Tabletop Games
A Powered by the Apocalypse game about legendary heroes favored by the five colored winds of fate.
Solo personal project
Released January 2025
Design Pillars
Your motivations are as important as your abilities
Complicate your life for fun and profit
Diverse character options multiply each other
Favored Soul is as an attempt to capture the spirit and feel of one of my favorite tabletop games, Magic: the Gathering. I didn’t want to simply recreate the gameplay of that game, and I didn’t want to use cards at all. Instead, I focused on one of the core concepts of magic: the color system.
This project was an interesting mix of creation and adaptation, as I wanted to make an homage to the way Magic feels to play without directly stealing it. What does it mean in the narrative that a card has a certain ability? How do the mechanics of the colors translate to personality traits or vibes? How can I give my own spin to these concepts and keep them fun to play?
The mechanical core of Favored Soul is a combination of two other game systems: the 2d6-based narrative engine of Powered by the Apocalypse games, and the diceless narrative token system of Belonging Outside Belonging games.
Players choose two playbooks for their character: a Color and a Class. These provide different ways to gain and spend Favor, a representation of the attention and interest of one of five storyteller pseudo-deities called the Winds of Fate. These Winds favor anyone who upholds their values, especially when it comes at a personal cost.
The game is also made to be mostly free-form in play and gives both GMs and players a great deal of authorship over the shared adventure. Tables can create their own moves and artifacts, and the direction of the story follows organically from the consequences of player actions.
If this sounds interesting to you, feel free to download the game for free and find out for yourself!
A tarot-based narrative game about making your characters before you make your characters.
Solo personal project
Released February 2025
Design Pillars
Begin stories that you want to finish later
Suggest character traits, but never define them
Borrow the interpretive power of tarot cards for narrative inspiration
The Story So Far was a game I started on a whim based on my love for both character backstories and the lifepath-style character creation systems of old school RPGs. The game was first designed as a solo journaling RPG, but I ended up shelving it for a couple of years before returning to it and retooling it into a group game.
One of the game’s biggest problems as a solo game was the logistics of play itself, which was mostly a mess of different pages and writing prompts all over a table. Rewriting it as a group game allowed me to largely solve that problem while also encouraging shared backstories and more opportunities for other player’s creative inputs.
I have always loved the aesthetics of tarot cards and how different each deck can be based on the unique art and design, so I wanted The Story So Far to take advantage of that. After learning about the effect of priming in a psychology class, I realized that if I asked players to draw and look at a card before any other gameplay, I could ensure that whatever personal tarot deck they used would influence their storytelling and make each game unique and personalized.
During gameplay, players discover the origins of their character and the reasons they became an adventurer. They then take turns drawing a major and minor arcana that become a narrative theme and situation to play out a short scene. Finally, they take the records of their early adventurers and use them to inform the character creation process in another game system of their choice to play out a longer campaign.
If this sounds interesting to you, feel free to download the game for free and find out for yourself!
A playing card RPG about transforming superheroes fighting for justice and dealing with the consequences.
Solo academic project
Unreleased, finished May 2024
Design Pillars
Let players feel like superheroes
Create a unique and satisfying resolution mechanic
Simulate a genre and only a genre
Suit Up was a game developed as part of an RPG class, although it was one where I was given quite a bit of creative freedom as to how I designed it. I wanted to capture the feeling of the Japanese style of transforming superheroes such as Kamen Rider, Super Sentai, and Sailor Moon.
I also wanted to set myself apart from many other games and find a creative new core mechanic, so I decided to use playing cards. I figured that the characteristics of a card could allow for a robust resolution mechanic for a lot of different situations and actions. The division of cards into multiple suits also played into the transformation idea, as well as the obvious pun about superhero suits.
Characters in Suit Up have a Hero Type that works like a class and gives them unique Powers in play. Actions fall into one of four categories that determine their suit, and a unique Action Draw mechanic lets players treat their deck of cards as both a randomization engine and a measure of their Hero’s stamina. There is no distinction between combat and other actions so players can create dramatic scenes however they like.
Heroes also have a number of different Forms they can shift into, granting them enhanced abilities tied to a specific suit. These Forms can also be upgraded with Potential, a resource that represents any source of power the player wants. Heroes can also battle against larger, more narratively important enemies that can only be defeated by a heroic finishing move that becomes both a triumphant, climactic attack and a chance for Heroes to compete for the spotlight.
If this sounds interesting to you, feel free to download the game for free and find out for yourself!