Why I Published This Adventure

I wanted to share my experience trying to write RPGs and the struggle of just finishing something. I've been into RPGs since I first grabbed a full copy of Rolemaster Express at a free comic book day. Though I've since moved on to games I enjoy a lot more, nothing blew my kid mind more than the idea that I could keep on doing the imaginary games that I loved so much with my friends. The hours I've been able to sink into dreaming worlds and sharing worlds with others have meant so much to me since then.

Then in high school I got the idea that I wanted to design my own. I even wrote a few, participated in some of the 200 word RPG competitions (do they still do those?), and played them with my friends. Some were flawed, some were fun. The scavenging one with millions of procedural generated items was a bit much, the time travel one had some neat real world mechanics, and the book-based one really meant something to me (more on that later). I actually playtested and revised, and playtested and revised since everyone told me this was the way to get a good game and I was proud of. Unfortunately I didn't have any real design skills at the time. I kinda knew layout from working the school magazine, but my art was abysmal. So I let my games stay in a google drive folder and never shared them because I couldn't get them looking as beautiful or refined as I wanted them to. Nothing was ever done because it wasn't sleek or pretty. My skills were in technical design and writing.

So I decided to go to college for game programming, but that just got more technical and further from design. I barely even wrote anymore. Then I discovered Electrical Engineering and transferred schools. It got more technical, RPG design went behind the back burner, kept barely alive by residual heat. I still played, but didn't have time or energy to design. Finally I graduated college, got an engineering job and playing RPGs was hard because of time. I was starting to get pretty depressed. I never used the creative part of my brain, it was just turned off. I didn't even really think about RPGs or writing anymore.

Thankfully my partner and friends who had never tried RPGs offered to play one with me after I was reminiscing about the "good old days". We've recently started Horror on The Orient Express, so I guess I got them hooked. It's brought a lot of joy back to my life to spend time in imaginary worlds with my friends. It even inspired me to pick up those old projects I had sitting in my google drive. This time I decided I needed to finish something, which means I needed to start small.

I chose the smallest I could: a 200 word RPG submission I made years ago about wizards using real life books to cast spells. It was pretty clever, and I knew friends that still played it. So I expanded it, tested it, and wrote a lot more to make it a real system. I got rid of all the hand-waviness required to make a 200 word RPG work. I'm now writing the final chapter, doing layout, and editing the thing. I'm getting close to having something I can share with the world, but I can feel myself slowing down, getting over-perfectionist and obsessing over tiny details again.

I decided to go even smaller. I had a very well written dread adventure sitting in my google drive. It didn't need more writing or editing. All it needed was layout and art. The part that always scared me. I set an arbitrary deadline, as is sometimes done in engineering, and decided to do all layout and art in a weekend. Then I would accept whatever I had at the end and share it with the world. I'm pretty proud of what I came up with. No matter how well it does or how many people play my adventure for a tiny indie RPG, I now know I can do it. I will finish my RPG and share it with the world.