A Halfling Baker's Dozen or What Is This Blog About?

What is this blog about? What even is this? Why, and more importantly, wherefore?

It is about my relationship with the design of table top roleplaying games. I have 5, or maybe 6, probably 7 projects underway at the moment where I try to develop roleplaying game tools for fun and profit. More accurately, for fun and understanding, for wisdom bringeth more profit than gold, even in a gold for XP system.

I am going to undertake half-a-dozen RPG related projects to help me understand the design principles of roleplaying games. It would be nice if these project lead to something useful and tangible or engagement with other people but mostly these are my notes about what I’m thinking and learning about RPGs. I’m going to try and write these as if they were for an external audience. Two reasons, firstly a bit of self-discipline, secondly, if anyone wants to engage I’d like them to have something of a reasonably quality to engage with.

A common feature in my work is the use of procedural generation as a tool to provoke improvised structured content. I want to be able to produce useful gameable content. Content which supports player lead engagement whilst reducing the burden of preparing and running that content and supports collaborative and imaginative emergent gameplay.

Let’s see if that turns out to be a manifesto or an indulgence.

Over the next few years I am going to pursue the following RPG projects

Pavements and Princes – the eponymous and original purpose of this blog. Pavements and Princes is a project to develop a system agnostic ruleset for generating and operating urbancrawls as a sandbox campaign. I’d like to be able to support someone running a West Marches style hexcrawl campaign or a Barrowmazes dungeoncrawl style campaign in a city. I was tempted to call it Easthome. Perhaps I should have. Perhaps one day my sons and brothers will. What I think makes this different from Dungeon 11011 and Hexnut is that I don’t think a fully worked up set of processes exist for urbancrawls. They are the most under developed of the three milieu. Let's see if that is a problem with the author or the material.

Dungeon 11001 is my spin off from failing to get very far with Dungeon 23. This is my project to collect or develop a toolkit for generating, presenting and running a sandbox dungeoncrawl, at least a small one. This was my intent with the original Dungeon 23 and one of the reasons why I didn’t make much actual progress with that. I was distracted by trying to understand the how and why and wherefore rather than generating any actual content.

The Octarchy is my RPG setting project. It’s an Italian Renaissance themed Old School Revival setting with an emphasis on espionage, intrigue, trade, factionalism, the seeking out of new knowledge and lands and the industrialisation of magic. I want to poke around in the design principles of what makes a setting work and the design choices you can make to make a setting easy and compelling to take to the gaming table.

Walk on Part in a War is design project for a series of adventures. These adventures share two common elements. Thematically they all involve the player characters starting as minor players in a wider more complex conflict. They are also what I am going to call Unfolding Fractal adventures. That is adventures that start with an initial scenario and a set of procedures to generate longer, deeper enduring content that the players can interact with and the player characters can inhabit.

Chassis is my attempt at an RPG ruleset. This is definitely one that I’m doing to understand the way RPG’s work. I want to come up with a working set of rules for a crunchy semi-classless fantasy-themed RPG system. I’m currently looking at magic systems and skill systems and how character advancement can follow a Do It to Advance It ethos. If it works I'll be, more baffled than surprised.

Lastly, Hexnut, which is to hexcrawls what Pavements and Princes and Dungeon 11001 are urbancrawl and dugeoncrawl sandboxes. Like Dungeon 11001 plenty of material already exists, so this is more a project about me finding it, understanding it and applying it as a tool to help me codify it for me.

So that’s what this blog is about, a half-a-dozen projects to help me work out how to be the sort of the roleplaying game designer that I want to be by learning how RPG systems work by building my own.