Swords & Shaman of Sonnegard Project (also it has been awhile)

I'm reopening this blog after many many years because at last, something is happening.  I stopped blogging here because I was moving into a new position at GameStop Corporate at the time, where I thought I might be moving closer into the game community.

It was a wonderful experience, but during my time there, my friends reawakened my first love of gaming, the table top role playing game. I found that more than computer games, my passion lay in the table top rpg experience.

As time went on, I was asked to DM for the group and eventually I had a rather exhaustive stack of game world information and a couple of house rules to our campaign.  This never felt like enough though.  I felt that we would get bogged down in rules at times, or other times I had to explain why not everything published was allowed. In other words, why our game was different.

A very good friend of mine suggested that I write a new rpg. I was dismissive of the idea at first, but as time went on, it seemed inevitable. We wanted a game that had very light rules mechanics to keep focus on the gameplay, but very robust and crunchy characters to keep players invested. We also wanted something that showcased what the game world was really like, rather than attempting to bolt rules onto someone else's very nice system.

So one weekend, I sat down and compiled all of my notes and tried to carve out something that might be playable. On Sunday, September 17th of 2017 I showed the 187 page doc file to my wife Liz who was eager to play.

Liz was impressed but right away informed me of how badly written and confusing it all was. You see, she is a former publishing assistant. So we both went right to work on hammering things out. Liz has been the best partner one could ask for, and the game simply could not exist without her. She's a writer, designer, editor and layout and pretty much everything else that needs doing.

That was almost exactly two years ago, and we have come a long way.  We have since released an early test version of the game. Our test game, 'Swords & Shaman of Sonnegard' is available for download on drive thru rpg now! We have also demo'd the game for several conventions and the feedback has been very positive. We are so grateful to everyone who came to the table

At present, we are in the process of finalizing a massive edit of the entire Game Master's book now and very soon should have a much improved version of this online. We have been working closely with Juan Ochoa https://www.juanochoa.co/ , who is doing an amazing job of illustrating the Player's Book which we hope to have finalized for kickstarter in early 2020.

In the meantime, it is my intention to continue posting updates here as well as anything else that might be relevant.

Regards,
Brian