While it may be slow to come to the attention of North American audiences, South East Asia has had a thriving and extremely talented TTRPG community for decades. But spend any amount of time searching the #RPGSEA hashtag on Twitter, and some truly exciting tabletop game designers are making their mark on the hobby. I was privileged for the chance to connect with Sin and Pam, co-designers of Navathem’s End, to talk about their creation, game design, and the TTRPG community in the Philippines.
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Brent: Thank you both for taking the time to talk with me. For our readers not yet familiar with your work, please tell me a bit about yourselves.
Sin: Hi, my name is Sin and I’m a game designer, illustrator and layout artist from Manila, Philippines. I’m one of the co-designers for Navathem’s End. Most of my work can be found on diwatamnl.itch.io and I design a lot of games that focus on themes of hope, defiance, love, and community.
Pam: Hello! My name is Pam, and I’m a game designer, editor, sensitivity reader, and cultural consultant from Manila as well. Beyond game design, I’ve been involved in community advocacy for RPGSEA, and have helped organize events like Session Zero Online. A lot of my work can be found on thedovetailor.itch.io, and I’ve been published in a number of other games so far. I helped Sin design Navathem’s End, and also handled its editing.
B: What drew you both into tabletop roleplaying games? What was your “hero origin story” in the hobby?
Pam: All my older brothers were into AD&D and Warhammer! There was a time when I was reading more ttrpg source books than I was “real” books. Started playing in earnest when I was in college, and then it went downhill from there. Session Zero’s first run – a physical convention – inspired me to start designing my own stuff after a long period of hacking and homebrewing World of Darkness games for my playgroups. In 2019, however, I was invited to Big Bad Con – that marked the start of my professional career as a freelancer in ttrpgs.
Sin: For me, I was invited on a whim by a friend of a friend to my first ever D&D game and it was the most fun 4-hour introduction to tabletop rpgs for me. After that, I kept playing with this big group (we were a group of 10 that eventually whittled down to about 12 people) for about 3 years. Somewhere within those first three years, I learned to DM and homebrew. That’s kind of how it all began – I wanted to make my own world and setting and I wanted to run games the way I wanted to. Eventually, I found out that there was a local organization organizing tabletop rpg events and I got hooked even more. Gamers & GMs PH became like a second family after I joined. They encouraged me to try and design and think of new games all the time when I was still starting out. Some members from that group continue to be a huge part of why I can keep doing what I’m doing. I wouldn’t be here without their support.
B: How and when did you shift from players/GMs to designing your first games? Was that gradual or did you jump in right away?
Sin: I think it was gradual and it was not? When I first started out with D&D like I mentioned, I loved playing as my character, but I was also really drawn to GMing. It seemed like a lot of fun: being the one to present obstacles, puzzles, and plot hooks and seeing the characters just go for it. My favorite is always in watching the players deliberate for a long time about what to do next. I think I started GMing about… just 4 months or so after I really started playing D&D. After that, I started looking into other games and often, my circle would only have a small number of people who knew how the game worked – which often resulted in me being the perpetual GM for the group. I didn’t mind it, though! It was really fun for me. Still is!
Pam: Gradual, honestly. I spent years as a GM, picking at systems I was familiar with and tailoring things as I saw fit. To be honest, the shift to design was driven by wanting to work as a game designer. I had always wanted to, although back then I was hoping to work in the video games industry. Session Zero and Big Bad Con showed me that I could actually design for tabletop roleplaying games. Since it’s a hobby of mine, I figured I would go for it.
B: Navathem’s End was one of three RPGs successfully funded during a 3-project Kickstarter in 2020 called Our Shores, which featured creators and projects from Southeast Asia. Could you talk a bit about Our Shores and what came from that project?
Sin: First of all, Our Shores allowing devs from countries in the SEA to get funded was already a big leap because as some people may not know, Kickstarter doesn’t have support for many SEA countries, including mine. That alone was a big door and a major hurdle. With Sandy Pug Games’ help, we managed to circumvent this and Our Shores was born!
Our Shores was really an exciting project for us. It was the first for many of us to experience being part of the Kickstarter that really highlighted OUR projects, as opposed to the usual song and dance of being hired for someone else’s project to either do art, layout or writing for them. While I love and enjoy being hired for other people’s projects, I also had been slowly trying to fund Navathem’s End’s development for a long time out of my own pocket and out of money raised through my patreon. Our Shores gave me that chance I needed to let Navathem’s End become a product that I wanted it to. It got edited, it got art. I was really happy about that. Similarly, the other two projects that were funded by Our Shores were also given the same opportunity. Capitalites and Maharlika are both incredible games and it is nice to see how much Our Shores helped it come to life, as the devs wanted them to.
Further, Our Shores also funded a small zine that was a collection of micro-rpgs by a collection of other SEA designers. We raised some money for each dev and they were allowed to do what they wanted with the money and create their mini game. For many of those SEA designers, it was their first time to also be involved in a Kickstarter.
