Our group is made up of classicly trained, neurodivergent "nerds". We're all connected through meeting and pretending to be heroes in other worlds for the last 40+ years. It's found-family, deep friendships and a literal lifetime of commitment for what we consider normal. For many, the group predates marriages, kids and other milestones.
Who We Are
We are players and game masters. We've all been playing longer than we'd like to admit. We all have day jobs or other 'real life' things that impact our time for creativity and escape.
We have crossed systems, editions and genres settling into a rhythm of casual, bi-weekly sessions with all but one active player being over 50.
We have lost members to the passage of time. The only legacy they leave are scattered notes, stories of epic campaign moments and folios of alter egos we will never interact with again. All those years of notes and creation amount to zero if the creator dies before reaching some formalization process.
AxiomRPG is our attempt to formalize something that can be carried forward by anyone since none of us are getting younger; a Gaming Legacy.
Our Design Journey
In late 2024 a group of gamers decided, "Let's design our own game system and settings. How hard can it be?". Let's just say that what followed was a crash course in how many disciplines are required to accomplish such a thing.
The majority of our group is over 50 years old. We all have our assortment of disabilities and life challenges but gaming has been an anchor for most of our lives. We meet and play bi-weekly barring weather, health or family obligations since the early 1990's.
None of us are professional authors, editors, artists or marketing professionals. We just enjoy escaping reality for a few hours.
The Mechanics
We began by thinking we could shoehorn everything we wanted to accomplish into TinyD6 or a similar light or minimalist mechanical system. That quickly evolved through nearly every iteration that already exists involving 2 and 3D6 based systems.
To be clear: we aren't anti-d20, we just wanted to break out of the sameness we've been playing since D&D 3e/Pathfinder 1e.
We stepped back, regrouped and decided to test another classic system, West End Games' OpenD6. As another Old School staple we liked the granularity and it scaled into the more complex systems that a minimalist d6-based system wasn't intended to handle. There was significant discussion regarding the pros and cons of dice pool systems like WEG D6, FASA D6 and even the World of Darkeness. We didn't want a system that required more than two handfulls of dice, the "Moose Cup" effect.
We evaluated the published OpenD6 material, modified or replaced the mechanics we didn't like and eventually compiled the Core Rules (AX.C) that fit our intentions. We also wanted to retain the 'universal' aspect of easily adapting to multiple genres.
This is about the time we adopted AxiomRPG for the product identity.
The Worlds
Our group has two world builder creatives with various attempts at homebrew and variants of published settings that we decided would be good candidates for conversion from the original mechanics to our newly developed standard. These would provide yet another lesson in scope management and patience.
The first round of consolidation, the World of Andrus, quickly devolved into writing a series of narrative novels instead of a game setting. This required a couple resets to refocus effort and attention into a more open ended story framework instead of a lore dump of completed stories. This was a clear lesson in Player Agency and writing for shared storytelling.
For reference, Scrivener is absolutely awesome software... for writing novels. The distraction is a desire to do formatting and layout before your actually write the content. We shifted to using Obsidian for consolidation and organization of the source materials into plain markdown format.
The Structure
After fumbling through a few iterations we eventually settled on a structural outline for world building based on the core rules. (This has since been revised from 14 to 16 sections.)
Sections
- System/Catalog Details
- Dice Mechanics
- Attributes
- Talents
- Character Creation
- Lineages
- Factions (new core)
- Professions
- Perks
- Power Traditions (separated from Perks)
- Equipment
- Combat
- Health
- Advancement
- Threats
- GM Guide
This outline evolved into the notation structure for all our materials providing a very simple cross reference mechanism that could be used for print, PDF or web presentation. It had the added benefit of allowing us to focus our development efforts on specific sections and allowing Core Rules to clearly apply when the Catalog didn't require mechanical adjustments.
Catalogs
By reevaluating our decades of world building through the lens of this new Section-based format, it became necessary to apply some significant mechanisms to sift, sort and organize the vaults of word documents into some semblance of cohesion.
This is where AI entered the picture. We started where everyone does, by leveraging what was native on our various workflows. Copilot and Google were initially very useful in sorting and applying the established section logic to our archives of digital documents. We were still learning the methods for applying this new tool to our data.
Then the massive debate on creativity and IP theft became a concern.
