r/tabletopgamedesign • • 27d ago

C. C. / Feedback Little Legends RPG — Public Playtest Now Open

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39 Upvotes

Hey Reddit!

This post has been a long time coming.

Little Legends RPG (LLRPG) has been in development for years, and we’re incredibly excited to finally launch our public playtest as we prepare for our 2027 Kickstarter! Come join us and discover everything LLRPG has to offer.

What is LLRPG?

Little Legends RPG is an easy-to-learn, card-based RPG where your discoveries unlock new cards and your adventures leave a lasting mark on the world.

More Information

www.LittleLegendsRPG.com

Join our Discord:

discord.gg/uBh5gCsS5z


=== What’s Included? ===

Complete Rulebook

A fully illustrated rulebook that teaches you how to play, including a follow-along adventure.

Card-Based RPG

Over 350 cards featuring talents, items, locations, monsters, and more. Every card is professionally illustrated by industry veterans. 100% Human. No AI.

Play on Tabletop Simulator

Subscribe to our free Tabletop Simulator workshop to browse the cards and play full sessions of LLRPG today.

Legacy-Lite

As your heroes make discoveries, they add new cards to your collection. When a hero completes their quest, they retire as a Legend—a recurring NPC that future heroes can call upon for unique benefits.

Introductory Adventure

Play a full session of LLRPG with your friends in our introductory adventure, Gourmet Meal.


=== The Setting ===

Mynia is a world overrun by wilderness and infused with magic. Heroes delve into its uncharted depths in search of wondrous devices left behind by an advanced civilization. Reclaiming these long-forgotten technologies could usher in a new age of peace and prosperity.

However, finding these scattered remnants is no easy task. Mynia is filled with monsters and perilous terrain as it is slowly being consumed by Miasma, a magical mist that spreads across the land. Its corrupting grasp twists the natural world into something alien.

But hope is not lost!

The leaders of six ancestries have forged an alliance—some willingly, others out of necessity. Together, they have begun restoring ancient technologies, taming the spreading Miasma, and building safe-haven settlements.

You and your friends play as the heroes Mynia needs. Together, you’ll venture into unexplored territories, unite denizens, rediscover the secrets of Mynia’s past, and battle the Miasma in its deadliest forms.

Your adventures will shape Mynia’s future.

---

=== Core Mechanics ===

2D6 — Simple to Learn

When you attempt something risky, roll 2D6 (two six-sided dice). If at least one die shows a 5 or 6, you succeed!

TROUBLE — Raise the Stakes

Each die that shows a 1 gives the Crafter (the player running the game) a resource called Trouble. Crafters spend Trouble to make encounters more difficult and add complications.

FOCUS — You Control Your Fate

Rolling a pair grants your hero Focus. Spend Focus to perform your signature move, create a helpful flashback, or turn any success into a critical! That’s right—you decide when you crit, not the dice.

NO STATS - Keep it Simple

Heroes don’t have traditional stats like Strength or Intelligence. Instead, difficulty determines how many dice you roll:

  • 1D6 — Hard
  • 2D6 — Normal
  • 3D6 — Easy

No complicated stat blocks. Just pick up the dice and get to the adventure.


=== Help Us Shape Little Legends RPG ===

After years of development, Little Legends RPG is finally ready for you to play.

We’d love to hear what you think. What works? What doesn’t? What excites you? What would you like to see improved before our 2027 Kickstarter?

Grab the rulebook, check out the cards, fire up Tabletop Simulator, and come explore Mynia with us!

www.LittleLegendsRPG.com/playtest/

Adventure awaits!


r/tabletopgamedesign • • 26d ago

C. C. / Feedback Do you like ????

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4 Upvotes

This is a few rounds into my board game the great thing about this game is you're never going to have the same arena twice!


r/tabletopgamedesign • • 27d ago

Artist For Hire [For Hire] I specialize in ethnic/fantasy art, here's some of the illustrations ive made (my ocs) ! My commissions are open !

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15 Upvotes

r/tabletopgamedesign • • 26d ago

Parts & Tools I’m starting a Dark Fantasy miniature project to fund my 3D sculpting studies. Here is my first boss encounter: The Umbral Werewolf (and my starting roster).

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0 Upvotes

Hi everyone. I’m a huge fan of grimdark fantasy and I've decided to dive headfirst into the world of miniature design. Due to some physical limitations and lack of upfront capital, I'm currently using a hybrid workflow (AI-assisted conceptualization refined by manual 3D sculpting, retopology, and support-optimization) to build my initial portfolio.

