39 thoughts on “Have you designed a PbtA game? If so, what year did you begin work on your game(s)?”

  1. Currently designing a PbtA game, Cyclopean Stars. It is a Cthulhu game with heavy inspiration from cop fiction, True Detective Season 1 being a big one. I technically started in 2015 but development has been erratic. Inspirations are taken from the Warren (for advancement moves, I eliminated playbooks). I am also dong narrative stats which echo Fate. In early playtesting.

  2. Let’s see… I started work on Legacy in 2013 and started work on What Ho World in early 2015, both ending up getting kickstarted and published 2 years or so later.

    In terms of inspirations: Legacy was inspired by AW, DW, Reign, Tribe8 and Pendragon. What Ho World was inspired by Dream Askew, Fiasco, and Once Upon a Time.

  7. Circles of Power, started designing it in 2016, ashcan released in February 2017. Inspired by The Warren, Monsterhearts, Saga of the Icelanders.

  11. Demihumans, a game about elves, dwarves, and others as humans take over the world and crowd them out, was begun in August 2016. It’s, at this point, a hack of Apocalypse World 2E with significant inspirations from Sagas of the Icelanders, Monsterhearts, Burning Wheel, Dungeons & Dragons, and probably lots of others I’m not thinking of.

    Hallway Fight is a game I started designing this month. Inspired by the Marvel-Netflix shows, it feels like it’s going to be a pretty far-from-the-original PbtA game, with ablative and charge-up moves.

    (Oh, and I have no idea when they’ll be done but I want Demihumans to be out by next year.)

  14. The Indie Hack, started work in 2015, completed in 2016, August. Dust, Fog, and Glowing Embers, started work in late 2016, but still in progress. Inspired by AW, Dungeon World, and Fallen Empires.

  15. It’s far from a complete but, on The Unit my police procedural drama PbtA hack, I’ve started with determining the archetypes for the different playbooks and then figured out the basic moves. Now I’m stuck figuring out the playbook moves… I just started working on it in January 2017.

  16. Marshall Miller: It started out as a dicepool game, so Lady Blackbird was a big starting inspiration. Dystopian Wars gave me more insight into the dice pool mechanism. Dungeon World, obviously. One of the biggest inspirations was a DW hack by Hamish Cameron about cannibalistic goblins that I can never spell because it’s literally in Greek– that’s the game with the mechanic of “you do thing to add a character move” that I kind of kept for Threadbare’s character modification moves.

    There were later inspirations, after I had a working draft, but those are probably the big ones from the early days.

  18. I started my Ars Magica hack in late 2013 and released the first version in 2014. It sat unchanged for a couple years but I’m now almost finished a revision (started about a month ago). Other than ArM and AW it was also heavily influenced by Sagas, Dungeon World, The Sprawl, Monsterhearts and Undying. Oh, and Blades in the Dark and…

  20. Yes. We started Spirit of 77 I believe in 2013. We released in 2015. My current one Bedlam Hall started in 2016, and is being released late this summer.

  22. Spirit was a little more straightforwardly inspired by AW, of course. To be honest, we were also inspired by D&D 5e’s mechanic “Rolling with Advantage” as a replacement for straight +1 modifiers.

    Bedlam Hall was a little different – It was inspired initially by Monsterhearts but also by WWWRPG. Their method of tracking “Heat” as a wrestling concept was very clever, and helps breaks the game out of just “onscreen, in the ring” sorts of player goals. You can lose a lot of matches, for example, but still advance and improve with WWWRPG (which is smart). So naturally, wrestling should apply to a game based on Downton Abbey (wait, what?).

  23. I started designing Therps (thematic roleplay system) in 2010 from scratch. In 2013 after a couple iterations, I discovered PbtA, found overlaps, and adapted it. I tested it out with a setting called Hardwire at GenCon 2015, and it was a success. I dialed back development because I had changed life focus to making video games, but I did create a GM bot for Slack that plays by Therps rules, and have run a couple campaigns. So at this point, I don’t think I’ve made a game, but I have made some accessible tools that have enabled games to happen. I’m not all that eager to publish, in my old age I’ve grown selfish – I develop things to make my experiences better, I don’t really care if they get out into the hands of the rest of the world.

  26. I started working on Slingtown as an ORE game in 2009, then turned it into a Transmission for Technoir in 2010, then kept working on it as an AW hack in 2011, before abandoning it mid-2013.

    The setting was too relentlessly hopeless, and I didn’t see a way out of it to an optimistic ending.I don’t regret a minute of the time I spent on it, and AW’s metastructure was a great way to explore and make its themes and ideas explicit, very helpful in exposing the ways it was a dead end.

    l often review my current stuff through a PbtA lens, although figuring out what’s fat and meat and bone in AW is tricky. Thinking about Principles, Agendas, GM-facing structure is rarely wasted time.

  27. The Sprawl in 2010/2011 (whichever year the first Big Bad Con was in). KS in 2014, release 2016.

    Kratophagia… I guess also in 2011 according to Stephanie Bryant! KS next year, I imagine.

    I have a bunch of moves and notes for a Republican Roman political game, and for a fantasy pirate game. Those are like most of my hacks in that I basically get a brainworm and have a fully playable set of moves in a day, then as time allows I refine, add playbooks, and write over several years, usually immediately before conventions or playtesting sessions!

  30. i suppose the only one i’ve finished to outside playability is Among Humans, the doomed pilgrim hack i worked on for threeforged. so that would be 2015. I’ve aborted several more, the largest being a Changeling: the Lost hack that i got to run for a year at least back in… 2012-2013.

  31. I started Pasión de las Pasiones (telenovela episodes powered by the apocalypse) in June 2016, tested it at Metatopia 2016, and am hoping to get it into ash-can mode in the near future!

  34. It varies. Under Hollow Hills was started in 2013 and is being coy about proceeding, but Bedlam Beautiful was a rush of talk talk talk write write write play play play repeat for two weeks in January 2017 and now we’ve hired an artist, played it at Dreamation, and are planning the Kickstarter.

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