My Gaming Projects, Part I - Doomed Slayers

My interests as a role-playing gamer are varied, and I have a large number of gaming projects going on at any one time. In this series of posts I want to present an overview of the most important ones.

Let us start with the most successful one - "successful" because it has actually resulted in a published product:

It all began with some thoughts about the role of classical fantasy RPG "adventurers" - diverse groups of heavily armed, dangerous people who travel from town to town and kill creatures and people for money and treasure. In recent years they have often been called "murderhobos" and for good reason - from the point of view of the typical, upstanding citizen of a fantasy world they must seem like dangerous sociopaths best to be avoided.

So why do the authorities of a typical pseudo-medieval fantasy world tolerate them at all? Why aren't they seen as a threat to the peace of the land to be stopped as soon as possible before they get out of hand? If you play something like D&D the answer could be "because they are tough enough to take out whole armies once they become experienced" - but that's not a very satisfying answer, because then you need to explain why the adventurers haven't simply taken over.

I then realized that I could make all this make sense if I treated adventurers as their own distinct social caste, analogous to the nobles, priests, peasants and so forth you find in feudal societies - the difference is that anyone could join this caste, but would then be expected to follow this caste's strictures which conveniently justify all the usual behaviors you see in adventurers.

In this RPGNet thread, I worked out the basic duties and privileges of this caste - called "Slayers", as the main reason for their existence is to hunt down and slay dangerous monsters which threaten civilization. The duties are:

• Go where you are needed, help where you can (the duty to slay monsters above all else).
• Do not tarry where you are not needed (don't linger and cause trouble in places where there are no monsters to slay).
• Own only what you can take with you (don't own land or houses which would encourage you to settle down and lower the local property values).
• Fight the monsters, not your kin (basically, "stay out of politics" if it's not involving monster-slaying - though that works out better in theory than in practice).

Of course, Slayers also have some unique privileges to compensate for their dangerous way of life:

• Pay them what you can, appropriate to what you ask of them (pay them a fair wage, if you have the means).
• Do not bar their way (freedom of movement across national boundaries, freedom from tolls and taxes at such boundaries).
• What they find, they keep (right to plunder in monster lairs).

The response in the thread was overwhelming, convincing me that I had a winner. To showcase how such a subculture of Slayers would work in practice, I created a suitably generic fantasy world where all the major tropes of fantasy RPGs would have a place:

Eventually, this was published at DriveThruRPG, where you can pick it up for $3.99 - and since its publication, it has gotten some very nice reviews.

+Bruce Baugh writes:

"Out of all this, and the rest of the concepts laid out, a complete yet highly adaptable social structure emerges. You'll recognize precedents, and it's not like Jürgen would claim otherwise - he explicitly discusses some of them, and how the specifics of D&Doid fantasy might change them. You get a system that is fallible and exploitable in lots of ways, and yet serves a real purpose and is capable of enduring for a long time, if the classic dungeon fantasy conditions continue. You get a genuine moral and social foundation for what could easily be - often is - purely amoral or even anti-moral looting and pillage."

+Colin Ritter writes:

"Doomed Slayers takes on this peculiarity by presenting the caste of “Slayers” who have denied claims to social status, wealth, family and their past to become monster hunters. While a noble’s soldiers are busy protecting the borders and seeing to the interests of law and order Slayers actually do the hard work of hunting the things that the soldiers will not or cannot fight. To fans of “A Song of Fire and Ice” the Slayers represent a group similar to the Night’s Watch, but rather than maintaining The Wall and keeping forts they are bound by an honor code to roam the countryside fighting back monsters that threaten to destroy civilization as a whole."

 +Alexander Osias writes:

"Overall, Doomed Slayers is a good sourcebook -- however I find myself looking for more. I want more examples of different types of Slayer organizations that might have arisen -- some more like the Templars, some more like the Freemasons, and some like Hell's Angels perhaps? The intriguing premise already has me looking for more source material. This doesn't mean that Doomed Slayers isn't satisfying -- it means that it has set me up for the next expansion to this campaign premise, which will hopefully maintain its ability to translate almost all of the material into any D&D setting."

He was not the only one expressing a desire for more source material - and in fact, I have a half-finished sourcebook sitting on my Google Drive. Titled "The Order of the Silver Hart", it describes an organization of Slayers who will only accept nobles into their ranks - who upon becoming Slayers technically aren't nobles any more, though they will become nobles again once they stop being Slayers. And they insist they aren't involved in politics, even though many of their members will later rise to positions of power and leadership in their native countries and often forge powerful alliances with other ex-members...

However, as I said at the beginning I have numerous other gaming projects, some of which could also end up as publications - and I need to decide where I should focus my energies. So far, Doomed Slayers has sold 104 times, which certainly isn't bad for a small-press RPG publication, and certainly for my first RPG publication ever - heck, the revenues even paid for commissioning the artwork (though just barely...).

Still, I am wondering whether my other projects could do better on the RPG market. What are your thoughts on this?