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Birthday Presents

Today's my birthday!

To celebrate, Wizards of the Coast were kind enough to release the all new 2024 edition of the Player's Handbook for Dungeons & Dragons. But what's even cooler is that today also marks the 40th Anniversary of the day I first played D&D.

Way back in 1984, I didn't really know what Dungeons & Dragons was, but I'd seen the Basic Set in the red box on store shelves a few times and I thought it looked awesome. I kept asking my mom for it but we didn't have a lot of money back then, so I had to wait with my fingers crossed for my birthday to come around. When it finally did, I was bouncing with joy as I flipped through the Player's Manual and started to figure out how this cool game worked.

I played (or mostly just read) the Start adventure (poor Aleena). Then I played the solo adventure probably three or four times until I got the hang of it. But after that, I kind of ran out of road. My mother was not interested in this strange game (I think she preferred Backgammon back then), and with no siblings or even any family in town, I didn't have anyone to play with. I asked some friends at school, but sitting around inside writing stuff down and doing math was not a great pitch back in the early '80s. So aside from trying the solo adventure a couple more times with characters I made myself (a dwarf and then a thief), I didn't get much more mileage out the Basic Set.

The next year I started highschool, and to my great excitement, there was a D&D club, which I joined immediately. The club was organized by a friend named Sathi who put us all into gaming groups (the city of Sathirajan from the Mythmaster World Guide is named in his memory.) That's how me and my friend Dave (who I would go on to play Ultima IV with) met John, Jason and Paul, and the five of us started playing Advanced Dungeons & Dragons.

John agreed to be the Dungeon Master and the rest of us made our first characters; I was an elf fighter named Dangor (what a terrible name), Dave was a Paladin named Paladon (equally terrible) Paul was an elf cleric named Crow (myeh) who used a long sword (sacrilege!), and Jason was a thief whose character name I forget (but almost for certain was the best named of the bunch). Over the course of that campaign we confronted the threats and challenges thrown at us by our wily nemesis The Antipaladin - an evil undead paladin who sought to conquer the world from his magical, plane-shifting castle.

We played AD&D for a couple of years until John, Jason and Paul all graduated ahead of me and Dave, and our group fragmented. Fortunately, though, I was able to drift into another group with John and Jason who were playing a different game called EXP. EXP is an absurd science-fiction RPG created by a friend of ours named Hugh (you can play it here!). There were probably twenty different people in and out of the EXP group over the years. I think I must have played EXP from '88 until '93. At the same time, I also started another gaming group with Paul - and we played a few different games; AD&D of course, but we also tried Gamma World, Paranoia and others.

From the many people I met and played with in these different groups, I got exposed to a wide range of different games - many of which I only played a few times. Some of them included Star Frontiers, Boot Hill, Car Wars, Top Secret, Traveller, Champions, Shadow Run, Warhammer, and Rune Quest - and certainly others I have forgotten. My favorites, and some of the strongest influences on Mythmaster were Paranoia (for factions) Rune Quest (for progression) and Traveller (for character creation). In fact, when I started learning to code so I could build the Mythmaster character generator tool, I relied heavily on a javascript character creator for Traveller that helped me understand some of the basic architecture in order to get started.

Sometime around '93 a new core group formed with myself and Jason, along with another Jason, Greg and Pat. The five of us (and many others who would drift in and out over the years) mostly played GURPS. We played Cyberpunk, Espionage, Martial Arts, Supers, Psionics, Victorian Era, Imperial Rome, and a bunch of different universes and campaigns using the many GURPS source books. GURPS was great, because making characters was fast and flexible, and progression was thin and de-emphasized, which made it easy for us to play one-shots or mini-campaigns, taking turns as GM to suit our schedules and our wide range of interests.

I was playing with that group frequently before I left it all behind in 2001 to move from Vancouver to Montreal to start working in the game industry. Sadly, I never really got into a new gaming group in Montreal, and I largely left the TTRPG world behind for 10+ years before I started working on Mythmaster - the history of which I detailed in my previous post. Looking back on it over the last ten years that I have been working on the game, I realize I missed something of a renaissance. Hundreds of small TTRPGs have been released, and in the last few years I picked a few of them up (mostly to study). It's awesome how many systems and universes there are out there for players to dive into.

So in honour of the release of the latest edition of the D&D Player's Handbook, and to celebrate exactly 40 years of D&D for me, I decided to ship the DnD 2024 Celebration Update.

