This blog will be where I will post ideas, thoughts, and struggles as someone who thought it would be fun to design a RPG system, having never done so before. 

So, let's open up this blog and start with what I am trying to do and what this blog might be about. Beyond the Torchlight was born out of a discussion with my Friday night game group. Coming off of the OGL controversy this past winter, I was able to finally convince my players to break their D&D 5e obsession and play something else. I was getting burned out on D&D, and the amount of preparation it required as a GM, so we had a lot of conversations about different types of games, that we might want to try. My interests leaned towards OSR games if in part only for the fact that they seemed like they could be learned and played very quickly. I finally settled on playing a game called Cairn, which captured my attention based upon its simplicity. There are no classes, no races and no leveling up. While it technically isn't an OSR game, it fit the bill of something that I wanted to transition to for a short campaign.

I have been playing that system for a few months now and it has been a nice change of pace. There have been some great roleplay moments that we have had, but there are also ideas that I would like to explore that Cairn doesn't address.

Adding to this, is the fact that I can tell that my players aren't entirely captured by Cairn. I have found it to be a very refreshing way to GM a game, but I can see that some my play group needs a bit more crunch and depth, specifically in the combat system.

Around this same time, during one of our game sessions the phrase "Beyond the Torchlight" emerged from someone's mouth. I can't recall the exact circumstance, but it definitely was borne from a conversation on how the Cairn system does not have any sort of Darkvision. Immediately after that phrase was uttered, we all agreed that someone had to grab that domain name.