My Fantasy RPG World, Feedback and Ideas appreciated

I just got back from the Origins Convention in Columbus, Ohio. I had a nice long sleep in my own bed, not a hotel. Tomorrow it's back to work.

I haven't been on a real vacation in a very long time. I spent a lot of time and money on this, but it was very very much worth it.

I learned a lot. Next year will be even better.

I am a champion class procrastinator, and I am the sort of person that cannot be simply told, "the stove is hot, don't touch it". I have to at least hover my hand near the stove once to feel it's warmth.

It is counter intuitive, but for an event like Origins, it helps a lot to pre-plan stuff. I didn't pre-plan much. I had still fun. But I faced several inconveniences. It was harder to find a hotel than I thought. By dumb luck, I got the last hotel room a 20 minute drive away from the convention center. Next year, I plan to reserve a hotel adjacent to the convention center. Those hotels are quite expensive, but it would save me time and aggravation by being closer to the convention and let me go to more events. Also, I would save a lot of incidental expenses by being closer to the convention.

There were hundreds of events to choose from and I went to many fun and informative events, but I was shut out of some events that I wanted to do by not signing up in advance far enough.

Gen Con is four times bigger than Origins and twice as crazy. It's a month away. I can't get a hotel remotely close at this point. I decided to skip Gen Con in 2025. I need to be more on the ball for 2026 if I want to go to Gen Con.

I also networked with some indy authors and indy RPG creators, so I learned some things.

I also learned that running a game at a convention is a different animal than running a game anywhere else. For Origins 2026, I plan to host an event or at least co-host an event.

Most gaming events at Origins are 2 hours or 4 hours. But that has an asterisk. It's always 1 hour and fifty minutes or three hours and fifty minutes, officially. But someone is going to be ten minutes late, and it will take about ten minutes to get settled and started in most cases. So really, if i want to run a Scarterra demo, I need it to be self-contained in three hours and thirty minutes.

A while ago, I ran a self-contained Scarterra adventure at my local gaming store for a bunch of stranger, about four hours and some change and I thought it felt fast. I need to go a little bit leaner if I want to get in on the convention circuit.

Getting into Gen Con as an exhibitor is really hard and you need to have a network or some name recognition, but it would not be difficult for me to get a slot in Origins 2026. I just need to submit an application two to three months prior.

I can either host an event under my own name and banner. Or I can join a group such as Games on Demand. Games on Demand had several events with 4 to 6 tables, each with a different home brew RPG demo.

 

World Anvil has their 2025 Summer Camp going. They are releasing 40 assorted prompts in batches of 10. And if you write 8 you get a copper badge, 16 a silver, 24 a gold, and 32 a diamond.

I am a completionist so I'm going for diamond. Probably not going for all 40. You only get dubious bragging rights.

Besides the digital badges, every one of the 40 categories has a small prize. Each category has a single judge who can use whatever subjective standards he or she wants. If I win a prize, neat. But the real prize for me is getting more eyeballs on my website.

As of the time of this writing, 20 prompts are revealed, and I have written articles for eight of them. The World Anvil Summer Camp Home page is here. My personal Summer Camp page is here.


I am not going to post all my Summer Camp article links here, but I'm especially proud of my article on priests and priestesses. I put a lot of effort into that because it's a major part of Scarterra's lore.

 

I have a new professional grade character sheet.

Viewable from this link.

 

Summer Camp 2025 is over. I wrote 33 articles this month. You can find them all here.

These are my three favorite articles

Priests and priestesses

Draconic Idioms that permeated human vernacular

Psions


I have various irons in the fire on new Scarterra things. We'll see what I end up finishing first.

I have recently hired some IP lawyers that have actually worked on RPGs before and are gamers. You might say they are literal rules lawyers.

 

Zeta Gardner continues to produce excellent work.

Here is the finished version.



Here is the same artist's illustrations of two ollums. Ollums of course are gnome cannibals.

Dibbrist the ollum is a less mutated ollum, so he can still pass for a gnormal gnome, he works as a gong farmer which is handy because no one scrutinizes gong farmers too closely.

Besides moonlighting as a cannibal, he acts as a spy and smuggler for criminal cartels. I haven't used Dibbrist in a story yet, but Dibbrist can be adapted as a spy or minion of whoever the Villain of the Week happens to be assuming the Villain of the Week is urban.

Ollums are stronger than they look. Notice that the small gnome is pushing a human sized cart without difficulty, but again no one scrutinizes a gong farmer too closely.



Collme is a more deformed ollum that cannot pass for a gnormal gnome except in very low light. Collme eventually fell in with a pack of morlocks as a scout, but when captured, she sold out the morlocks. She was an NPC in an adventurer where the PCs used her to show them where the morlocks were.



