Making Environment More Than Scenery
Most fantasy games treat magic as something that happens to the world, then disappears.
A fireball explodes. A portal opens. Reality bends for a moment, and then everything snaps back into place. The spell ends, the numbers are updated, and the world itself remains fundamentally untouched. Magic changes the immediate situation without leaving marks.
That approach never quite worked for the kinds of worlds I've always been drawn to.
I'm more interested in settings where the environment isn't just a backdrop, but a system that responds to what people do to it.
Dune's full cycle shows ecosystems as layered transformations rather than static states. Arrakis wasn't always a desert: the sandworms created that. The Fremen's success in terraforming it green nearly destroys the spice cycle. There's no "correct" ecological state, only different configurations with different costs. Every solution reshapes the system in ways that create new tensions.
Dark Sun makes magical destruction mechanical and visible: defilers versus preservers as a fundamental choice where both paths have consequences.
Studio Ghibli films (especially Princess Mononoke and Nausicaä) refuse to create simple villains, showing instead how everyone believes they're doing what's necessary to survive. The tension between nature, technology, and spirituality isn't about finding the "right" answer—it's about recognizing that every choice preserves something while costing something else.
Even Sword Art Online: Alicization explores what happens when a world's rules are strained or pushed past their intended limits; systems under pressure behave in unexpected ways.
What all of these have in common is that the world itself feels alive. Not in the sense of having consciousness, but in the sense that it responds to what happens within it. The environment has momentum. It participates. And critically, none of them tell you the answer. They make you think about the tradeoffs.
Coming from a more science-y background, the alternative has always felt hollow to me. If magic really existed and had been used for generations, it wouldn't just create individual dramatic moments. It would reshape ecosystems and influence how societies develop.
But it's more than that.
Most fantasy games treat magic as something that exists on top of a mundane world—medieval Europe plus wizards. The societies function like historical Earth despite having teleportation. Economies work like pre-industrial markets despite conjured materials. Warfare looks like historical battles despite reality-warping power.
Magic is everywhere, but it doesn't fundamentally change anything.
I wanted the opposite. In Threshold, magic isn't cosmetic. It's inherent to how the world functions. Societies organize around it, and factions emerge as responses to it. Geography reflects its history. Even the people trying to avoid magic are defined by their relationship to it.
So instead of asking "What cool places can players visit?" I started asking "What kind of world would actually exist if this was how reality worked?"
That question led to Dead Zones, decay gradients, regions under different stages of ecological stress, and factions built around competing philosophies about how to survive in a world that's breaking down. The setting didn't grow out of a map. It grew out of cause and effect.
Which brings me to the actual design work.
Vision is one thing. Implementation is another. This post is about the gap between "I want environment to matter" and "here's how environment actually functions as a game system."
What I Worked On
The conceptual challenge: Make environment a core mechanical system, not just atmospheric description.
In Threshold, power doesn't vanish when the spell ends. It leaves marks. Magic alters the land and creates consequences that accumulate over time. The world is under strain: some regions are still functional, others are collapsing, and a few have been pushed past recovery entirely.
If that's the reality of the setting, then environment can't just be set dressing. The state of the land needs to affect what resources are available, what creatures live there, how magic functions, and what choices feel viable.
This meant creating a system that tracks environmental degradation in a way that's:
Visible to players (not hidden GM bookkeeping)
Mechanically consequential (affects gameplay directly)
Narratively meaningful (reinforces the themes)
Scalable (works from local to continental levels)
The result is what I'm calling the Threat Level system—a gradient from 0 (pristine) to 5 (“irreversibly” corrupted) that describes the ecological state of any given region.
Threat 0-1 regions still have healthy forests, clear water, and abundant wildlife. Threat 2-3 regions show visible decay: thinning vegetation and corrupted creatures appearing. Threat 4-5 are Dead Zones where natural life has been replaced by ecosystems that feed on death and corruption instead of sustaining life cycles.
Players experience this through travel, resource availability, encounter types, and the visible consequences of their own actions.
The mechanical challenge: Connect player actions to environmental change without making magic feel punishing.