In version Beta 2.1.1 you'll find a new NPC; the Wizard Zovtecoste, and his familiar, the 1000-lb Gorilla 'Deendie'. Mythmaster is completely free for as long as it's in Beta, so feel free to check it out and let me know what you think. Maybe forty years from now, you'll be marking the anniversary of the first time you played my game (and hopefully I'll be turning 92).

Making Myths

I just so happens that I do a pretty good Ian-McKellen-as-Gandalf imitation. I also have a not-half-bad Sean Connery, an okay Marlon Brando, a passable Patrick Stewart, a poor but at least consistent Clint Eastwood, and a laughable attempt at a Harrison Ford. All of these amateur impressions were useful to me more than ten years ago when I was reading The Hobbit (for the third or fourth time) to my son every night before bed.

The problem, though, was that The Hobbit has one Gandalf, one Bilbo and at least nine too many fucking dwarves for me to have any hope in hell of voicing them all. Many a night of reading ended in disappointment for my having mixed up my Kili voice for my Fili voice or my Bifur for my Bofur. While I couldn't keep them all straight in my head, my son could, and it was pretty darn important that I got it straight, or what, really, was the point of reading stories at all?

After fumbling for many weeks trying to keep all these characters and voices straight in my head, I decided to make things easy for myself. Rather than reading stories, I would make them up. I dusted off my old GURPS rulebooks and flipped through them, determined to make characters with my son and invent our own fantasy universe to play in.

It turned out GURPS was too much for a three year old. So was D&D (I had 3.5 back then). Rather than try to teach him a complicated RPG, I decided to make a very simple one. And so, Mythmaster was born.

My first few iterations on the game got me to a set of core rules that was only seven pages long and used only standard six-sided dice. A character could be made in a few minutes, details about skills, spells, weapons and creatures were added on demand, and within a month of the initial idea we were playing. As we played, I would record the rules as we made them up; a rapier did this much damage, a heal spell restored that much health.

The rules started to grow and to accrete some complexity and I landed on a few patterns I really liked. The main one was the 3x3 stat matrix and skills based on attributes calculated from the averaged stats. It was the first formal structure in the game, and it is still the core of how characters work. I feel makes for a good, credible simulation, and that it has an inherent auto-balancing effect on a hybrid random/point-spend character creation system that softens the chaos of pure random, while preventing the degenerate build strategies that plague pure point-spend.

My young son's first character was a ranger-y sort of guy named Coyote, who was son to the Chief of the Road Runner Clan (it pays to expose them to the classics). The Road Runner Clan were a nomadic tribe in the Red Plains, between the cities of Red Road and Brinjevi... which exist in the World Guide to this day. Coyote had a friend; an NPC trader from a nearby village named Michael. Together, in one of their first encounters, they rescued a goblin who had been captured and was about to be eaten by some mean orc bandits. Improbably, they made a friend of him also. His name was Dodger, and his inclusion made me decide to add goblins (and orcs) to a growing list of playable species.

Coyote, Michael and Dodger had some fun adventures, eventually convincing Dodger's tribe - who had taken up residence in an abandoned stone quarry - to begin trading stone with the Road Runner Clan in exchange for useful goods from Michael's village. Acting as peacemakers, my son and his imaginary friends put new pressures on the game, creating a need for skills and abilities that would allow a four year old to roll dice to determine if his socially and politically savvy characters could negotiate treaties. Suddenly, the game started to become complex in ways I had not anticipated, and I was frankly glad I had not over-invested the small amount of free time I had in writing out and balancing stats for dozens of weapons and spells (though that would all come eventually).

At some point, my son got distracted by other interests, and we stopped playing as regularly, but I continued to chip away at the rules, and from time to time we would come back to it with updated versions of Coyote, Michael and Dodger. A few years later, and living back in Canada, we invited friends from my son's school - two brothers - to start a new campaign with us.

That campaign was set in Skyrim. I had the strategy guide for the game, and I found the ones for Oblivion and Morrowind on line. I can't image a more valuable set of source books for a Director. By this time, the Core Rules had grown to sixty pages, and I had the beginnings of a Bestiary with nearly 100 creatures. I was largely satisfied with the rules, but I wanted to be able to focus on designing my own campaign universe in my spare time without having to build the plane while I was flying it. Having half of the world of Tamriel and 200 years of its history took an enormous load off of prep work for our play sessions so that I could do that. Thanks Bethesda and Prima!

