Game Design - Mini Dragon Slayer

So I have a degree in Graphic Design (never used professionally) and a career in Technical Writing so I developed some kind of sickness in which I write and rewrite games. So many games are full of unnecessary and often confusing stuff. So many sentences are passive, or tangled, or generally awkward, so I try to see if I can make them better. I'd like to think that I usually do but then toss the results.

Then I came across a challenge on Venger Satanis' blog. He has a game called Crimson Dragon Slayer and he's recently cut it down to 3 pages and challenged anyone who wanted to format it. I took up the challenge, he sent me the Word file and and hour later I had hacked together a nice little game. 

I used art by Kim Diaz Holm, who makes incredible art that he releases under the Creative Commons license with attribution. He has a Youtube channel so you can see him create art from scratch, it's amazing.

I doubled the page count but its still a clean little game that I think would be good to include with modules and such that ordinarily require one own an RPG. I sent it to him and he seemed to like it, he gave me a free pdf for participating, and was generally agreeable about the whole thing. He also said I could post it or change it or do whatever I wanted with it, so I edited a bit more (removed some art and cut a few bits that seemed Cha'alt specific) and got it to 4 pages (2 pages of content as 1-4 is the title page, and 4-4 is the credits).

The main way the game is cut so short was ditching attributes and leaning on other games for spells and monsters. This works for a beer & pretzels pick-up game, or for a game bundled for free with a module. I might follow this up with some kind of Spell book crafted from the Glog. So here is the core game.

Mini Dragon Slayer


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