Orkish Odyssey

Here's a rundown of my released and upcoming projects, with some comments about what inspired them. All my released projects are available on Itch for free or PWYW, and all are released under CC0 (No rights reserved). I take a lot of inspiration from other people's work, and I don't mind at all if people take ideas or even whole chunks of my stuff for use in their own projects.

Released

The Gonzo Lands

June 5, 2026

I'm not a huge fan of generic TTRPGs like Fate or GURPS because I think the lack of specificity makes things a lot harder for people, especially the GM. Nonetheless, I do get the appeal of a generic game, and I've been working on The Gonzo Lands in some form before I even really got into game design. In its final iteration, I used the bones of Troika!, though I changed a couple things like turning it into a roll-over system with scalable difficulty and getting rid of Skill (at least for PCs). Since it has the same mechanical bones as Troika!, it's broadly compatible with all OSR material, but the flexibility of character creation means you could just as easily use it for a Star Wars game as a fantasy dungeoncrawler. My hope is that this might be a good game to use to introduce people to TTRPGs.

Dwellers in Darkness

February 3, 2026

I love Cthulhu Dark by Graham Walmsley. I think it's very nearly a perfect Cthulhu game, and one of the reasons it works so well is that the whole system is built around this gradual decline as your character slowly accumulates Insight and eventually loses themselves. Walmsley has also clearly thought very long and hard about what makes a Lovecraftian story work, which you can see if you read Stealing Cthulhu, a book about how to effectively adapt Lovecraft to a tabletop RPG environment.

Walmsley convincingly argues in Stealing Cthulhu that the Call of Cthulhu RPG is based less on the stories of Lovecraft, in which the protagonists are often powerless and usually die or go insane by the end, and more on the stories of August Derleth, in which the protagonists can often score minor victories against the (more cleanly defined) Mythos.

While I think Walmsley has a point, there is still a very large ecosystem of great modules for games like Call of Cthulhu and Trail of Cthulhu, and I realized that I kind of wanted a rules-light system capable of handling these pulpier kinds of stories without having to replace all the PCs each session or two. Hence, Dwellers in Darkness, a "Derlethian" roleplaying game named after an August Derleth story.

Originally, Dwellers in Darkness was based on a 2d6 system I came up with from scratch, but I realized there were some rather inelegant (though promising) mechanics. I eventually used the framework of Nate Treme's Tunnel Goons and Jon Davis' CRIME WAVE to get it to a point where I felt comfortable releasing it.

I wanted to have some additional content, like conversions of monsters, spells, mythos tomes, equipment, etc. from Call of Cthulhu, but that would have taken a long time, and I would have had to research the copyright stuff so I could convert it to open-source. Maybe that will come later, but for the moment I'm happy that I got a one-page cosmic horror RPG out there that I'm pretty pleased with.

The Sound of Water

December 26, 2025

I ran a three-month campaign of Vaults of Vaarn a while back, and while I love the setting, I think there are some problems with the implied pointcrawl format. Fortunately, Leo Hunt published a guide for making a Vaarn hexcrawl, which I used to (sparsely) populate a 20 x 24 hexcrawl. I stocked some of the hexes with places from the Vaults of Vaarn core rulebook or adventures supplement, and I came up with the rest using the tables from the book as inspiration. I mainly released this cause I realized I did all the work already so it might as well be out there if it'll be useful to someone else.

Plunderer!

August 3, 2025

This is my biggest project to date and probably the one I'm proudest of. I basically combined all the rules I liked from OSR games, and a few original ideas of my own, into one ruleset. I'm actively playtesting this game and eventually want to revise the rules as necessary, put some art and a bestiary in the book, and add some other useful tidbits.

Whitesliver

June 25, 2025

This was my first published game, and I did most of the writing in one 3-hour session. More than anything else, it was a design challenge to try to boil down the rules of Whitehack into one page. It's not quite one page, but I think I was still pretty successful. I owe a lot to the people who did most of the hard work of summarizing the salient rules of Whitehack so I could devote my time to messing around with the fundamentals and fitting everything into two pages (more or less).

The Backlog

Here's an extensive list of things I've thought about writing/making, in a rough order of how much I've thought about them.

South Asia Hexcrawl

Tentative Title: Prayers to the Tiger God

I majored in South Asian Studies in college, and I'm kind of bummed by how little material there is for South Asian-inspired RPG adventures, especially considering how awesome South Asian folklore is. The "Eureka!" moment that launched this white whale into my life was realizing that the end of Amitav Ghosh's Sea of Poppies, a bunch of different types of people hijacking an East India Company ship, very closely resembles the launching point for Wolves Upon the Coast, a bunch of Viking thralls killing their master and taking the ship.

I've gone back and forth on a lot of different aspects, especially when it comes to system, high vs. low magic, and the sensitive topic of depicting colonialism and other real-world issues. At first, I thought about something very close in tone to the Wolves Upon the Coast Grand Campaign, low (but present) magic and a focus on the horrors of war (in this case, colonial violence). Later, I found out about Mun Kao's Kala Mandala setting, which is more whimsical. If I wrote the hexcrawl for Kala Mandala, magic would be more common, the world would be a little brighter, and references to colonialism and references to real-world religious conflicts etc. would be toned down. I've been reading through some of Zedeck Siew's stuff recently, and I do like how colonialism is presented in his work though, so I'm very conflicted.

This may be the project I'm most eager to work on, but I also have a lot of research to do before I feel comfortable tackling this.

A Song of Ice and Fire Hexcrawl

Tentative Title: Wilderlands of Ice and Fire

Recently, I've been rereading A Song of Ice and Fire and reading the supplemental books for the first time, and I really fell in love with the world depicted there. I'd like to make a massive hexcrawl covering Westeros and much of Essos with very minimal keying, somewhere between Wolves Upon the Coast and Judges Guild's Wilderlands of High Fantasy. I'll probably be ready to start on this before the South Asia hexcrawl, but I still have to (re)read a couple books before I'm completely caught up with ASOIAF.

I've also been working on a built-in system, since I don't know that Wolves Upon the Coast by itself is a perfect fit. My current mock-up is a mix of Gregor Vuga's Kriegsmesser (Warhammer by way of Troika) and Luke Gearing's brutal Violence rules. However, I'm also considering using something similar to Mythic Bastionland, which may have my favorite combat system. It may be recency bias, but Chris McDowall just released a preview of the rules for Intergalactic Bastionland, and I think the system described therein could actually work really well for this.

Chinese-Inspired Science-Fantasy Setting (for Gloam)

Tentative Title: Prophets of the Peach-Blossom Spring

I've been following the creation of the Lone Legend's tarot-based TTRPG Gloam, and at some point the thought struck me to use it as a basis for a kind of baroque, psychedelic, Chinese-inspired science-fantasy setting. I think using a Tarot deck could be a really cool way of generating game elements, a bit like Cörpathium but for things like character lifepaths as well since each Tarot card contains multiple dimensions of information.

Other Projects

These projects aren't really well-visualized, but they're things I've considered and think I could possibly pull off.

#dwellers in darkness #orkish odyssey #osr #plebeian #plunderer! #the gonzo lands #the sound of water #ttrpgs #whitesliver