Our Design Journey
In November/December of 2024 a group of old 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.
By 'old' we mean over 50 years old. We have our assortment of disabilities and life challenges but gaming has been a staple for most of our lives. We meet and play bi-weekly barring weather, health or family obligations since the mid to early 1990's.
None of us are 'real' authors, editors, artists or marketing professionals.
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, WEG OpenD6. As another Old School system we liked the granularity and it scaled into the more complex aspects for which a minimalist d6-based system wasn't really designed. There was significant discussion regarding the pros and cons of dice pool systems like WEG D6, FASA D6 and the World of Darkeness.
We evaluated the published OpenD6 material and replaced some of the mechanics we didn't like. This eventually got us to the Core Rules (AX.C) that fit how we wanted to play. It also retained the 'universal' aspect of easily adapting to multiple genres.
This is also about the time we adopted the AxiomRPG identity.
The Worlds
Our group has two world builder creatives with multiple homebrew and published setting variants that we decided would be good candidates for conversion from the original mechanics to our newly developed standard.
The first round of consolidation, the World of Andrus, quickly devolved into writing a series of 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.
For reference, Scrivener is absolutely awesome software... for writing novels. This is when 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.
| Section | Topic |
|---|---|
| 01 | Design Notes / Setting Overview |
| 02 | Dice Mechanics (Core) |
| 03 | Attributes (Core) |
| 04 | Talents |
| 05 | Character Creation |
| 06 | Lineages |
| 07 | Professions |
| 08 | Powers & Perks |
| 09 | Equipment |
| 10 | Combat |
| 11 | Health & Damage (Core) |
| 12 | Advancement (Core) |
| 13 | Threats |
| 14 | GM Tools |
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, allowing Core Rules to apply when the setting didn't require mechanical adjustments.
Genre Catalogs
By reevaluating our decades of world building through the lens of this new section 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 applying the 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 basic research and development 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 a type 1 diabetic and fully blind. Relying on assistive tech, speech to text and screen reader, 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 apparent that gaming was now mainstream with Actual Play dominating streaming and an explosion of new publishers churning out settings and systems. Then there's the "AI Slop" cycle where anyone with an idea could rapidly produce vast quantities of barely passable products to stock a web store or leverage for crowdfunding.
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 group and anyone else that might be interested. We just formalized the process using Mkdocs and now add everything as we cycle through the editing process.
No paywall, no subscriptions, no login. Just a fully accessible, static HTML website with a reliable search function. It renders effectively on both desktop and mobile platforms.
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.
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. We extended the character generator to allow character advancement and exporting data for reloading later.
Data can be exported to a JSON file 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.
Ongoing Development
This is a long-term passion project that will continue for years 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 distribution. We don't have the bankroll for artwork and even less to pay a proper layout designer. Any PDF products will likely be fairly simple presentations. That opens the door to random Print on Demand options if we really want to get jiggy.
Also, with the regular expansion and editing processes, generating a static PDF file now seems a bit preemptive. Once we reach a more complete status with each product, we will revisit the idea of PDF and PoD.
Artwork
We actually did commission real human created artwork for the World of Andrus. Oil on canvas, converted to digital and touched up by an artist that's now working with WotC.
We're evaluating if integrating the artwork on the SRD is the best option or if a PDF/PoD presentation would do it more justice. It could become part of a Kickstarter/Gamefound campaign for a limited edition run (leather bound, foil inlay, super fancy, etc.)
For clarity, we won't be using any AI artwork, ever. Not even as place holder. We have been buying stock art assets on DTRPG to build up a library of verifiable human created art that can be used as we explore rule book layout options and techniques. This goes back to the PDF/PoD topic above.