Welcome to the Workshop!
Hey There, Friends!
I am your friendly eternal Dungeon Master, Aboleth Eye! And if you've found this blog, you must be interested in Tabletop Roleplaying Games, like Dungeons & Dragons (mostly 3e/3.5 Edition)! But not to worry, there are plenty of other TTRPG projects I am eager to share through this new Aboleth Workshop Blog.
Who am I? Here's a big trove of my personal lore; read if you dare! Lol
Commissioned from LadyZolstice
I started playing Dungeons & Dragons in college, around 2012, and I was honestly quite lucky to start with 3.5 Edition. No, I'm not here to bash 5th edition; my brain just really fit well with the game design for the system. That is why I have been playing, running and homebrewing for 3e/3.5e for the last twelve plus years.
My very first foray into sharing stuff I personally made was through Giant in the Playground, the amazing forum for 3e/3.5 content. I even shared a 3.5e-template homebrew system to emulate the Holy Grail War from fate/stay night (and its spinoffs) since I was very into the Nasuverse in the mid 2010s. But I was disappointed in how my work hit a wall; and I will be honest (because it's objectively true) it was a first draft of a project rather than a final one. It was massively flawed, and people let me know the flaws were there.
Looking back on that experience, I recognize I wasn't prepared to have my work critiqued. I wasn't experienced enough as a ttrpg host/game master and game designer to take it in stride. That project was abandoned once I had to turn my attention to other concerns--concrete ones like moving states, finding an adult job, etc. But you can still find that flawed homebrew here; I look on it with kinder eyes these days. Haha
Around 2015, to combat some of the loneliness I was feeling entering the adult world, I joined social media through Tumblr. I enjoyed that it was easier to engage with and share content compared to the conventions of being on a forum. I didn't intend to, but eventually I became the type of blogger I would have liked when I was starting out playing D&D and other tabletop rpgs: sharing fantasy art, tabletop roleplaying stories, etc. To this day I still run my Aboleth-Eye Tumblr and tag everything to high heaven personally.
With more years of engaging with D&D content (and feeling more content and confident in being and adult geek), I began to create my own custom options for the game system. I was playing online regularly with a group of friends from college and others we found along the way. And thus I had an outlet to share new ideas for 3e/3.5 content, and had trusted voices to give me honest feedback. I was inspired to create once more: all sorts of classes, monsters, magic items and fantasy races to offer my friends. And with more experience being online and on social media by that point in my life, I became eager to share my content. And so I decided to upload my homebrews to Tumblr as well, making a side blog just for sharing more personal thoughts and creations for D&D 3.5e.
Several games came and went on that homebrew blog. And honestly, even though those projects were shelved, I am exceedingly proud of what they were.
Around this time, I went through a huge phase of consuming every scrap of Bloodborne lore. Thank to lore channels like VaatiVidya, I was able to fully dive into the amazing eldritch horror story--even though I didn't have the means to actually play the game myself.
My obsession led me to undertake a project to recreate the trick weapons of that FromSoft game in a D&D 3.5 based system. That was an amazing experience working with my favorite ttrpg system but taking it in a new direction; and I started to share these weapons on the Workshop Tumblr. I systematically went through each canon weapon, and created many homebrew ones too; and people really seemed to like them. That eventually led me to realize the enemy statistics for Bloodborne's iconic monsters, and then new ttrpg classes and abilities so people could play their own Hunters fighting said monsters. I reached out over Tumblr asking for playtesters and started up a Discord server to host the playtest games. I got to fully learn how to host games on my own, playtesting my game with complete strangers. And that was an experience I will never be grateful enough to--coming out of my shell completely without realizing!
Eventually I hit a wall with my alpha draft of my D20borne System, but I still tinker with it to this day. I researched other games and mods people have done with D&D 3.5e and I feel confident I could attempt running that again some day. But my brain-muse decided I had other obsessions to dive into, and new projects to try.
Next came a Powered by the Apocalypse style game based on the manga Houseki no Kuni (or Land of the Lustrous in English). I had only recently learned about PbtA games, and diving into narrative-focused games was very intriguing to me. With two players I found through Tumblr I was able to playtest that new game; finding many bugs along the way. Eventually, however, I read further than the anime adaptation showed of HoK, and spoiler alert but some story beats messed my perception of where this ttrpg project could go... So I shelved that project and kept up with the newer issues of HoK as they came in--the project probably isn't going anywhere anytime soon, I am sad to say.
Dejected and dealing with being a goshdang adult, I took a break from homebrewing new games, and started brewing up stuff for D&D once more. And that was all fine and dandy for a time; but this side blog never quite found its footing on Tumblr in my opinion. Then again my posts became so sporadic--since I am very very critical of my ttrpg homebrew--that I went in with no real plan to find my footing. Honestly, after years of uploading stuff whenever I felt like it, the blog has been more for me to say I have shared my homebrew classes/races/etc without allowing it to be truly seen.
That stops today. At least, I hope this new blog becomes a new vehicle for me to find my people. The gamers who love talking about worldbuilding, game design, trying new systems and finding inspiration in collaborative storytelling.
Luckily I have been inspired to share my work, on Blogspot specifically, in the last year and a half through another project--my Ravenloft story blog, Freaks & Facades! I started hosting a Ravenloft 3.5e game on my now fully active Discord, and my players are so amazing that we decided to share the story of their misadventures. I have learned so much about blog formatting through this project that I have decided to wholeheartedly share my large backlog of D&D and TTRPG design here on this new blog.
The first few posts I'm going to be sharing are going to be full republishings of my past homebrew design. So please bear with me as I find my footing with this new blog.
In the meantime, if you have made it this far and want to get started engaging with my projects while I am compiling what to post, you can find them here:
- The Aboleth Eye Discord - an active discord server about playing TTRPGs, worldbuilding and sharing what we love; LGBTQIA+ Friendly
- Freaks & Facades - my Ravenloft 3.5e recap blog, where I bullet journal the campaign story of my amazing Friendly Freaks (and their players)
- The Aboleth Eye Homebrew/Lore Masterposts - the original post collecting all the homebrew and worldbuilding ideas I've done over the years, most of which I will be uploading to here in time.
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