Welcome to The Guild of Steel
Announcing a TTRPG Game Design Cooperative
We are The Steel Guild, a Game Design Cooperative, and we make games!
We are a game design duo from Pittsburgh interested in organizing ourselves in a cooperative model. We want to introduce ourselves, and our first big project!
Our name comes from a) our origin in Pittsburgh - the City of Champions to some, the Crown Jewel of Appalachia to us - and b) our commitment to making progressive, awesome ttrpg products.
The two of us have been playing and running TTRPGs for many years, and as time’s gone on we’ve discovered a love for all of the great art coming out of the indie scene. We have been greedily basking in the awesome art, writing and design from these games as a fire has been lit in our hearts to make our own. Credits to our origin come from creators like Sandy Pug Games, Bogfolk and Stockholm Kartell, and individual games like Into the Motherlands RPG, Gubat Banwa, Bastards! and more.
Inspired by Sandy Pug's Co-Op Manifesto, and seeing the success of cooperatives in creating some of the best art around, we want to walk the talk and live artistically fulfilling lives.
The Steel Guild being run on a cooperative model ensures that; the typical top-down structure of the workplace in the Western world is terrible for the creation of art. Structural and organizational change is one of the few ways to really move forward and try something else. Even before we take on more artists and designers, we want to organize ourselves differently. We can’t change society overnight, but we can choose to organize ourselves in the most efficient, moral and creatively-fulfilling way. We hope to inspire others to try new models, even as we stand on the shoulders of giants.
Who Are We?
Asher Winnie He/They (links ahoy)
Writer, Barista & Coffee Enthusiast. For the past month I’ve started a game design blog called Hearthside (here on this substack!), and have made some content for MÖRK BORG in the past.
I find ttrpg creation incredibly rewarding in my spare time, and realizing that I need to work collaboratively in groups to make things better than I could on my own!
Krist Muñoz-Malavé He/They (@kristworks)
Writer, Filmmaker, Abolitionist. Force of Nature. Wizard punk across multiple timelines. Excited to put their mind to making our own games!
Our Guild’s Principles
Unapologetically Queer
We are both queer and proud to be vocal that trans rights are human rights, that access to healthcare and reproductive health is a human right, and that uplifting BIPOC voices is the way forward both to creating equity and great art. TTRPGs are art and all art is political. If that turns you off, simply put, we don’t want your money nor do we want you playing our games.
From a business perspective this makes no sense, but that’s not how we operate: being vocal about our values is a boon to the creation of safe communities, and fostering artistic creation, rather than a hindrance. Nazi punks gtfo!
Human Made Art
We are firmly and openly opposed to Artificial Intelligence in the creation of art. We follow the Miyazaki school of thought in regards to AI-art, that it is “an affront to life itself”. Not even to mention ethical concerns in regards to future copyright litigation…art and its creation is one of the few things that bind all human cultures and societies together. When we are sad, happy, when our societies are thriving or falling apart, people make art. To systematize and reduce images (or text, or voice, etc) to a kind of technological slurry is just plain wrong.
I (Asher) have skills in writing and layout, but illustration has never been my strong suit. Where some folks see that as a limitation to be overcome, to then steal art from others and recreate it with a new digital tool, I believe they're seeing the woods for the trees: my lack of illustration skills are not a hindrance, they're an opportunity to make new connections and include more people (illustrators) in the process. We believe collaborative ideation - creating in tandem as a group, rather than competing to find the "strongest" idea - is the way forward in making great games.
And the ethical way forward, no less!
This open source logo from HINOKODO, check it out!
Products of The Scattering
We’ve been speaking in generalities about TTRPGs and games. Our drive and inspiration is to self-publish TTRPG products through licensed games (and one day, to make our own system and support a community around it).
We’re not interested in D&D as a creative pursuit. We’ve played it for many years, but feel that there’s so much more out there in the ttrpg space, and you don’t “need” licenses to make great art. Our current project uses Limithron’s PIRATE BORG license (itself under the MORK BORG license), but as we go on to say, that’s because we think we have something valuable to add to an already existing game.
PROJECT UNSEEN
The working title of our current project in development, Project Unseen, came about from opening a new book for the first time.