The extremely fancy blade is on purpose. Collme was part of the gnomish minority in a dwarven city and she stole the blade from dwarves. Dwarven blades have great craftsmanship.

 

Yay, I see that my suggestion from years ago did help giving a cool character a part of their backstory.

 

Two characters, only one has an illustration though. A middle aged kalazotz woman is quietly using the gong farmers guild as a front for criminal enterprises.

Now that I think about it, I could use a third character. I should probably introduce a gong farmer who is actually a good person.

 

I don't if any of you guys while away happy time scrolling around my website. I have a new friend who is a professional web designer. He is giving me tips on CSS code and website layout. On this front, I have progressed from "baby" to "kindergarten".

My buddy has strongly sold me on the notion that a 1920 x 500 header is best at the top, but more vertically oriented pictures are good in the body of an article. He used the "metaphor" of the header the appetizer and the portraits are the
"meal".

On a computer screen a 1920 x 500 will take up exactly a third of the screen, which is a nice visual but it can let readers start reading the article.

I love this zodiac wheel



But when it's used as an article header, it less glorious.



Now I have this picture of the Nine in 1920 x 500 format



It looks a lot better in article preview mode.


When I mention the Nine in the body of an article rather than the header of an article, I will still include the full zodiac wheel.





On smart phones, the 1920 x 500 format is less visually appealing. According to Google Analytics, roughly 40% of my website traffic is on smart phones and 60% is on computers.

The search bar will obscure the header. But my new friend gave me a CSS code to move the search bar on smart phones and only smart phones.


Right now, preview mode of articles with portraits shows the middle third of most portraits which basically means "Here's the torso! Look at the torso! LOOK AT IT!"

I can fix that, but I have to do that one-at-a-time, and I have hundreds of portraits. I will alter the headers one at a time if necessary, but if there is a CSS short cut to make this quicker, I will find it. In the meantime, I can use the Nine's 1920 x 500 header on like dozens of articles, so I'll do that first.


Hopefully more incremental improvements will follow. If any of you guys have suggestions for further improvements to make my website easier to navigate, let me know.

 

My current short-term project is to finetuning my world primer.

Once I have my world primer as good as I can make it, I'm going to overall the layout of my homepage to make the world primer front and center, below the logo and elevator pitch.

Here is my world primer

Please critique it. No criticism is too nitpicky or too harsh. I'm also seeking feedback not just on the text but on article layout and formatting.

I want this to be as close to perfect as possible.

 

I kind of want to commission more kalazotz illustrations. But I'm slowing down on commissioning illustrations at the moment. I have had less than stellar luck finding new artists I like, and my favorite old artists are kind of busy, so they can only squeeze me in on their off-time from their day jobs. I have a one more awesome gnome illustration in the pipeline but it won't be ready for a while yet.

I won't pretend that making AI is difficult, but there is a learning curve for using the tool, and I have made some incremental improvements, learning the options I have, including how to alter dimensions of generated images, so I can make better header images, landscape rectangles instead of square portraits.

These are all AI portraits I've used for recent articles.







And Spooktober 2025, I have 14 vaguely spooky themed articles. I only need 13 to get the participation badge but a voice in my head is telling me to do all 21. However many I end up doing, you can check out my Spooktober entries all in one convenient place.

Spooktober 2025 in Scarterra

 

I don't know if I mentioned spirit loas before. Spirit loas are something I invented for Scarterra. Well it's loosely based on Caribbean folklore, so I didn't invent, but it is something you don't see in many medieval fantasy settings.

"Loa" means "horse". Spirits, mainly the spirits of dead people will ride the horse. Effectively a spirit loa invites a spirit of the dead to possess him/her and while doing so can borrow skills possessed by the dead person. They can summon spirit riders across vast distances in the blink of an eye.

They can also detect ghosts nearby, that's mainly for running medium based ghost stories.

Spirit loas, general loa

Spirit loas, RPG mechanics

Spirit loas, guidelines for PC character generation

I created spirit loas with the intent of giving players an option for creating interesting PCs with interesting powers that are a lot easier to understand and use than playing a full-on magic user.

Thus far, no one has chosen to make a loa PC in anything more than a one-shot, so I haven't got to explore them much in-game.

I don't usually give you guys accounts of the RPGs I run, but things have gotten interesting and very loa-y.

In my main campaign with my main play tester, he has recently busted a villainous scheme to experiment on spirit loas, enhance their powers, and create super soldiers.

After killing or driving off the villains from the spirit loa prison camp, he has now 23 spirit loas and 2 captured enemy knights to escort back to friendly territory.

