I am Rowan Sender: a TTRPG designer and host of the Eternal TTRPG Jam.
This page is, for now, a backup of my games in the event that large online hosting platforms become too unstable due to manipulation from outside forces.
That said, it is also a challenge for my to actually learn a bit more about webdev since it seems like that is the direction the the internet is going. I don't have a solid vision of what this will look like, but it seems that the institutions that underpin the foundation of the modern internet, will continue to be eroded under the guise of "protecting the children". An age old fulcrum through which censorship and discrimination are leveraged.
This is rapidly turning into a manifesto about the internet. That's not what I'm here to do. We're here to talk about games.
My interest in Pen&Paper games has been following me like a dark specter for most of my life. When I was young, I had managed to collect all of the Dungeons & Dragons 4e players handbooks despite being fairly poor and not really having anyone in my life who was interested in playing with me. I was also colossally stupid at the time so I spent most of my time looking at the pictures and lists and imagining what the game could possibly look like. They were, if nothing else, evocative to my little brain. At around that same time I fell into a group of friends that had a passing interest in adjacent mediums (common nerd media at the time), and attempted to make a pokemon TTRPG that truly never left the concept phase. I had almost no idea how a tabletop game functions on the most basic level. I knew there were characters. And dice. End of list. And that's where my interest sat for many years.
There comes a time in every person's life where they are confronted with the MIRE. This may come in the form of a particularly toxic young relationship. It may be exposure to substances or lifestyles. Or, god forbid, you get caught up in the most deleterious of pass times: fandom culture from 2012.
Luckily I dodged most of those, only briefly existing in the miasma that was SuperWhoLock in its heyday. I like your shoelaces, btw. The only similar affliction is the deep depression that also follows me like a specter. And the weed. That was mostly a function of the depression though.
(for those keeping score, we're at three specters and one miasma)
Speaking of, the real thing that I wanted to talk about was 5e. This game ruined my brain and kept me alive during the pandemic. I became obsessed with it. I had, at one time, a near encyclopedic knowledge of the game. If you're reading this an thinking "omg, we have so many interests in common", divest yourself of that stance. This paragraph should be read with the tone of the preamble of an episode of Intervention. This was a profoundly damaging period of my life and I am still working to overcome the psychic scar that Dungeons & Dragons 5e has left on my mind.
I wish that I had a cute, concise story about how I got into indie games. The first one that really knocked me out of my groove is Dungeon World. Or actually, it might be more accurate to asy Adventure Zone: Amnesty is maybe woke me up to it. Or even reading the write up about the Clay That Woke randomly out there on the internet. I don't really know where it came from, but it did and it hit me like a truck.
I think its still accurate to say that Dungeon World was really the first game that I learned about and sought out myself. At the time I was deep in the paint on Homebrewery (some works that, despite a foolish amount of work going into them, will never see the light of day) and saw reading indies as a way to expand my design horizons for those particular projects. Little did I know...
Having written all of that has made me remember that Shadow of the Demon Lord might actually be the first indie TTRPG that I bought with the intention of running a game. That never happened, due to that fickle thorn of scheduling. It still may have been the first non D&D game that I had read with the critical eye of game management. If you haven't heard of it, its a pretty cool little game about demon invasions. Its very much in the design vein of 5e, but it does a decent amount of work to fit the mechanics to the specific subgenre better. They also have a pretty cool character sheet, which is always a plus.
Enough about 5e.
We'll say that was about 2023. Since then I have begun collecting (and sometime reading) indie games at an alarming rate. I have become the wizard with the stacks of books. I am very nearly out of space. It's becoming a problem. Living where I do means that the Half Priced Books around me end up with a pretty decent selection of TTRPG game books and I've been extremely luck with my finds there.
And then there's the PDFs. Jesus. I'm going to have to find a new way to store them soon. Or just commit to only doing local storage.
I won't go into depth here about all of the games I've collected, but some influential pieces are Dungeon World, Thirsty Sword Lesbians, Dungeon Bitches, (definitely had a PBtA phase) Quest, Cairn, Wanderhome, A Quiet Year, and Into the Odd.
As I mentioned, I had begun homebrewing D&D pretty early on. That was honestly most of my time spent with the game; far surpassing my play and prep times. Looking back at my history like this, it's pretty easy to see my predilection towards game development.
Most of 2023 and 2024 was spent spinning my wheels on projects including one ill-fated Grimdark Fantasy PBtA game and another tentatively called Drifters Vs. Draculas another PBtA about cowboys and samurai fighting vampires. That one I may come back around to. Its basically feature complete. We'll see how life goes.
Towards the end of 2024, I finally got a little bit of an extended break from all of the general life business and got to work on games a bit more. From that come the idea for Weekend Wizards. "Why haven't I head you talk about that game?" you may be asking. Well that's because I completely stalled out on it. The idea is there. You can go read it on my Itch. But I lost steam on it and I don't know when I'll get back to it. It's still a fun idea, but the core of it needs a rework.
Weekend Wizards is an important stepping stone however. It was really the first time that I branched out into my own system and tried to take development of my own game full into my own hands.
January-February of 2025 I participated in the Tiny Worlds Game Jam. I made two little game settings, collaborating with JamesMusicus on one. These projects were really fun and a nice way to kick myself out of the rut I was starting to feel with my other dev work.
Then I went looking for another jam.
And there wasn't anything like it.
Sure there were game jams. A few about specific system. Or niche topics or causes. Or as a part of a games marketing push. Or (worst of all) tied to a specific content creator. I may be alone in this at this point, but I refuse to allow my creative work be a part of someone's marketing.
So nothing really scratched my itch.io (please laugh). I wanted something open enough that I could bring my own ideas to it, but still closed enough to give guidance and structure. It was also weird to me that there weren't any mainstays that were always around. Why was the One Page TTRPG Jam the only one that seemed in anyway consistent. I sat on this for a while.
And then rather suddenly on a random day in the second week of February, I developed the idea for the Eternal TTRPG Jam. Huge shout out to my very brave wife for helping my put together the marketing and branding in the mad hour that followed. The jam was posted and up about two hours after I had decided to go for it.
The jam has been a god sent for me personally. Its been such an amazing structuring system for my development of games and system. The community that's sprung up around it has been amazing as well. I always get a little sappy about it, but its really feels like it's had a small, but overwhelmingly positive impact on the TTRPG space online. Indie TTRPGs are, in a lot of ways, in their infancy. Things like the Eternal Jam are important avenues for the community to develop itself and worm its way out from under the hegemonic influence of games like Dungeons & Dragons.
It's really important to me that this stays an open and accessible space online (hence the need for this website in the first place). We may be entering an era that requires us to take back a bit of our agency, both in the real world, and online. Certain systems have been eroded and that is going to have a knock on effect. But its not all bleak. From this, we can reclaim some control over out lives. But it will take effort. Get used to going to people's personal websites again. Curate your own experience. Put in the effort. Be curious. Learn how the world you live in works.
This is sounding preachy again.
On the topic of tabletop games and the development of our community, I'm also a part of a small group of game devs and community members that are attempting to make the community a better place.
This community effort covers four large topics:
That's kind of the long and short of it. It's mostly organized on the group's Discord which can be found through the website. Be warned that it's pretty highly structured over there, so don't get too overwhelmed.