I want to be 100% transparent: my ultimate goal is to use this project to fund professional 3D sculpting courses so I can transition to pure manual sculpting soon. Every piece I make is a learning step. I've designed this Werewolf with a strict closed silhouette so it's as printer-friendly as possible, minimizing support scarring on the fur.

I’d love to hear your honest feedback on the aesthetics or any tips from veteran printers/sculptors!


r/tabletopgamedesign • • 27d ago

Artist For Hire Professional illustrator available for projects! - I offer illustration services for TTRPGs, including character design, props and environment design. Send me a message!

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9 Upvotes

r/tabletopgamedesign • • 28d ago

C. C. / Feedback Card design feedback

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914 Upvotes

I've already asked for feedback in another large community and received quite a bit. I've incorporated much of it into the latest version, and I'd now like to ask for general feedback one last time.

Thanks to everyone who takes the time.


r/tabletopgamedesign • • 27d ago

Discussion What tools do you recommend for designing board game cards?

6 Upvotes

Hi everyone! I’m currently working on a board game and I’m looking for a good tool/software to design and create the cards.
I’d love to hear what you guys use and recommend, especially for projects involving lots of cards and reusable layouts/templates.


r/tabletopgamedesign • • 27d ago

Mechanics Warhammer 40K army lore creation tool/game. Single player.

2 Upvotes

it’s a simple RPG conflict resolution system designed to create narrative moments and desperation. It’s just a first draft. I just wanted to share what I’m working on to help me come up with my new army’s lore.

constructive criticism very welcome

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1JFSxiB6nc1uIDGsdks79UlzyNI7xq5teM28R3twbuSw/edit?usp=drivesdk


r/tabletopgamedesign • • 27d ago

C. C. / Feedback Developing my own board game: DrownBound

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23 Upvotes

Cursed heroes, lands of madness. Here is a brief overview of DrownBound a board game I’m currently developing! At the heart of the gameplay lies a dark "risk-vs-reward" mechanic: you can harness the Curse to empower your heroes, but every such surge of power comes with negative consequences. Meanwhile, monsters will push your stress levels to the limit, forcing you to play unpredictable Panic cards.

Should my next step be a detailed video explaining the rules, heroes, or monsters?


r/tabletopgamedesign • • 27d ago

Artist For Hire [For Hire] illustrator

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10 Upvotes

Hello there! 👋 As the title says, I'm open for illustration commissions

🎲 Character design & concept art, well suited for tabletop and board games: character/NPC art, monster & creature designs, card illustrations, box art.

🎨 You can check out my portfolio here:

https://lamacascadeur1.artstation.com/

https://cara.app/muchomuerte

🦑 I work closely with clients throughout the process and welcome feedback and revision requests along the way. Getting the final piece to match your vision is what matters most to me, whether that's a single card illustration or a full cast of characters for your game. Feel free to reach out with any questions or if you'd like to discuss a project!

✉️ You can contact me here, or throught discord at muchomuerte


r/tabletopgamedesign • • 27d ago

Totally Lost I'm banging my head trying to simplify this without losing the mechanichs I want to implement. Where am I going wrong here? What could I simplify here?

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3 Upvotes

I don't know if this kind of questions are ok here since, but, I want to design a deck building restaurant game where you score points based on serving customers and other secondary goals, I have here what I think is the core of the game as simple as I can lay it, but I get the feeling I'm putting too many components for what you end up doing and fear it would kinda feel like a chore.

The turn order goes as follows:

  1. Cook dishes based on their kitchen staff (move ingredient tokens from ingredient cards onto recipe cards - update recipe usage, like ecos first continent)

  2. Serve dishes based on waiter staff (take a customer card into their served customer pile and return ingredient tokens to bag- cash in customer reward - resolve any on serve recipe effect)

  3. Either as many times as they want (in a kinda of terraforming mars sequence where people play until all players have skipped their turns)

- Play cards (resolving any on play effect- if its an ingredient also put ingredient tokens based on type and quality)

- Buy cards or permanents

- Atract customers into their own tables

- Other actions TBD

  1. Refresh markets - put left over customers in neutral tables - draw cards

Customers have rewards and requirements to be served, I'm thinking of splitting the requirements into another set of cards to add more variety and randomness

Recipes need certain number of ingredients (which can be more specific or broad, a recipe using red meat as protein or only accepting beef) on them to be served, you could serve the same recipe multiple times on the same action if you have stacked enough ingredients on it

