Hi everyone!

I'm writing from Oklahoma, where I'm getting to spend some quality time with Owen K.C. Stephens. If you somehow don't know of him, he's a legendary game designer who's worked on dozens of different tabletop RPGs over the course of his nearly 30 years in the industry. In addition to spending time together and introducing myself to the culinary wonders of the Midwestern United States, Owen and I each had our own list of objectives to tackle during our visit. I wanted the opportunity to Playtest the Eversaga RPG with said legendary game designer. Owen wanted the opportunity to expose me to cinema that he describes as being foundational to the "zeitgeek" of Tabletop RPGs, meaning "movies that explain why certain things work the way they do in Tabletop RPGs because they served as inspiration."

Owen and the Zeitgeek

Owen is a MUCH more avid cinema-goer then I am. Sitting through movies, even ones I like and am motivated to see, has always been difficult for me. (I self-identify as having ADHD, a conclusion I came to because my brother has ADHD and I'm extensively trained in working with kids with this diagnosis and ended up going, "... oh," after a few years of study.) As a result, my movie repertoire is SIGNIFICANTLY dwarfed by Owen's.

13 Ghosts, 13th Warrior, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension, Alien, Aliens, Army of Darkness, BeastMaster, Big Trouble in Little China, Black Moon Rising, Blade Runner, The Blob (original), The Blob (1988), Blood of Heroes, The Boondock Saints, Brotherhood of the Wolf, Bubba Ho-Tep, Buckaroo Banzai, Cannonball Run, CHUD, Conan the Barbarian (original), Conan the Destroyer, Dark City, The Dark Crystal, Dave Made a Maze, Deathstalker II, Dragonslayer, Drunken Master II, Dune (1984), Escape from New York, Excalibur, Fire and Ice, Five Deadly Venoms, Godzilla (original); Godzilla vs. Destoroyah; Mothra vs. Godzilla; Godzilla: Final Wars; Godzilla, Mothra and King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All-Out Attack; King Kong vs. Godzilla (original), Halloween II, Halloween III, Hawk the Slayer, Heavy Metal, Hellraiser II, Highlander, House on Haunted Hill (1999), House II: The Second Story, Jackie Chan's Project A, James Bond: Casino Royale (2006), From Russia With Love, GoldFinger, On Her Magesty's Secret Service, The Spy Who Loved Me, Jason and the Argonauts, The Killer, Krull, Kung Fu Hustle, Ladyhawke, Lensman (animated), The Lost Boys, The Mummy (Hammerfield version from the 50s), Predator (original), Princess Bride, Red Dawn (original), The Road Warrior, Rock & Rule, Robin Hood Prince of Thieves, Robocop II, Rumble in the Bronx, Seven Samurai; Magnificent 7 (either); Battle Beyond the Stars, The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad, Shaolin Soccer, Son of Kong, Sneakers, Star Trek: Wrath of Khan, Starship Troopers, The Sword and the Sorcerer, Terminator (original), THEM!, The Thing (1982), The Thing From Another World, Vampire Hunter D (original), Vampires (1998), The Watcher in the Woods, Willow, Wizards.

Please note that this is the first Draft list as Owen complied it on 07/16/26, it has since expanded as Owen has made movie references around me that went totally over my head. After Owen realized that my interest in movies was SO low that I really couldn't do much more than 3 hours or so a night tops, he decided to focus more on movies that had as many tropes in them as possible. Currently, we've watched The Shadow (1994), The Mummy (1959), Godzilla vs. Gijan, The Blob (1958), and The Amazing Screw-On Head (a TV show pilot from the early 2000s). Owen's health willing, we have even more movies planned for tonight and Thursday night before I prefer to head out to GenCon! Currently my rankings for what I've seen so far is: #1 The Shadow, #2 The Amazing Screw-On Head, #3 The Blob, #4 Godzilla vs. Gijan, and #5 The Mummy. If you'd like, I can post a quip to my Patreon and give my final rankings Thursday evening or Friday after all movies we have time for have been finished. Let me know in the comments if you'd like that!

Alex and the Playtests

Kyrshin's expression is kinda what I looked like all session, watching others try my rolls. Art by Karolyne, click for more!

Now, what about my side of the trip so far? Well, originally I had two playtests scheduled, one on Saturday after I arrived and one on Sunday. Unfortunately, there was a ton of Wildfire smoke in my home state of Pennsylvania the Friday I left to fly to see Owen, so my flight was delayed long enough that I missed my connecting flight and had to spend an evening in Nashville. This meant I wasn't prepared with content or the wits to run on Saturday, so we rescheduled the game for Tuesday. I'm gonna summarize a bit about all the feedback I got, but if you want to see ALL of it, I actually took my feedback notes in the Eversaga RPG Discord, which you can join by becoming a paying member of this Discord. I've even had a couple Patrons following along and giving their own thoughts as I went. (Special shout-out to $10 Patron Gold Zephzellian, I've really enjoyed vir commentaries on the notes I've made.)

