When I first started writing tabletop RPGs, I made a huge mistake. Not an entirely unique one, but one those with similar tendencies of temperament have made many times before and will no doubt continue making into the foreseeable future: I tried to make a single glorious game, a shining city-on-a-hill with all-encompassing rules and a vast, detailed setting.
This led to predictable consequences. Any time I had an idea, I put it into the setting, repeatedly reassembling the tetrominoes to create a snug spot for each new piece. I tinkered with the mechanics endlessly, striving to simultaneously innovate while also streamline subsystems into easily grasped patterns. So of course, the almighty megaproject went on for year after year, expanding in scope with no end in sight.
A severe rookie move on my part, and one I’ve been regretting ever since. At a certain point I snapped, and stopped making games altogether, shifting gears into writing fiction instead. But, after numerous short stories and one novel, I could not help but feel the urge to write an RPG again. But first, I must exorcise the demon of my past, which goes by the name Black Iron Engine.
Prehistory
The earliest version of the Great Work coalesced in my late teens, under the title “Inheritors of the Artificial Earth”. It began as a joint project undertaken together with my twin, whose love of roleplaying games equaled my own at the time. This phase can be mostly easily summed up as “wizards with laser rifles riding dinosaurs”, a gonzo science fantasy future taking place after the second cyclic apocalypse. Each cycle created a different kind of technology (biochemical in the prehistoric age, electromechanical in the modern one, and psychomagical in the future), on top of space aliens, outer gods, and crystalline beings living in geode cities within the Earth’s mantle.
One aspect I put an inordinate amount of thought into was floating islands – I wanted them all over the place as the fortresses of sorcerer-kings, but there needed to be a reason for them. The best I came up with was this: in the fourth (or higher) spatial dimension, the apparently thin air they floated in had a physical structure (say, a mountain in a parallel universe) that invisible struts attached to, anchoring the island. Thus it would appear to hover, but from a God’s eye view, was merely part of a larger building.
This idea spun off with numerous other consequences. Why not use that logic to explain, say, giant humanoid mecha (unrealistic for all manner of reasons, but especially the crushing weight they would exert on the ground and difficulty of supplying sufficient energy density) by making them function like oversized marionettes, their joints subtly attached to a 4D armature that held them up? Why not let people carry devices (or even simply decorative accessories) that floated along with them? Why not create an unseen storehouse of objects that could be summoned up or put away with a word?
It’s important to note here that I was steeped in media that dealt with the surreal rejection of the world as objectively real: The Matrix, The Truman Show, The Big O, and the entire bibliography of Philip K. Dick, to name just a few. So all of these concepts gradually coalesced into a single idea. What if instead of a collection of possible applications, there was one, single, vast structure that performed all of them? Given a sufficient amount of time and development, you would hook it into everything, make every rock and tree subject to modification at will, as though they were models in a computer simulation. Such a machine could replace every natural process, becoming the great engine that drove the world. So, drawing on PKD’s novel VALIS, I lifted the phrase “Black Iron Prison” (a gnostic term for the false material world) and gave it a driveshaft spin. Thus: Black Iron Engine.
BIE the RPG
The war of conflicting ideas did not, however, end there! Clearly I wanted to elaborate on the sort of world you’d get when absolutely everything was artificially controlled, but I had several different potential premises within that concept. Three of them ended up receiving some form of expression, the first reaching its zenith in Black Iron Engine version 0.8, the cover of which you can see above. This interpreted the Engine as a steampunk contraption of planetary gears, powering a 1900s-era Art Nouveau utopian megalopolis. It used a Through The Looking-Glass-derived chessboard metaphor for the city blocks and centered around the conflict between four factions (The Throne, The Guild, the Church, and the Academy) for control of the great machine and thus, the world. I had fun playtesting it, but the biggest issue is that the world was simply too nice. I liked it but it lacked the bite of “everything you know is wrong” that I liked so much from a lot of my source material.
Thus, the second major iteration: Black Iron Engine 0.9. This transposed the Engine closer to the modern day, a retrofuturistic cassettepunk world flavored by conspiracy theories about men in black and the 1970s NASA style guide. Now the player characters were the hardworking engineers of the Civil Service, tasked with maintaining an aging infrastructure while not causing a public panic by letting word get out that the world was fake. The shift into a higher technological level made explaining many elements easier for my brain (which always asks “is that actually physically possible”) and gave it a desirable degree of secrecy and revelation. I finished the game some time in 2022.
And then sat on it. I just wasn’t happy with it, it wasn’t perfect. By this point I was getting anxious that roleplaying games were even a viable path forward for my writing career, so I set it aside (a ~250 page, fully laid out and illustrated game, mind you) to shift gears into writing a novel of the same name instead. The novel pushed the premise even farther into the future, about a protagonist who suffered from a glitch-disease who had to learn to speedrunning exploits for reality itself to face a malignant god-AI. It is my intention to release that novel as well, after I’m done launching this game, but one thing at a time.
Lessons Learned
A couple years back, I saw a friend successfully publish an RPG and asked myself why I hadn’t just done the same. So I made an Itch.io page and put out a couple small games for the joy of it. Even so, that old monolith never stopped haunting me. My whole creative career after it has consisted of carving off singular ideas from the omni-setting and giving them their own space to breathe, and each part I gave its own life made me a little freer. If I was ever to move forward creatively, I would need to finally reckon with the lurking progenitor.
So I hauled it out, dusted it off, and polished it up. I’ll be releasing it on the 26th: Black Iron Engine 1.0, the version I finally let myself call “done”. Next post I’ll dive into what you’ll find inside, as well as announce an official release date, but for now, thank you for listening to a very personal story about something that defined a significant chunk of my life. I’m never going to do it again, but perhaps the work wasn’t wasted after all.
[This was previously a post on my Patreon, now being migrated here. Members get early access to all new posts!]
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