By: Joe Gaylord (Lazarus Game Lab)

Since 2018, I’ve been regularly publishing TTRPG content, supplements, adventures, games, settings, and so on. I can imagine a lot of people in the hobby want to be involved in this side of TTRPGs, but don’t have a clear sense of how to get started. This is the start of a series of articles on my process for developing games and other TTRPG content. I highly encourage you to also pick up guides from people like Storytelling Collective and others who have covered elements of this in more detail and who can offer other perspectives on the topic.

For this article, I want to take you beat by beat through the process of creating a game. This isn’t theoretical; this is how I actually built a game for the Free RPG Game Jam. It took me about 2 weeks, but I’ve been doing this a lot, so your mileage may vary time-wise. I’m going to use this article to introduce the macro-level ideas, which I’ll unpack in the rest of the series. 

Patches is a cozy journaling TTRPG. In it, you play as an article of clothing or other fibercraft object and tell the story of how you are made, used, damaged, worn out, and reused until you are disposed of, then how you are remembered after. You can pick it up here: https://lablazarus.itch.io/patches 

Starting Places: The Kick and The Pitch

I always start a game with two elements that shape everything else I’m going to do, what I call the “kick and the pitch.”

The kick is my word for the initial motivation that pushes me to build a game. It almost always puts some requirements and limits in place and might shape a lot of the details of the final publication. In the case of Patches, my kick was a post on Patreon from Beth and Angel Make Games promoting a game jam. The goal was simple: make a game between April 14 and May 25 to include in a bundle for Free RPG Day.

 Note that this kick didn’t give a lot of direction other than “build an RPG quickly” and maybe “one you’re ok giving away for free”.

The pitch is my term for the one-sentence description of a game, which I usually try to nail down at the beginning. It’s important because almost everything you do begins or should begin with this kind of description. Because Patches’ kick didn’t give a lot of direction, my hunt for a pitch needed to begin with seeking inspiration. That came when I was reading a book to my son. Something From Nothing by Phoebe Gilman is a kids’ book I have loved since I was a child. It’s the story of a grandfather remaking a blanket into various clothing, until every scrap of material is used up. However, it is not gone entirely, and the grandson uses the memories to create the story, making something from nothing. 

Mechanically, I needed something that would be quick to make and test, and which would be highly adaptive to this kind of abstract story, which pushed me to a journal game. 

So, Patches’ pitch became “A journal game that tells the story of an article of clothing being remade and repurposed until it is gone, narrating various owners over time”. Keep in mind that a pitch might not be totally finished when you start a game, and it’s fine to revisit it as inspiration comes. However, you want to begin with a clear enough idea that you can start working concretely on it.

Framework Documents

For me, the last step before sitting down to actually write is defining some key elements of the game. I do this by putting down a scoping document, choosing an audience, and defining a team and community. 

Scoping documents are a tool I borrowed from project management. They tell you the basics of how the game will look and are essential for keeping a team on the same page. 

They cover things like: What is the expected publication date and platform? How long and in what format should it be? What system will you use? What budget is available for creation and dissemination? What has to be part of the project? What can’t be part of it? 

For Patches, this was minimal and informal (since this document is mostly for team coordination, I probably wouldn’t write it down in this context, but I would have the parameters very clear in my head when starting): 

• Solo journal game
• Duet mode optional, depending on how things develop
• Focus on cozy aesthetic, “make and do and mend” mindset
• Target playtime about 2 hours (personal preference)
• Publication via Itch.io by May 25, 2026
• Very low budget, ideally €0
• Target price <€5, free through bundle
• Short format, 1-12 pages

Alongside the scoping document, I always try to think about a target audience for a game. What kind of people would like to play it and why? If possible, don’t make this abstract; think of someone specific whom you know and make the game for them specifically. If you can, even ask them for feedback on interim work.

Patches is for people who want a TTRPG experience, especially between formal sessions. It speaks to people who want a cozy aesthetic, especially those with an interest in crafting, making, and sustainability. There may be some overlap with vintage and sewing enthusiasts. It likely hits young millennials or old zoomers, but age can be open. My nibling Molly fits the bill of this game’s target; they play Pathfinder regularly, always have a craft project going, and appreciate cozy aesthetics. 

The last element before writing is to define a team and community. The team is who will work directly on the project, writing, art, layout, etc. This is easy for patches because it needs to be fast and low to the ground. The team is me. The community is who I’ll turn to for feedback and ideas, often people working in parallel on similar projects. I’m in a number of Discord servers, but because this is a jam through Beth and Angel, I’ll look into their server to see if I can get support there. Otherwise, Rising Tide can probably provide a good community for me, with a lot of people working on a diverse range of games. In the end, I also turned to a friend with expertise on accessibility and layouts because of specific concerns that came up.

Conventions, Conceits, and Inspiration

While I’m writing, there are some key sources of ideas that I like to keep in mind. 

Conventions are the expected elements of a genre or style of game. For Patches, I wanted to make sure the game included the idea of upcycling, reselling, and disposal only as a final option. This should also include a notion of material becoming less over time with use. It also should be cozy, so focused on normal life with low conflict and stakes, getting involved with individuals on an emotional level. 

