Welcome to the first Brave the Dreamer design diary! In this series, I’ll be documenting the process of making my first tabletop role-playing game. (Check it out here!)
Like any creative endeavor, making a game can be daunting, but I’ve been fortunate to have phenomenal support along the way. By writing this series, I hope to pay respect to the people and resources I’ve leaned on, to record a snapshot of my design process at this time, and to demystify whatever I can for anyone who might be considering making a game like this.
Some Proximate Influences
The first playable draft of Brave the Dreamer came together in about a week, which, even without any previous game design experience, my gut would say is very fast. But to put things in perspective, I did not have a day job demanding my time (still the case as of this writing), and that draft was in many ways a crystallization of ideas that had been percolating for months already.
Two pages from GUN&SLINGER, created by Nevyn Holmes, showcasing the game’s layout.
I’m indebted to my friend Kona not only for running the (No) Strings Attached Game Jam in July/August of this year, for which Brave the Dreamer was created, but also for hosting a weekly book club where participants were invited to read TTRPG books and share their thoughts and criticism. Because of my (mild) participation in the discussion of game and game-adjacent titles like GUN&SLINGER, Celestial Bodies, Orbital Mechanics, and HOW TO MAKE YOUR RPG/STORY GAME MORE HEALING/ THERAPEUTIC—on top of several years playing story games and indie TTRPGs with various groups of excellent people—I’d been thinking critically about game mechanics, layout, and writing for several weeks before the game jam even started. I’ve long held that the period where I was reviewing/critiquing every book I read has done more for my novel-craft than any workshop, and this experience was similarly galvanizing.
On a wholly different topic, I was on a camping trip with my partner D. this past May when I experienced the latest instance of “X random thing reminds me of this MUD I used to play.” As a teenager, I logged many, many hours (days, weeks) on a certain Multi-User Dungeon, and have many strong memories of it as a result.1 That got D. and me talking more about the MUD, and wondering whether we might enjoy both rolling new characters. We returned home to find that said MUD is, incredibly, still active, with a “small but robust” playerbase. Thus we entered a period of several weeks where we spent altogether too much time On-Line, and I (via my older character, at least) participated in some world-shaking game events that gave me intense, vivid dreams IRL.2
However, after the initial novelty and excitement faded, we were confronted with the fact that this MUD was not actually a very good game. For example, many NPC-given quests were not solvable unless you had hints from other players who’d already done them. Having a social aspect to puzzles can be generative when done intentionally, but these puzzle solutions were more often of the “guess what the designer was thinking” type—an accessibility issue. Other things that were tedious and unfun, including the grindy process of becoming a mage like my character did, had been historically criticized by players, but the game admins—apparently sharing the mindset of older players who had gone through the gauntlet and felt others should have to do the same—decided they should remain unchanged, instead of devising alternative challenging-but-not-tedious paths to the same goals. Finally, since the game was created in the early 90s as a run-of-the-mill medieval fantasy world, the kinds of decolonialist play I had become accustomed to in indie TTRPG spaces, while not nonexistent here, felt like an uphill battle against the world’s bog-standard racist tropes. (Not to mention the TTRPG spaces I’m in are consent- and courtesy-first in a way many of these old games are not.)
I promise my disillusionment with the MUD becomes relevant later.
The Dream
Many of my fiction ideas start as dreams, and Brave the Dreamer was no different. Against the backdrop of so many game-related influences in my waking life, it’s perhaps unsurprising that I dreamed about a game. What was more of a shock was how cohesive the idea was. An entire ludonarrative sprang like Athena full-formed from my unconscious mind!
Unfortunately, that game wasn’t Brave the Dreamer. Instead, it was a game (or metagame) about chasing a fugitive across multiple different board game worlds—a little like the bastard child of Stratego, Jumanji, and possibly Gamedec.
I still think that idea is cool and want to make some version of it, but when I initially sat down to workshop it, I had trouble finding a way to approach it that didn’t involve the player character being a cop. Taking a cue from Mind MGMT, I wondered if the player character might instead be a rogue agent from an agency that was trying to burn them. Perhaps what the player character was seeking wasn’t a fugitive but themself: they’d been shattered into facets, those facets hidden in different worlds.
That notion brought to mind Jane Schoenbrun’s trans masterpiece, I Saw the TV Glow, released earlier this year. I’d seen it twice in theaters—both times emerging with an intense, complex mix of emotions. Perhaps, like the big bad in that film, the enemy agency wanted the player character to forget their true self and live as a derealized puppet. I was immediately intrigued by the emotional stakes of this idea.
