Drosvald - A TTRPG System

I've been working on a TTRPG system and setting recently, and I'm feeling good about it. I dabble in world-building and game design regularly, but it's rare to get the feeling that what I'm working on might actually have legs, and might end up being something I stick with. So today I'm going to start sharing it with the world. First off, let's have a quick overview of the setting.

Drosvald is the name of the region this game is set in. It's a peninsula, reaching into the cold north seas, consisting of a series of Holds - frontier settlements, none over a century old, built by refugees escaping a war to the south. The region is mostly wild and untamed, though there are ruins to be found in the mountains, remnants of an older civilisation that was destroyed centuries before in the Firefall - an apocalyptic event that not much is known about. The region was largely uninhabited for centuries after, until the refugees crossed the Barrier Mountains searching for a new life.

The primary cultural inspirations for the people of Drosvald come from a mix of Japanese and Norse influences. The people largely worship the spirits present in everything - reminiscent of Shinto religion. There's also a monotheistic religion drawing influence from Christianity and Buddhism that is starting to take hold - for the people of Drosvald, it's based on what they believe are holy texts found in ruins of the precursor civilisation. In the Holds and villages dotted across the land, people dine together each night in large communal halls, and town guards stand watch, grasping their naginata.

Politically, the vast majority of people in Drosvald consider themselves part of the Kingdom of Reylund - though the Queen has recently passed away, leaving her son the heir too young to rule. In his place a council of regents has assembled - one from each of the Holds. For a while, it looked like they'd keep the kingdom in peace until the Prince can take the throne, but tensions are starting to show, and there are whispers that war is only a matter of weeks away.

The setting is relatively low fantasy, but there are a handful of non-human people spread around Drosvald - notably goblins, trolls, an elves. There's also whispers of dwarves deep in the hills, but no verified accounts of them exist yet.

The system of Drosvald is based around a 2d10 mechanic. Roll 2d10, add a relevant attribute, and relevant tags or situational bonuses, and try to roll equal to or higher than a target number. There are 4 possible results:

• TN or higher, and the dice match: Critical success. Achieve your goal, and something extra.
• TN or higher: Success. Achieve your goal.
• Lower than TN: Partial success. Either:
  • Achieve your goal, but suffer a penalty
  • Do not achieve your goal, but get a boon
• Lower than TN and the dice match: Fail. You don't achieve your goal, and something else goes wrong.

The idea of this system is to minimise the effort on the part of the GM to make sure that something changes every time someone rolls the dice. If the situation is entirely unchanged, you're not running the system correctly.

Aside from the core mechanic, one of the major differentiators of this system is the combat system. Designed to flow smoothly and keep everyone engaged, the initiative system is entirely ad-hoc, controlled by the GM, and enemies don't have turns as such. Players are invited to act, and during their actions they might do something which triggers "threat" to build on the enemies. The GM can then trigger the enemies to act by spending "threat points", utilising unique abilities of the enemies that resolve largely without dice. The player-facing design here should lower the cognitive load on the GM without diminishing the fun that many players draw from tactical combat. It's also quite a deadly system, with wounds quickly stacking up, preventing the damage-sponge feel of systems like DnD and Pathfinder, and is targeted at a level of abstraction that allows players to gain the advantage in fiction-first ways - thinking about how their character would act before looking for abilities on their character sheet.

So what are my overarching goals for this system and setting?

Primarily I'm building a game to play with my friends. If we have a good time playing a campaign or two in this system, and I don't ever do anything else with it, I'll be happy enough. That said, I've got this feeling that this idea might be something more. I'm going to take a stab at fleshing it out more, and seeing what happens with it as I grow the idea.

For the system itself, I want something that fits my style of GMing - reducing cognitive load from things I see as busywork, and freeing me up for the parts of the game that I feel I'm neglecting when I run other systems. I'm also tying the system into the setting of Drosvald very deliberately - I've dabbled in game design of more setting-agnostic systems before, and they've never stuck. Something about tying it into the setting gives me a better feel for which mechanics fit what I'm aiming for and which do not.

On the setting side, I want to build something a bit different from what I've played before. I'm taking massive inspiration from a few places in particular - Symbaroum, Dragonriders of Pern, Ironsworn, Shogun (the book and TV series) and of course Japanese and Nordic culture in general. At the moment the ideas I have need some refinement - I was originally going for a social class split on the cultural inspirations but that felt overdone, and what I have in my head at the moment feels more like a hodgepodge of the inspirations than a cohesive world, but there's some parts that I'm absolutely loving.

And in terms of this blog, I'm going to be dumping a bunch of my ideas here, both setting and system, and should be sharing some drafts of the system once it's built out enough to share. There's a good chance I'll be writing some adventures as part of the effort as well.

Art-wise, it's going to be massively limited. I'm not using AI for it, and I don't expect to make money from this endeavour so I can't really afford to pay someone to put much together. There's also not much publicly available that fits the theme I'm going for here - Japanese and Nordic mix seems quite rare outside of modern interior design! If I do publish it, online or otherwise, I could see myself getting something commissioned for the front cover, but I wouldn't expect more than that.

That's all for now, but stay tuned for:

• A dive into the mechanics of the system
• An overview of the magic and religion in Drosvald
• Mechanical breakdowns of decision points - such as "How I decided to get rid of initiative"