It’s not often that attention is pointed towards SEA designers. We often have to fight very hard for the centers of our hobby to even think about us. Before Our Shores, I’d been getting some commissions here and there, but I’d say the attention picked up quite a bit after that. I know that for some devs involved, it also helped them have that space to experiment with a platform that we normally wouldn’t have had access to, but all the anxiety of it was tempered by Sandy Pug’s help. It was a really enriching experience and I hope that we get more opportunities to shine that kind of light on SEA projects in the future.
B: Navathem’s End is an amalgamation of elements from OSR, Powered by the Apocalypse, and Forged in the Dark. What was that design process like? Did you have an idea of where to start and where you wanted to go, or did you find your way as you went?
Sin: Oh, honestly I had no idea what I was doing in the beginning. Navathem’s End started with nothing but a test character sheet and a dream. I had some bits and pieces from Powered by the Apocalypse and Pendragon that I wanted, but had no clue how to properly implement it. I read so many games that employed PBTA just to kind of… understand how to even design something from that school of thought because it was very, very different from homebrewing for D&D. It was confusing but I wanted to do it anyway.
Our adventures into Forged in the Dark were all thanks to Pam, to be honest. She knows that game inside-out, cover to cover. A lot of our mechanics that helped the game flow pretty easily came from Pam’s suggestions to plug certain elements of FiTD in.
What a lot of devs don’t often talk about is that sometimes, when you’re coming from a background of being so inundated in the D&D type of design, it takes quite a bit of unraveling before you can kind of learn to design for other systems. I personally really struggled with that. Not that I am saying I hate D&D design; I just knew that Navathem’s End wasn’t meant to be played as a D&D campaign and/or setting.
Pam: Admittedly, when Sin invited me along to help them design Navathem, I came in with the mindset of “I am here to supplement whatever they have in mind”. So, my focus was trying to find ways to make Sin’s concepts shine on a mechanical level. Forged in the Dark is my wheelhouse, so I tried to see what parts of that toolkit I could use to Navathem itself.
After that, it was a long process of “does this work? Does it not? How do we present the aesthetic of Navathem through mechanics?” It was a LOT of tinkering, but it was 100% worth it in the end.
Sin: I agree. When the playtesting happened and we started seeing where things fell together in place and where they fell apart, it became a lot easier to design and revise the game. It was like watching a rube goldberg machine come together.
B: Are there design elements of Navathem’s End either of you are particularly proud of? Is there anything you hope other designers can learn or take away from your design?
Pam: I’m really proud of the fact that Sin and I managed to make everything gameable – at least we hope that we have, although feedback has confirmed, time and again, that we took things in the right direction. One of the things I personally can’t get behind is if a ttrpgs source book is full of fluff that chokes a potential playgroup’s ideas, and generally makes itself a difficult world to play in. This isn’t to say that books full of lore are bad. It’s more of, the intent of games in my opinion is to give complete strangers the tools to make the world and concepts you’ve come up with their own. If you can’t guide them through taking ownership of the game you’ve made, what’s the point?
I don’t view myself, by any stretch, as some kind of pillar of design, and I don’t really know if my stuff helps or inspires other designers to make their own things. I can only hope that when folks read Navathem and other works of mine, they’ll go “damn, I want to play this thing”, or “oooh this is very inspiring for my own stuff!”. That’s enough for me.
Sin: For me, I’m just proud of it being finished. And that sounds really simple, but this game has been brewing in my head and in a 200+ page google doc that my patreons have had access to for years. Haha! Just the fact that it is done, that I can tell my patrons: “Hey, it’s ready for download!” is very cool to me. I, too, am proud of all the little things that make it Navathem, of course. The lore, the mechanics coming together: I think all of those things make up what is Navathem, but also just the fact that it is out there, available for consumption, is what thrills me – because that means all my personal fears and worries of whether people will like it or not can now be released into the void. Of course, I have thoughts about supplements and erratas for the future, but as it is, it is done. A finished product is better than a perfect product, as they say.
If you were to ask me about mechanics, I think I would say much the same as Pam. It was really difficult to kind of come to a point where we could stand back and say “Yeah, I think this is all more or less gameable.” You could play in the world of Navathem at “present day,” but you could also play a campaign that took place during the Times of Chaos. It would all still work. You could decide “Eh, I don’t really want to implement this one rule” and the game would still function. I think that’s what’s pretty cool about it.
B: I know that even two or three years ago, many Southeast Asian designers in the TTRPG space were just coming to the attention of North American audiences. How has the situation changed since the launch of Our Shores and Navathem’s End?
