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?