I (Asher) backed and received Limithron’s kickass pirate game PIRATE BORG. A long time fan of MÖRK BORG (and a creator of some content for that game) I was ecstatic to get my hands on it. Besides the normal fun of starting a new system, I was excited to share this with my friend Krist. Krist is from Puerto Rico and this game is set in a dying “Dark Caribbean”, an alternate Caribbean beset by an undead apocalypse.
When we opened the book together and poured over the map, we were given pause. The island of Puerto Rico was there, of course, but devoid of place markers or settlements. I’d been excited to share this ttrpg with Krist, a fantasy he could see himself in, and we both realized that hadn’t exactly come to pass.
We want to change that. Project Unseen is an attempt to add more indigenous influence back into The Dark Caribbean, through playable classes, monsters and Places of Power. In place of Relics (the rare but powerful magic items of PIRATE/MÖRK BORG) we are introducing sites of magic. Places rumored to hold great magical power that knowledge or experience can be pulled from, sites of adventure and danger that make for thrilling storytelling. They are both concrete on the map (like El Yunque, the only tropical rainforest in North America) or placed anywhere (like El Dorado, which we've given a Midas twist to).
Now, this is a critique of Limithron's PIRATE BORG but we want to clarify that this is meant as a constructive critique, not a callout post. It makes sense why this creator wouldn't want to invoke or rip-off indigenous names, folklore or places. By starting in the middle of the action, PIRATE BORG says openly that is NOT a game about indigenous genocide or roleplaying slavery.
It's a game about swilling grog, killing zombies and skeletons, enjoying blasting apart what remains of colonial hold over the isles with cannons of sentient bone. Lowlife pyrate scum. It's a wonderful vibe, and we really like this game. Yet, even as we understand why a creator wouldn't want to dig in the cultural wreckage of a culture not their own, we feel like it's a missed opportunity for great storytelling. Everything in history is interconnected: the history of the Caribbean is defined by indigenous genocide, slavery, and pirates were inseparably intertwined with both.
Project Unseen is about putting more of the unseen people of this kind of fantasy back in. It's not a game about adding slavery or genocide back in. It's not a game where people like the Taino are reintroduced just to have a crosshair placed over their forehead (as combat-centric games like MÖRK BORG are want to do). It’s meant to reintroduce a lot of the wonder and grandeur that exists in the real Caribbean back into its Dark counterpart, for BIPOC people to be heroes in their own stories, and ideally other compatible OSR / NSR games to do the same.
Starting en media res in the Caribbean precludes that "the damage is already done"; but the notion that the indigenous inhabitants of the Caribbean are gone at the Golden Age of Piracy is just not true. Many of these people live on in their descendants IRL, and they should live on to fight off The Scourge in the imaginary too. We want to critique this awesome project the best we can: by iterating on it, and making something new!
This is where our cooperative model is especially useful. Even as we're drafting and rapidly prototyping, we know that we need more eyes on this. Asher comes to this as an outsider to these cultures, and Krist is himself Puerto Rican, but the Caribbean is a large tapestry of many different cultures, people and ways of life. A traditional company might pay one or two consultants to look over the project, but once Project Unseen has its legs, we want to get other designers and artists to contribute back in.
Our desire is to have this be an indigenous Carribean work of art, rather than a work of art about the Caribbean. Over the course of this year we'll be looking out for Caribbean BIPOC illustrators and creators to commission and bring in their expertise, to bring into The Steel Guild and collaboratively ideate.
THE FUTURE
Thank you for reading so far. We’re really excited to announce our presence and our plans for Project Unseen. To get further updates follow us on Twitter and Itch.io, and subscribe to this Substack.
Regular issues of Hearthside will return in the new few weeks, but this place will serve as a newsletter for important updates! We are finishing our first written draft of rules for new classes, monsters and places of power this month, and are going to spend March playtesting and iterating. If this project interests you, please follow us or send us an email at steelguildcoop@gmail.com
Game design blogs are so great because they're discursive: people openly share ideas, and that leads to iterating on those ideas in the future, either in ttrpgs or in future blogs. We hope to inspire great new ideas, and we'd love to hear about them.
From The Steel Guild, keep creating and keep-on keeping-on!
