Welp! Here We Go

Fatal Familiar is the official title for my TTRPG I landed on less than a week ago after calling it The Elseware RPG for the last 6 years. A project I started after a major breakup, while moving from apartment to apartment in a mad scramble for survival in LA County. The idea for a multimedia project that would tell a bigger story of a bizarre world where our imaginations are made real and dangerous had not yet calcified into a tabletop game yet- it was a podcast, a comic book, an ARG, all kinds of capital C Concepts, but not yet a game. Ironic that the world- nay, universe, I came up with was the start, and now the game is almost ready to be run by others, yet the setting isn't important at all. The very idea that there's a bigger universe connected to this game feels almost cliche now. Most people who play this thing will likely rarely do so in the setting I made for it. Just like with Dungeons and Dragons or any other TTRPG with rich lore and established ideas, the stories people tell using these mechanics will always outshine anything us self-indulgent game-smiths might invent. And I think that's rad.

The way development started on the game at all is a friend (who'd never played any tabletop RPG before) was interested in trying one out after becoming a fan of The Adventure Zone. They were interested in Pokémon, so I investigated a fan-made TTRPG based off that. It was far too complicated and interested in replicating the game's mechanics for my taste- I wanted to play something more creativity based- akin to Fate or Powered By The Apocalypse- but maybe with a few more mechanically rigid ideas thrown in to replicate that more tactical combat you get in strategy games and monster collectathons like Pokémon or Persona. When this hypothetical game idea turned into a full-blown project, the idea to set it in my Elseware universe seemed obvious. The resulting playtest sessions far upstaged any of my other Elseware projects, and now we're here, and Fatal Familiar is pretty much ready.

I have a lot of work ahead of me- the game is already designed (technically the release version is version 5, as I've been updating it consistently while playing with friends) but promoting it and making it presentable is something I'm investing a lot of time and energy in. As soon as I click "Publish" on this devblog I'm jumping over to Indiegogo to start the process of *big inhale* crowdfunding this thing. My main goal is to get people as invested in the mechanics and storytelling tools contained therein as I am, so that one day I may be a player, instead of always being the GM. Soon, before the illustrated version of the game is funded or complete, I'll be releasing a text-only version for early adopters. In the meantime, there's a lot of work to do.