Hey, everyone, it's Kyle, Head Honcho (and only Honcho) at Loreshaper Games.

It occurred to me that while I've been working on Loreshaper Games I haven't really talked about my pre-Loreshaper history. It hasn't all been roses and sun-shine, but I want to give people an image of what my process was like and how my philosophy has been developing.

I'm also including links to most of the stuff I'm mentioning. Not all of it is any good, but it's fun to see. I'm calling them "freebies", even though they've all been released for free in the first place. Retro freebies?

The Early Days

I got my start over on 1km1kt, with a game called Orchestra. It's a bad name for a game, I will concede. I don't think it ever saw a coherent release in that form, though I did work on it quite a bit (there's a bad IF version of it floating about somewhere, though it's not objectively bad so much as never finished and not great).

This starts the beginning of a long career in which I've generally failed to finish what I've started, though I've been turning that around in 2018.

I did a few Game Chef competition entries (mostly all in the same year, which did not improve their overall quality), then went silent for a bit. I was a featured reviewer at DriveThruRPG, which led me to slow down a little because of conflict of interest concerns, but also gave me a great ability to see all the things.

Literally all of them. I was reviewing a product every day at one point, and I specialized in core rule-books.

Homebrew Monster

Since I was still working on reviews from time to time (I actually quit reviewing long before I quit being a featured reviewer on DriveThruRPG, meaning that I still had that pesky conflict of interest thing limiting me: past me was bad at getting stuff done, but it was my wild mild college days) I couldn't do a whole lot of actual work, so I made homebrew instead.

Now, I had two games that I reviewed that stuck out to me enough that I continued to play them with my group for years:

Eclipse Phase, and Degenesis

Both are good, high-quality games (especially Degenesis now that it had a re-release in its Rebirth Edition, which is superior in every form to the original game and much better looking).

But I liked a slightly different fare than the core rulebooks offered, so over the course of a few years I made the following pieces of homebrew content:

An Ultimate's Guide to Combat (Eclipse Phase)

Believe it or not, my first real "homebrew" was also something that I still occasionally see people make reference to/ask for a sequel to with the second edition of Eclipse Phase coming out soon.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/b2l0rv08z71ow80/UltimatesGuideToCombat11a.pdf?dl=0

I think the fact that I fancied myself a serious game designer is pretty darn obvious in this. I have a military-style manual (cribbed from other sources with a nominal adaptation to the Eclipse Phase setting) combined with some new game rules, including a weapon quality system and more weapons than the base game of Eclipse Phase even had, not to mention more ammunition types and modifications for existing weapons.

Basically, my goal was to take a game where combat took multiple turns, and create tools to make combat take just one turn, unless you really went super-heavy for armor and defenses.

I think I succeeded, if at the cost of my players' sanity.

Ned's Morph Overhaul (Eclipse Phase)

Again, a fairly serious entry, though nowhere near as large as An Ultimate's Guide to Combat. I was working a summer job when I started working on Ned's Morph Overhaul, and when I eventually started moving into my final semester of college and my future career it got abandoned.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/leaivaf71zyu31p/NedsMorphOverhaul4.pdf?dl=0
In the interest of full disclosure, I actually modified this fairly recently when I was playing in another Eclipse Phase campaign and had a few custom morphs to make. My poor GM.

The purpose of NMO was two-fold. For AUGC, I had created a morph creation system (Eclipse Phase had one in the Transhuman book, but I found it hard to use and it was aimed at players, not content creators). However, AUGC's focus was just on combat, and I didn't want to introduce too many new rules in one place, since I knew many people had no interest in AUGC because they didn't like combat-heavy games.

NMO took the work in AUGC and applied it to morphs, which are bodies that the player characters upload themselves into. Adding new morph traits, including some to customize the new morph creation system to give it more flexibility in how morphs could be created, and between NMO and AUGC I think I made about a dozen morphs using this system.

However, NMO and AUGC had both been written in LibreOffice before I really knew how to use it well, and it was a matter of time before the documents became nearly unusable due to the formatting errors and misjudgments.

