Hey everyone. I started early this year bringing to life my homebrew setting and turning it into a fully-fledged tabletop game. It is a medieval-esque, dark fantasy, low-magic world.. big influences are Mervyn Peake's 'Gormenghast' series, Ursula Le Guin, Samuel Delaney, Mørk Borg, and other 'old school renaissance' games.
I've made a lot of progress and am really proud of where it currently is:
* Cartographer (Tad at iconicmaps.com - he's awesome!) has started working on three separate commissions for maps of the game world and has made incredible progress so far;
* A handful of digital paintings commissioned by a RL friend, which really gives a sense of scale and tone to the whole setting, as well as some other minor commissions for art assets like monster design and faction concepts, etc;
* Started a wiki sourcebook to keep everything organised and documented, including lore and rules, character creation guide, etc;
* Developed a Discord bot for downtime activities including crafting and gathering as well as investments for cross-campaign gameplay opportunities;
* Worked up a v1 ruleset with a little help from outside sources and game dev/worldbuilding Discord guilds.
https://cursed.land is a landing page if you want to check out one of the concept paintings.
I'm just getting to the point where there's a handful of people I've got interested in doing playtests, and starting to nail down the rules into a more polished and final format after a few 'alpha' versions.
Who I'm looking for:
* Someone confident with iterating tabletop gaming systems, most appropriately OSR-style games and Fudge (I am basing all of my custom rules and mechanics around a core of 'effort pools' and 4dF rolls). I've found that rule development is not a strength of mine, and am mostly looking for someone to go through what I've got so far and suggest revisions / guide playtests until it's all really working. I'm personally a proponent of 'less is more', and have gone the direction of cutting a lot of classic TTRPG tropes - skills instead of levels, no HP, no numerical damage and 'to hit' rolls, no modifiers and saving throws etc. The game on a mechanical level is extremely story-focused but challenging, inkeeping with the dark fantasy setting.
* An individual to help with quest design and some of the creative writing tasks, purely because there is *so much* to do; I have a really strong sense of the setting and really am a good collaborator. Hopefully I can get you up to speed and there will be enough signifiers to make any input and growth of lore straightforward. I'm mostly looking for someone who is good at designing questlines for tabletop games (including seeding many links and challenges within a quest structure) and isn't afraid of writing a bit of dialogue and immersive descriptions once we're on the same page about atmosphere and the particulars of the setting that would come into play. I have goals surrounding factions, downtime mechanics and overall aims of the entire game, I'd love to share them and see what people come up with on the 'scene scale' alongside me.
* One or two more concept artists interested in helping to visualise details of the game world, due to RL commitments of the original artists I am looking to expand on the input available to me so we can push out illustrated PDF adventures as soon as the playtests are fruitful.
Please forgive the hasty elevator description, please add me on Discord (dom#8090) or email gm@cursed.land if you're interested and I can give you spiel until you explode. I'd love to hear about what you're interested in helping with and a little bit about yourself!
Join me on Discord: https://discord.gg/WH9cVSy
Thanks for reading and here's to hoping I can find a couple individuals to help guide the game and join the team!