my projects

i made these

i like to do game design. these are my projects. note that i mostly fart around and dont finish stuff & also all of the art is from the internet (except for a couple pieces for Astrals & Algols 2e that i commissioned). while i'm not actively working on anything right now, i'm musing a return to Ozymandias 2056 or Interregnum or starting (and probably promptly aborting) a fifth project.

Astrals & Algols 1e (2019-2020)

like many beginning designers with little exposure to other games, my first project started as a series of hacks for D&D (3.5e in my case) to better accommodate my own setting, which i started working on in the summer of 2017 and playing with shortly after. i didn't start to conceive of it as a separate game until 2019, at which point it had expanded to include mechanical and class overhauls influenced by my developing sense of game design, balance, and desire for what i wanted the setting to be like (and also inspired by a Giant in the Playground forum user called Grod_The_Giant). by the end of its run, A&A 1e included:

spell points (called Astra), overdrawing mechanics, and a magic "addiction" system;
injuries;
restrictions on the availability of teleportation and magic items;
a temperature and weather system i never used;
incentives to investigate and prepare for monster fights ala the witcher (didn't really pan out the way i wanted);
overhauled spell, feat, skill, and equipment lists;
simple mechanics for local economies;
weapon and armour properties;
mundane and magical prosthetics;
distinct dog and horse breeds;
a kickass map; and
25 base classes.

A&A was being playtested basically the entire time it was in development, which was both a blessing and a curse. on one hand, it was excellent to have constant feedback and be always testing (i even got to play it for a little while!) but on the other i often felt constrained by the need to balance the desires of my immediate playgroup with my own interests as a "designer." it's also an interest time capsule of my intellectual development more generally: the loredumps are very much indicative of my understanding of history at that point and the pages for the "races" are burdened by the colonial-anthropologist tone, something which i inherited from D&D and mashed with whatever i was learning in my history and anthropology classes that semester.

Astrals & Algols 2e (2021-2023)

at some point i started to chafe against the crudeness of the google drive and D&D 3.5e's horrid balance and ditched A&A 1e and started again, this time starting with the explicit goal of making something that was not D&D and putting it into a pdf, like a normal person. while this also coincided with my growing interest in ttrpgs as a medium and an expansion of my knowledge, the second edition of A&A was still very much a D&Derivative. at least this time i had developed a design philosophy and goals that, while malleable, guided me throughout 2e's development.

first, i was sidelining the setting that was the impetus for the first edition. it was still there but i was first and foremost trying to make interesting mechanics and adjusting the setting around that as needed (compared to 1e, 2e's pdf has basically no loredumping). second, i was aiming for a balanced experience, inspired partly by D&D 4e's design: there should be no bad options and no absurdly broken combos; everybody should be able to contribute, more-or-less evenly (on average), in a fight. A&A, i came to understand, was a game about tactical combat.

compared to 1e, A&A 2e reflected my growing awareness of history, culture, and some problems therein (for example, i started moving away from "races") and also my intensifying opinions about progression and decisions in tactics games. i reduced the maximum character level to 12, condensed progression such that numbers had lower ceilings and every level provided a serious choice, and strove to eliminate terrible and too-good options. the action economy was reworked, with three tiers of actions and expanded support and crowd control options specifically for non-magic characters. i also experimented with a lot of procedures to structure the out-of-combat experience, like skill challenges (generally successful), a bonds, burdens, and goals system to encourage acting in-character (generally successful), mechanics for travel encounters (barely used), a reputation and renown system (barely used and generally annoying to do so), and loans (never used).

A&A 2e is the closest i've come to "finishing" a project and all-in-all im pretty happy with it. sure it's got problems but, come on, i did that all by myself! i even commissioned cover art and got physical copies printed. it also pushed me to learn a lot about the medium and to treat game design as an actual artform.

Ozymandias 2056 (2022-2023)

Text sample from Ozymandias 2056 i started working on Ozymandias 2056 after listening to the Crysis 2 theme (not joking). in Ozymandias 2056, climate change developed far faster than scientists predicted and by the year 2056 the world as we know it is gone and buried; what remains of humanity on earth is sandwiched between deserts populated by manmade horrors, irradiated wastelands, flooded cities, and craters created by powerful weapons of war. the players are precisely engineered supersoldiers, living relics of the old world and the last of their kind.

Ozymandias was meant to be distilled combat. i had learned from A&A 2e and decided to largely ditch the extraneous procedures on focus on the tactics, inspired, in-part, by XCOM (because i was playing it at the time). in a strange twist, i decided to use Fantasy Flight Games' Genesys dice, which are very well-suited to the FFG games that use them but, as far as i know, had never been used for tactical combat. unfortunately, the game never got to a playable state (though i do have a few dozen pages of, in my opinion, beautiful book), so i never got to see how it would pan out in practice. i ended up dropping the project when i started focusing more on school but would like to pick it back up at some point, perhaps shifting it away from grid-based combat or combining it with Interregnum.

Interregnum (2025)

my latest project started as a 3rd edition of A&A before i split it off into its own thing to give it more room to breathe. Interregnum is (this may surprise you) yet another tactical combat game with a 2d12 resolution mechanic. like A&A 2e interregnum was a mechanics-first setting-last kinda game (noticing an ebb and flow here....), but thats about where the similarities end. interregnum's gameplay is much more structured, sort of like a board game: the game is separated into two stages of play: the Commission (go to a place and do a thing) and the Interregnum (manage world changes, develop your base, work on long-term activities—analogous to "downtime"), with different rules and procedures for each but both feeding into each other. interregnum also codified some of the GMs abilities, giving them a resource (malice, one of several metacurrencies) which they can use to interact with the fiction and mechanics in a defined and predictable way.

Interregnum logo while i had a solid outline and draft going (and a pleasantly simple page design), very little actually made it into the pdf before i started running lancer again, which sated my appetite for design, so it's never been playtesetd. still, looking back on my notes for the base management, character creation, and various metacurrencies, i think interregnum could be my most interesting ttrpg project. i'd like to come back to it at some point, perhaps combining it with Ozymandias 2056.