My First (Big) Game: Street Rats

During my last semester of college, I told myself I was going to make a game. Not just a game, actually. The game. You know, one of those big triple-A games that you get actually money from. I'd already done a lot of work in cyberpunk settings, and Shadowrun had been the first game I'd played other than stuff from 1km1kt and a very small bit of D&D as a player that wasn't that involved with my group.

So I officially ended my reviewer relationship with DriveThruRPG and set out to make my own answer to the cyberpunk market, Street Rats.

It was... marginally successful. I learned a lot in the creation of Street Rats, which is perhaps more than can be said about the game itself. It wasn't abhorrently bad, it was just a mess. More than anything, I shot myself in the foot by making something that was impossible to work with.

The setting was actually fairly well-received, and I still get comments on some of the short fiction pieces when I wheel them out for display. I wanted to design a game with the same robust systems I'd made working on AUGC and NMO, so I did stuff like making a calculator for firearm attributes based on real-world ballistic properties (in PHP, no less, which I had worked with in the past with dubious results).

The real moral I learned from Street Rats is that you can't lose sight of the forest for the trees. From its first release on DriveThruRPG to its final update, it went through multiple extreme shifts.

I'm still proud of the discipline and focus it took to create the game, however, and I enjoyed making it overall. I had weekly playtests that taught me a lot about how to effectively incorporate feedback (generously, but with a grain of salt) and really run a game when you have limitations like "I haven't made the rules for that yet" hanging over your head.

There's also something to be said for your first big game as something that gives you a kick in the pants.

Below, I'm linking to three versions of Street Rats: an early unreleased playtest, the first DriveThruRPG version I have archived, and the most recent version. Have at 'em.

August 27, 2015: https://www.dropbox.com/s/zwclzmc59wilxsp/StreetRats%209-27-15.pdf?dl=0
DriveThruRPG Alpha 1.0: https://www.dropbox.com/s/qi8pd5i0ju357xq/StreetRats%20Alpha%201.0.pdf?dl=0
DriveThruRPG Alpha 2.4: https://www.dropbox.com/s/rrphzp7ct99sw16/StreetRats%20Alpha%202.4.pdf?dl=0
DriveThruRPG Alpha 3: https://www.dropbox.com/s/3m0d4ih2i3ky4ep/StreetRats_Alpha_3.pdf?dl=0
DriveThruRPG Alpha 3 Character Sheet: https://www.dropbox.com/s/2dzqb6ctzm2db30/StreetRatsCharacterSheet%20Alpha%203.pdf?dl=0

Try at your own risk. It's pretty flawed.

Loreshaper Games

It was sometime after Street Rats had been released that I made Loreshaper Games. Originally, it wasn't my personal brand. 1km1kt had been quiet, and I wanted to run a competition in their stead since we had been discussing an annual competition. I was able to gather a dozen or so competition entries and have the first Loreshaper Games contest, with my original intent being to make Loreshaper Games a community site and keep writing under my old brand, Homoeoteleuton—I have/had a thing with bad names.

Back to Homebrew: Artifacts (Degenesis)

So, with Street Rats discontinued and nothing else to do, I decided to check out my new favorite game Degenesis. As you have likely surmised, I wanted to make more content for it, so I did. New weapons, new Cults (playable factions), and a variety of new character options along with more ambitious (and uncompleted) features eventually coalesced into a fairly lengthy document, Artifacts. You can find it here:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/8k0idye1ya9xc07/Degenesis%20Artifacts.pdf?dl=0

Even with the incomplete elements, it's a noticeable jump up in quality and visual design from my previous works, still entirely composed in LibreOffice, because I'm into using FOSS when it's practical.

Work on Artifacts continued basically whenever I was playing Degenesis, and it's officially never been canceled, though I need to prioritize on other projects right now (I expect to return to it over the summer and really polish off some things).

My Very Minor Role in Open Legend

While I was working on Artifacts I was also unburdened by too many constraints on my time, and near the end of my first significant chunk of work on the supplement I stumbled into a request for playtesters.

