The first question one might ask someone trying to build a new fantasy tabletop roleplaying game from the ground up is, “Why the hell would you do this?”. An excellent question, after all there are already a lot of such games out there on the market. Well frankly, it started as a bit of a compulsion, this was something that just had to be made, was calling out to be pulled from the aether and realized in the material world. The sort of impulse of creation that makes life unbearable and burns through your veins until you let it spill out of you. Secondly, there really isn’t a game system out there that fits the need we started developing the Bloodfall TTRPG System for.

Yes, there are plenty of “old-school” style games which are perfectly suitable for the open table. Yes, there are also plenty of games which accommodate modern sensibilities while maintaining a 70s/80s style of play. We love all of these games, or at least many of them. I alone have played tens of thousands of hours across dozens of games in the past decade and half. I have loved all of them but something deep inside burns yearning to spill creation out into the world.

Let me be clear. If this system only ever amounts to being something that my friends and I run for people locally and online, I would consider that a success. But, to be clear in the opposite direction, I at least have ambitions beyond that and no matter how arrogant or egotistical it might sound I do very much believe that many people will come to love and appreciate what we are creating here.

In the rest of this article I want to layout the general principles behind our design choices and in future posts I’ll talk about the more detailed reasons behind specific choices. So here it goes:

1.) We are leftists and punks, we need to adhere closely to the values that these truths guide us towards.

This means that the Bloodfall TTRPG System will always be as cheaply available as is possible and some form of it will always be available for free. This also means that we will avoid, to the best of our ability, harmful stereotypes or hateful design/rhetoric, or the presumptions of a bourgeois society. We will also seek to correct course when we make mistakes. In the same note we will not compromise our particular creative vision for the sake of economic gain.

2.) Our design must prioritize and facilitate open table based play & foster a healthy gaming community.

We love dedicated campaigns, they’re tons of fun. There are few things as satisfying as sitting down and playing out an interesting story with a group of friends. You can use Bloodfall to do that, it works perfectly fine and will be enjoyable. But there are plenty of systems out there built for such things. We have sought to create a system that mostly specifically is built for an open table style of play. It needs to be able to be picked up and put down as is convenient for each player. Our hope is that you can have just as full of an experience with Bloodfall after one four hour session as you can if you play it three times a week.

3.) Most importantly, we need to make a game system that is both fun to play and that we enjoy making.

This is pretty simple. If we aren’t having fun making and playing the system then we have gone wrong somewhere. Yes, we want other people to play and enjoy Bloodfall. Yes, it would be nice to make some money or get recognition for our work. But fundamentally this is a labor of love, an act of creation done out of the necessity of having a game system that we want to play.

So I hope that this helps illuminate what sort of thing that the Bloodfall system is going to be, what it needs to be. We hope to have the finished version of the game out by late October – early November.