Here's where vision collided with playability.
In my setting, magic drains life energy from the environment. That's thematically central—it's part of why the world is dying. But I ran headfirst into a fundamental design tension:
If casting spells damages the environment, and environmental damage is bad, then casting spells is bad. Which means players using one of the game's primary features are being punished for engaging with the system.
That's not a game about hard choices. That's a lecture with dice.
I needed mechanics that created meaningful dilemmas rather than moral scolding. Players should feel the weight of their decisions, not the weight of my judgment.
At the same time, I had to address a parallel problem: technology.
Magic isn't the only force reshaping the world. Alongside it, early industrial methods are emerging—tools, infrastructure, extraction techniques meant to impose order on a world already under strain. Sometimes this includes magitech hybrids. Sometimes it's purely mechanical.
Either way, technology isn't presented as a clean alternative to magic. It's another way of exerting control, and it creates its own pressure. Strip mining for resources damages land differently than draining it with magic, but the outcome is similar: stressed ecosystems and accelerating decay.
The game needed mechanics that acknowledged this reality without creating a false binary where ‘magic = bad’ and ‘nature = good.’ The actual tension is more interesting: all forms of power carry costs, and the question is which costs you're willing to accept.
What Went Wrong
Problem 1: The "Don't Play the Game" Problem
My initial approach was straightforward: every spell cast pulls life energy from the surrounding area. Small spells wither grass. Medium spells kill trees. Large spells create localized dead zones.
Simple. Thematically coherent. Catastrophically unfun.
The message players received: don't cast spells.
In a game where magic is supposed to be one of the core character paths—where Spiritualists, Magists, and hybrid approaches all rely on spellcasting—this was design suicide. I was actively discouraging players from using their primary abilities.
The system told players that using magic made them complicit in the world's decline, but offered no alternative except "don't cast spells." That's not a meaningful choice—it's a trap designed to make you stop engaging.
Problem 2: The "Healing Is Impossible" Problem
The flip side to that was restoration mechanics.
If magic damages the environment by pulling life energy out, then logically, healing that damage requires putting life energy back in. Which is expensive. Brutally expensive.
My first pass had restoration costing 10x to 100x more than the damage dealt. One spell might kill a tree; healing that tree required sustained ritual work over days or weeks, draining the caster's own life force in the process.
Thematically? Perfect. It reflects the real-world truth that breaking ecosystems is easy, fixing them is hard.
Mechanically? It meant players choosing the Spiritualist path (focused on environmental restoration) were signing up for a Sisyphean nightmare. They could heal small areas through exhausting personal sacrifice, but the scope of the world's decay was so vast that their efforts felt meaningless.
I imagined the perspective of players would be: "Why would I choose this path? I can't actually fix anything."
And they’d be right.
I'd created a game about futility rather than difficult decisions. The problem was too big to solve and the solutions were too costly to attempt. Futility isn't interesting—it's just depressing.
What I Changed
Solution 1: Make Environmental Cost Optional, Not Mandatory
The breakthrough came from reframing the question.
Instead of "Should players be punished for using magic?" I asked: "What if players could choose whether to pay the environmental cost?"
This led to a split-cost system:
Full Cost Casting:
Pay the spell's entire Mana cost from your personal pool
No environmental damage
This represents using your own internal life energy
Environmental Pulling:
Pay only part of the Mana cost (or none at all)
Pull the rest from the surrounding environment
Causes immediate, observable environmental damage proportional to energy drawn
NPCs (and possibly PCs) notice and react based on their philosophy
Suddenly, magic wasn't inherently destructive. It was a choice.
A character facing a life-or-death situation can pull from the environment to survive. That's understandable. Desperate. Human.
A character casually nuking their surroundings for convenience? That's a different statement entirely.
The mechanics now create actual moral weight rather than mechanical punishment. Players aren't being told "magic is bad." They're being asked "how much are you willing to cost others for your own power?"
That's the question I actually wanted the game to explore.
Visibility and Reaction:
When someone pulls from the environment, it's not subtle:
Grass withers in an observable radius
Nearby plants lose leaves or wilt
Small animals flee or die
The ground may crack or darken
And crucially, people see this happen.
