Notebook: My TTRPG Supplement
Across my social media accounts, I list "narrative designer" as part of my persona. This label is factual, but also, in many ways, hopeful. You see, I have a certification from the University of British Columbia in Writing for Video Games. I also earned a certification from NYU in Screenwriting, where a whole module was spent on narrative design for games. To round all of this out, I have consulted on narrative design for small indie video game projects (projects that either fizzled out or are covered by an NDA).
All of that is to say, I have some imposter syndrome about the whole "narrative designer" label. I shouldn't. I have done the work and have the education, but without a major game title or TTRPG supplement to my name, it feels weird to me.
Anyway, recently some friends who started a little TTRPG co-op asked me to throw something together for them. I have been working on a solo journaling RPG for a while, along with story elements for a potential board game, but this felt like a quick win.
The only problem was that I wasn't going to get any help. Game design, story, art, layout, and everything else were going to fall on me. They only wanted a mini-zine, so pulling people off their own projects felt silly.
I agreed, primarily because I already had a little system I was going to pitch to a TTRPG magazine. All I really needed to do was add some encounters, come up with a mechanics cheat sheet, and figure out how to make it all look good.
And boy, let me tell you, making it look good was the hardest part for me. I am a writer and a gamer. Putting together stories for encounters is easy work for me at this point. Balancing mechanics is a bit more time-consuming, but what I had in my back pocket was luck-based. What I did not know how to do was zine layout, and my artistic abilities are incredibly limited.
These two limitations proved to be the largest barriers to entry for me, but they also gave me opportunities to learn new skills. I have ADHD. New skills are novel and release loads of dopamine. I decided to tackle this thing head-on.
I must have watched five hours of YouTube videos about how to use Affinity Publisher. In time, I became reasonably competent at it. Though it took months for me to produce a halfway decent 14-page supplement, so how competent I am is up for debate.
Layout figured out, I ran into the problem of art. Luckily, Affinity is owned by Canva, so I was able to utilize loads of Canva assets.
When it came time for actual illustrations, I did my best. I think they came out okay, but the reality is that it took a lot of sketching and tracing to get anything moderately competent-looking.
After about 90 days, I was able to release Hand Full of Death. It's not perfect, and I am sure I made 100 mistakes with the layout, and the art is meh, but I made it. No AI, no bullshit, just one creative with a goal.
Did it do anything to lessen my imposter syndrome? Not really. But I do feel pride in figuring it all out, especially since my prior engagements involved things like writing dialogue trees or shoring up plot holes, not laying out a product or testing mechanics.
I guess my point in writing this blog is to say: do the hard thing. Fuck your imposter syndrome. Get out there and find opportunities to work on the stuff you want to work on. You won't be perfect at it, and it may go embarrassingly slowly, but you can do it. And when YOU do it, rather than offloading it to a machine, you get to keep those skills you learned and a sense of fulfillment that shortcuts just can't give you.
Anyway, if you play OSR games or TTRPGs and want a drop-in duel mechanic, along with two encounters you can use it in, check out my supplement Hand Full of Death on itch.io (it's free!).
As always, thank you for trusting me with your time, and thank you for reading my words.