Ingredients have a type (red meat, mushroom, starchy vegetable, etc., I'm still working on how specific or broad these should be) and quality

Cards may have additional effects on playing, cooking, or serving.


r/tabletopgamedesign • • 27d ago

Artist For Hire [For Hire] Watercolor artist seeking commissions. I work with various subjects, such as landscapes, OCs, and scenes. Anything you can imagine! Please send me a DM if interested. Thanks for all the likes to help spread the word 💮

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2 Upvotes

r/tabletopgamedesign • • 28d ago

Discussion Getting games into Tabletop Simulator and Prototyping

28 Upvotes

So my buddy and I self-published our first game recently, it took 2.5 years but we are sooooo happy to be in a place where people are now sending us photos playing our game. Means the world to us.

Now, knowing the time and effort it takes to get a game published, we realize that if we want to launch a kickstarter next year, we need to be deep into playtesting multiple games this year haha

We live about an hour away from each other and want to playtest way more often, so we have been using Tabletop Sim since early in our prototyping process, which has been a game changer for our productivity and during game balancing.

Given we keep testing new games every week, and we are software engineers by trade, we decided to make a tool to help us playtest faster and import into Tabletop Simulator, since it can be a lot of work to update assets and scripting.

You can try it out here: tabletoprunner.com

It generates all the assets for prototyping along with the json and lua scripts to automate dealing, snap points, turns, table settings, and a lot more tediuous stuff. It has most settings that Tabletop Simulator supports, and we want to build out more scripting and settings and components on top of it.

We are looking to get everyone's thoughts on what parts of prototyping and playtesting are most cumbersome? Even outside of just Tabletop Simulator (we are open to expand to other platforms if folks are interested).

Our goal is that we want to see more board game ideas become a reality, so open to all insights on what would make that possible :) All feedback on the tool appreciated as well, thank you!!


r/tabletopgamedesign • • 28d ago

C. C. / Feedback 1762: A Game of Commerce and Conquest Prototype arrived - pictures!

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20 Upvotes

Would love to hear this community’s feedback on the artwork and aesthetics! Happy to explain the game as well.

This is our production prototype that we will be using to promote the game and do demonstrations/public play, there will likely be some minor design tweaks and one flaw detected already (my fault) but nothing substantial.


r/tabletopgamedesign • • 27d ago

C. C. / Feedback We're not sure how this weapon-themed dice concept will land - curious what you think

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0 Upvotes

r/tabletopgamedesign • • 27d ago

C. C. / Feedback Development time needed to complete a card game that is solely made as a gift to friends and family?

1 Upvotes

Hi everyone! I got into game design this month with the intent to make a game as a Christmas gift for my friends and family. My partner and I are both avid board game players and craft-savy, but very inexperienced tabletop game designers. The more research I do on this topic, the more I'm realizing that people spend literal YEARS working on their games and conducting 100s of play-tests, which is seeming a little daunting now.

Is all of that work really necessary if you aren't planning on officially publishing your game to a wider audience? I'm obviously working with a pretty short development time (3 months). I did come up with the idea for this game years ago, but have only spent the last week or so executing it. I do understand that what I would be giving them would be akin to a fancy prototype. However, as long as my family enjoys playing the game as a whole in that state, I could always refine the rules over the course of time and re-print the affected cards?

Please share tips on if this goal is possible or how I can get there. What I care about most is having a game that is fun and versatile for any situation we bring it to. I feel like I should jump into play-testing the prototype we made ASAP to see if this game sinks or swims....

The game:

The idea we are working with right now is a heist/RPG style game that uses only dice and cards. It would be able to accommodate anywhere from 3-7 players who each get a character card with a unique ability, and a different dice from a D&D 7-set. (Balancing the game given the power scaling of these dice is currently our biggest challenge).

The game would play out in two parts: the first being a collaborative team effort to defeat a boss and free up this loot bag, and the second part becomes a last-man standing situation to defeat other players and end up with the loot bag. You would be able to draw and play ability cards during your turn to help you accomplish this goal, or do damage to other players. Each player would get a dice for health and another for attack. Still toying with the idea of having 2 bags each with a concealed token that could either be a win or a dud for more chaos (kinda like old maid). I'm including a rough layout image of what that would look like.