A Naturalist witnessing someone drain life from the forest doesn't see "necessary magic use." They see violence against the land. A Spiritualist sees someone taking what they've spent years trying to restore. A Magist sees normal operating procedure. A Technologist sees vindication; why non-magical solutions are needed.
The same action generates different reactions based on philosophy, and those reactions have consequences: social, economic, and sometimes violent.
This turns environmental cost from an abstract penalty into a social calculation. Not "can I afford this mechanically?" but "can I afford the response this will provoke?"
Solution 2: Make Restoration Brutal But Meaningful
For the restoration problem, I leaned into the difficulty rather than softening it.
Healing environmental damage remains exponentially more expensive than causing it. A Spiritualist attempting to restore a dying region is making a genuine sacrifice—spending their own life force (HP and Mana both) over extended periods to give energy back to the land.
But I changed the scope and framing.
What Spiritualists Can Actually Do:
Threat 1 (Depleted): One person can stabilize and begin healing. Takes days to weeks. Exhausting but achievable. This is one Spiritualist maintaining a sacred grove or healing a battlefield scar.
Threat 2 (Withering): One person can maintain one area OR multiple Threat 1 zones. Takes weeks to months. Visibly draining—the Spiritualist ages faster, weakens, but the land responds.
Threat 3 (Barren): Requires multiple Spiritualists working together, rotating effort to avoid individual death. Takes months to years. Creates a small oasis in a larger wasteland.
Threat 4+ (Dead/Void): Requires generational community effort. Success uncertain. This is the work of lifetimes, sustained by communities who dedicate resources to supporting the Spiritualists attempting the impossible.
The key change: Spiritualists aren't trying to save the world. They're trying to save a place.
A Spiritualist can create and maintain an oasis in a dying region. A sanctuary where life still flourishes. That's not a global solution, but it's meaningful. It matters to the people living there. It's a small victory, but it's real.
And importantly, it creates interesting narrative choices:
Do you maintain three Threat 1 zones scattered across the region, helping more people with smaller efforts, or focus all your energy on healing one Threat 2 area completely?
Do you try to heal the ancestral land your people lived on for generations, knowing the effort might kill you, or do you preserve something smaller that you know you can save?
When a desperate community begs for help with their dying fields, do you spread yourself thinner, or do you stay focused on the commitments you've already made?
These are compelling questions. The answers depend on values, not optimization.
Parallel Pressure: Technology Isn't Innocent Either
One reason the split-cost system works is that it doesn't create a false binary where magic = destruction and nature = purity.
Technologists point to magic use and say "See? This is why we need alternatives." They're not wrong. Magic does drain the world when used carelessly.
But their solutions aren't cost-free either. Mining for metals scars the land. Factory runoff pollutes waterways. Deforestation for lumber and farmland creates its own form of ecological collapse.
The game presents this honestly: all forms of power apply pressure. Magic drains life energy directly. Technology extracts resources and creates waste.
The mechanics don't pick winners. They show costs and let players decide which they're willing to pay.
What I'm Testing Next
The system has structure now, but several pieces still need refinement:
Environmental Effects on Magic:
What happens when you cast spells in a Dead Zone? The environment there isn't providing life energy anymore—it's sustaining itself on corruption and death. Do you pull from that inverted cycle instead? Does that affect the caster? Create different spell results? Risk corruption spreading to the character?
Right now this is a gap. I know it should matter, but I haven't settled on how.
Corruption Mechanics for PCs:
Does prolonged exposure to Dead Zones corrupt characters? If so, what does that look like mechanically? A separate track that fills as you spend time in corrupted regions? Wounds that don't heal normally because your body is adapting to the inverted cycle? Stat degradation? Or is the risk entirely environmental (hostile creatures, toxic conditions, resource scarcity) without direct mechanical corruption?
This ties into the larger question of how much the game tracks slow degradation versus acute dangers.
The Restoration Math:
I have rough cost ratios (10x-100x more expensive to heal than to damage), but I need to run numbers to see if this creates the experience I want. Is a 10x multiplier enough to feel significant? Is 100x so brutal that even the small victories feel Pyrrhic?
