Lyme's RPG Writing Journal #1: The Story So Far
I’ve learned a lot of useful things by paying attention to the personal stories of my favorite RPG creators as they try to make games, so I’m going to start an irregular posting series about my own work. It will also be the best place for in-depth news about what I’m working on.
First, if you want a quick update without reading anything, here it is:
My roleplaying/worldbuilding game Dawn of the Orcs kickstarts November 19th. You can follow it here: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/lyme/dawn-of-the-orcs
The game is complete and I have test print copies in hand – the Kickstarter is just to pay for the print run, so fulfillment should be quick and smooth.
I’m still working on writing The Lurking Fear GM’s Guide. It’ll come out sooner or later, and when it does it will be a free PDF.
I recently put an alpha version of Fear and Panic online for free: https://lymetime.itch.io/fear-and-panic
It’s a d100 horror game like Lurking Fear but much more innovative – no hitpoints, no initiative, completely reworked sanity. I’m taking it to Metatopia this year, and I’m going to keep tinkering with it and improving it for a while.
How I Got Here
I got my start in gaming playing Call of Cthulhu on the Yog-sothoth.com forums, then ran a lot of CoC and Delta Green in college. I eventually branched out, and at this point I’ve played most of the most popular systems, and plenty of obscure ones – BRP, Fate, PbtA, FitD, Savage Worlds, Genesis, Year Zero Engine, d20, Shadowrun, WoD, WHFRP/FFG 40K, Mork Borg, Eclipse Phase, Cthulhu Dark, and GUMSHOE, to name a few. I also started listening to gaming podcasts, beginning with the YSDC ones, and later including the Jankcast, I Podcast Magic Missile, KARTAS, RPPR, and the many other shows in the RPPR universe. If all that sounded like a foreign language, it’s okay, we’re getting to the part about actually making games.
In 2019 I submitted a game called The Panopticon Must Fall to the 200 word RPG challenge on Github. It was a faction-play game about rewiring sensors in an automated dystopia to foil surveillance. It was not a finalist.
In 2022, I started writing The Lurking Fear, my first full RPG, while on a long bus ride. I had a couple specific goals. I had spent my early days as a CoC GM running with just the free 6e quickstart rules, and was a little frustrated by people referring to CoC as a crunchy or complicated game – I wanted to show people that all the rules that mattered fit on four pages, and the rest is just window dressing. I was a little more frustrated with the 7th edition of CoC that I had recently run, and that made significant changes to the rules for the first time in the game’s history – small changes by the standards of most other games, but by CoC terms, quite a bit of extra complexity, including Luck mechanics and Chase rules. Inspired by the way OSR treated early D&D, I wanted to put something online that would be a free, simple, open-source way to play CoC adventures, no matter what Chaosium did with the game line. Somehow I missed the existence of Cthulhu Eternal, which does the exact same thing with a good deal higher production values. Still, the various incarnations of Cthulhu Eternal are around 100 pages long, so I still think The Lurking Fear has its niche.
I was happy enough with The Lurking Fear to commission cover art and layout for it, although layout for a 4-page game was not terribly expensive. I put it online on August 20th, 2022 – H. P. Lovecraft’s 132nd birthday. I didn’t have much of a social media presence, so I posted about it on Yog-sothoth.com, Reddit, and some Discords I was in. It got hundreds of downloads within a few days, which was really encouraging for a first-time creator.
With some fun exceptions, The Lurking Fear was not picked up by veteran CoC players as an open-source alternative to the world’s most popular investigative horror game. What it did do was attract people in the indie space who weren’t familiar with CoC at all, and who wanted to know more about how to run this kind of game. I started work on a GM’s guide for The Lurking Fear that would explain how to run both horror games in general and TLF in particular. And I’m still at work on that guide. The level of instructional writing involved is very different from the storytelling involved in writing an adventure or even communicating the fundamental rules of a system, and it’s a kind of writing that’s very similar to the business emails and procedure documentations I write at my day job. That means it draws on a lot of the same energy as my day job. Should I have buckled down and just gotten it out the door already? Absolutely. I have a commissioned cover already right here. But it’s a free supplement for a free game, so I try not to feel too bad about it. At this point I have around 20,000 words in a document, and I expect I need another couple thousand to finish it. It will be by far the longest thing I’ve written for RPGs, so it will need some serious editing passes. And I’m trying to decide if it needs interior art or not. I already have a very nice cover for it, and in my head its perfect form is as a dry two-column textbook, but some kind of interior illustration is the standard these days. At least some of the better parts of the GM’s Guide are already up on this blog.
Between 2022 and 2024 I released a couple other things on Itch.io. Nightmare Unleashed takes the sanity mechanic from classic Call of Cthulhu and asks, “since this is the most important mechanic for horror, what if it was the only mechanic, and it was used for all resolutions?” It’s an ultra rules-light, one-page horror RPG. Working on Nightmare Unleashed for the One Page RPG Jam was how I met Plasmophage, the artist I’m now collaborating with on Dawn of the Orcs. That was definitely a lesson in how doing small, fun, free projects like the One Page Jam can help create relationships and build trust that comes in useful later for much larger projects.