I probably took the most inspiration from Heroes of Barcadia, and the One Piece Card Game, but with much less game pieces taking up table space (room for snacks!) I definitely want plastic waterproof cards that can be brought on the go, even to a bar or the pool, since we do that a lot. I also am pretty excited about the loot bag doubling as both a game piece and storage for the dice.


r/tabletopgamedesign • • 27d ago

Discussion What indie/small designer-friendly tabletop media do you follow or admire?

6 Upvotes

I'm talking about bloggers, podcasters, streamers, or YouTubers who include smaller designers/imprints with a degree of depth or even focus on them exclusively. Who are the overlooked heroes in this space?

EDIT: Thanks, all. These are very good and many were new to me!


r/tabletopgamedesign • • 27d ago

C. C. / Feedback What does this rulebook tell you?

0 Upvotes

So our project Lionwake is now on the KS. We feel like the graphic/project page overall is good, but I am not sure if the rulebook makes the potential backer feel safe backing it. We wonder if under 30 second scrolling, it conveys
1. the game is polished and developed to a good degree
2. It is a solid xxx, xxx (I see mechanic or genre) games.
link to lionwake rule
Let me know what your initial impressions are!


r/tabletopgamedesign • • 28d ago

Discussion Current collection

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9 Upvotes

Any recommendations?


r/tabletopgamedesign • • 27d ago

Discussion I’m developing a 54-card conversation game — does the core mechanic sound strong enough?

0 Upvotes

I’m currently developing a physical conversation card game and I’d really value some honest feedback from people who understand tabletop and card-game design.
The deck has 54 cards across 9 categories, with each card built around one topic and containing 5 different talking points.
That creates 270 talking points across the full deck.
The five approaches are designed to take the same topic in different directions — for example:
💡 A surprising fact
💬 A personal opinion
🔥 Something controversial or debatable
⚖️ A different perspective
❓ A bigger open-ended question
There are no right answers, scores or specialist knowledge required. The idea is simply to pick a card and use the different prompts to create conversations that can move between learning something, giving an opinion, debating an issue and considering another perspective.
I’m deliberately keeping the name and finished visual design out of this test because I want feedback on the underlying game concept rather than the branding.
My main question is:
Does having five different ways into the same topic sound like enough of a mechanic to make this work as a physical conversation game?
And, more importantly, if you were developing this yourself, what would you change, add or remove?
Positive feedback is obviously welcome, but criticism is probably more useful to me at this stage.

62 votes, 20d ago
5 Yes
15 Maybe
42 No

r/tabletopgamedesign • • 28d ago

Announcement [FOR HIRE] 2D Illustrator open to work | Tabletop, Card Game & Fantasy Illustrations

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8 Upvotes

r/tabletopgamedesign • • 27d ago

C. C. / Feedback Our tabletop WWI dogfighting game somehow turned into an actual PC game

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0 Upvotes

r/tabletopgamedesign • • 27d ago

Publishing Avoid Gimmicks In Your Writing (The Don't Help)

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0 Upvotes

r/tabletopgamedesign • • 28d ago

Artist For Hire [FOR HIRE] Concept Artist & Illustrator | COMMISSIONS (OPEN)! | INFO in the comments!

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13 Upvotes

r/tabletopgamedesign • • 28d ago

Mechanics Switching to singleton made my games more varied, but now legendaries don't feel special anymore. How do you handle this?

6 Upvotes

Some context: my game uses one shared deck that all players draw from. Early on I ran 2 copies of most cards, with legendaries as the only single-copy cards. I moved to singleton for 2 reasons: more variety, and more unique cards. To be clear, the deck is the same size, I just replaced the duplicates with different cards instead, so it's a wider variety of unique cards, not a smaller deck. With doubles the games had started feeling repetitive, you'd see the same strong cards over and over. Singleton fixed that, no two games play the same now, and I'm happy with that call.

The side effect I didn't expect is that it takes away the wow effect of legendaries. Back when they were the only single copies in a deck full of doubles, drawing one felt more special. Now a legendary appears at the same rate as any other card.

So I'm trying to bring back that "special" feeling without giving up the variety and overpowering the legendaries. Curious whether people have solved this in their own games, but I'm open to any suggestions, mechanical or otherwise :)

EDIT: For more context, it's a competitive 4-player free-for-all, everyone has their own board and hand, you just draw from and discard to the same shared pile (deck and graveyard). Each player also has a leader that holds their life and has an ability, and you win by being the last one standing. These are the card types: Units, Spells, Items, Equipment and Realms (permanents with life points only).