The goal is "difficult but achievable," and that's a narrow target.
NPC Reaction Depth:
I know NPCs should react to environmental damage based on their philosophy, but how granular should this be? Does a Naturalist attack you on sight for pulling from the environment, or do they give warnings first? How do different factions balance their ideological positions against practical needs?
A starving Naturalist community might overlook environmental damage if you're helping them survive. A prosperous one won't. How does the system track that nuance without becoming a social simulation?
These questions need playtesting to answer. Design in a vacuum only gets you so far.
The Broader Design Philosophy
Here's what I learned from wrestling with this:
The goal is reflection, not prescription.
This is where those influences converge into actual design philosophy.
In Princess Mononoke, Lady Eboshi isn't wrong to want to protect her people through industry. The forest spirits aren't wrong to defend their home. San isn't wrong to fight for the forest. Ashitaka isn't wrong to seek peace between them. They're all right from their perspectives, and the tragedy is that they can't all have what they need.
That same principle runs through all the works that shaped this game. Dune doesn't tell you whether desert or garden is "correct." Dark Sun doesn't tell you defiling is always wrong—sometimes it's survival. None of them present simple answers.
I want players to have that same experience—not as passive observers, but as active participants making those choices themselves.
When you pull from the environment to save your party, you're not "playing wrong." You're making the same calculation characters in these worlds make: "What am I willing to cost the world to protect what I love?"
The system doesn't judge that choice. It just shows the consequence and asks: was it worth it?
That's where the reflection happens. Not from me or the GM telling you the answer, but from you deciding what you value and seeing the result play out in the world.
The world reacts to power because that's how systems work.
The original system was prescriptive—it told players "magic drains the world, restoration is brutally difficult" without giving them meaningful agency in that reality.
The revised system presents the same facts but frames them as forces within a larger system rather than moral judgments. The world reacts to power because that's how ecosystems work, not because I'm standing over your shoulder.
Hard problems don't need easy solutions, but they need achievable ones.
The world in this game is dying. That's not fixable at the scale of a single campaign, and pretending otherwise would undermine the setting's entire premise.
But individual characters can still make a difference in specific places, for specific people. That localized impact is enough to make the struggle feel worthwhile. A Spiritualist who spends years maintaining a single sanctuary isn't solving the global crisis, but they're preserving something real. That matters.
Visibility creates weight.
When magic leaves marks, when regions reflect their history of use, when NPCs respond to what they witness, power stops feeling abstract. The choice to pull from the environment isn't just a numbers trade—it's an act with consequences people can see.
That's what transforms "should I spend resources?" into "what am I willing to cost others?"
Mechanics should support multiple philosophies, not endorse one.
The system doesn't tell players whether Naturalists, Spiritualists, Magists, or Technologists are "right." It shows the logic behind each philosophy and the costs each approach carries.
Naturalists preserve what remains but struggle to keep pace with decay. Spiritualists heal through sacrifice but can't scale their efforts. Magists advance through power but drain the source of that power. Technologists innovate through industry but create different forms of destruction.
All of these are internally consistent positions. The game supports all of them. Which one players gravitate toward says something about their values, not about "correct" play.
Questions for Readers
On environmental cost mechanics:
When games give you the option to do something harmful for immediate benefit, what makes that choice interesting rather than just frustrating? What's the difference between a meaningful consequence and feeling punished for engaging with core systems?
On restoration as gameplay:
Have you played games where "fixing things" is a major mechanic? What made that engaging or tedious? How much visible progress do you need to see to feel like the effort matters?
Next post will likely dig into resolution mechanics—how the dice actually work, what kind of play the game supports, and why that matters. I'll walk through different systems and what I settled on.
- TTRPG Traveller
Vision & Goals: Designing a game for a world that’s ending (now)
This post is about the shape of the game I’m trying to make.
Not the mechanics (yet), nor the process behind them, but the assumptions everything else rests on: the tone of the world, the kind of play it’s meant to support, and the boundaries I’m deliberately working within. If future posts focus on how individual systems evolve, this one is about what those systems are meant to serve.
