u/BlackTorchStudios

Well, Crows' Backerkit launched today. Somehow we finished After Eden's Playtest Rules today too.

A few months ago I made a post here called "“Racing Crows: How MCDM loves giving me heartburn”"

At the time, every new Crows dev update seemed to reveal another thing we had independently been working toward in After Eden: dangerous overland travel, party roles, inventory that actually matters, expeditions that can go wrong before you ever reach the dungeon, and the idea that getting home should be part of the adventure.

Then James Introcaso showed up in the comments and basically told me to stop worrying about it. There is plenty of room in the hobby, games draw from the same traditions all the time, and there is no reason people cannot enjoy both.

That stuck with me. So before anything else, thanks again, u/DirectorofSHIELD.

Because today Crows: Fortune or Death launched its BackerKit campaign, and through completely ridiculous timing, today is also the day we finished the Beta 1.0 public playtest rules for After Eden.

First, I am excited for Crows.

Dangerous dungeons, wilderness travel, wounds, constrained inventory, light, treasure, a persistent hometown, and a game that is perfectly willing to let you wander into something you absolutely should not fight? That is very much my favorite parts of the hobby.

And After Eden overlaps with some of that same design space.

After Eden is a post-apocalyptic tactical expedition fantasy game set in Nox, the world left behind after the Devastation of Eden. You leave settlements, cross dangerous wilderness, search for ruins and other Discoveries, recover relics, knowledge and salvage, and then try to get home with what you found.

The basic loop is:

Prepare → Travel → Discover → Enter Danger → Push or Retreat → Return.

So if the thing grabbing you about Crows is “pack carefully, go somewhere dangerous, find valuable shit, and hopefully make it home,” there is probably some familiar DNA here. Where the games seem to start heading in different directions is mostly a question of where they put their mechanical weight.

After Eden goes much deeper on tactical combat. Stamina is both your action economy and your defensive economy, so movement, attacks, maneuvers, Block, Dodge, spells and other Reactions all compete for the same pool. If you spend aggressively on your turn, you may not have much left when something comes after you.

There is also more persistent mechanical investment in the individual adventurer. After Eden has classes, but most long-term specialization comes through Traits, including Traits connected to ancestry, training, discoveries, factions, Khaos exposure and things your character actually survives during play. The goal is not heroic power scaling. Characters gain more options and become more distinct without eventually outgrowing the danger of the world.

Outside combat, a lot of the game lives in the expedition itself. Travel, supplies, Risk, Discoveries and the choice between searching harder or keeping moving are meant to create decisions before you ever reach a ruin or roll initiative.

That is probably enough comparison for now, because I do not think these games are really trying to replace one another.

They seem to be coming at a similar appetite from different directions. Crows is pushing toward dungeon-crawling survival horror, treasure hunting and a persistent hometown. After Eden is pushing toward tactical expedition fantasy, post-apocalyptic exploration and longer-term investment in the individual adventurer.

And apparently we picked the exact same Tuesday to put both of them in front of people.The After Eden Beta 1.0 rules packet is attached to this post.

We are actively looking for playtesters. The pregenerated character sheets and playtest adventure are still in development, and we are hoping to have both ready by the end of the month so people can run the full package at the table.

In the meantime, feel free to dig into the rules and let us know what you think. Feedback on mechanics, procedures, clarity, organization, layout, things that immediately click, things that do not, or anything else that jumps out is genuinely useful right now.

And if Crows sounds like your thing, their campaign is live today.

Heres the After Eden Playtest Rules PDF

Fortune or Death, James. Thanks for the encouragement.

Lesson learned. Don't post a solution before checking the math just because you're excited.

A recent design discussion for After Eden started with a basic question: should weapons roll damage, or would flat damage better serve the game? Combat uses active opposed rolls. When attacked, a character can spend Stamina to Block or Dodge. If they cannot defend, or choose not to, the attack becomes Unopposed and automatically hits.

We initially considered letting an attacker choose between average damage and bounded exploding dice on an Unopposed Attack. Average damage would provide reliability, while rolling would risk a lower result in exchange for a higher ceiling.

Then u/Exver1 pointed out the mathematical mistake. Exploding dice were both the more entertaining option and the statistically stronger option. Flat damage might occasionally help when an exact damage threshold was known, but most of the time there was no way to even know that. Players would roll because it was more fun, had the higher expected value, and could produce exceptional results.

