey to making this possibly-good game. It's also meant to be an educational tool for designers who can write but would like to learn how to make physical and distributable products.

The Plan

All of my brainstorming will go into this blog. The way I write games is that I pose myself a bunch of questions, and rather than answering them in the same document, I reference the questions when writing the game. 

The ultimate goal, for me, is to create something playable and enjoyable. I'm not trying to be a professional game designer, or to make it into "the industry." There's nothing wrong with that, but to me, the game's the thing.

Here's a step by step path to product, which will undoubtedly change and shift:

1. Statement of intent (what you're reading now)
2. Inspirations and goals
3. Inclusion and Accessibility
4. Boiling Things Down: The Scale of the Game
5. The Role of Art
6. The Character Sheet
7. The Nitty Gritty: Outlines, Tables of Content, and Rules
8. The Setting and Factions
9. Format: The Zine
10. Graphic Design for Game Designers
11. Printing and Exporting
12. Playtesting

Patrons

My goal is transparency and education. With the exception of polished art and finished or close-to-finished products, This journal will be in front of a paywall. it'll be crossposted between my Patreon page and blogspot. Both of which are linked below. 

Levon

Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/forkfrenzy
Blogspot: https://forgeintothedark.blogspot.com