I haven't touched tabletop role-playing games in a few months now. In preparation for my upcoming move to Canada, I sold most of my collection. I didn't expect to even think about these games until well after the move.
Then, I found Typst.
Typst is a computer language for laying out books and documents. It's similar in concept to LaTeX, a common tool for academics. In fact, I have been using LaTeX to lay out all of my role-playing games for several years now. However, despite its ubiquity, LaTeX is pretty terrible to work with. It's slow and hard to extend. So, when I saw that a newcomer to the field of layout tools was getting rave reviews on Hacker News, I thought I would give it a try.
So, I chose to rework Vox Draconis: Kingdoms of Stone and Fire into Typst instead of LaTeX. The result was awesome, and I adore the toolset. It was much easier to use.
What I didn't expect as a result of this experiment, though, was that it rekindled my interest in working on Kingdoms of Stone and Fire.
With the final death of Silver Gryphon Games last year, I did not expect to ever pick up game design again. Now I'm seeing all kinds of possibilities. I think my mistake was attempting to make a commercially-viable game. All of the different disciplines of marketing, finances, and so forth pulled me away from the thing I actually liked to do - design.
So. The PDF of Kingdoms of Stone and Fire that is on this site now is what it looks like after the conversion to Typst. It's far from complete, though.
The game was originally meant to be an updated version of my original retroclone, Vox Draconis. I think my first mention of it on this blog was back in April of 2021. Since then, I barely talked about it. I suppose this is as good an opportunity as any to explain what the game is about and what I'm trying to do with it.
Vox Draconis: Kingdoms of Stone and Fire is a tabletop role-playing game set in a fantasy, pre-iron world filled with dinosaurs, dragons, and warring kingdoms. It's anachronistic and whimsical. While it takes some cues from classic swords-and-sorcery, it's less about fearing the dark and more about carving out a place in the world. It's closer to "noblebright" than it is to "grimdark."
The rules are meant to be simple but not entirely narrative-driven. Many rules-light games out there, like Powered by the Apocalypse, are intended to just give a framework for a story. Kingdoms of Stone and Fire is meant to power a story, yes, but it's also meant to be an interesting game rules-wise. People who enjoy exploring mechanics and game progression should find it fun, if I design it right.
I also want to design the game so that it fits into an hour or two of playtime instead of the four or five hours that some games take. This might be the bigger challenge, and I have a lot of thinking to do here. It has to be more than just combat rules that are interesting and worth spending time playing. As it exists now, it's not there.
Finally, I want the game rules to be relatively short. Too many role-playing games have manuals that are hundreds of pages long. Kingdoms should be short enough that it can be understood and started in half an hour, but have enough content that it can be explored for months or years, if desired. That's also going to be difficult to pull off. I suspect that the crux will be making the main rulebook short and concise, and providing the rest via supplemental works.