That criticism led us back to a larger problem. Because defense is actively rolled, attempting to Block or Dodge creates the possibility of suffering a Critical Hit. Under our previous Critical damage rule, there were situations where spending Stamina to defend could produce more expected damage than simply accepting an automatic hit.

After testing several alternatives, we arrived at this structure:

----

Ordinary Hit

Roll normal damage.

Unopposed Attack

The attack automatically hits and deals maximum normal damage.

Critical Hit

Roll the attack’s normal damage dice. Whenever a die rolls its maximum value, roll another die of the same size and add it to the damage.

Additional dice can continue exploding without limit.

If the Critical Hit causes the target to lose HP, it also triggers a Wound.

----

This gives each result a distinct identity. An ordinary hit deals normal rolled damage. An Unopposed Attack is reliable and severe. The attacker found a clean opening, so there is no attack roll or damage roll. It deals maximum normal damage.

A Critical Hit is volatile. It usually deals less damage than an Unopposed maximum, but it has an unlimited ceiling. The Wound trigger also ensures that a Critical remains consequential when the damage dice roll poorly.

Exploding dice are exciting when they chain, but a Critical that rolls minimum damage can feel like a Critical in name only. A Wound gives every Critical a guaranteed consequence without making its damage consistently enormous.

The defensive choice is now:

- Do I spend Stamina to defend, knowing the attacker might break through with a dangerous Critical

or

- Do I preserve that Stamina and accept guaranteed maximum damage?

Our original solution was wrong, but understanding why led us to something stronger. Credit again to u/Exver1 for catching the mathematical issue and pushing us to examine what the rule was actually doing.

We should have something more complete to show from After Eden, our frontier fantasy TTRPG, soon. An earlier version was thoroughly dismantled in a previous post, found HERE, and the resulting revisions pushed development back several weeks.

For those who play games with exploding dice, do you yell EXPLOSION! or BOOM! when the dice start chaining?

Tonight was one of my favorite brainstorming sessions we’ve had while developing After Eden.

Recently, we’ve been going back through early developed content and asking how much of it genuinely serves the game we’re building, and how much remains because the system originally drew inspiration from games like D&D 5e. That led us into a discussion about whether weapons should roll damage or use flat values.

Combat in After Eden uses active opposed rolls. When attacked, a character can spend Stamina to Block, Dodge, or do nothing. If they cannot or choose not to defend, the attack becomes unopposed and automatically hits.

We eventually decided that dice probably was for the best for the system, but we could playtest flat values using averages. However, that conversation brought us back to two problems we had been trying to solve for a while.

One of my co-developers, Daniel, is a big fan of Draw Steel. We cannot use its always-hit structure because active defense is central to our game, but it led us toward the idea of allowing attackers to take average damage on an unopposed attack. That solves the low-roll problem, but taking the average would usually be the obvious choice unless rolling offered something the average could not. The solution was exploding damage dice.

Rolling Unopposed Damage:

Whenever you make an unopposed attack, you may either take the average damage or roll normally.

If you roll and a damage die shows its maximum value, roll one additional die of the same size. Additional dice can also explode.

The maximum number of additional dice is equal to the number of dice in the original attack. If the attack originally rolled two dice, it can generate no more than two additional dice.

----

Taking the average guarantees a solid result. Rolling risks falling below that average, but creates the possibility of a much stronger hit. The explosion limit keeps that possibility exciting without allowing the damage to spiral.

What I enjoyed most was how naturally the rule emerged. We started by questioning whether rolled weapon damage was still right for the game, and that discussion connected flat damage, active defenses, automatic hits, criticals, and low-damage feel-bad moments. By the end, one small rule had addressed two problems we had been circling for months. It still needs playtesting, but it was a useful reminder to follow the curiosity. We knew there was something there, we just had to figure out what it was.

Hopefully this is useful to anyone else working through their own mechanic development. We should have something more complete to show from After Eden, our frontier fantasy TTRPG, soon. Yall brutally shredded it in a previous post (Found HERE for those curious to read the system), and that led to quite a bit of revisions that pushed us back a few weeks.

