For the past two years, and more rapidly over the past few months, I’ve been developing a tabletop game.
Ahadi is a synthesis of my loves both in and outside of the TRPG medium. It draws from history, wargaming, nation-gaming, and political simulations to create a game about the tools of power in the same way that D&D is about dungeon crawling or shadowrun is about extremely violent gig work.
And friends, it is going to be great.
Sorry for the lack of updates last month, I’d signed up to run a game I’ve designed at Big Bad Con, and as a result had to put my nose to the grindstone to get it done and playable in time for the Con! Fortunately I’ve basically finished, and a playtest version of the game is up on DriveThruRPG and Itch.io. With that in mind, I encourage you to check it out and read on!
In November of 2018 I wrote a post called Into the Breach around the circumstances of my return to wordpress, and my initial goals for the site. Those initial goals have been met, the Ko-Fi has met minor success, I’ve managed a decent array of articles, and both of my RPGs are in playtest-ready form. I had some off periods and long stretches where work on the RPGs meant that I wasn’t writing Eliph or Fear the Swarth articles, but by and large I’ve proven to myself that I can maintain consistent writing output.
So the next step is monetizing that output. The Ko-Fi works for one-off donations, but in terms of a revenue stream I need something more consistent. As such, I’ve started a patreon.
So we’re through that first stage of Incident Eliph, and with it the first stage of this new run at writing. To mark the occasion I wanted to take a moment, look at the project as a whole, and talk about why Eliph is shaping up as it did. What influenced it, some of the worldbuilding and the decisions that went into designing it.
Incident Eliph is a Quest, a type of interactive fiction that evolved from text-based adventure games, 4chan, and Andrew Hussie in no particular order. A better summation of its history than I could hope to provide is here, but for our purposes you need to know the following: Quests are stories where the writer (Or Quest Master) gets input from the players on the actions of characters or things going on inside of the narrative. I’ve been writing them for something close to seven years.
The story itself is a Fantasy/Horror quest set in an alternate Ottoman Empire. It takes inspiration from the Leviathan series Scott Westerfeld, The Thing, the art of Keith Thompson, Triumff by Dan Abnett, and City of Brass by SA Chakraborty; aiming for an aesthetic that marries bizarre mechanical advances and the prominence of Djinn with grotesque biological horror. At the character level we follow Yousuf Oziri, an officer in the Ottoman Empire, recovering with his platoon on the island of Kianida after a disastrous offensive in Russia.
This is not the largest or the most popular project I’ve undertaken in the field, but it is the first one I’m really actively marketing to people and the first one I’m trying to treat as a professional product. It’s the public facing part of the writing push I outlined in November and the only content currently linked to my Ko-Fi account. As such it is disproportionately personally important, a test of if I can really commit to a schedule and if people might be willing to buy into a patreon or other self-published offerings. Of my skill as a pseudo-professional instead of a hobbyist.
Below the cut are spoilers for the first eight updates (About twelve thousand words) of Incident Eliph. So if this has you interested and you haven’t checked it out yet, I highly recommend reading the story here before continuing.
 | Leuca on The Truth of Colonialism in… |
 | richgreen01 on Introducing Ahadi |
 | uthoroc on A Better Haqq |
 | D&D Under Siege… on The Truth of Colonialism in… |
 | wheeze-wizard on The Truth of Colonialism in… |
Fear The Swarth 