So, wanna see some overall vibes from the playtest? Well, that's go!

Playtest 1: Character Building

This playtest featured Owen K.C. Stephens, artist Jacob Blackmon, and Jacob's roommate. For this playtest, I handed the three of them Chapter 2 of the Eversaga RPG Core Rulebook and allowed them to follow the order listed in the book without a lot of instruction on my part.

Almost immediately, everyone seemed lost about where to go and how to proceed. The current document didn't have a good enough "Where to start" thing.

We noticed a few places where I hadn't properly fixed "Species" to "Ancestry."

My vocabulary is too much in some places (I used "ontogenically" and phylogenically in at least one place). I think I was studying for my cert when I wrote that, lol.

Everyone: "WHERE'S THE TABLE OF CONTENTS?!"

One of the human heritages was called 'Streetwalker' and Owen informed me that this is a slang term for a prostitute. He then proceeded to read EVERY human talent as though a Red Light District prostitute was saying it. Cue 15 minutes of laughter. Obviously, this needs to be changed.

Several ancestry talents don't scale properly and are written in a way where their effects are concealed. Specific example was the Persistence human feature, which everyone missed because Break a Sweat draws your eye to it.

There was a lot of discussion on whether it made sense to include the ancestry Attribute in the baseline, since that's picked at a later point. Owen also pointed out that if I put the stat value into the stat block, it would allow me to do things like, "Value of 2 to one Attribute, -1 to another Attribute). I haven't decided if I want to do this.

Almost everyone felt the Gear Proficiency system felt bad, it's just an XP Tax. Leaning towards axing it after this playtest.

Owen: "There are so many different moving parts and levers, I'm having trouble solidifying anything. This must be what it's like to try to learn PF1 now after 10 years of content." (This comment from Owen DESTROYED me.)

Martial Arts not being useful for Attacking felt weird to people, "I only have two skill options so I am not going to take Martial Arts for my martial artists, which feels weird." "Appendage" as a weapon category instead of "Unarmed" wasn't popular with anyone at the table.

Baselines, especially for "smart" baselines didn't seem like they were strong enough conceptually. Everyone struggled with understanding the difference between "brilliant" and "clever" and "shrewed" for example. It was commented on about how elegant talks about being strong of mind but doesn't actually give that bonus. Owen called it, "When mechanics fail to deliver on the promise they make with their name and lore," calling out Vital Strike in Pathfinder 1E as an example. (This feat promises that you're going to deliver powerful, deadly blows but because of how it works you tend to never use it because it doesn't do more damage than a regular full-attack.)

A couple of players were concerned that they might make bad, unusable characters because the system didn't give them a direction to go in.

Interlude: Chopping Down the Rules

By far the most difficult pieces of advice that Owen gave me during the first playtest was that I should trim down the Eversaga RPG Core Rulebook significantly. Currently I'm at 440 Pages with plans for more, and he recommended 240 Pages as a hard cap. This is not the first time he's given me this advice, and since I was here in person I asked him, "Owen, why this specific number?" And because Owen is awesome, he told me.

We basically looked over all the Top 15 Adamantine-selling TTRPG Core Rulebooks on DriveThurRPG, and he told me that RPGs that have bigger books tend to have better buy-in. For example, Daggerheart can afford to have a 400 Page Rulebook because the buy-in is, "You can watch the creators play this game on their extremely popular, influential web series," and "The IP is one that people are connected to because of said web series." Now, for the record an Adamantine TTRPG title is one that needs to sell at least 5,001 copies across its lifespan and until about #7 on the list, all the TTRPGs that earned this rank on DriveThruRPG are either from a major TTRPG publisher people have heard of before (e.g. Free League Publishing or Chaosium for example) or they have a major IP that people know (e.g. Star Trek), sometimes both. #7 on this list is Twilight Sword by Two Little Mice, which sits at 200 pages. Going up a bit more, #5 is called The One Ring Core Rules by Free League Publishing, which has 240 pages and has an interesting case, where everyone knows what The One Ring is; this is a Lord of the Rings TTRPG. But for some reason they must not have been able to CALL it Lord of the Rings, so it kinda doesn't have the IP buy-in. This is where Owen's recommended range of 200 to 240 pages came from.

This was, as you can imagine, an extremely difficult piece of advice from Owen. I mean, this is chopping 200 pages from my book without accounting for any GM sections that need to be written! But it's really, really difficult to argue with data like that.

Playtest #2: Pregen Play

Now, for the second playtest I had pregens built to test a couple of things. I spent all morning frantically building these characters and formatting them, got to the point where I was like, "Oh no we're not going to be able to play if I'm not faster," and ended up just copy/pasting stats in a word document. It was ugly as sin, folks, and I got a lot of comments about the presentation that I'm not gonna bore you with here. Sometimes playtests are just sausage.

