January ‘26 Update

“It’s me, and I’ve been here the whole time.” Dropout, check them out. Anyways.

Around the time I stopped regularly releasing my articles last year I made the dramatic decision to return to college. I figured that during the first semester I would stop writing so that I could focus on my classes and hopefully get back into some sort of healthy routine with learning; no distractions.

I can now say this somewhat worked, I made A’s and B’s and have moved into my second semester, and I have a lot less anxiety around the whole thing, so here I am again.

The whole reason I am back in college, despite seeing the absolutely ruinous state of modern American higher education, is in the desperate hope that I can escape waiting tables in the toxic restaurant industry, since making content for TRPGs is a difficult career path.

So what am I working on now, or, what will I be working on going forward?

Heartbreaker is my own version of Dungeons & Dragons. Yes, I am developing it alongside my own version of a whole new roleplaying game system. Is that crazy? Well, at least it gives me enough things to talk about that I started a substack.

The original name for the project was Complex 5e, and the conception was bringing more “realism” or simulation to the game. From my perspective. Armor has always been counter-intuitive to me in these games and it is something I deeply want to address. The same goes for weapons and what is dependent upon the wielders strength or alacrity. I also have a whole fantasy alchemy thing that I spent years developing that I want to bring into a new edition and potentially shape a whole setting around, but more on that later.

With Heartbreaker I also want a magic system that is more chaotic and dangerous, less of science and more of art or intuition. My alchemy system is heavily scientific, in that ingredients do things, these things are reliable, and thus the whole system integrates into society and can be made more efficient to stave off the dangers of a fantasy world. Two scientific systems only offer the choice of “which is more efficient/powerful?” And in my opinion that is not an interesting choice at all.

I also want to shift how players interact with the system from character “creation” to character “discovery,” which, again, I will discuss more later.

Ultimately, Heartbreaker is just my own system for playing the kind of game I want to play with rules I am familiar with enough to modify, but I want to modify them, add artwork, and then make them available to others as my statement about the game and the hobby and the whole space. You know, like artists do.

More specifically: medieval fantasy alchemy.

My alchemy system was designed to have specific properties that would become specific and defined effects depending on a large number of specific variables and times and charts and graphs and complex math equations. Approachable? No. But for some reason it is what I wanted. And it took me years to figure out no one would want to use it, not even me.

My latest version is not yet complete, but the bones are there. I dialed back the properties so that they are more vague and can be defined by the players and arbiters at the table. The complex math is gone, and the crafting is going to be a bit more free-form and vague, again, to be defined at the table by those playing the game, not me. I just want to give a chassis that others can easily adapt and build upon.

With the advent of my alchemy system in this new era of my life, I have been thinking about the world I want to build to go with this system, and what it would look like with alchemy (medieval fantasy alchemy). Once I started asking that question, a whole new element of the project began to form in my head, and generally of its own volition. Which leads to my next point.

I have done some research, and as far as I can find, this is a new term. And I like it, so I am taking it. If you want to use it go ahead, I am just going to be fleshing out my own version of it for a while.

Mutant fantasy comes from my conception of a fantasy world, roughly medieval to early renaissance, that would have not only magic but also alchemy, or herbalism. Powers that transform capability and multiply force would utterly define a world, much like iron used to make swords and lead for bullets has done up until the atom-splitting nuclear weapons.

Mutant fantasy is intriguing to me because it is difficult. I have never before considered a world in this light, from this perspective, and coming up with ideas for it has been difficult, and as we all know, anything worth doing is going to be difficult. Mutant fantasy is a world that takes from both medieval fantasy and far future post apocalypse, such as what can be found in Worlds Without Number (a favorite book I have yet to run a game in, yet).

Mutant fantasy takes from the post-apocalypse genre quite a bit actually, at least I think it will, given the ideas of mutants and strange powers coming from foreign substances that become prevalent in a world unprepared for their influence.

The way I want to approach this project is a method I have only used once, and I deeply enjoyed and loved every bit of.

When I lived in Vegas I found a group of players online and wanted to run a 5e game in a world that we built together, and we ended up using the Microscope system (unfortunately their patience only allowed for one day of play). From that game I made a world, Malusoir.

The first step was of course to understand the premise, which turned out to be the magical planes of a typical DnD world collide into the material, which is a massively catastrophic event that reshapes, well, everything. From this we started developing a timeline and the events, which I took later and expanded upon.

The first step was laying out the initial world. I had chosen a map outline that I liked so then I laid in the ancient empires, which I roughly based on the races in the book as well as some history perusals.

To be honest I cannot remember where I put the rest of my notes and files, but I based this progression of existing societies on something. Either way, I tracked them and their changes over time, as well as the evolution of their languages.

The third age is where things started to get a lot more defined, and interesting, because it is during this age that the planes collapse into the material and change the entire world. At this point several languages have evolved and there are dialects and off-shoots that I am tracking.

I randomly determined which planes were going to crash into which regions of the map, as well as their order, using die drop on the paper map. This really shaped how things were going to turn out. These changes are illustrated by the following:

While I was doing all of this, I started tracking the specific in world dates of these events in order to create special days on the calendar. I have always enjoyed tracking in game time for celebrations and such and this was definitely going to go on a calendar.

Probably the most interesting part of this whole process was taking all of my prior work and then using it to figure out how all those events would reshape the existing peoples and societies, which I whittled down to tracking the refugees from one place to the next.

Once the refugees were tracked and I had a decent idea of where everyone was after all of the planes, except one, had collapsed into the prime, I started fleshing out this existing hellscape.

The reason I left one plane was the inciting incident for the players; I was going to make their first session them surviving the collapse of the last plane into the world. The game was not my greatest, but I had never run anything like it before.

As I mentioned earlier, I tracked the development of the languages of the people as they survived these cataclysmic events. This was also a lot of fun, right up there with tracking the movements of the refugees as the planes fell.

And these are the languages as they eventually were in the game.

The whole process of making this world was so much fun, and allowed me to really understand the place when the game began. My biggest regret is that the game did not go on for all that long, and a lot of that work only really ever served the purpose of showing me what I was capable of. And now that I know that, I plan on using all of these ideas, and a few more, to determine what my new Mutant Fantasy world is going to be.

The whole planar collapse idea is one that has been floating in and out of all my worlds for years, I just like the post-apocalypse idea of DnD and pushing that to a post-DnD typical setting just makes me even more excited.

I have, somehow, copies of my history document and the player handout I made all those years ago. In case you are interested, you can check them out (for free).

Oh, and since I am a map freak, here are some of the prettier, more final, images.

The place we began our play, after the disastrous first session, was the Vorhen Prescience in the northeast section of the world. If you want to hear more about that, comment, message me, maybe a little interaction.

Until we meet again?!