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Samuel Garber
Game Designer
Umbrus is a tabletop roleplaying game that focuses on deep character customization. By using a modular set of customization options and skill/spell agnostic classes, Umbrus allows you to have some of the greatest gameplay-to-roleplay fidelity of any system on the market. Umbrus embraces the creativity of roleplaying and affords its players a high degree of freedom on how they create their characters and engage with the world, as well as providing characters with opportunities and room to grow and change beyond character creation.
While the sourcebook is still being worked on, the game is currently in late beta and is available for purchase as such on itch.io! It is in a feature-complete state for play, but is missing game master tools and clean formatting.
Very early on in the design process I bounced ideas off of a small team to create the basics of the mechanics and the lore of the world, moving on to solo development. On top of designing the game, my focuses were to maintain a comprehensive view of the game as a sum of its systems to ensure it had internal consistency as well as intense iteration on the various systems to further improve the game. In addition, as the project has moved closer towards completion, my role has shifted towards being an art lead and publisher.
A section of the URPG Changelog
The game has been a challenge. In particular, it was a harsh lesson in scope, as it has been a challenge to organize and keep track of things as they grow and change. The changelog that I have kept updated over 4 years of iteration has been invaluable in this respect. Umbrus has also been a challenge due to the sheer breadth of skills that it has required, particularly later in its development. While I was very comfortable doing the design and writing of the game itself, it has been a challenge managing the deadlines for artists, and researching and determining best practices for an eventual crowdfunding campaign. However, these lessons have been integral to improving as a designer as part of an interdisciplinary team.
Umbrus has also reinforced my lessons on playtesting, learning when to scrap or redesign mechanics, and not obsessing over a problem, only to design something worse than the original and wasting work hours. The degree of how interconnected the systems are made it an excellent lesson in being mindful of the game as a whole and how changes I wanted to make could affect the project.
It's also been useful to help reinforce the idea of directed design. Because the game's design goal is player customization that is not fully based on what class you pick, there are several design limitations that are quite difficult to design around, namely that classes have to be skill and spell agnostic, and cannot significantly favor a specific player build (read: melee, ranged, spellcaster).
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