I think nashi claws say they have the bludgeoning trait instead of the slashing trait.

Cultivation perk can be shortened A LOT.

Kitsune Shape Shifting is too fiddly talent-wise. No one wants to learn how to be a teapot and a pillow separately.

Action Points had a major conversation. Everyone thought that you got a set number of Action Points per turn and spent them on actions, rather than it being more like PF2 (you get 3 Actions that can you augment with Action Points). The general consensus was, "The word 'Action' is used too much here" and "Simple/Intricate/Complex was more cumbersome to use then a simple 1-2-3 Action system like PF2. We had a lot of discussion about changing what Action Points currently are to 'Stunts.' Maybe you get 3 Stunts per encounter and can spend those stunts when you activate an ability to do something cool.

Owen's wife had a major comment about how there was too much "proper nounage" in the descriptions. The comment was, "Everything is so flourishy that it's hard to understand what each ability is doing. It feels like you're giving alternative names to things just to be different from other games."

WT (aka Wound Threshold) is the abbreviation for 'Weight' in the US. Everyone found it confusing that weapons had WT as a major statistic. Similarly many traits weren't clear about what they did because they were just tossed into a trait line for you to decipher.

Everyone hated Intuition as an Attribute with an abbreviation of 'Int' because it made them think of Intelligence. I either need a different abbreviation, or I need to change Intuition to Insight or something similar.

Most of the gamers weren't fans of 1d20 + number Inititive, saying its too swingy. I use a lot of d6s, maybe D6 + something instead?

The Evade ability needs Athletics. Maybe it should be rolled into Defend? One of my playtesters HATES shields that give active bonuses with no passives for wearing armor.

A bunch spells and abilities have DRs that just don't work.

In general Hit Dice and Wounds were popular, but it was pointed out that once someone is out of Hit Dice, it doesn't matter what kind of weapons you use. You might as well use a peashooter. It also didn't feel good that someone couldn't be instantly knocked out, like an underling.

There was a lot of discussion about being able to "Catch Your Breath" during combat to regain lost Hit Dice. I REALLY liked this idea.

At the end, I asked everyone to note the ONE thing they wanted me to hear if I learned nothing else from their feedback:

LJ: Switch to plain language that fulfills the promise of the name/description.

Friend 1: Make sure that Action Points / Stunts / Whatever feel more impactful. I only have a few, they should be impactful.

Friend 2: Please make sure shields have a passive element.

Owen: It bothers me that once someone has no Hit Dice, it doesn't matter how damaging my attack is.

Where Does Eversaga Go From Here?

Doing a playtest is kinda like being in a shootout where you've gotta take care of a MacGuffin and can't shoot back. Art by Eryn, click!!!

One of my core beliefs is that Owen K.C. Stephens isn't always right, but if you're gonna try to claim that he isn't, you need to have some DAMN good evidence. And realistically, I don't have any evidence that he's incorrect about the size of the book. In fact, I suspect he's probably correct. So my first goal is that I'm going to be working on making a plan to reduce the page count in the Eversaga Core Rulebook. My goal is 240 Pages of rules; if I can make it happen, I might reduce it further to incorporate some setting flavor. We'll see what I can manage.

One of the big places I plan to make these trims is in the Player chapter. It has more content than anywhere else in the game; there's 43 baselines and 12 pages of content per class, for instance. I can cut a lot of that and save it for a future book. Basically, I need to focus Eversaga on the Core experience first and foremost. This means a lot of stuff that's not needed is going to be pushed back to a later book.

One idea that's growing on me is using Action Points instead of Simple/Complex/Intricate, and then having Stunts be the thing you spend to do cooler things. That feels and sounds cool to me, very cinematic. Wow!

I also really like the idea of being able to Catch Your Breath in combat, and I think a refinement of the Wounds system is needed. My current idea is that an effect's WT is replaced with a Mark state or a Damage stat, something like that. That's how many Wounds are threatened against you. Then you roll your Hit Dice to try and block those Wounds from there. I'm not 100% sure this will work, just the first idea I'm thinking of!

At the end of the day, my ego is a little bruised but I think there was good feedback here and I'm excited to keep going, keep refining, keep trying to make something cool that'll be remembered long-term!

What's Up Next?

Friday is my usual day for updating Iconics, but I did this big blog. I'm gonna see if I can do my planned article for Danshi, but that might not happen. Depends what I can get done tomorrow! Worse to worse he'll be out next week while I'm at GenCon. Like I mentioned, I'm traveling until 8/17, so my schedule MIGHT be a little crazy. A good way to get ahold of me to talk Eversaga or see my thoughts is to become a paying Patron so you get access to the Discord! I'm really enjoying chatting with the Patrons who've joined, and like a greedy dragon I would love to add YOU to my collection!

Until next time, bye!