The game sounded interesting, so I shot an email out, and that was how I met Brian Feister, creator of Open Legend.

As a wannabe designer, I talked to Brian a lot, usually stressing his patience with my haughty schemes and design decisions that ran afoul of Open Legend's design scheme. With that said, I was able to get a few things brought into the final game, like a system for purchasing individual powers that I remain pretty darn proud of.

I also did a very small amount of writing on the game, though I'm not sure if it made it in. I do know that I'm listed as a contributor on both the Open Legend and the Amaurea's Dawn PDFs, so some might have slipped through.

The Legacy of Eight

The Legacy of Eight was a passion project that sprung up when I discovered Open Legend. Intended as a supplement to the setting, it was a sweeping science-fantasy setting that I still keep developing and working on.

It's not quite ready for the light of day, and unfortunately it wasn't quite ready for the Open Legend ruleset either, since the setting and system grew in divergent directions and Brian wisely decided not to take it on as an official Open Legend mini-setting.

Here is an alpha version of Oskan's Ark, an introductory adventure for The Legacy of Eight which got canceled when plans to have The Legacy of Eight potentially be part of the Open Legend lineup were canceled:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/go4irqq9do5vw5r/Oskan%27s%20Ark.pdf?dl=0

Trivia: I actually have a TLOE novella finished that I then decided was too awful to publish. As with everything else related to TLOE, it's being worked on.

Othenar

Othenar was something I was working on following Open Legend, when I hadn't decided quite how I wanted to design the new system for TLOE.

I have about half of an Othenar novel finished, which is also awaiting a re-write (or at least the final parts getting replaced with something that didn't fizzle-out halfway through, then a continuation on that more sturdy foundation).

We'll see Othenar get ported to the Hammercalled rules when it's released, but you can also find it in wiki form at:

http://othenar.loreshapers.net

Hammercalled

Hammercalled has been my new ruleset/setting that I've been working on. It's intended to be the ruleset I can put all my old orphaned settings into (except TLOE, which is still getting its own product line with novel systems), and also a multi-genre capable game that fulfills a need for straightforward heroic action that I haven't been giving.

Hammercalled was conceived in the summer of 2017, and is a product of mad inspiration and blending things that probably shouldn't blend. Yet it seems to work.

I expect the Hammercalled Roleplaying Game system to be ready for public playtesting this month (I was aiming for this week, but with work on velotha's flock taking longer than expected we'll probably push that back a bit. I've already done some in-house (aka "with my eternally patient local friends, who keep asking about Street Rats, dangnabit") testing of it, and it's shaping up to be something I think will be enjoyable for people who like both storytelling and high-octane mechanic-based games.

velotha's flock

velotha's flock (yes, I stylized it like that, no, I can't change it now) was something I made on a lark (you'll get the pun in a moment). Early in 2018 I decided to get more serious about game design and actually doing stuff with Loreshaper Games as part of a process of self-improvement.

So as I was picking up work on Hammercalled again I had an idea: what about a game with were-ravens.

i made a game with were-ravens
in free verse
because i could

e e cummings eat your heart out.

I don't know if there is any other ~10k word length roleplaying game in free verse, but it's a unique thing. I encourage people to check it out, because it's pretty fun in playtesting and even if you don't have anyone to play it with it doubles as a book of angsty poetry of the sort I should have stopped writing at least a decade ago.

It's an experiment in narrative storytelling with light mechanics, and I think it accomplishes that pretty well.

You can download the latest version below:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/p1jmlvq6okz33or/velotha%27s%20flock%20current.pdf?dl=0

I'm also working on a supplement that allows more character options, a "rough draft" of which is due out before the end of the week. It's taking longer than expected, so I don't know if it matters.

Now

Well, as I said, I'm working on velotha's flock, Hammercalled, and The Legacy of Eight. That's enough work.

Last but not least, I'd like to acknowledge kiranansi on Twitter for making the challenge that inspired me to write this. Hopefully someone saw something interesting in it, or got a kick out of the old and rusty pieces of my collected works.

Note: to be concise, I've left out most of my personal campaign settings. Some of them might see use in future projects.