The Making of Shardfall: A Dragon Legends Adventure – Part 3

The Making of Shardfall: A Dragon Legends Adventure – Part 1 | Part 2

The Prototype Problem

Index cards.

Yep. That’s what we started with.

Just a stack of colored index cards. Each one filled with far too many numbers, scribbled stats, and an occasional question mark when we didn’t quite know what the ability should do yet. It was messy, overcomplicated, and honestly kind of hilarious in hindsight.

But it worked… Sort of.

It didn’t take long to realize that if we wanted this game to actually function, we were going to need nine decks total. Nine. That was the magic number where everything clicked. 4 encounter decks, 4 loot decks, and 1 boons/banes deck.  Early on, the mechanics were way too crunchy. Some lineage and class combos were smooth and fun. Others… not so much.

Warriors? Easy to design. Honestly, too easy. They were quickly too powerful.
Humans? Total opposite. For some reason, we could not figure out what made humans mechanically interesting without being a generic stat boost.

Balancing was a nightmare. We didn’t want any one class/lineage combo to become “the obvious best.” That felt like a betrayal of the RPG roots, where creativity and choice should always matter more than optimization. But getting there took more trial and error than I care to admit.

The first board was just as scrappy. I built it using hexagon wood pieces from a $10 TEMU order and bingo chips we had lying around. It was a Frankenstein’s monster of a prototype—but it held together. Barely. I’ll throw some pictures at the top of this blog if you want to see how far we’ve come (and maybe get a chuckle out of it). Looking at it now is a little embarrassing, but hey, everything has to start somewhere, right?

Colored index cards eventually gave way to spreadsheets. That was a game-changer. Suddenly, tweaking monster damage, adjusting item values, and balancing loot tables became way easier. Instead of re-writing 350 cards by hand, we could just tweak a formula or drop in a new stat. Efficiency unlocked.

Then we hit a bit of a snag. It was during one of those late-night spreadsheet sessions when we realized… about a dozen of our encounter monsters were trademarked by Wizards of the Coast.

Oops.

That opened a whole new can of anxieties. Was this game really original? Had we unconsciously crossed any other legal lines? Did we need to worry about trademarks now?

For a brief moment, it was tempting to put it all back in the drawer. But we didn’t. Instead, we shrugged and kept going. We made a list of everything that needed renaming or reworking. We reminded ourselves: this is just a prototype. If this ever became a real thing, we’d cross that bridge when we got to it.

And then came our very first full playtest with my daughters. My 17-year-old and 13-year-old sat down, grabbed character cards, and helped us run through a full game. It was clunky. Crunchy. Some abilities took forever to resolve. Some cards didn’t quite make sense. But you know what?

It worked.

And for the first time, I let myself think—maybe this could actually be something.

The Making of Shardfall: A Dragon Legends Adventure – Part 4