Also, for those who've played games with exploding dice, do you yell EXPLOSION or BOOM with the same gusto as CRITICAL! When you crit? Very curious there.

I could use your help.

If you really enjoy tearing apart game systems, finding unclear rules, identifying missing content, or explaining why something might break at the table, then this post is for you.

I am wrapping up the adventure packet for my tactical expedition frontier fantasy TTRPG, After Eden, and I want to make sure the player packet is as free of contradictions as possible before I put the full playtest out there. I know the whole point of releasing a playtest is that people will give you feedback through survey questions and tell you all the things they did not like. But the adventure packet is not ready yet, and I have been getting the jitters waiting to release something, so this is my request.

Feel free to be as ruthless as you want. Feel free to drop questions as well. I will be responding to everything that comes in here as best I can.

The main premise of After Eden is balancing momentum and attrition as you venture into a very dangerous world, gather salvage and loot, gain experience, and then return to civilization, settlements, and safety to translate what you recovered and survived into growth, power, and capability.

The game has a heavy emphasis on combat, wilderness exploration, and site delves, along with structured scenes using our Crisis and Negotiation mechanics.

It is a medium-crunch game. If that interests you, click the link and let it rip.

Player Playtest Packet:

http://drive.google.com/file/d/1Yr-NaAIsL7Yi41ZX27MeahTWy_S5seiO/view?usp=drivesdk

Hey everyone, this is going to be a shorter post. I’ve been wondering how people here define a “fantasy heartbreaker,” especially when so many tabletop RPGs begin with someone modifying a game they already enjoy.

There are thousands of games that change one or two mechanics from an existing system, particularly D&D clones and adjacent fantasy games. The term fantasy heartbreaker has been around for a long time, but where do you draw the line between a heartbreaker and a game that has developed enough of its own identity to stand on its own?

One example I might have initially placed somewhere in that territory is Nimble, since it is largely based on 5e. At the same time, it became commercially successful because of how quick and easy it was to run, suggesting that a game can remain visibly connected to its source while still offering something people genuinely value.

I’m developing my own RPG, After Eden, and I tend to fluctuate between feeling extremely confident in the project and wondering whether I’m just a poser rebuilding ideas that already exist.

What do you think actually defines a fantasy heartbreaker, and what makes a derivative game feel meaningfully distinct?

Here is the Player Rules Playtest packet for After Eden: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Yr-NaAIsL7Yi41ZX27MeahTWy_S5seiO/view?usp=drivesdk

I decided to do a pretty major overhaul of our character creation process after having developed a pretty significant section of what we had, because I realized that my assumptions had come from very early on in the development process and were almost identical to D&D’s class and subclass structure. But now that almost all the core rules are made for my TTRPG, After Eden, and those rules support tactical, expedition-based gameplay with a moderate level of lethality, the class design structure just didn’t fit.

See, when you do classes and subclasses, it innately has a degree of heroic feel to it, or at least that’s been my experience. There’s a bit of predestined energy, and in a setting like ours, with the default setting being slightly post-apocalyptic and mostly frontier-based, it doesn’t make a lot of sense unless there are great structures in place to support many of the types of class-subclass functions.

And so, we set to exploring what would fit best. It was a scouring of different RPGs that might inspire us, and brainstorming the methods in which we could facilitate the experience of your expedition shaping you and changing your character. Our wound systems already do that to some degree. You can get permanent wounds that can last your character, or long-lasting wounds that take a long time to recover, and that can permanently change your character. So we were like, well, what if you could get permanent upsides that you could gain in your journeys?

We drew our inspiration a little bit from Draw Steel’s ancestry point system, where you have something like three points to spend, and you can buy one or two traits, or sometimes three traits. And we were like, oh, traits, that’s a cool idea. The other one, and I for the life of me can’t remember which system, so feel free to drop a comment if you know, but I remember hearing about this tag system, maybe it was Legends in the Mist, where your character has tags, and these tags kind of have a free-form interpretation of what they do. We really liked that idea of what your experience out in the world provides you with mechanical benefits.