Shortly after the RPG Liminal Horror hit the scene, I got interested in it and wrote an adventure for it, Rotting Potential. It’s an adventure about the Mandela effect and the undead – and without ever mentioning it by name, it sums up my feelings on Covid-19. It has wonderful art by Evlyn Moreau, and terrible layout by myself, the only time I’ve done my own layout for a game unless you count Panopticon. For some reason, not many people downloaded it, which is a shame. On the other hand, a ton of people have downloaded 5E: The Roleplaying Game, a parody of D&D that I released during the OGL debacle. It’s not intended to be a playable game, and I never got the cease & desist letter I was aiming for, but I had fun writing it.
The Orcs Arrive
I’ve had notes for a game about orcs sitting on my hard drive for a while. I like orcs a lot – probably a good topic for another blog post. Originally I wanted to put out a full length traditional fantasy RPG about playing orcs, and for all I know that could still happen; I have half a rule system and some setting info figured out. At one point I even outlined a PbtA hack about orcs. While working on these games, I started coming up with more and more complicated ways to randomly generate the Dark Lord who created and ruled the orcs.
Meanwhile, I’ve wanted to do an “experts sitting around a table trying to solve a serious problem” game for a while. You know the scenes in classic monster movies where the scientists and generals look at maps and talk about what the monster can do, or the scenes in war movies where they do the same thing but without the fun monsters? Or the control room scenes in two of the most well-regarded comedies of all time, Airplane and Dr. Strangelove? I’m not sure if it was before or after I heard Rag-nerd-rok’s actual play of Juggernaut by Jason Morningstar, but that definitely stuck in my head as an example of doing it well.
At some point in August of 2023, I had the realization that one of the things I enjoy most about orcs is all the different ways they can be portrayed, and one of the challenges of a traditional game is picking just one. What I could do is to provide the tools for players to make their own Orcs. Things came together all came together and over a single long, sleepless night I typed up the majority of Dawn of the Orcs, which put the players in the position of that small group of experts, as they create the first Orcs over the course of a war. After a couple days of revisions I had something worth playtesting. I ended up doing probably more playtesting than I’ve ever done for a game. By May of 2025 the text was complete enough to start layout. I reached out to Plasmophage again. She suggested a very graphics-heavy layout, with some form of artwork on every page and a couple big splashes. I was skeptical at first, but it was the right call. She did most of the artwork herself, and the result has been a really beautiful, cohesive project.
Dawn of the Orcs is a bit of a tricky game to explain. It’s definitely a roleplaying game – players play the roles of Sages who are skilled in magic, technology, warfare, or perhaps just bluffed their way onto the Council. It’s also a worldbuilding game, where you explain how the choices your characters make shape the abilities and culture of your Orcs. And it’s a strategy game, where you try to use your Orcs to win a war. I’m calling it a roleplaying and worldbuilding game right now. I do know that I’ve playtested it extensively enough to know it works, it’s fun, and it’s pretty beginner friendly – I’m able to toss a copy of the rules at people who haven’t played a similar game before and let them figure it out, which is good, because there are not a lot of similar games. Originally I intended for it to be the kind of thing that would be a one-time experience for most players, but after seeing how differently each game went, and getting several requests, I eventually added some support for replayability.
I was going back and forth about if I wanted to release Dawn of the Orcs digitally or in print until I started to see Plasmophage’s art. That convinced me I wanted to be able to see the book as an object at a gaming table. I went down a bit of a rabbit hole in sustainable printing – another great topic for a separate blog post – but since this will be my first major physical release, I ended up deciding to keep it simple and use it as a learning experience. I’m crowdfunding on Kickstarter, printing with Mixam, and using Indie Press Revolution for shipping and fulfillment. Mixam does let me print with 100% recycled paper, so that’s a good start.
At this point, Dawn of the Orcs is complete as a book, and I have a box of test print copies in my living room. I have a date for the Kickstarter, November 19th, a pre-launch page, and even a trailer video. I have plans for printing and fulfillment in the US, although I’m still trying to figure out the UK and EU. I’m trying to figure out how to promote it without having an existing following as a game designer, and while avoiding some of the most traditionally useful tools like Twitter and Bluesky (I just don’t like ‘em). Finishing the book before launching the Kickstarter has definitely helped make this an easier time than most people’s first Kickstarters are, but I’m sure there will still be some bumps in the road.
Fear and Panic
One more thing. Ever since releasing The Lurking Fear, I’ve wanted to do a game that didn’t just condense the Call of Cthulhu experience, but improved on it, based on my experience with running horror games and all the innovations that have happened since CoC came out in the 1980s. Right now, I’m calling that game Fear and Panic. I’m planning to copy Mothership for this. I’ve already put a basically playable game online so I can get feedback and get GMs thinking about what it can do. Over the next few years I’ll tinker with it and improve it until I have something that can be packaged into a 1.0 release. I’m in no rush – my goal is just to make the best horror RPG I can by iterative improvement.
Where I Am Now
Right now, I’m trying to write The Lurking Fear GM’s Guide, finish design on Fear and Panic, and sell Dawn of the Orcs. Since running the Kickstarter for Dawn of the Orcs involves some hard deadlines – and since this is a project people will actually be handing me money for – Dawn is going to take priority for the next couple months, but I hope to be able to post updates on all three projects.