These goals aren’t immutable. They will change as the game is tested and revised. For now, they function as constraints. When something later breaks (and it will break) or needs to be reworked, this is the lens I’ll be evaluating it through.
A World That Hasn’t Ended Yet
This isn’t a post-apocalyptic game, but rather a pre-apocalypse fantasy setting.
The world hasn’t collapsed into ruin, but the cracks are showing that it’s about to fail. The crisis is present and uneven. Some regions are already scarred beyond recovery. Others are only beginning to show signs of strain. That means the world isn’t a ruined wasteland yet. Life still exists, and that’s part of the pressure—because you can still see what’s being lost.
The tone I’m aiming for is melancholic urgency. Time matters here. Decay is visible rather than abstract, and choices leave marks that don’t fade quietly. Hope still exists, but preserving it requires tradeoffs, and those tradeoffs are visible in the world.
This is more nobledark than grimdark. Mortality is real, but despair isn’t the point. Meaning still exists, and the world remains worth engaging with even as it deteriorates.
A Post-Divine Reality
The gods are gone.
There is no divine intervention waiting to correct mistakes or validate moral choices. Prayers go unanswered. Whatever happens next is the responsibility of mortals acting with incomplete information and competing values.
Magic exists, but using it leaves marks. Drawing on power affects the land and alters ecosystems. Those consequences are meant to be immediate enough that they can’t be ignored. Magic isn’t separate from the world’s decline; it is entangled in it.
Alongside magic, technology is emerging as another response. Not steampunk spectacle or modern machine hand-waving, but early industrial pressure. It represents an attempt to impose solutions on a world that is already strained. These approaches can alleviate suffering in one place while accelerating collapse in another, and the game is interested in that tension rather than presenting any option as clean or correct.
What Play Is Meant to Feel Like
This game can support short campaigns and one-shots, but it’s built to deepen with continued play. The longer a group stays with it, the more its systems begin to interlock and matter.
A full campaign, moving from Tier 1 through Tier 4, is expected to run somewhere between forty-five and seventy sessions, with around sixty sessions being typical. At the low end, that looks like about a year of weekly play. At the high end, it can stretch to several years for tables that meet biweekly.
That length assumption is intentional. The systems are designed to support accumulation and slow change, both in characters and in the world, without relying on runaway numbers to maintain interest.
The structure is tiered, but not exponential. Early play stays local and grounded, focused on understanding how the world works and where tensions lie. As the campaign progresses, decisions begin to ripple outward. The final tier isn’t about becoming untouchable; it’s about legacy. The question is no longer whether the characters matter, but what will remain because of them.
Within those arcs, individual sessions are meant to stand on their own. Players can miss sessions without collapsing the campaign, and the consequences of earlier choices continue to surface even when play is episodic.
What Players Are Deciding About
When players are deciding what to do, I want their attention pulled toward a specific kind of question.
The most important decisions are philosophical. Which approach do you support? What are you willing to sacrifice? Are you making things better, or just differently worse? These choices are reinforced through exploration—where players go, what they investigate, and what knowledge they decide is worth uncovering.
Resource tension sits alongside those questions. Power is finite. Relationships can fray. Land can be damaged or preserved. Deciding when to spend something, and when to hold back, is meant to matter.
Tactical play still has a role, but it is secondary. Positioning and choice should be meaningful, but combat is meant to resolve quickly. Fights are one way the world pushes back. They are not the center of the game. Character relationships, problem-solving, negotiation, and preparation are all expected to carry as much weight as direct confrontation at different stages of play.
The Role of the GM
The GM’s primary role is facilitator and arbiter.
They present the world and its problems without prescribing solutions. They adjudicate rules consistently and show consequences clearly. The GM is not playing against the table, and they are not guiding the group toward a predetermined story. The game is meant to be played to find out what happens.
Secondarily, the GM shapes the world in play. They establish regional texture, portray faction motivations, and make the state of the land visible. Everyone believes they are acting reasonably. The GM’s job is to make those beliefs understandable, even when they collide.