We regrouped, applied some research and devised a very basic, local AI solution that allowed us to compartmentalize the automation that kept us on track. The early automation and efficiency was essential to our part time efforts.
Of note, one of our creatives is fully blind. He relies on assistive tech, speech to text and screen readers to interact with his PC. This made reading his world crafting documents from before his blindness much more complex. Applying AI to the task of reviewing, correcting and compiling these existing documents into our new framework vastly simplified his interaction, allowing him to successfully return to the creative process.
From Commercial to SRD
At first we saw our efforts like many do; our ideas were the result of decades of design, play and revision. They had to be worth something, right?
By the time we arrived at that idea, it was clear that "gaming" was now mainstream with Actual Play dominating streaming and an explosion of new publishers churning out settings and systems.
As we continued to develop settings and discuss our actual goals, it became fairly clear that our motivation wasn't to become yet another freelance design studio struggling to pay bills. We really just wanted to formalize our content and share it.
The development track already included generating an SRD website, mostly for sharing the project status with our local and extended group and anyone else that might be interested. We just formalized the process.
No paywall, no subscriptions, no login. Just a fully accessible, static HTML website with a search function. It renders effectively on both desktop and mobile platforms.
We recently decided that having all the content under a single site is too cumbersome to manage efficiently. Separate sub-domain sites will become standard allowing us to edit a single site more efficiently without exporting and publishing the entire package for minor adjustments in a single area.
The Web Tools
In the beginning we kept reworking a play test character sheet. The process involved a Word document, printed to PDF and then adding form fields using Adobe Acrobat Pro. It was labor intensive. Character creation involved referencing the SRD site or a printed version and evaluating each character option individually. There had to be a more efficient way.
With the section structure and a clearly outlined character generation process we decided to try 'vibe coding' a set of web-based tools to compliment the SRD website. We ended up with standalone HTML pages backed by React. The tools run entirely in the browser with no backend. To our surprise, it was smoother than anticipated. We were even able to add options for creating custom content and a suite of GM tools. Like the SRD, it renders reasonably on both desktop and mobile, simplifying in-play character management.
This eliminated the need for players to reference the SRD while building a character, dramatically reduced the time to create a character and produced a clean markdown character sheet. Then we extended the tools to allow live character management and exporting data for reloading later.
Data is exported to JSON formattted files for re-use with a simple upload. It's not a grand scale suite like D&D Beyond but it more than meets our needs and everyone gets access for free.
Ongoing Development
This is a long-term passion project that will continue as we create, play, tweak, adjust, correct and expand content. We edit between sessions almost constantly and explore ever deeper into our archives for potential standalone or expansion material.
As we rediscover long forgotten ideas they start to spawn new ideas and concepts that we can explore more fully using the established framework. This keeps our old brains on track and provides a proper system for documenting new half-baked ideas for later review.
PDF & PoD Publishing
Part of the initial planning was to produce dedicated PDF files for sale. We don't have the bankroll for artwork and even less to pay a proper layout designer. We're activley exploring systems like Pandoc and Typst to create reusable templates for converting our markdown content into functional PDF or even EPUB formats. It's gonna take some time to learn the systems, create the pipeline and refine it into a full process.
If the results are refined enough, we may drop them on DTRPG or some other marketplace for the general public. That same publishing pipeline would open the gates for Print on Demand or special print run editions.
However, with the regular expansion and editing processes, generating a static PDF file seems a bit preemptive. As we reach a more complete status with each product, we will revisit the idea of PDF and PoD.
The Core Rules are nearly 'stable' at this point with fewer change proposals coming up as we play test. Most of the Catalogs are in a long-term design, re-balance and play test cycle.
Artwork
We actually commissioned real, human created artwork for the World of Andrus. Classic monochrome oil on canvas, converted to digital and touched up by an artist that now works with WotC.
For clarity, we WILL NOT be using any AI artwork, ever. Not even as place holders. We've built up a library of stock art assets from DTRPG, verifiably human created, that can be used as we explore the discipline of rule book layout.
If we reach the point of producing PDF or POD products, our artwork will be human generated or entirely absent till we can afford to comission appropriate art resources. This would probably be the only instance where we might consider crowdfunding via Kickstarter or Gamefound.