Anyway, with my son and his school friends, we started to play semi-regularly, and I got some really good testing in. Somewhere in there is where I made perhaps the biggest detour in the long history of the game; I added classes. Prior to then the game had always been class-free, and characters could invest in any skills they wanted. Classes added some direction and progression and a feeling of coherence and structure, and they would be a part of the game for four years or so, but ultimately, they proved too constraining. Many elements that were added to improve classes - such as Perks, and the structures for Skill and Spell Fields, and the progression that exists within them were born out of a need to diversify character builds that had been rendered too simplistic by the addition of classes. While classes themselves ultimately would be removed, the things I learned from having them in, and the improvements made to the game to compensate for the problems they created ended up being great additions. The path to understanding leads through the woods of stuff that doesn't work.

Sometime in 2018 or 2019 it started to dawn on me that I might actually be able to release Mythmaster as a product. I started giving some thought to that idea while continuing to play the game with my son and his friends and also attempting to start a campaign with colleagues from work. That campaign began with the assassination of the Imperial Governor Rufus Tritinnius at the wedding of Olfina Gray-Mane and Jon Battle-Born in Whiterun on 1 First Seed, 4E 201. Eight people made characters, and we played once before I got overwhelmingly busy with work itself, and life on top of that, and we never went further. I really wish we could have.

At this point I was managing the entire game as a series of .pages documents with embedded .numbers tables and placeholder art pulled from the internet. I would periodically push a new version of the game, format the entire thing as a set of PDFs and print out half a dozen copies of each book at Kinko's or Office Depot and staple-bind them. I still have old hardcopies of the Core Rules, the Bestiary, the World Guide and the NPC Guide across multiple versions.

Of course, in 2020, the pandemic happened. For a long time my son couldn't play with his friends. But because video conferencing and screen sharing tools were suddenly ubiquitous, and various digital whiteboards and shared online collaboration tools were easily accessible (and in many cases being made free for personal use), it occurred to me that I could play online.

I reached out to my gaming group from back in the late '90s, before I moved to Montreal, and we got the band back together. We had played many different games together all those years previously, and we were all still close friends, even though we rarely saw each other. So I sent them the PDFs and a few days later we were meeting online over Zoom to make characters and figure out how we'd set up our first play sessions. Within a month of the start of the pandemic, six of us were playing every Saturday night using Zoom, Miro, Rolz, and a several other tools.

Those first months were a meat grinder - not for their characters - for the game. The early play sessions were not level one encounters with kobolds; these were pitched battles against the frost giants of tabletop RPG playing. All the usability and design problems that were invisible to my son and his friends revealed themselves to be red-hot pokers for experienced players. I had just pushed alpha 1.6 when the pandemic started, and in two years we went through four major iterations - each one larger and more significant in scope than any previous iteration. The core mechanics of rolling Challenges were overhauled and simplified. The Stats & Attributes matrix was shuffled around and renamed. Derivatives were changed. Movement and Bulk were simplified and rebalanced. Classes were removed and skill and spell fields elaborated. Perks were added along with many new spells and skills. The game switched from being entirely d6 based to using all of the standard dice. An enormous suite of tools were built in spreadsheets to automate the tuning, balancing and updating of game content. Quickly, the game matured into something very close to the version you can play today.

It was only in 2022 that I decided I needed to stop messing around with spreadsheets and PDFs, and reconsider the idea of releasing the game in print format. I didn't see the point of trying to mount a Kickstarter to raise tens of thousands of dollars to spend hundreds of hours of my time on printed books. All print would do is fossilize the rules into the sediment of hubris, and wrap them in glossy art I would have to buy because I could not make it myself. A pretty but deprecated set of rules is useless. I did not want to disguise the remaining problems in the game in a glossy package - I wanted to fix them. I wanted the game to be responsive and easily updatable. I wanted it to be accessible to anyone. I wanted to be able to continue to tune and balance the game and to fix problems as I found them, as I had been doing for a decade already.

So I abandoned my plans to release the game as a series of books, dusted off my web development skills from decades previous, and started porting the game over to HTML. I got myself set up with a domain and started converging toward a fully digital version. To my delight, and that of my players, the rules became far more accessible, the game became more playable, and iterations and improvements came faster and faster. They continue to come, faster than ever.

There is another entire post I'll have to write here about the process of learning javascript and making the game even more data-driven, accessible and updatable, but this post is already too long.

I was originally hoping to ship the game last summer or for the end of 2023, but I got sick a bunch in the back half of last year, and with work and life, it was just too much. Fortunately, I am well again. I am playing regularly with my group, and also with my son and his friends, and all of us are very excited to finally share the game with a wider audience. Today.

We hope you'll find the game as fun and engaging as we do, and we hope you'll stick around for the beta, and beyond. There is a lot of content still to come, and lot to learn about this game that continues to live and grow as we play.

Welcome to Mythmaster RPG.