I started playing games when I was 15 years old. I learned how to play Shadowrun (3rd edition) by playing it with people that, I believed, knew the game. Sure, I read the books. Not the rules, of course. Just the cool stuff. The cyberware options. The guns. But not the rules. Those were shown to me live by the friend who introduced me to the hobby, and his friends who already played together and whose group I joined.

They knew the game.

Of course, they didn’t. Not really. Without getting lost in the weeds here, let me assure you that they used rules they–or whoever taught them–made up. And I’m not talking about house rules here. They didn’t change a rule on purpose to fit their playstyle or tastes. No no. They believed that their version of the game was the right way. The only way. Quite a common thing within the hobby, to be fair. Most people I knew wrongly thought that rolling a natural 20 in 5e D&D is always a success on a skill check, regardless of the DC. (The 2024 version of the game might have made that an actual rule, I think).

There is nothing wrong here; it’s cool, actually. Shows that games are living and breathing with each table, that they can be so personal and unique for everyone that no two tables ever play the same game.

Eventually, I caught on, of course. I went from player to GM pretty fast, because telling stories, and guiding others to tell theirs, seems to come naturally to me. That didn’t really mean we starting using the rules as written. Some of them, yeah, I got them to understand the actual rules. But for the most part, the way we were already playing the game felt better to us. So these rules did become house rules.

And house rules can be awesome. Every table has them. Every GM has them. Taking the raw text and rules and fitting them to your style and taste is a core part of the hobby. And for someone like me, this inevitably leads to wanting to make more than just a tweak or adjustment or subsystem. I don’t just want to make something for another game.

I want to make my own game.

My first game design ambitions came in the early aughts. The same person who got me into the hobby had some ideas for his own game. So we played around with concepts, themes, lore, rules. Well, I was mostly interested in the rules part. And most of the stuff I came up with was highly derivative of Shadowrun, one of the only two games I knew. So there were attributes and skills, powers and cyberware, no classes, and so on. Obviously, nothing came of it. But the design flame would continue to burn, and still burns to this day.

Next, I would start to …

… with just a bit more patience, things became …

… when the next project turned out to …

Ok, no, I won’t bother you with the next 20 years of personal history of not accomplishing at thing. But in that time, I played a lot of new and different games. Learned what makes these games work, learned what I want to get out of a game. I always had knack for taking things apart to see how they worked. Putting them back together is a different story.

Tabletop Role-Playing Games are such a great form of social entertainment, art, creativity, and design. There’s so much you can do with a game, and there is so much more a game can do when its design supports the fantasy/themes/vibes it promises.

That’s why I want to make my own game. The game I want to play. That works the way I always wanted games to work.

Project Star Quest

First of all, I’m not the only one working on this. A friend/player of mine has helped me set up a lot of the initial ideas and themes, and is largely responsible for it being a sci-fi game. Unfortunately, he hasn’t been able to contribute much in a while due to life stuff, but I’m looking forward to reuniting with him. The times we got together always lead down interesting paths I’d never even consider by myself. Design, much like playing itself, benefits massively from collaboration.

Space Adventure in Humanity’s Dark Future.

That’s the tag line for my current work-in-progress. It’s what years of ideas and iteration have lead to. Project Star Quest (not the final name (hopefully)), is a game with satisfying, deep tactical combat, but also with rich, consequence-driven narrative gameplay. That’s the goal, anyway.

Project Star Quest is a big game. For a single designer (currently, and even for two people it’s still a big undertaking). It’s not rules light or mostly vibes. Nothing wrong with these games, they’re just not what I’m after. The core loop of the game has the players embark on dangerous missions, where they overcome challenges as much as fighting enemies. Between missions, they deal with personal situations and potential fallout that resulted from the risks they took during the missions. A constant feedback loop of big picture stuff of a crew of space adventurers making a living in a hostile galaxy, and highly focused missions, each informing details of the other.

Maybe you leave some tracks behind during a mission infiltrating a corporate moon base, which leads to bounty hunters showing up at your door after the mission, during your personal interludes. And maybe dealing with the bounty hunters goes badly enough that your next mission is made all the more difficult because of that. You know, normal RPG stuff, just with systems in place that help the players get there, tell that story, set up and resolve these consequences.

It’s a game that has a lot of inspiration, but is itself made from the ground up. From first principles as much as I can. Streamlined, taken apart and put together over and over again as I examine what I want in a game, what I would enjoy playing and running and reading. There were several prototypes of games that came before this version, and every iteration became more focused, more in line with what I want to be as an aspiring designer.

In the big picture, the two pillars of narrative and combat are the most important things to me. Having a tight design, rules and systems that support the promise of the game, are just as important to me as being able to tell a great story. I strongly believe that a well designed game helps the players bring the fiction to life just as much as it helps them fight big monsters.

Blades in the Dark, Spire/Heart, Spectaculars are great examples of story-focused games. These games are packed with rules and design and systems that directly help telling the story.

Pathfinder 2, Lancer, Draw Steel, on the other hand, are great games that offer deep, tactical combat. They also have systems in place to help tell a story in some capacity, but their focus is in fighting, and they’re great at that.

(I’d love to talk about these games in more detail, but this intro to Project Star Quest post is already getting long enough.)

So this game needs to be able to do both, without the two pillars competing with each other, or having them feeling too disconnected. Did I do it, you ask? Well, game’s not done yet, so, no.

But it’s coming together.

I’ll be posting many more updates in the near future outlining my design process. Expect posts on early prototypes of the core mechanics, on how I approach designing combat, what I want to from the narrative side of things, and the lore that lead to the working title Project Star Quest.

Hopefully, I’ll be able to put together a full picture of the journey so far, catching you up to the current state of things, and taking you with me as this thing comes together. In its current form, or whatever future iteration springs from it.

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