So we kind of came down on this idea of using traits as the secondary leveling mechanism. We’re going to retain classes because it gives us a structure to work with that we like, it’s recognizable, and we’ve already done pretty extensive work on the identities of our classes. We feel that those classes really fit the system: the Warrior; the Specialist; the Weird, which is our pet class, symbiotic, adaptogenic nature character; the Arcanist; the Operator, which is kind of like a mix between a survivalist and an artificer; the Vessel, which is similar but not exactly the same as a cleric; and the Occultist, which is a combination of a witch, warlock, and summoner all wrapped into one. We really like these class shapes, but traits felt like a really good way for us to give different expressions of the types of characters you want to see out there.

So we’re going to be doing something along the lines of character creation traits, ancestry traits, origin traits, general traits, and class traits. Each class is going to have its own category of traits that you can get, which will be gated by level. We’ll have general traits that you can get that are gated by level and other experience prerequisites. Traits will be something along the lines of one, two, or three points, depending on the quality of the trait. Then we’ll also have some ancestral and maybe origin traits that are higher level. So if you’re a level 5 character who is an elf, there may be a level 5 elf trait that is like, once you hit a certain level of power, you can unlock this new level of control over some things that elves have natural abilities to do. Some elves never reach that potential, and some do. So, you know, there you go.

The last thing that we landed on is something that you don’t have to buy into. You don’t have to spend trait points whenever you level up. You just gain it when it happens to you. These are our marks of chaos, which you can innately gain whenever you survive a really deadly encounter, like surviving a dragon attack from a creature that was much more powerful than your party, surviving a deadly trap, or things along those lines. So those become another way your character is changed by what they actually survive, instead of just by what you selected ahead of time.

I share all this because, obviously, it’s always helpful to see what the design process looks like for other people who are designing, and to give permission for others to know that you can scrap all of your ideas, or most of your ideas, for a component of your game and restart if it doesn’t fit what you’re looking to do. I highly recommend doing an audit after you’ve got your core mechanics done, if you did anything prior to doing your core mechanics. And honestly, audit the core mechanics as they go. Once you get a certain way into the project, you’re really building around those core mechanics, not looking to see if those core mechanics still serve the system. The core mechanics become the system. But in our case, we had classes developed early because we thought we’d be playtesting earlier without all of our mechanics completely nailed down. Now that most of our mechanics are nailed down, we are revisiting things like classes, which were developed a little too early in the process.

So let us know what you think, or if you have experience with a system like this. Or tear the idea apart and put up what you think might be the biggest issues. Leave your thoughts, and we’ll read them all.

Hey everybody,

I was looking to get some feedback on the site delve mechanic that we've been working on from a structural standpoint, and get some insight on how some of y'all have been using dungeon turns and things along those lines, which is what inspired this mechanic.

I'm working on After Eden, a post-apocalyptic frontier fantasy game that has a blend of combat, survival, and exploration. We've hammered out most of the other things pretty well, but site exploration is kind of the area we're the least familiar with since we don't come from an OSR background. This mechanic is something that, conceptually, we understand, but we have not had a ton of experience utilizing it. Any feedback would be appreciated.

The design looks something like this: When you come to a site, it is not considered a static location. The site adapts with you, and thus you have site turns. Every site turn is broken down into roughly 15-minute intervals. Within those site turns, you have three activities that the party can take before that turn ends and moves on to the next one. It's useful for tracking things like torches, as well as random events that can happen, such as wandering monsters and things along those lines.

A turn activity isn't a standardized activity. It's the natural progression of what you do during a dungeon, where somebody says, "Hey, I'm going to do this," and another person says, "I'm going to do this," and they're all doing that at roughly the same time. That is an activity.

Moving from one section of the dungeon to another is another activity. That's kind of the cadence of it. It's the pass back and forth between players wanting to do something and the GM describing the results of what they wanted to do. You get about three of those, and then the site turn turns over, representing the 15 minutes having passed.

Every other site turn, so every two site turns, you make a wandering monsters check, or a random events check. You roll a d20, and on an 18 to 20, it triggers whenever the site is at an undisturbed level.

There are four levels of alertness, one through four, and they increase the die score by two for each level it goes up, until it's a 14 to 20. That represents the highest level of alertness and means there's a much higher probability of a random event happening every other site turn.

There is also one other component that we introduced, which is Noise: You can generate noise by doing site activities, and the level of noise that happens during those activities will dictate how far away you might attract attention. Combat also generates noise. If you go one round, it's a fairly low level of noise, but if you go up to four rounds, it ends up raising the alertness level of the entire dungeon because it makes a ton of noise. That can also change if you use very loud spells or weapons that make big explosions.

