On January 1st, 2022, I tweeted this twit:

This proved to be somewhat ambitious. So let’s talk about what happened in 2022 and what’s happening now!

What is His Majesty the Worm?

First, a little context.

His Majesty the Worm is a new-school game with old-school sensibilities: the classic megadungeon experience given fresh life through a focus on the mundanities and small moments of daily life inside the dungeon.

• Often-ignored subsystems, like food, hunger, light, and inventory management, are central to play and actually fun.
• The game has robust procedures. Characters adventure in the Underworld, rest in role-playing driven camping scenes, and plan long-term actions in the City at the center of the Wide World.
• The relationships between companions, called Bonds, powers the rest and recovery mechanic of the game. Role-playing literally drives the game forward.
• Tarot cards are used as a randomizing element. Combat encounters are handled with an action-packed subsystem that ensures that all players have interesting choices every minute of combat: no downtime!

Here’s how the book pitches itself.

What is the state of affairs?

In 2016, I started writing His Majesty the Worm. In 2017, the game was far enough along I could run weekly playtests. This weekly game is still going. (I should do a retrospective of running a five-year long megadungeon campaign at some point.)

In 2021, I began putting the game’s appendices into a basic layout with some public domain art. I hosted these as pay-what-you-want titles on my Itch. Over the course of the year, this generated enough revenue that I commissioned all of the art I planned for the game.

At the beginning of 2022, I had finished the game’s text. The word count was a whopping 123,881.

I scoped a quarter for an editor to edit the text, a quarter for me to implement edits, a quarter for a graphic designer to provide layout templates, and a quarter for me to implement the layout.

This timeline was mostly successful! In 2022, I edited the entire book and finalized the layout of the core text. (I have not yet finished the layout of the appendices, roughly ~100 additional pages.)

(All the stuff in the core book. Boy, page 111 has a lot of content.)

I, uh, kind of forgot about everything that comes after that.

I have never published a physical book before and there’s a lot of stuff here that I’m working on. I’ve spent my whole life thinking about RPGs and kept myself perfectly ignorant of the industry of publishing.

• The cost of physical books is incredibly high right now. What format should the book be in? How can I make it as cheap as possible so that people aren’t priced out? How can I make it as nice as possible so the game is a treasure to own?
• I’ve thus far avoided the hectic stress of crowdfunding. I wish I could avoid it altogether. How long can I put this off?
• What mechanisms will people use to buy the book? How can you trade me dollars and have this book shipped to you? Do I set up a webstore? (I don’t know how to do that.) Do I use another interface?
• Once people have bought the book, who packages it and ships it? How much does this cost? How do you keep shipping costs low? How do I keep packaging costs low for this non-standard size I chose for the book? How do you accommodate for international shipping? How are taxes paid on imported media?

So…when can I buy it?

Not yet. Soon.

Despite some unanswered questions, after six years of development the game has never been closer to being fully realized. I am so excited to share it with you.

If you want to check it out, I hope you will:

• Join my mailing list. I will only email you to give you updates about the game and let you know when it’s ready.
• Check out the appendices. I think each appendix has content that’s applicable to any dungeon-based game you’re playing. Every $5 thrown towards the game helps speed its development along. Plus, when they’re ready, I’ll upload the finalized, full-art version of the appendix on Itch as a free upgrade.

I’ll be talking a lot about the game here, doing a deep dive into the rules, to help you figure out if this is a game that you want to try out. Stay tuned.