A convention that I knew I needed to include early on, but wasn’t sure how to build in, was randomization. Journal games are basically a list of creative writing and need a means to vary the prompts and provide some details and inspiration. I needed a specific mechanic there, but I didn’t feel like simply drawing cards or rolling dice fit with the feeling of the game. It was “in square brackets” for me, something I’d need to revisit and mull over.

Conceits are the unique features or ideas that you expect people to agree to when they sit down to play. You can ask players to buy into a few conceits, but too many can make a game opaque and hard to play. One of the conceits I chose early for Patches was the idea of the “journal” being a single page that gets smaller and smaller as you write. You’d have a full sheet for the first entry, then fold it in half, and half again to represent the game progressing and the fabric wearing out. This let me keep the game short, which I prefer with journal games. It also gave me a sense of “ludonarrative consonance,” the idea that the story you tell and the mechanics you play with work together well. 

I took a piece of paper and fiddled with the concept a bit, and I liked what I was looking at.

Inspirations are elements you “borrow” while writing a game, whether from your previous work, other games you’ve encountered, or from broader experiences. I wrote here before about my love of blunderbuss tables, which are tables that use a full set of TTRPG dice at the same time. Here, I found a good starting place for the randomization that eluded me earlier. If I started with a full blunderbuss table and removed a die for each journal entry, it would mirror the reduction in the writing space and the material, and give me a thematic source of randomization. This could work.

Pen to Paper

After a long journey, this is where I started to really write. 

I began, as I almost always do, with an outline and layout. Ideally, I’d like the “rules” to fit on 3-4 printed pages, with the tables being the front and back of a sheet, matching the writing space. Given the importance of folding the page in half, A4 format made sense. I designed a quick cover using Canva. I made the cover A5 initially, so half a page, giving me a page and a half for any rules and instructions besides the tables themselves. Journal games have simple rules, but it’s good to be as specific as you can, even if part of that is “don’t let the rules limit you, use your imagination”.

For the entries and blunderbuss tables, I decided that I could use the R theme common in sustainability circles (Normally: “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle”) to frame a theme for each entry. A4 became “Receive” for the first owner of the item. A5 became “Reuse” for the next. A6 was “Repurpose” for when the item was made into something else, A7 “Reduce” for when it started to become a scrap, A8 “Remains” for the last bits and final disposal, and A9 “Remember” for its legacy. Each would have thematic tables that removed the largest die, until Remember had only a D4 table. I gave each table entry an initial title or description and put some lorem ipsum text to test whether this formatting would fit on the page, and it worked well. 

The aesthetic was more or less what I was looking for. From there, I went through a process of expanding and refining, writing as many ideas as I could on the tables in a document, then removing or editing the ideas I had, and then writing more to fill any gaps. I went through a number of iterations, changing ideas such as the specific order of the tables. In spite of my efforts to plan ahead, taking time to fiddle with ideas in my notebook is a big part of this step as well. 

At the end of this process, I had what I think of as an ashcan or whitepaper version, plain black text on white paper. This isn’t usually enough to be a saleable product, but going back to my business roots, it’s a minimum viable product. What it does is allow me to test and check my work before investing more effort in it.

Test, Revise, Layout

With my ashcan version in hand, I started to test. I looked over the flow of the game, checking for connections, errors, and repetitions. Then I ran it through. The good news is that the rhythm mostly worked well. 

The only major issues, other than changing a couple of prompts, were to suggest players pre-roll the next scene and to include a trigger warning in case players roll something troubling, such as the story of a child’s toy ending in “tragedy”. 

If more substantial edits were needed, I would need another round of tests and edits. I had some friends run it as well, and they overall seemed happy with the game. As such, I could move forward with the layout.

From here, the conceits took over again. I look for layouts and art assets that complement the overall theme. I had my cover from Canva, the golden spiral layout design for the tables, and ultimately, the final journal page. Continuing to work with Canva, I used a text that looked like crosstitch. To achieve the organization I wanted, I made most of the layout into a table. I needed to size the text to fit. Once I had everything fitted, I used a dash border and pastel colors to create the effect of a quilt. To fill some of the white space, I added a few handicraft-looking graphics. Here is the end result:

One key thing to keep in mind is the role of accessibility and printing technology for your final document. While I love the final look and vibe I arrived at, I created a second document much closer to my white paper design. It’s not my preferred version, however, it will be easier to print, read, and use with assistive technology.

Ideally, before sending, I like to print the document as a test. This helps ensure the fonts are comfortably sized and nothing strange happens in export and printing. Sometimes, due to timelines, that isn’t practical, but it is a good step to include.

Publish

And that’s the document ready to ship. With my full color and white paper version set up, I was ready to send the project. Of course, there was still much to do in terms of promotion and publicity, areas where I fall severely short and am still learning.

It’s deeply rewarding to see something you’ve worked on become something others can enjoy. Even if a game sells 1 or 2 copies, it feels great to see it exist in the world after the journey from idea to page. I wish you all the luck in the world in your own games.

Coming up in the rest of this series, I’ll take each of these steps, starting with the prep work, unpack them, and give you some more detail on how to use them in your own process.

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About the Author

Joe Gaylord is a TTRPG creator based in Northern Italy, publishing as Lazarus Game Lab. He has been playing TTRPGs for over 25 years and has worked on over 50 titles as an author, contributor, and designer. You can access his work, including Patches, and connect with him here: https://lablazarus.carrd.co/