Created over a semester by a team of 4 designers
Published a 67-page tabletop RPG rulebook
Designed Symbiote progression systems and core dice mechanics
Wrote significant portions of the Game Master section
Collaborated on worldbuilding, balance, and system iteration
Learned Adobe InDesign and rulebook layout for publication
Living Lands is a tabletop roleplaying game created by a team of four Rochester Institute of Technology students over the course of a semester. Together, we designed an original RPG system, fantasy setting, progression framework, and a complete 67-page rulebook.
The game takes place in a world overwhelmed by a magical force known as Ren. The landscape has been twisted by uncontrolled magic, creating dangerous biomes filled with mutated creatures, living environments, and ancient beings waking beneath the earth.
Players take on the role of Biomancers, adventurers who survive by bonding with Symbiotes, small creatures that allow them to safely channel the world's magic. Players customize both their Biomancer and their Symbiote, gaining new abilities and adapting to the challenges of the Living Lands.
My primary contributions focused on the Symbiote system, core dice mechanics, Game Master content, and rulebook development. I also worked closely with the rest of the team on worldbuilding, balance, and playtesting.
The entire project started with a design constraint from the course: every player needed a companion creature.
That eventually became the Symbiotes.
Rather than making them simple pets that followed players around, we wanted them to be central to both the mechanics and the setting. Players customize their Symbiote alongside their Biomancer, unlocking new abilities and different ways to approach challenges.
The setting grew naturally from that idea. We imagined a world where humans couldn't safely survive the overwhelming magical force of Ren without a Symbiote to filter that energy into something usable. Once we found that connection between the mechanics and the setting, many of the other pieces started falling into place.
One of our biggest goals was giving players lots of ways to build their characters.
Living Lands allows players to customize their Biomancer through biological augmentations, magical Evocations, and Symbiote abilities. Since the setting was built around adaptation and mutation, we wanted players to have a lot of freedom in how they approached character creation.
One piece of feedback we received early was that players didn't always feel like they had enough interesting decisions during their turns. We spent a lot of development time creating additional abilities and progression options so that players had more opportunities to specialize and develop their own playstyle.
Because the game places a large emphasis on player characters, it was important that players could build something that felt uniquely theirs.
The game uses a d12 dice pool system where players roll a number of dice based on their attributes and count successes on rolls of 10 or higher.
I worked heavily on the dice mechanics and spent time looking at a variety of existing RPG systems before we settled on the final version. We liked the feeling of rolling multiple dice at once, and the probabilities gave us a progression curve that felt good during playtesting.
While we tested the game throughout development, most of our testing focused less on balance and more on making sure mechanics were understandable, functional, and fun to use at the table.
Living Lands was my first experience building a large tabletop RPG from start to finish.
The project taught me how much work goes into communicating complex systems. Writing mechanics is one thing. Explaining them clearly enough that someone else can learn and run the game is another challenge entirely.
I wrote much of the Game Master section and helped organize the final rulebook, which gave me a lot of experience writing long-form design documentation. I also learned Adobe InDesign and handled much of the formatting work needed to turn dozens of pages of notes, mechanics, and worldbuilding into something people could actually read.
The project also showed me how closely mechanics and worldbuilding influence each other. The Symbiotes started as a requirement for the assignment, but they eventually became the foundation of the entire setting. Seeing that happen made me think differently about how mechanics can drive worldbuilding instead of simply existing inside it.
The Table of Contents
The character creation process
A sample of the custom monsters players can fight