It has been far too long since I posted anything here.
I could blame work, family, the usual shortage of hours in a day, or the peculiar ability of game design to consume an evening that was supposed to last twenty minutes.
Mostly, though, I have simply been making games.
The website itself is still badly overdue for an update. That is coming. But before I disappear into another round of rebuilding pages and arguing with WordPress, I thought I should actually show you what I have been doing.
Quite a lot, as it turns out.
The first result is Writ & Ruin.
Writ & Ruin is my solo sword and sorcery RPG about one dangerous life in a savage age.
You cross hostile kingdoms, bargain in cruel courts, raid ancient ruins, fight for treasure and carry the consequences of those choices from one tale into the next.
Sorcery is powerful, specific and costly. Monsters are singular horrors rather than entries in a universal bestiary. Their supernatural weaknesses are discovered through play rather than secretly predetermined.
The game uses a simple d6 system, an Oracle, procedures for journeys, ruins, courts and Borderland incursions, and campaign systems built around debts, relationships, scars and changes to the world.
Your victories earn scars. Your debts follow you. Your tale becomes a saga.
Writ & Ruin is now available on DriveThruRPG.
And Writ & Ruin is not the only game that has been sitting on my desk.
The Undying Mandate is fantasy Nordic noir.
It is a game of investigations, old obligations, cold cities and supernatural things that do not conveniently arrange themselves into combat encounters.
Evidence exists before the characters arrive. Failed investigation rolls do not erase or move clues; they change your position, attract attention or make obtaining the truth more dangerous.
The setting takes the machinery of police procedural and Nordic crime fiction and places it in a fantasy society where the dead, old laws and things living beside human civilisation are part of everyday political reality.
It is much closer to finished than the silence around it might suggest, and it is one of the next Se7en Sagas releases.
Scar City: is something rather different.
Imagine 1940s Lisbon without ever actually saying “1940s Lisbon.”
Seven hills. Trams. Cafés full of people having two conversations at once. Refugees arriving from a war beyond the borders. Spies, smugglers, ministries, careful newspapers and policemen who would rather make a problem disappear quietly than arrest it publicly.
Now make it fantasy.
Then run it using the world’s most famous fantasy roleplaying rules.
The Drowned Catalogue is the introductory adventure to this setting, a strange noir investigation about a book, a dead bookseller, a car in the river and a bureaucracy capable of erasing much more than paperwork.
It is my attempt to make D&D do something it normally has absolutely no interest in doing.
Meanwhile, I’ve been quietly working on a passion project.
Gangs of New Kowloon is a diceless magipunk fantasy skirmish game about rival anthropomorphic street gangs fighting for territory, reputation and survival in a haunted ghost-lantern city. Players use a shared language of cards, scars, wounds and hard tactical choices rather than dice, with every fight leaving consequences that carry forward.
Gangs of New Kowloon has made the transition from a document I keep rewriting to a game people have actually put on a table.
The Quickstart has now been through several games, including repeated playtests with my girls, and the core version is finally locked.
That has meant testing the Spirit Deck, scars, wounds, movement, scenarios and all the small interactions that look perfectly sensible in a document until someone actually puts a miniature on the table and asks an inconvenient question.
It has also led to work on a companion app and, separately, an experimental PC adaptation. Neither replaces the tabletop game. The cards, board and miniatures remain the centre of GoNK.
There is still a lot of work ahead here, particularly visual development, production and figuring out exactly how I eventually manufacture something like this without filling my house with boxes.
But it exists. It works. And people have played it.
So that is where Se7en Sagas has been.
The Undying Mandate and Scar City are close behind.
Gangs of New Kowloon is growing at the table.
There are other things moving in the dark behind those, but I have learned enough by now not to announce every strange idea the moment it crawls out of my notebook.
I am also going to try to be rather less invisible.
That means more regular development posts here, and shorter looks at the games, rules, images and playtests on Instagram.
For today, though, there is a savage age waiting.
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