So that's kind of the model we're working with, and we'd love to hear your feedback, what your experience has been with dungeon turns, and whether you feel like this is roughly in the same ballpark. We feel like it hits the same feel while providing us with a little more structure, and we're planning to test it in the coming weeks. Any feedback would be appreciated.

Howdy everyone, Luke from After Eden TTRPG here.

I’ve hit a bit of a design wall concerning how quests interact with the game’s exploration loop.

Currently, After Eden has two primary ways for events and locations to emerge during wilderness exploration: Risk Events and Discoveries.

1. Risk Events

Risk accumulates through failed actions and movement across dangerous terrain. When the party reaches certain Risk thresholds, a Risk Event is triggered.

These events are not entirely random, since they occur in response to the party’s accumulated Risk. They usually involve hostile encounters or setbacks, although that is not always the case. Mechanically, they occupy a similar space to random encounters and wandering monsters in other games.

2. Discoveries

Discoveries occur when players search a hex and overcome its Discovery DC. They represent hidden locations, resources, lairs, ruins, or other interesting places within the region.

Discoveries are almost always location-based and are not inherently hostile. They might be beneficial, neutral, dangerous, or lead to a larger location such as a dungeon or adventure site.

The Problem

I’m struggling with how Discovery tables should handle two different kinds of content:

1. Locations that are randomly generated or specifically designed for that region.

2. Leads, clues, and destinations connected to quests.

After Eden is an expedition based game set in a post-apocalyptic frontier fantasy setting. Many quests will involve objectives such as:

- Find the lair of a dangerous monster.

- Locate a missing group in the wilderness.

- Track down a mad mage’s hideout.

- Search for a lost ruin, resource, or artifact.

- Find the source of a problem affecting a settlement.

I’m unsure whether these objectives should be placed directly on Discovery tables, handled through a separate lead or clue system, or resolved through an entirely different exploration procedure.

Gating quest progress behind Discoveries may create situations where the party simply fails to find the content they were sent to investigate. On the other hand, automatically revealing the destination may undermine the purpose of exploration and searching the wilderness.

How have you handled this in hexcrawls you have played, run, or designed?

When the party is told, “Find the monster’s lair” or “Locate the missing people in the woods,” how does that objective interact with hex exploration? Are clues and quest locations part of your random tables, placed directly on the map, discovered through tracking or investigation, or handled through another procedure?

This is one of those problems that makes sense to me mechanically in separate pieces, but I’m having trouble connecting those pieces into a satisfying exploration loop. Any feedback or examples would be appreciated.

If you want the playtest details, they can be found here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1mXoTmewQW-2oDD67YyUrPdb7wUsjTNBY/view?usp=drivesdk

Hey everyone, Luke with After Eden here.

I wanted to share a quick look behind the curtain from our latest playtest.

This past weekend, we ran one of our first exploration-heavy sessions. After Eden is a post-apocalyptic frontier fantasy game focused on expedition play: heading into dangerous wilderness, finding resources and discoveries, surviving the trip back, and using what you bring home to grow stronger and push farther next time.

For this session, the party was sent into the Deep Dark Wood to find a young couple who had run away after being forbidden from marrying. The group tracked them through the woods, found one of them dead, followed the trail to a goblin den, explored the cave, rescued the girl, killed several goblins, and finally ran for their lives while a larger goblin horde chased them out.

The session gave us some useful rule fixes.

1. Awareness was doing too much.

Awareness is our perception-style skill, and it was getting used for almost everything in overland travel and cave exploration. To fix that, we added Examine, a fine detail skill similar to Investigation in D&D 5e.

Awareness now handles things like hidden creatures, ambushes, danger cues, and movement in the dark.

Examine handles bodies, objects, rooms, traps, mechanisms, clues, and specific details.

We also decided to add in the use of knowledge based skills when taking the Search action, so you can apply your Nature, Khaotics, or some other knowledge to help find signs.

That should keep Awareness from becoming the default answer to every exploration problem (we hope).

2. We had a terminology conflict.

During exploration, the party chooses a daily intent. Previously, those were Advance, Search, and Encamp.