Design Priorities
At the system level, everything is filtered through a small set of priorities.
I’m optimizing for clarity under pressure. Rules need to remain usable when attention is divided and stakes are high. I’m comfortable with complexity when it produces meaningful decisions, but not when it exists for its own sake. Longevity matters as well. Mechanics need to hold up after dozens of sessions, not just during the opening arc.
Equally important are the things I’m deliberately avoiding. I don’t want grid-dependent combat pacing. I don’t want consequence-free magic or exponential inflation of numbers. I’m not interested in rigid class identities locked in early, or in bookkeeping that pretends to be realism. Moral binaries disguised as alignment systems don’t serve this project either.
Constraints I’m Treating as Fixed (For Now)
Some decisions are already solid enough that I treat them as boundaries rather than experiments.
Mechanically, the game assumes freeform spell construction rather than fixed lists. Using magic carries visible environmental cost. Combat is zone-based and resolves quickly. Health is split between stress and lasting wounds. Progression is skill-based rather than class-locked. Resources are abstracted to create tension without accounting overhead. Defense is active, requiring players to roll and make choices rather than hiding behind static numbers.
Narratively, the crisis is unfolding now. There are no evil races, and culture is not biology. Ecology is structural rather than decorative. Dead Zones represent drained and inverted environments rather than generic cursed areas. Regions exist along a visible decay gradient, and the absence of the gods is a permanent condition rather than a mystery waiting to be solved.
These constraints are what keep the game from drifting toward easier, more familiar solutions.
Inspirations and Cautionary Tales
Inspiration here isn’t about copying systems. It’s about recognizing patterns.
I’m drawn to worlds where ecological tension drives conflict and moral disagreements come from incompatible values rather than villains. I’m cautious of patterns I’ve seen repeatedly: magic treated as a consequence-free resource, combat expanding to fill entire sessions, scaling that turns the world into background noise, and lore that exists only to justify encounters.
This project is an attempt to hold on to what works for me while avoiding the irritating parts I keep running into.
Where the Design Is Right Now
The game is not a blank page, and it isn’t playtested yet.
Core systems exist on paper, including the resolution engine, the character framework, baseline combat, and the magic system. Other areas—advancement details, combat techniques, equipment catalogs, bestiary ecology, and GM tools—are still being built.
That unevenness is intentional. I’m focusing first on the systems that create the most downstream pressure, knowing that later revisions will cascade outward. The next major milestone is a playtest-ready Tier 1, with enough supporting material to run the first five to ten sessions without inventing rules on the fly.
Questions for readers
In long-running campaigns you’ve enjoyed, what tends to break first? (ex. pacing, tone, power curve?)
When magic carries visible environmental cost, what feels compelling at the table—and what crosses into frustration?
My christmas gift …
to myself and others: Beginning the design blog
Now that I’m on my Christmas holiday I’ve had time to think about things, and especially after reading Taron Pounds (Indestructoboy)’s Patreon post I’ve decided that this is a good time for me to get my feet wet. So before I start getting into the nitty gritty, I wanted to kind of go over my intent for this blog.
First and foremost, this blog is a design journal.
It isn’t a guide on how to design a tabletop roleplaying game, and it isn’t an attempt to present a finished philosophy. What I’m documenting here is the process of designing a single TTRPG from start to finish—MY TTRPG—including the parts that don’t work, the assumptions that turn out to be wrong, and the revisions that only make sense in hindsight.
The goal isn’t to arrive at clean conclusions. It’s to record decisions as they’re made, while the outcome is still uncertain.
Why This Project Exists
This project started for a simple reason.
Rather than continuing to mold my ideas into existing systems—compromising here, house-ruling there—I wanted to see what would happen if I designed the game I actually wanted to play. One built from the ground up around my own interests, sensibilities, and tolerances as both a player and a GM.
I’m not trying to make a “D&D killer.” I don’t expect this project to become widely popular, commercially successful, or definitive in any meaningful way. At its core, this is a selfish project in the most literal sense: it exists because I want it to exist.