And that wasn’t the only connection. There is a scene in the film where (very mild spoilers) the main character revisits the show they were obsessed with as a teenager. They find that it lacks any of its original magic, that any interesting edges it had were ostensibly never there to begin with, and the only thing left is a cringey, made-for-TV quality.
The parallel to the MUD I’d recently revisited felt plain.
In my brainstorming notes, a distinction began to emerge between a Childhood phase and an Adulthood phase—between watching and fanning over a piece of media and losing yourself in its world, vs. re-engaging with it from an emotional distance, perhaps as a forgetful automaton controlled by society’s demands. But translating “society’s demands” into a game mechanic to interact with was uncompelling to me (and is probably being explored in more interesting fashion by Possum Creek’s upcoming game Seven-Part Pact). Childhood and Adulthood instead spun out and evolved into other proper nouns like the Present, the Show, and the Dream.
Ultimately, these nouns seemed to be asking, what was real? And what was worth returning to?
Descended from the Queen
Promo image for For the Queen, first edition.
With these big, meaty questions, I quickly landed on making something “Descended from the Queen.”
Alex Roberts’s For the Queen (second edition recently released by Darrington Press) is one of my favorite RPGs for its zero prep, easy teach and capacity for intense emotional stakes. I’ve played games of it that are goofy and comedic, but much more often they’ve been dramatic, queer, exciting, and tense—sometimes all of the above. Emulating the format felt both encouraged and doable: the System Reference Document (SRD) is available under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) license, and essentially consists of a number of prompts building up to a final choice. No complex mechanics to figure out here—I could simply focus on writing good, incisive questions. From up top, I knew I’d need to know what the final choice would be, and posited: “The Dream summons you. Do you accept the call?”
From there it was off to the races, drafting the opening flavor and some preliminary questions. After a few more days of noodling, I had what I was calling:
80% drafted of a descended from the queen game inspired by _I saw the TV glow_ with 2nd closest touchstone being something like _wayward children_ series. It’s about something you experienced in childhood (the dream), the people you interacted with around it (the forum), and your current situation where you've found acceptance of a new life (the present). And there are some speculative or liminal elements of “was the thing you experienced earlier actually the most enlivening thing that's ever happened to you/the world where you belong, or is it merely an experience that shaped you and you've since put away/your new life is the real one”
More to Come
So, the game was beginning to come together. But how did I write the game’s prompts? And what did I find out in playtest? Check out the next installments in this series, where I’ll do a deep dive on these questions and more:
Part 1: Shoulders of giants
In the meantime, you can find Brave the Dreamer below:
Bonus: Design Notes
If you've read this far down, here’s an extra glimpse at some of my raw design notes (transcribed below):
The Show is the Dream.
In the Dream you were beautiful, powerful.
In the Past, you were neither of those things. Who made sure you knew it? (in the group?)The Dream can also be “quit your job to do the creative pursuit” etc.
Tension b/t Dream & Present should be compelling.
Might Be vs. Is
Acceptance practice vs. Radical Dreaming
Be given a clear model of Might Be, but make it frightening, frighteningly beautiful, intimidating/extermination
Tantamount to annihilation.Why do you distrust the Dream’s ____?
Contempt @ those who chose the Dream.
Descended from the Queen—members of a friend group who experienced The Dream.
And a Postscript about Tools
I did a fair amount of brainstorming (writing and sketching) for Brave the Dreamer in a 3.5” x 5.5” white Moleskine notebook. I had previously tried to use this notebook for journaling/note-taking and ended up discouraged by the small size. Though I did successfully employ it as a travel journal on a 2018 trip to Italy, it became water-damaged in the process, and the white cover got kinda scrungly-looking. It would have continued languishing in disuse had I not heard my writer friend gush about doing morning pages in Decomposition notebooks for their low-stakes, recycled aesthetic.
I decided to pull the Moleskine out for brainstorming, and surprise surprise, the small size and obvious discoloration worked in its favor! I felt less self-imposed pressure to have something perfect on the page, and I had to scrawl very little before I was on a new page, free from any psychic shackles of the previous ones and racking up internal reward points the more pages I used. It also helped that I was seated at a local cafe/bookstore that forbids screens and that I used ink, precluding me from erasing anything (particularly sketches).
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In this case, I was commenting on a charcoal briquette, which was used in the game as an ingredient in magical ink mixing, important for my mage character. ↩
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These dreams spawned an idea for a novel that I managed to workshop into a completed outline earlier this summer using the tarot-like storytelling game Spindlewheel as a writing aid. Another blog post covering that process is probably due! ↩