Pam: I think it is changing, albeit far slower than many of us hope it would. Granted, nobody expected a global pandemic to strike and change everyone’s plans. Some real systematic barriers exist for us, the most major one being the fact that many of us struggle to get visas for countries that host big TTRPG conventions. Then there’s the fact that hobby spaces remain primarily white and focused on North America. Not a lot of people, whether they’re designers or hobbyists, will look very far beyond their own circles. Furthermore, not a lot of folks are cognizant of how their biases and personal preferences have a different impact depending on who they’re dealing with, and what they choose or choose not to patronize as a gamer. For example, most Southeast Asian game designers can only release digitally. Unfortunately, your typical ttrpg player strongly prefers physical copies. SEA designers generally have no means of publishing physically, at least not without monumental effort and a LOT of support. The strong preference for physical means that many gamers won’t bother buying our stuff.
Then, of course, your typical TTRPG gamer will tend to think that all they need to do in order to be “inclusive” is to support one or two token people from a marginalized group. The truth of the matter is, EVERYONE in a marginalized group needs support. Furthermore, a person’s marginalization doesn’t necessarily mean that they’ll help their own, or be good people. At several points in our history so far as a community and design space in TTRPGs, RPGSEA has seen how people within the circles have chosen to pull the ladder up after they’ve gotten opportunities rather than do more work to uplift their peers. This hurts us a whole lot more than it would our peers in America, given how small and constrained our spaces are, and the countless limitations we face with respect to access.
Anyway. I won’t speak for everyone, but I am grateful for folks who continue to keep their eyes peeled for us online, and do everything they can to give us access to opportunities like grants and online conventions. Those do go far with respect to recognizing us and our design. My hope, of course, is that more designers and hobbyists will actively try to break out of their comfort zones, check their own blindspots, and give our stuff a chance.
B: Speaking as designers, what other games are out there right now that you are excited or by? Any games or systems to inspire another project?
Pam: I admit that I’ve been incredibly busy with real life matters and a pending migration, so I have not been keeping abreast of other games lately. That said, I’m still watching the design progress of Makapatag’s Gubat Banwa, which is a tactical SEA-inspired high fantasy game. I’m also always excited to see what Momatoes will come up with next, since they’re a furious force of good in our space on top of being an absolute monster with respect to churning out excellent games.
Beyond that, it’s just been nice passively watching my Southeast Asian peers get excited about their stuff, and helping them with hype.
Sin: It’s not very new, but I’ve been wanting to check out Apothecaria by Anna Blackwell and Anamnesis by Blinking Birch Games. I’m very attracted to solo games at the moment because that is one genre of TTRPGs that I haven’t quite fully grasped yet. Not that I don’t know how to design for it – just that I haven’t quite tried to design a solo game yet. I really want to try. I’m also really in the mood to try digging into some system-agnostic stuff. Whenever I get into the mood to make new games, I always end up digging into lots of small games of the genre that I want to create in. I have some ideas for “investigative” type of games and I want to see what the scene has made in this genre. I want to make a really classic “whodunnit” game so I’m on the lookout for this types of games, too.
B: What projects do you both have coming up? Anything you can tease or talk about?
Pam: The Dagger Isles Supplement has me occupied. Am extremely excited to see what people think when we finally release it for open playtests! Then there’s Tales from Sina Una, which has been put up on Kickstarter. Please look forward to it!
Sin: I, too, am writing for both the Dagger Isles and Tales from Sina Una! I’m very thrilled to get to write for those two. I have a couple more projects under NDA, unfortunately, so I cannot share them with you, but I will say that I haven’t been part of such big projects before! While exciting, it is very nerve wracking. Certainly more risk comes with being part of bigger projects.
Also, here is where I can say that Navathem’s End is hoping to release for print sometime in 2023! We’re hoping for early to mid 2023 and the folks at Exalted Funeral are gonna help us with it! I’m very, very excited for that.
Presently, my goal is to make a couple of major personal releases every year or so. Maybe 2 or 3. This year it was Hark! Says the Frog Magus, Faster and Faster Still, and Navathem’s End. I’m wondering what I’ll have out in time for next year, haha!
B: Thank you again for talking with me! Where can folks find you if they want to see what you’re up to?
Pam: Beyond my Itch, I do post a lot on Twitter – @TheDovetailor. Stay tuned to that space if you’d like to see how I’m doing and what I am up to. Beyond that, I deeply appreciate folks taking the time and space out to support me through Ko-Fi.
Sin: I’m quite active on my twitter: @diwataMANILA. All my works are on diwatamnl.itch.io and my most recent ones have all been art packs! I’ve become quite busy with layout work and I often grumble at not having vectors and license free art that fit what I need for certain projects, so I’ve been making and releasing my own. If you would like to commission me, you can check out my rates at diwatamnl.carrd.co! If you wish to be the first to get all the stuff I release, I appreciate support through subscribing to my patreon at patreon.com/diwataMNL.
Thank you so much!
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Thank you again to Sin and Pam for talking with me. Please give them a follow at the links about and check out all those games! And if you have a suggestion as to who I should interview next, or want to talk with me yourself, reach out in my DMs on Twitter, @DorklordCanada.
