Self nomination: Me, Seraaron.
Title: I’m making a free tabletop roleplaying game, from scratch, in Obsidian.
Explanation:
At the beginning of 2021 I decided to finally start writing a TTRPG, called Agora, after years of putting it off. I had the opportunity, in part thanks to the pandemic, and now thanks to Obsidian I had the means. I instantly fell in love with the way you can link everything together, and it seemed like a perfect match for writing a wiki-style rulebook for a game with many layers and interlocking systems.
I finished the pre-alpha version in the summer, and published the public alpha in September. Which you can check out and play right now — if you like — though there’s still a few things missing. Playtesting has gone exceedingly well, and I’m hoping to begin the beta phase by the end of this year, along with a demo scenario, and have a viable product a few months after that. It’s all very exciting, and it wouldn’t have been so easily possible without Obsidian.
Agora’s unique features, aside from being written entirely in Obsidian, are:
- Agenda driven gameplay, where your intentions and actions are always the most important thing to consider before making any roll.
- Use-based leveling, and a JRPG-inspired job system.
- Special powers and capabilities, to make every new character feel personalized and different from one another.
- Two main resolution mechanics, one for quick checks and simple actions, and one for performing more complicated tasks.
- Clean and accessible design, using natural language, bold and italic text to emphasize key points, and a slightly more casual tone than most other rulebooks. All in the spirit of making the game easier to learn without the need to rely on too many variables or numbers.
- Agnostic design. A generic system that can be suited to almost any setting or situation with just a little tweaking (and the tools provided to help you make those tweaks) to suit your game’s tone.
- A small but growing Discord community of other passionate designers who are already showing interest in adapting the system to their settings or game ideas.
The game is also free and open-source (CC BY 4.0), so you can download the SRD vault from my github and hack it all you want. The custom theme I made for it is also available in the Obsidian community themes.
All in all, I’m really proud of how much I’ve managed to accomplish in this short time span (approximately 100k words written in 9 months — which is definitely a new record for me), and I’ve already started making a little bit of money from the project thanks to some Patreon donors, which helps keep the site running. I’m looking forward to making even greater strides next year!