Writing Portfolio
Resume available upon request.
I am a player focused narrative designer and writer. I establish a logic based on game concepts to ensure gameplay and narrative are closely intertwined. I love having arguments about whether “trash loot” is a good idea as it has narrative implications, or if enemies should just drop money.
hey its DJ lilfatbro coming atchu with some tunes to peruse with, have a good one
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Game/Narrative Design
As a narrative designer, and game designer in general, my experience comes from spending years making my own ttRPG system, The Days of the Sun, and the subsequent module Westside. The former being an open ended sandbox, and the latter being a heavily scripted story that follows a core narrative thread through a web of encounters. As they are solo projects, I was responsible for everything.
TDOTS (The Days of the Sun) was designed with cooperative world building in mind, and the mechanics and narrative had to support it heavily. First came player classes, establishing what players are capable of. Looking back, this was essentially my way of creating a state map. There were at least five different revisions of the main class cast but I settled on a group that follows my main criteria for class design. Which is: in a game, each class must be different enough from each other, measured via five criteria I came up with over my design career. In descending order of importance they need at least three differences in: player perspective, job/role, state map/function, narrative, difficulty.
For example the Sword Master class, shown to the left, is classified as the following: creature attack type, melee physical damage/off tank, passive stances with low action economy, wandering warriors for hire who cherish their starting weapons, easy difficulty with a small but powerful spell pool.
Perspective is by far the most important, as that is how the player will perceive class differences. Even small differences, like with the Warden, can be powerful in transforming class identity. Swordmaster looks for how creatures attack to react by changing their stance. Wardens look to what the enemy is attacking with, hoping to steal it and use it against them. They both are focused on the same aspect of combat, but that small change in perspective makes players ask totally different questions. And that engagement and player agency is invaluable.
The second thing to do was write the magic system, as it’s essentially logic glue. I think of magic systems like our sciences. It is the core rules of your world that everything needs to work inside of. But, I couldn't write it first. Because the player comes first. Narrative makes what you do matter, not the other way around. The magic system had to accomplish five things: support established class mechanics, create new narrative actions, establish player alignment, supply interesting history, and explore religion. I consider narrative actions to be what the player does outside of combat. Climbing trees, deducing puzzles, talking to NPCs, you name it. So with magic fire can light fires, ice can freeze water, earth lets you warp natural materials. Enough stuff to tempt players to ask good questions. Like “what is that building made of?”. If it's made of rock, they might be able to morph it if they are earth aligned. Similarly, they could burn wooden structures with fire.
Player alignment is something I actually don’t like too much in ttRPGs. People are complicated, boiling down your alignment to nine incredibly obscure words on a chart I feel is too clinical. Yes, it's used for spells, but how do you even interpret a spell like “Detect Good & Evil”? Is that based on your character's perception? Your Gods? The affected creature? So I wanted the magic system to help. I started by linking emotional or political ideas to each type of magic. So it’s not that you don't feel or connect with the other schools, you just are not as well attuned to those magics. So someone who always keeps in touch with everyone is Arcane aligned, and someone who married, and kept loyal to, their primary school crush would be Earth aligned. And having a character who can use all magic equally means you are a very rounded person emotionally. This also helps tie in some of the character race mechanics, allowing players to be “born” from an element, even having themselves physically mutated by extended exposure to it. You can read all about the magic system on the right.
Taking inspiration from the other mechanics already established by the player forward systems, like class and race, and the idea that your connection to magic is inherently personal, I moved forward with the history and religion. Working both at the same time, because they really do go hand in hand. This is where I established that Oathkeepers and Angel Lords have different ways of connecting and viewing their Gods, even if they are the same being. And that there is no list of deities. This lets players add to the setting, which reinforces cooperative worldbuilding. Players can create their own religion to explore and craft with the other players and GM, or use some of the examples of common imagery provided to add to. The final page of religion to the left if you want to read up on the specific details of each element.
For a way to interact with the world’s history, you have books. Books are a way for players to research specific topics. And being on an untamed frontier, books are rare. To the right you can read the rules, but in short you get an amount of questions to be answered by the GM, another player, or yourself depending on a random dice roll. This has been by far the most fun for me during playtesting, as telling a player “yes, you really can say anything and it will be true”, and seeing their reaction is always great. Most of the time the answers really have no great impact on the story, but the feeling of agency is something every player loves. Again, cooperative worldbuilding.
There are other mechanics that support cooperative worldbuilding, which I’ve said a lot but it is the central narrative. One of the things I did was not include any towns, save for capital cities, on the map. The players then are instructed at character creation to make a settlement to hail from. They are given the background on four different countries including culture, common class types, terrain, businesses, and daily living. Then they choose anywhere on the map to put their town. On the right you can see one of the countries, Masaru.
Naturally you need people to live in those towns, so the networking system was next. After a few incarnations, on the left you can see the final rules as they appear in the book. Your network is a group of people that the player creates, and then adds to as the game progresses. If you do bad things to the people in your network they’ll be harder to contact. If you’re kind and personable, you’ll have an easier time tracking them down. It's a simple system but works very well. It is also very useful for the Noble class. As Nobles can summon people directly to them, without consent, if they’ve traded enough gold. Which ties networking to combat and player class choice.
Westside was very different, as I already had all of the heavy lifting done. I didn't need to worry about creating ties in every system, the system was built. I could focus on delivering an interesting story. The game revolves around your players investigating heinous crimes over approximately 4 sessions. The station serves as your team’s central hub, housing any evidence and clues you’ve collected. This was a way to enable groups of people who maybe don't have the most reliable schedule to still be able to play. Players, called Officers in the rules, who are no-shows “call in sick” for that session.
The main narrative is following clues left by events around the city, called “calls”. By meeting these people your officers fill out their network and build a profile of the city and its culture. Most of the calls are fairly lighthearted, giving the players a break from the heavy main cases while still gaining information. For the cases, I made a narrative thread, weaved through a lot of smaller calls. Here’s the diagram for the first case:
And this is the line my players took to find the killers in testing:
There were other connections as well, like how one of the tree poachers attended parties with Mac and would sell drugs there as well. You would learn that at the rave anyway, but this let my players get closer to Mac to arrest him at the rave rather than tracking him down to his apartment. Most of the other characters you would meet, like Black Iron Billy, come up in subsequent cases as well. So if you were to falsely imprison BIB, you would have one less lead going forward.
Scruffler was made so that the GM can set clues about Scruffler in any other random call. Like maybe Big Dog from call #5 “Big Beer Bust” was selling beer to Scruffler at the primary school and Scruf bolts. Then you may want to find out what creep was buying and follow up, later finding the connection to the murder. Scruffler, the person you are likely to find last in the story, also contains the narrative thread leading you to case two. Below you can read calls number 4, 5, 10, and 11. As well as the opening pages for the Aurelius case so you can see how the ideas look in game.
And that’s my narrative style. I love tying gameplay into the narrative to make what the player does matter. And I love to craft narrative webs, helping foster a sense of connectivity in a world. I like to focus on small, lighthearted, character driven scenarios that make the challenges of the main plot seem worth fighting for. I also champion a player first mentality that lets the player make mistakes and suffer appropriate consequences. And, as always, I love designing player classes and ability sets, as well as plot player progression. After all, a narrative needs a hero, and that hero needs to grow on their journey.
Thank you for visiting, and I hope you think I’m a good fit for your studio.