Archipelago

Archipelago is a magical pirate TRPG that I developed with a few friends over the course of a year. The game was designed to be incredibly modular and customizable, both in creation and development of characters, and ships. It was inspired not only by video games like Darkest Dungeon and Path of Exile, but also some of our favorite seafaring movies, like Pirates of Penzance, and Master and Commander

In our planning and designing, we aimed for interactions and combat that would be fun and exciting, without being slowed down by too many mechanics and rules. We wanted to make sailing a ship strategic yet simple. We wanted leveling up a character or ship to feel weighty and fulfilling and special. We wanted Game Masters to be able to create short and long term quests and goals for the characters with ease. And most importantly, we wanted the system to intrinsically have flavor that would lead to deep, fun, thrilling stories.

Creating a character involves spending points to unlock abilities and traits in skills trees. Each character has access to the skill tree for their own class, as well as four other generic skill trees that all characters have access to. There is no predetermined or mandatory path a character must go down-- all advnacement decisions are completely in the hands of the player. In letting players choose what skills and abilities they want, we hoped that there would be a lot of character diversity, even if two characters belonged to the same class.

Figuring out combat was the most challenging and time consuming part of our design, and it went through many different iterations. Ultimately we decided on an initiative system that utilized "zones." Zones were an abstraction of a battlefield with the intent of being able to have large scale battles without crowding the map or worrying about how everyone moves. For example, a zone might be the whole top deck of a ship, or the crow's nest 20 feet in the air. Being in the same zone as someone essentially means that you are next to, or able to be next to, someone right now. By doing this, we removed having to walk around space-by-space and calculating if an attack could hit through a sea of people, and sped up combat.

In the end, we reached a pre-alpha stage with a lite version of the rules that you can look at (and play, if you would like!). It was great fun to work on a longer term project like this, and Archipelago has definitely inspried me in more ways than just game design (in fact, I am writing a little something pirate related right now. Stay tuned!). And while the game has its flaws, it is something I am still very proud of. I am looking forward to taking another shot at TRPGs as a passion project in the future, and know that what I learned with Archipelago will be invaluable to what I do next.