I suppose ever since I started making games and getting into this indie ttrpg scene I’d wanted to do my own dungeon crawler, dungeons are just such a perfect little unit of gameplay, but it wasn’t until I I played in a Play-by-Post playtest of Tibbius’ Swords Against Demons that an idea really started to coalesce in my mind about what my take would be…

Hey! Long time no see…

I’m starting up this ol’ blog again and getting it going properly this time. I go over everything that’s happened with me and TTRPGs pretty much since last October and talk a little about what’s next.

The times is finally here! Time to announce when you’ll all be able to get your hands on a copy of JKG. I’ve been waiting for this for quite a while and I’m so excited to see what you all think of it. The game will be available digitally from both itch.io and DriveThruRPG with a very nice Print on Demand full colour paperback available on DriveThru from October 20th 2021.

So, I’ve attempted to start writing this blogpost a few times now and very quickly came to the realisation that I don’t really have much to say that isn’t already in the book. So this one is gonna be pretty short and skip a lot of things, though I do have a few things to talk about.

In Jack Kills Giants I wanted to get away from the typical privileged adventurer class of characters. Even from the generally grittier and lower class characters that come out of OSR style games by focusing on ordinary people, forced into dangerous situations. Giant Slayer will never be a profession in JKG. No-one who does this wants to be doing it forever. Slaying giants is a side gig, a desperate gamble and just a really really terrible workplace environment.

The professions each character can have are intentionally mundane and only tangentially useful to giant-hunting. No print-maker or village farrier in their right mind is going to pick and leave to chase man-eating giants around, but they don't have a choice.

I'm not sure where I latched onto the idea of using keywords, whether it was a specific game or chatter on one of the RPG discords but the moment I started using them I fell in love with them. It started with the giants themselves, a big inspiration, as the name suggests, for Jack Kills Giants was of course the stories of Jack the Giant Killer. In every story Jack defeats the giant through trickery rather than an outright fight (also the original stories, like most folklore, are incredibly gore-filled and brutal).

Since I'm going to be releasing this game soon (keep your eyes peeled for the announcement) I thought I might as well do a nice big breakdown of my design decisions and inspirations in creating Jack Kills Giants. Keeping on theme, I'm going to attach each topic to a body part. Naturally it makes sense to start with the heart: the core resolution mechanics.