About RPG Lab

I'm Mirko. I've played tabletop RPGs on and off since the eighties, and a while ago I started designing one of my own. That's when I noticed the gap this site is meant to fill.

For one thing, it's hard to find out about new RPGs before they're finished. A crowdfunded project on Kickstarter or BackerKit might get a few weeks of attention, but not much before or after. Finished games show up on DriveThruRPG or itch.io next to tens of thousands of others. If you love a particular system, keeping up with new material for it means signing up for every designer's mailing list, assuming they have one. As a player, I want to hear about a game while it's still taking shape, follow along, and maybe even help playtest it when it's ready for that.

It's hard from the other side too. Talking about a game while it's being made is how the first players hear about it, and a project nobody knows about until launch day tends to fizzle. The designers I know run their playtests on a mix of Discord, Google Drive, and PDFs sent around by email, and the feedback comes back as chat messages that are hard to match to the right version a month later.

There's also nowhere good to talk about design. The conversation is scattered across a few subreddits where a thread sinks within a day, social feeds that sink even faster, and blogs and forums spread so thin that last year's discussion of the exact problem you have now is unfindable. Nothing today plays the part The Forge played in the early 2000s. Divisive as it was, it left a mark on indie design because it provided a platform for these discussions to happen.

RPG Lab is my attempt at one place for all of that. Software people call it building in public, and video game developers do it with devlogs: show the work while it's rough, so the people who care can follow along and chip in. I think TTRPGs benefit from that at least as much as software does. A project can start here as a working title and a sentence, gather updates and playtest feedback as it grows, and still remain here after release. Posts are open to anyone who wants to write about design, either related to RPGs in general or to a specific project. I'd like this to become the place where tabletop RPGs get made in the open.

• Players and GMs who want to find new games and material early, follow the people making them, and perhaps even contribute by playtesting and providing feedback.
• Designers making anything for tabletop RPGs and willing to show it before it's done. You don't need credentials, a publisher, or a finished draft. If you're working on something for the hobby and mean to put it out there, paid or free, you belong here.
• Anyone who wants to write about or discuss RPG design.

Most people here wear more than one of those hats. Designers play many games and are each other's best playtesters.

If you're not sure whether a particular project belongs here, ask yourself two questions:

1. Is it used in the playing or the making of tabletop RPGs?
2. Was it made specifically for tabletop RPGs, not merely usable for them?

If the answer to both is yes, it belongs. That includes:

• Games, from a one-page RPG to a multi-book system.
• Settings, adventures, campaigns, bestiaries, and other supplements, for your own system or a third-party system.
• Digital tools made for RPGs: VTTs, dice bots, character builders, generators.
• Resources for designers and GMs: asset packs, map packs, layout templates, design guides.

Some things don't belong, even though they're close:

• Board games, card games, video games, and interactive fiction. They're their own hobbies. RPG Lab may grow toward neighbors like these one day, but for now it focuses on tabletop RPGs.
• Actual-play shows, podcasts, and other video or audio content. They're media about play rather than something you play with. The people who make them are welcome to have a profile and write posts.
• General creative software. A graphics editor or a font library is usable for the hobby but wasn't made for it, so it fails the second question.
• Services. An editor or artist for hire is a person, not a project. That's what a profile is for. Note that I'm exploring some ideas around how to better accommodate such services in the future - stay tuned for updates.

A project is really just whatever feels like a single piece of work to you, whatever the size. It can be a whole game line with rules, setting, bestiary, and maps. It can be a single trifold adventure. If you make a series of one-pagers or zines, you might keep them under one project so followers see each new one, or give each its own project so it can have its own stage, playtest calls, and crowdfunding campaign. Either works, and you can run as many projects as you like.

Every project has a stage (idea, designing, in production, released) and a status (active, on hiatus, archived). Ideas are welcome, and a project can sit on hiatus for a year without anyone thinking less of it.

Every account is a person with a handle. A studio is an optional second name to publish under: a personal brand, a partnership, or a publisher, with its own page and its own followers. Its members join by invitation. Who can do what inside a studio is covered in the questions below.

Every project says how its art and its text are made: by the designer, commissioned, licensed or stock, open license, AI-assisted, or AI-generated. It says so twice, once for what's in the working version now and once for what's planned for the final version, because placeholder art in a playtest packet and the cover of the finished book are different questions. "None yet" and "not decided" are honest answers, and always allowed.

RPG Lab has no opinion about AI in games. It has a label, and it has a filter. In your settings, you can hide projects whose art or text is AI-assisted or AI-generated, and that holds everywhere projects are listed. By default it looks at the planned version, so a project with placeholder art in a playtest packet still shows up; a stricter setting looks at the working version as well. The projects page has the same filter, if you'd rather use it there without changing your settings.

Two rules follow from that. The label has to be true. And nobody gets hassled for what an honest label says. Misrepresenting how a project is made breaks the terms. So does going after a designer over a declaration they made in good faith. Both get the same treatment. The full rule is in the terms.

Adult content is allowed but has to be flagged by the designer who posts it. Flagged projects are hidden from browsing and on their own page until you turn on "Show adult content" in your settings. What counts as adult content is spelled out in the terms.

RPG Lab is built and run by one person, and that's me - Mirko. Online I go by DigitalHobbit, and that's my handle here too: @digitalhobbit. I've written about RPGs on my blog and talked about them on YouTube (on and off), and I play every week. My own game, a very light, genre-neutral one, will live on this site alongside everyone else's.

Right now the site reflects my own ideas. I'd rather it reflected yours too. If something is confusing, missing, or wrong, or you want to tell me what would make this more useful for you, write to hello [at] rpglab [dot] io. I read every email.

The things people ask, or would ask if they knew to.