The problem was that “Search” was also an action, while “Scout” was an exploration role. So players were hearing Search, Scout, and Search again at different levels of procedure.

We changed the exploration intent from Search to Survey. So now the structure is clearer:

• Survey = the daily exploration intent

• Scout = the exploration role looking for discoveries

• Search = the moment-to-moment action used to find something specific.

That hierarchy should be much easier to teach and run.

3. Night activity was infrequent and un-engaging.

Previously, nighttime danger only started showing up after the party reached a certain Risk threshold. In practice, that meant nights could feel too safe unless the day had already gone badly.

We changed Rest Risk so that half of the day’s accumulated Risk carries into the night, rounded down.

So if the party ends the day with 4 Risk, the night has 2 Rest Risk. That means nighttime danger is less likely than daytime danger, but it is no longer a non-factor.

4. Getting a Critical while Scouting needed a better payoff.

This was the biggest feel bad moment of the session. The Scout rolled a critical success while looking for discoveries, but then the follow-up Discovery roll failed. The player had a strong success on their role, but nothing visible came from it.

For clarity, a critical success is 10+ over the DC. That felt wrong, so we changed the rule: if the Scout scores a critical success, the party automatically finds a Discovery if one exists in the hex.

We also changed the Survey intent. Instead of giving extra Discovery dice, Survey now lets the party add the Scout’s relevant Attribute score to the Discovery roll.

That keeps a Critical success meaningful and makes Survey feel like your extra skill and time has an impact on the result.

5. Torch play worked.

The cave portion went well. No one had darkvision. Site turns (think dungeon turns) kept the players from stalling. Goblins hiding outside the light forced interesting decisions. That part did exactly what we wanted.

6. Food and water are essential for testing.

For ease of use, we hand-waved food and water this session. That made some exploration roles less important than they should have been, especially roles tied to survival and camp logistics.

Future sessions need to enforce food, water, and supply tracking because those systems are part of the core expedition loop and made multiple parts of the Exploration play fall flat.

Overall, this was an eye-opening session. We have tested combat heavily, but this was one of the first times we really pushed exploration as the main focus of play.

We are working toward releasing the playtest adventure so other tables can take a swing at it themselves.

Until then, thanks for reading. If this sparked any questions about After Eden, exploration play, or the system in general, I’d be happy to talk about it.

You can find a link to the rules we used for testing here: http://drive.google.com/file/d/1mXoTmewQW-2oDD67YyUrPdb7wUsjTNBY/view?usp=drivesdk

Hey guys, it’s Luke with After Eden TTRPG, a post-apocalyptic frontier fantasy TTRPG about dangerous expeditions, tactical combat, and hard choices in a world remade by Khaos.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot while trying to get my public playtest packet finished.

If you’ve seen some of my other posts, you probably know I’ve tried to move the timeline up twice, and I’m still not quite there. Editing and layout have been a real struggle with a daughter who isn’t even one yet, but the bigger thing I’ve learned is this:

You really need outside eyes on your game before you realize how much is missing.

The first couple playtest versions I put out had a lot of things I just didn’t see. Imprecise language. Undefined terms. Hanging terms. Rules that showed up before they were explained. Assumptions baked into mechanics that were never actually written down. Whole pieces of the game that made sense in my head, but not on the page.

For anyone taking a stab at this for the first time, or anyone who has already been through it and can empathize, a D&D-style book project is not for the faint of heart.

After Eden is tactical. It is crunchy in a lot of places. It has multiple parts of the game that need to talk to each other clearly: combat, exploration, inventory, wounds, light, travel, survival, recovery, social conflict, and so on.

One thing I didn’t even fully think through until we had been playtesting for a couple months was how to make things like torches, inventory, carried gear, and mundane items actually matter at the table in a way that feels rewarding instead of just annoying.

It’s funny how many older games already answered a lot of these questions, and how many modern games moved away from those answers for simplicity and speed. Watching how different systems handle the same problems has been humbling.

This community is invaluable for staying grounded. It keeps you from getting too lost in your own assumptions. Even the harshest critics can be useful, because they will point directly at blind spots that your more supportive friends may be too polite to nitpick.