The spirit loas range between the ages 12 and 45 and all have varying levels of PTSD from their horrific imprisonment.

Originally, I thought the PCs would take the PCs on the shortest distance to friendly territory which would require them to outfight or outwit a bunch of soldiers and enemy informants, but instead the PCs are opting to go through rugged mountains in the winter to go around their enemies, effectively trading a "Man versus Man" conflict into "Man versus Nature". Not my usual, but this has story possibility.

My new favorite TV show, Frieren: Beyond Journey's End, is a medieval fantasy that subverts normal fantasy stories by putting the emphasis on character interactions while traveling, foraging for food, and taking on oddball jobs for traveling funds while putting relatively less emphasis on dungeon crawling and monster fighting.

It's a fair bit harder to do that in an RPG than in a television show, but I'm going to try to do slice of life. Herding 23 strangers through the wilderness would be interesting, especially since spirit loas tend to be weird. And spirit loas can typically channel ghostly abilities for 10 minutes to an hour at a time, so they have versatile skills but with an on/off switch.

The more they use their power in a single day, the more tiring it is and the greater the risk of a hostile possession, but I imagine it would make good television to have a scared twelve year suddenly start talking like a gruff dwarf and start seamlessly making a fire by rubbing sticks together.

In Scarterra spirit loas are rare. Spirit loas are mostly self-taught. And a lot of spirit loas are socially stunted loners, so you don't see them in large groups very often. This might be the first time in centuries where 20+ loas are gathered in a single placed. I could have all sorts of unforeseen supernatural events.

At the very least, spirit loas attract ghosts. And ghosts attract other things.

 

I get to run a demo game of Scarterra at a convention in November.

It's a very very small convention, but you got to start somewhere.

This is the first convention of it's type, so it's possible without enough word of mouth, we might get a small crowd. But it's something.

 

well, i suppose you will be nervous and excited at the same time...

 

I ran this adventure a long time ago with people I met at my local game store and it went well. It took me 4ish hours, and I need to squeeze it into 3ish hours.

First, I need to encourage less out of character chatter and just try to be more focused. I got some examples as I've been playing a wider variety of games run by other people, so I have more examples for what to do and what not to do when running a one-shot.

Just yesterday, I played a beta-test for an TTRPG based on the Invincible streaming series/comic book series.

Spoiler: Short summary of how this adventure went not that it's applicable to what I'm doing

It really felt like the show. We fought the Mauler twins. We caught one of them (the original according to him), but the other got away. We didn't save any of their hostages. We caused lots of collateral damage. We only recovered a tiny piece of their research on Kaiju before the warehouse blew up (and Rex's half-baked attempt to shut down some automated gun turrets instead destroyed the computer files Robot wanted), and most of us walked quite injured. I played Atom Eve. Maybe I should have played Monster Girl, she can take a hit better...we really got the crap beaten out of us.

Second, I need to trim some obstacles. Basically the adventure is the PCs have to go through a series of obstacles and challenges to get the bad guys and their would-be sacrificial victims. So fewer obstacles = shorter run time.

There are dozens of different gaming events going on. Since since this is very first gaming convention in my hometown, there might not be enough foot traffic for every gaming table. Though the event goes well, they plan to make it a recurring annual event.

I won't be able to run the Scarterra demo unless 3-5 players decide to try out my table in a timely fashion. I can potentially pad my numbers by asking local friends to act as players but that's a last resort, in order to do real playtesting, I want to run for strangers.

The event organizer may have some guidelines I need to follow but this the draft of the tagline I want to put in the event guide.

It’s the day after the Beltaine Honey Festival in the Barony of the Bees. Three children are missing and all the local powers that be are either too busy or too hung over to be of any help. If the children are to have any chance of being rescued, it’s up to the player characters.

This is a homebrew High Fantasy genre tabletop RPG using mind's eye theater instead of miniatures or grid maps and using skill-based dice pools instead of classes and levels. Dice and premade characters are provided.

From playing other people's demo games, I really liked it when a character portrait was included, so I plan to include visual aids. I have several pre-made Plan A is to try to print out full color AI art images of the character options on one side, with ~220 word character profile/background on the back side. It'll help with immersion, and potentially be something to take home with the character sheet. Both the character sheet and the character background will have "www.scarterra.com" on it prominently. If I can convert one fan, I will consider this a smashing success

I might through 200ish words describing the basic dice system in a nutshell.

If I can't get decent AI portraits in the next week, I'll revert to plan B which is to use the Hero Forge portraits I already have now which aren't have bad.

Plan C is to not bother with the portraits at all and just hand out character sheets.

Anyway this is my exciting plan.