If other people end up enjoying it, that’s great. If they borrow ideas from it, even better. But those outcomes aren’t the motivation. They’re side effects.
Designing without the pressure to appeal broadly frees me to be explicit about tradeoffs, to lean into ideas that might not be universally appealing, and to discard conventions that don’t serve my own table. That constraint—designing for myself first—is what gives this project its shape.
Why Write About It Publicly?
Most design write-ups are written after the fact. By the time they’re shared, the messy parts have already been edited out. The logic is clean, the narrative is linear, and the uncertainty has been resolved.
This blog is meant to capture the opposite.
Each post is written during the design process, while ideas are still in motion and outcomes aren’t guaranteed. That means you’ll see mechanics before they’re refined, changes that contradict earlier decisions, and solutions that introduce new problems instead of cleanly fixing old ones.
Writing publicly forces me to slow down and articulate why something feels right or wrong, not just whether it works. Even when a change doesn’t pan out, understanding why it failed tends to be more useful than the version that replaces it.
If there’s value here for anyone else, I expect it to come from that transparency rather than from any particular result.
On Notes, Drafts, and Process
A lot of this design work starts on paper.
I tend to sketch ideas, mechanics, and diagrams by hand first—often without a clear endpoint—before coming back later to translate them into something more structured on the computer. As a result, some posts will include photos of handwritten notes, margin diagrams, or half-formed ideas alongside more formal write-ups.
Those notes aren’t meant to be artifacts or conclusions. They’re snapshots of where my thinking was at a particular moment. In many cases, the ideas in them will change or be discarded entirely by the time they’re written out properly.
I’m including them anyway, because they’re part of how the design actually happens.
How These Posts will be Structured
Every entry will follow the same basic format (as best as I’m able):
What I worked on
The specific system, mechanic, or design problem I was focused on.What went wrong
Where assumptions didn’t hold, friction emerged, or testing revealed unintended consequences.What I changed
The adjustments I made in response, and why they seemed reasonable at the time.What I’m testing next
The next iteration or experiment, before I know how it will turn out.Questions
One or two focused questions, or occasionally a poll. Feedback is welcome and considered, but not every suggestion will be adopted.
This structure isn’t meant to be prescriptive. It’s just a way to keep each post grounded in concrete decisions rather than abstract theory.
On Feedback and Expectations
Comments and critique are encouraged. Disagreement is expected.
That said, this isn’t a community-designed game. Feedback helps surface blind spots and alternative approaches, but final decisions are filtered through the goals and constraints of the project as a whole—most of which are rooted in my own preferences as a player.
Sometimes a suggestion is good in isolation but doesn’t fit the direction I want the game to go. Other times it solves a problem the game simply isn’t trying to address.
When feedback isn’t adopted, that doesn’t mean its being ignored—it just means it didn’t belong here.
What This Blog Will Cover
Over time, this journal will touch on several broad areas:
Vision & Goals – What I want this game to do, and what I’m intentionally not designing for.
Core Mechanics – Resolution systems, action economy, and failure states.
Supporting Systems – Advancement, resources, and long-term play considerations.
Playtesting – How testing is conducted, what I’m paying attention to, and what surprised me.
Revision & Polish – Cutting, consolidating, and refining.
Release & Reflection – What worked, what didn’t, and what I’d change next time.
These topics won’t necessarily be addressed in order. Design rarely moves in a straight line.
A Final Note
Mistakes will show up here. Some will be obvious. Others won’t be apparent until much later. That’s part of the point.
This is a record of one person designing one game for their own table. If that perspective is useful to others, great. If not, the project still succeeds on its own terms.
The next post will start with the first real design question.
We’ll see where it goes from there. I hope you join me on this journey.
- TTRPG Traveller
What to expect
It all begins with an idea.
As those who have been following me in Discord or my Patreon may know, in the little spare time I have, I have been working on the concept of a new ttrpg. This is a new journey for me, and I expect many others find themselves wandering this same road. My hope is that by sharing this design journal, it will help others who are looking to start to see a process, just not the only process. Everyone’s journey is different, but that doesn’t mean we can’t help one another to our destination.