And for a two-book project that may end up around 400–600 pages total, you have to be nitpicky. You have to dig into the little things that don’t work, because those little things become real problems once people are trying to run the game without you in the room.

It’s exciting when you have core mechanics that feel strong or different. I’m still really excited about the stamina system we’re building for After Eden, especially for players who don’t mind a little math and like tactical decision-making.

But the biggest lesson so far is simple:

Stay humble.

Get feedback early.

Playtest as much as you can.

Assume the page is less clear than it feels in your head.

Thanks to everyone here who has commented, critiqued, questioned, or taken a look at the game so far. The feedback has helped a lot.

Right now, we’re aiming for an end-of-June deadline for the public playtest packet. I have about a week and a half coming up where I’ll be able to drill down hard on final edits for both the player-side packet and the adventure packet, and we’ll be playtesting that material heavily during that stretch.

Fingers crossed. For the other designers here: what did your first public playtest packet reveal that you completely missed on your own?

Hey everybody, Luke with After Eden TTRPG here.

I wanted to ask the community about resources for estimating costs, because there are all sorts of people here in different parts of the development process. Some are still in the early writing stage, and some have successfully launched one or more Kickstarters, BackerKits, or other crowdfunding campaigns for their TTRPGs. I’m trying to get a more realistic grip on what this project is actually going to cost.

One of the most daunting parts of this whole thing is that, based on the estimates I’ve been able to find so far, putting together a two-book system with a moderate amount of illustration, a player’s book and a GM’s book that includes monsters, looks like a $50,000 to $75,000 minimum cost project. I may be off by a decent degree, and that’s part of why I’m asking, but that’s the range I keep running into from every angle I can figure out.

I know one of the big places you can cut is art, but art is also where a lot of the excitement comes from. Not all of it, obviously, but a lot. So I’m wondering: for those of you who have finished this journey, where did you go to get your costs down? How much did you do on your own? Which parts did you handle yourself, and which parts were worth hiring out?

I’d also love to hear how you found editors, layout designers, artists, or any of the other professionals who helped finish out the product after you had the meat of the manuscript down. A $50,000 project isn’t completely outside the bounds of possibility, and I do think After Eden has the potential to be well-received. I also have experience in marketing and running a business, so it’s not like I’m coming at this with no idea how to promote a product. But that number is still daunting, especially when doing the full version of what I want to do starts looking like something that would need to raise $100K+ to really make sense.

So I don’t know. Maybe the looming abyss has me a little intimidated this Friday, but help a brother out. Where did y’all go to find the professionals who helped you finish your product? Did you do one book or multiple books? What would you do differently if you were estimating costs again from the beginning?

Fire away in the comments. Hopefully there’s something here that can help me climb out of this deep, dark abyss that is a giant looming budget.

Hey y'all, it's Luke with After Eden TTRPG

I've been nose down working on trying to get this playtest packet, the adventure side of it, ready to go so that we can have everything released by the end of May.

But one quick question I wanted to ask the community is in reference to character sheets.

We're looking at the information that's available, and it's looking like we're going to have to go with four character sheets to communicate the information needed: a quick reference page on the front, where all the information that you're going to need to reference on a very frequent basis is going to be for your character; an equipment page; a features page that includes all of the features that you get outside of your class, as well as the projects that you're working on, because projects is going to be a part of our system; and then a class page. We're looking at how we could potentially do a custom page for each class. I know that's going to be a lot of work, but it's what we're looking at.

I wanted to ask:

1. How many pages is too many for you?

2. What are some of the best examples of character sheets that you've used? I know Mothership gets a lot of acclaim.

3. Have you ever had a game that had really great reference guides? We were looking at potentially making combat, exploration, and negotiation reference pages, maybe one of each on the table at any point for people to pick up and use, laminated or whatever.

4. Where, for those of you who have had character sheets made, did you design them yourselves? Were they more artistic or more utilitarian? Did they communicate the feel of the game? Or did you have an artist do it for you?

Any feedback would be appreciated, and I'm looking forward to hear what y'all have to say.

Hey everybody, Luke with After Eden (again, two posts in one day!)

