Bluesteel
Rusts
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Pen and Paper RPG
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2014-2022
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Solo Project
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Years of design iteration
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Multipurpose willpower system encourages roleplay, adds risk-reward gameplay
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Novel magic system allows players to create their own spells or gear.
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Balanced to adjust for different many different playstyles
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Mechanics designed to support the game's world and themes
Overview
​Bluesteel Rusts is a game set in a dying world overrun by the chaotic and spreading Rustlands - a place where laws of nature themselves decay. Campaigns in Bluesteel Rusts focus on the players persevering against immeasurable odds, even when faced with failure and fatigue.
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Modeling both the player character's heroism and mental fatigue, the willpower system allows players to re-roll failed action attempts. However, if they fail their re-roll, they lose one of their five willpower. The core of Bluesteel Rusts is this system, and it expanded on in many different mutations. To model desperation and counteract death spiral, re-rolls become stronger as one loses willpower. Roleplay is encouraged by mechanics that allow players to restore willpower by encouraging each other, or acting according to their character's ideals (or temptations.)
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Bluesteel Rusts also features a unique magic system where players can create spells by transferring predefined properties between objects, such as transferring "Hot" into a monster to burn it.
Postmortem
What went well
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Worked on a single project for many years.
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Willingness to redo favorite mechanics yielded a much better game.
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Plenty of playtesting over many RPG campaigns.
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What went wrong
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Too few limits on when I'd stop iterating made progress towards finished product slow.
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Early versions lacked planning and focus which made development sloppy for a long time.
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Early mechanics slowed gameplay with overcomplexity.
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What I learned
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Aggressive iteration will most always improve a design, but have boundaries for when to stop.
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Expand out from a simple, multipurpose core mechanic.
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Determine the focus of a game before starting details.
Personal History
Bluesteel Rusts is a tabletop RPG I started making during my Freshman year of high school and have been working on it ever since. Bluesteel Rusts today looks nothing like it originally did back in 2015, and is much better for it. It has gone through 3 full reworks over the 5 yearlong campaigns it has been used. Through this constant iteration and constant improvement, I learned the fundamentals about game design and grew my passion for it. Not only that, I grew my best friendships through this game. This game means quite a lot to me.
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In the past, I had decided not to publish Bluesteel Rusts despite all the work I put into it. I worried it still retained old artifacts of bad design from my starting years, and thought it had a bit too much teenage edginess in the world and mechanics. I also wanted to move on to new things. Coming back to the system for a recent campaign, I have realized that it was much better than I remembered. In my past campaigns, I've continued developing Bluesteel Rusts, though not as extensively, and I intend to write out the system for publication some day soon.
The first party's roll20 sprites.