Once Upon a Time

When Galway and I began Helpful Goat Gaming, we were first envisioning this endeavor as a Game Design Firm of some sort. We had this idea that we would stream games, grow an audience, and create games. However, we became so enamored with our own community that Game Design took a back seat to the rigors of running a discord full of amazing people and streaming games and creating podcasts. While Game Design remained a passion of ours, that itch was often scratched by creating Role Playing Campaigns with amazing worlds full of stories. And yet, we’ve been slowly toiling with projects for which we have a great passion (Adam would roll his eyes at my use of syntax here =). Fablefall was just such a product and it was only within the last year that I’d progressed that design to a place where I suddenly realized we had an incredibly fun and engaging game on our hands. And it was time to do something about it.

So I began to build prototypes in Tabletop Simulator. And I subjected my friends to it. And of course, like in all early play testing, I found the game to be fairly broken. However, through all the weird rule clarifications and severely unbalanced powers, we had a blast playing it. The game has since gone through at least 24 iterations of the rules and balancing. And there is still tweaking to do, but WOO, it is fun!

Oddly enough, the game, in my mind, began as a Science Fiction/Futuristic theme. I wanted it to be the next Twilight Imperium! However, the stirring theme of narrative and story felt more … foundational to the experience. Rather than looking ahead at the limits of humans (something sci fi excels at), it felt better to root the theme in our origins (something fantasy excels at). I remember once the mechanics of the game seemed right, I put a poll up in our Helpful Goat Discord. I asked which theme the community thought seemed interesting for a war game whose central idea focused on stories. The choices I gave, if I remember correctly, were 1) Steampunk, 2) Sci Fi, 3) Willy Wonka/Candyland, 4) High Fantasy, etc. And it was my good friend and fellow founder of Helpful Goat that suggested that we make it a dream-like world of imagination which encompassed all of these. And thus the theme of our game, a land of imagination, was born. This was now Fablefall.