Today, I wanted to talk about ancestry design using orcs as the sharpest example of what we are trying to do. In After Eden, the progenitor ancestries, which are the primary player ancestries, were not created by a single pantheon or from one shared template. Humans, orcs, elves, and dwarves were each created by their own god, in their own god’s image, and each developed in a separate realm with cultures that formed independently from one another. Nox, the default setting of After Eden, is the human realm, previously known as Eden. Many of the other progenitor peoples now live there after fleeing their own realms, but that is something we will talk about another day.

The design goal is to make sure orcs are not humans with tusks, elves are not humans with long ears, and dwarves are not humans with beards and a mining culture stapled onto them. Instead, we want each ancestry to have its own psychological profile shaped by species physiology, divine origin, and independent cultural development. If these peoples were created by different gods, in different realms, under different conditions, then they should not all relate to the world like slightly altered humans.

Orcs are probably the most controversial expression of that design philosophy, and they are the ancestry I want to focus on today. In After Eden, orcs are driven by conflict. Their bodies adapt to challenge, resistance, hardship, and victory. Their physiology is constantly changing in response to what they survive, what they overcome, and what they consume from defeated enemies.

Consuming monsters and dangerous creatures probably is not controversial for most fantasy tables. The more controversial part is that orcs may also consume parts of defeated sapient enemies. That is an intentional piece of the setting, but the goal is not to present orcs as evil by default. For many orcs, refusing to take anything from a worthy enemy after killing them can itself be seen as dishonor. If the enemy was strong enough to challenge you, then part of them is worth carrying forward.

There is an honor culture in many orc societies, but it is not just about glory or violence for its own sake. Orcs pursue challenge because challenge improves them and improves the people around them. Competition, rivalry, combat, endurance, and hardship are not only signs of hatred or ideological opposition. They can also be ways of testing one another, strengthening one another, almost in a roundabout parental or brotherly way. Like when a parent throws their child into a pool to teach them to swim.

As hinted earlier, different orc lineages consume different parts of defeated creatures and understand those parts as windows into different kinds of growth. Some orcs consume flesh, some consume blood, some consume hearts, and some consume minds. Each lineage draws different traits from what it consumes, based on the nature of the creature defeated and the part of that creature taken into the orc’s body.

The other reason orcs need challenge is because their bodies do not only adapt to hardship. They also adapt to stagnation. If an orc does not pursue a life of challenge, danger, pressure, and growth, their body begins to degenerate over time. Their adaptive nature turns inward, overcorrecting in the absence of resistance. This means orc cultures naturally value strength, cunning, resilience, ambition, and a willingness to seek out hardship rather than avoid it.

That is part of why we think orcs will make great player characters, but also great enemies and interesting NPCs. They are built for adventure in a very literal sense. Their biology pushes them toward challenge, their cultures give that challenge meaning, and their lineages give players different ways to express what it means for an orc to overcome something and become changed by it.

Our goal for After Eden is to have a shorter list of ancestries with deeper lineage design, rather than a huge list of options that mostly feel like cosmetic variations. Orcs currently have four different lineages, and we will talk more about the design of the other ancestries as we get closer to releasing the player playtest packet and adventure playtest packet.

I hope you found this interesting. Is this kind of ancestry design a turnoff for you, or does it make the world feel more distinct? How do you handle different peoples, species, races, or ancestries in your own games? Let us know your thoughts, feel free to ask questions, and we will see you in the next one.

Hey everybody, it’s Luke with After Eden TTRPG.

I wanted to see what everyone else has experienced with this. I have an infant daughter, and the past month has been essentially fruitless when it comes to developing the TTRPG because my brainpower has been near zero. Of course, this is happening right when I’m doing a pretty substantial iterative pass based on feedback from many of the contributors here. The joys for being the primary contributor for the project!

I wanted to ask where everyone else finds inspiration to do layout and rewrites when their energy levels are in the tank, especially when the rewrite is substantial enough that it feels like a near-start-from-scratch situation outside of the existing components and structure of your book or packet.

I know this is a temporary problem. After finally getting sleep for the first night in what feels like two weeks, I’m taking a second pass and working on getting this done so we can meet our goal of having both the player and adventure playtest packets out by the end of May.

So I came here to ask: what do you all do when you hit this kind of wall? What resources do you look at? What methods do you use to find the right layout, sift through the correct order, or restructure a messy draft? Or did you pay somebody to help with this?

Thanks in advance for your feedback.

Onward and upward.