#@sp1n0za

[prima-materia-ttrpg]

It Begins / How do I introduce over six months of development in a single post?

Salutations, I'm a gay nerd and I wanted to make a fantasy ttrpg with a setting that panders to myself and anyone else who might have my taste so here we are :)

The ttrpg in question is Prima Materia, and I've been working on it for a while and making ok progress so I figure I should probably start a devblog (that's what this is) so I can finally start sharing it rather than keeping the entire project within my own circle of friends, never seeing the light of day beyond that. Particularly because I'm finally playtesting some aspects and want to actually release it into the wild someday so people can share and play it as they please.

Ah, so you've clicked the keep reading link? OHOHO you fool I shall unleash an infodump of epic proportions onto ye!

*checks notes*

Right I should probably introduce this project in more depth and explain how I got to this point, and why I'm working on it in the first place. A chronological account should suffice.

Back in the days of yore (2020) when I was getting into ttrpgs for what would become the third time I had first gotten into them (previous times don't count), I was trying to create a setting for DND so I could become a DM for the first time, fueled by the disappointment that every other game I'd been a player in ended after about 2 sessions max. Making an entire setting is of course not recommended for first time DMs, particularly ones that ever want to play the game, but of course this did not dissuade me for I am built different [incorrectly].

I built a tidally locked planet for that campaign, filled it with lore and towns and cities and an apocalypse that happened some time in the past. All was well, and the campaign lasted about a year before the holiday season came and caused it to dissipate. Reduced to atoms. By that point I had been homebrewing creatures and items for my homebrewed setting, including new playable species and subclasses. Homebrew is like a glue trap, and brother, I'm a dead rat.

After that campaign ended the OGL scandal hit (among many other things I won't go into depth about) and I saw the need to create for myself a place where I can always and forever write fun stuff to share with others, in a system that I have control over. After all, integrating the system and the setting, building them explicitly to serve each other, would allow for much more creativity.

That setting still exists on my hard drive, and while I do import some of my original work for it into Prima Materia's setting from time to time, it is dead and shall remain dead until such a time I can completely re-write it to make sense in Prima Materia. But it's so ingrained with DNDs lore that it honestly would be more like an homage to the original campaign I had with my friends.

So, I got to work. I started, of course, with watching a million videos on the subject of making a ttrpg and not actually writing anything down. But eventually, an eternity later, I was ready. I started doing some science-adjacent worldbuilding to build the initial planet for the setting, in which the initial setting would be. I created continents that looked mildly plausible, charted out ocean gyres, wind patterns, and finally climates. This continued for a while, and I made the playable species and started figuring out where on the continents they would have evolved so I could figure out what their cultures would eventually be in the modern day after 10,000 years of history.

In short, I had worldbuilder's disease; and while I did make some decent progress on mechanics like dice rolling, some combat, skills, attributes and stats, it started coming to a head when I convinced myself that I needed to make a minimum of five conlangs in order to name seven continents (and various cities).

Enter stage left, one of my friends who thinks my project is cool but recognizes that I am not getting much done. This friend, Spinz (who I hear has their own project coming down the pipeline by the way >w>), has become my Screamer of Tasks and is reminding me of the important things to focus on to actually make the ttrpg a reality some time in this millennium. Thanks to their help, I've been able to get to the stage where I am able to inflict my project onto my friends so that I may playtest mechanics and generally have an otherwise fun time with them.

So what actually is the setting? That seems like a lot of buildup and waffling.

True! I felt it was important to explain where the project is coming from. As for the setting itself, I don't think I can do better than the introduction I already wrote for it in the PDF. So here's that.

After several hundreds of trillions of years the last known natural stars in the universe began to die, heralding the end of the stelleriferous period and the start of a new age full of the neutron cores and black holes they left behind. But the gods this universe spawned would not let their mother die so soon. They created new stars fueled by their own Prima Materia, the building block from which all other substance comes; a pure marriage between matter, energy, time, and thought through which the manipulation and creation of physics itself is possible.

The gods created massive bodies for themselves in orbit around their stars. Some fell into a deep sleep, some are content to watch as the eons of time give way to the fruits of their labor. Others still engage in grandiose projects of a more personal nature. But they all continue the work which allows for life to once again evolve in the small pockets of the universe which now continue to defy entropy, a constant stream of Prima Materia flowing from their bodies into the stars that they orbit. Some day, they too will reach the stars.

But that's old news, and there are none left alive to remember it but the gods themselves. In the world of Prima Materia, you play as a relatively normal sapient creature in a smaller corner of reality that has much smaller problems to contend with. Brigands, societal clashes, ancient ruins, dragons, and the wayward extra-universal threat to the planet. Many societies have also been able to harness certain powers of now free-floating Prima Materia through a process often known as "Alchemy." Alchemy, an involved study which requires just as much craftsmanship as it does ingenuity, has opened up an entirely new science for societies to develop in this age of the universe.

Who will you be? What legends will be written in your name?

There are several playable species in the setting, all of which have various distinct cultures. Koura, which are basically giant lobsters; Sepia, which are basically giant Cuttlefish; Humans, which are basically giant chimpanzees; Entari, which are strange bird pterodactyl things with feathers (they're hard to explain but I will get art I promise); Xente, which are basically giant amoeba (ones that can change their shape to be humanoid of course, what even would be the point if they couldn't); Possum, which are basically... bipedal possums and Ternaki which are basically short technicolor space elves (They believe in God). All of these species will get their very own blog post of course, but this post is hugely long and I'm getting worried about people getting bored so that's all for now.

In the future blog posts won't be this long I promise (hopefully) and they'll be a lot more focused on one thing. This blog is meant to record the development process, write down a lot of worldbuilding that has lived only in my head for too long, and link to playtests.

If you made it this far, holy crap you read a lot of my shenanigans thank you for your time I am indebted to you, truly. The next post will be about Dice Mechanics. Bye.

P.S. If you want to ask questions about Prima Materia (or me) you can send me an ask on my main blog @girlcodedcreature