I’m feeling ill so I thought I would write a little bit about the games I like to create and play. This is a bit of a long read but I like reading these types of things so maybe you will too.

First, a little history.

Until late 2021, I actually hadn’t played in an RPG, but I had been GMing for over a year and a half. Like a lot of people, I imagine, our group began playing Fifth Edition Dungeons and Dragons in April 2020.

My first session was almost entirely filled with my colleagues. We worked with the local government and at that point we were still going into the office. Our jobs had changed overnight from giving face-to-face advice to the public to giving advice over the phone but the infrastructure wasn’t there yet for us to work from home.

So there I was, idly looking at the website for D&D Beyond on a Monday afternoon when my colleague walked past, noticed and I mentioned I was interested in DMing. Within a couple of days she’d rounded up willing participants and that Friday I ran my first session of D&D.

I hadn’t played in a D&D game and had very little idea of what I was meant to do but we had a great time. Despite working in person we held the sessions online. My brother joined us from the second session. They kept coming back, week after week. We had a lot of fun. I learned to use FoundryVTT and running sessions became a huge part of my life through 2020 and 2021.

Eventually I became frustrated with the design of fifth edition. Combat just wasn’t fun. Sometimes a player would wait twenty minutes to make a bad roll and miss. There had to be something better, I thought.

Of course, there is. So much is out there.

I began a new journey through the OSR and D100 systems. I spent months planning a Celtic Mythras campaign and even spent a considerable amount of time porting the system into Unreal Engine. I created my own OSR system called Meat which was a brutal, bloody and bleak Orcfest. It was a lot fun, but it’ll probably remain unreleased.

My journey through system design thoroughly engrossed me. When I wasn’t working or spending time with my girlfriend I was thinking about system and game design. Really, I’m bloody lucky she’s still there, despite me talking about Orcs more than two years into the hobby. Around this time I also became really interested in Agon and Blades in the Dark.

I feel like more than a few people could read this and feel like they had a similar journey.

No DIce, No Masters

Things really changed when I discovered story games. My biggest influences here are Orbital by Jack Harrson and Riley Rethal’s Venture and Galactic.

It was during a session of Galactic that I realised that there is so much untapped potential and space to fill in the No Dice, No Masters genre of games.

So many unanswered questions. The culture shock was real. How do we settle things like combat without dice? Is it possible to have a tactical game without a random input? How do we decide the weather and the time of day.

One thing I don’t enjoy about the No Dice, No Masters genre is the way gaining and spending tokens has been handled in some systems.

In some games you gain a token by doing something bad and then use that token to do something good. It’s meant to show character growth, but it felt like receiving a reward for doing things like “let someone down who depends on you.”

Games aren’t just escape. They are frameworks for how to think. They’re a language.

Of course, all of these thoughts led me to create my own tools to provide narrative structure to our GMless & diceless games.

Key & Token is my own take on the genre, where you gain a token by introducing a problem for the other players to deal with and drive the narrative forward. You can give someone a token by asking them a question about their character or the world. It removes the class system of setting elements and instead players take control of whatever might be in a scene.

Myriad was my answer to the question “What do I do next?”

Forecast and Watchkeep provide a system for GMless games for players to decide the time of day and the weather. It also allows for some characters to be in different times of day and be experiencing different weather effects.

Marauder provides a system for players to create a world map using nodes.

As an homage to my home country, I released Swyno, a bilingual magic system. You create magic by speaking the Welsh language. Cymru am byth.

Some thought on why I make these tools.

Perhaps my biggest takeaway from all of this is that my tools are designed from the point of view of a GM, rather than a player. I don’t want to prep for games any more. I want to build tools that generate content at the table and get everyone involved. Make worldbuilding and world generation part of the fun, but provide enough structure to give it some cohesion.

These tools aren’t meant to be GMless. There are as many GMs as there are players.

So what’s coming next?

Lodestone is an upcoming GMless, city-building tool.

Warband is a tool to decide combat without dice.

Gesture is a new magic system.

Chimera is a new, big idea that I am planning to bind all of these tools together.

What else?

Since starting on this journey I have also made some friends along the way. I’m lucky to talk about roleplaying games with other people I respect a lot in the community. If you like what I make, you can join us over at the Randomless Renaissance discord and take part in CERAMIC Jam.