Hello folks,

Our Pantheon is by far the most popular thing I have released on itch.io and sees, on average, around 20 to 30 downloads a week and has had over 5,000 downloads in the past two years! Part of the popularity is certainly due to the BLM mega bundle it was a part of back in 2020, but from looking at the data, it seems mostly just made folks aware of it. I thank you all who have downloaded it and I hope you enjoyed your time playing it.

Now for some exciting news! Today I have released Our Pantheon: Legends! This is not just a new version but a different take on the concept. It is no longer a hack of Dawn of Worlds and is now it’s own thing. Legends is intended to be a much less mechanically dense game without the crunchiness of the original. It is streamlined to focus more on crafting interesting narratives. You are still drawing maps and the like, but it draws more inspiration from fiction first games.

In Legends you no longer are spending Aether points on a long list of actions. Instead players can do one of three actions on their turn. This may sound limiting, but the way you define things is quite different. Say you draw a forest on the map, now you can just say “there are some wood elves living here, they have dark blue skin.” Just like that you’ve added to the map, defined a new species, and new society. In the previous version that would have been three actions.

This is a more collaborative game now too. Whenever something new is defined the other players have the option to ask questions about it. These questions can be very leading too. To continue from the example above, someone could ask “how do they react when the nearby humans start using the forest for lumber?” The only catch there is, that group of humans would have to have been previously defined.

The Chaos system has also been changed. Previously it was based on a series of dice tables. While I think it worked pretty good I decided to replace it with a deck of 52 unique cards. One of these cards will be drawn and played at the start of every round. They can be events similar to the stuff you saw on those dice tables, or they can have special rules on them that 

I’ve been working on Legends off and on for the past year and change. It has been a very iterative process. First it started out as a simple overhaul of the Aether system from the original. Then I worked on something that was extremely crunchy but had rules that allowed the societies and factions you made to play themselves. This proved to be a bit too slow and awkward for my liking so then I came up with the idea for a set of campaign games. This is where Legends first emerged from. The idea was (and possibly still is) that there would be two games you would play in sequence, one (Legends) where you would define most of the map, cultures, and various groups. Then there would be Chronicle where those things would have stats and actions they would take on their own. The problem was, that second game never really came together in a way that I liked. There is a new idea I’ve been working on, however, that I’m excited for, but we’ll see if it comes together.

In other news, I make video games as well! I recently released a free game called The One Who Struggles. It was featured at last month’s Seattle Indies Expo. If you enjoy games with difficult boss battles, please check it out.