The content was created by me. I found an old wallet game design in a notebook that had too many different things going on. I didn't know what I wanted the game to be. There were parts that were fight monsters and other parts that were storytelling.
I also found in that notebook the town locations and the families. Lore. I found the start of trying to make it fit onto the Ironsworn frame and Powered By The Apocalypse frame. Neither worked. Thats where AI helped. The lore and storytelling are the strong points. That's what was suggested by AI. She suggested I stop trying to make it fit and look at my games and pull the ones I enjoy playing.
So I looked at the storytelling games I enjoyed. Microscope, The Quiet Year, Icarus, Fall of Magic, Carta, One Breath Left and Dark Cults. I noticed they had a shared theme and I had already had a 16 panel grid system that could be a game board. So we discussed the pros and cons of using those games as a springboards. That's when I remembered The Wretched.
Combining the journaling the falling dice tower and the playing cards as the gridded layout of the town evolved over the conversation. I wanted to make a game I would play. I played through it and gave her the playthrough report and she asked why I made certain decisions and why nothing happened at certain points and how is the game different from the millions of lovecraft inspired games. That made me go back and think about the design, to see it from a player point of view. I put the notes away and started as if the wallet game didn't exist. And I watched a lot of cosmic horror films and wrote down what I liked. Then I looked at my shelf of Lovecraft/Cthulhu games and saw how they share similar plots.
Once I was able to answer the questions she posed I did another playthrough and she had no notes or questions. I drew the cover in Procreate.