…stepping out your door.

Hello, and welcome to my very first Driftborn devlog. I’ve been wanting to start writing these for a while now.

For years, Driftborn has been a secret in the background of my life. It started as sleepless nights, then notes scribbled in notebooks, ideas scattered across documents, and conversations with friends. Over time, those ideas grew into a real world, adventures, commissioned artwork, characters, and eventually a proper publishing studio with a website of its own and planned products to release.

Today is the day I can finally lift the veil: This devlog is the place where I can share the journey, the road I’m still travelling, and the many small victories and setbacks that will happen along the way as I’m building an indie RPG.

The title, wise words written by a far greater storyteller than I, feels fittng for the occasion.

Some of you may know me personally, or might have already read my story on the About page, so I won’t repeat it all here. What I will say is that journeys have become an important theme in my life. Some are planned. Most aren’t. But every voyage we undertake leave us a little different than when we started. Driftborn has certainly done that for me.

Along the way I’ve written hundreds of pages of notes, tumbled down creative rabbit-holes, and thrown away plenty of ideas that weren’t good enough. I discovered that creating a roleplaying game requires learning far more skills than I ever expected. Writing is only the beginning. There’s editing, layout, commissioning artwork, managing budgets, maintaining websites, getting abunch of legal stuff in order and a hundred other jobs that nobody sees when they pick up a finished book.

As exciting as it all is, it’s also kind of scary.

Studio CatRabbit is just a fledgling company at this point. In fact, most days it’s just me sitting behind a screen, trying to figure out how to turn the world in my head into something real, finding the right words for you to read to translate that image in my head. But I’m just one person, and I can’t do it all by myself. On my journey here I’ve come to rely on some stalward friends and whenever you see a beautiful illustration, read a detailed worldbuilding piece, or a polished design element, it’s usually the result of talented freelancers lending their skills to the project. Every piece represents time, effort, and often a leap of faith that the project is worth investing in.

Thankfully, I think it is.

Driftborn should feel like a grounded, lived-in setting. Yes, the world has been destroyed by the Shattering. And yes, there is the constant threat of Sliverstorms, the looming danger of the Witchkin and a strict government. Yet the Driftborn people carry on. They build homes. They start businesses. They make friends. They raise families. They tell stories. They’re curious about what lies beyond the Verge. They create communities, and those communities are what keep society moving forward.

At its heart, Driftborn is about people finding ways to build something worthwhile, even when the world isn’t perfect. You wont need to defend the world from outside forces here: it’s already been destroyed in the past.

Right now, I’m full steam ahead on several projects: Sliverling Hunt is taking shape as a free introduction to the setting. I’m also planning my first con booth at Day of Dungeons. At the same time I’m preparing a BackerKit campaign to publish Before the Slivers Fall even as it continues to grow into a full standalone adventure module. Work is also progressing on the Player Handbook, which remains the long-term foundation for everything else I want to create in this world. I’m actively comissioning arwork for all of these, and… ,  and… .

There’s still a lot to do.

A lot.

But for now, its my pleasure to finally invite others along for the journey.

In future devlogs I’ll be sharing artwork, revealing the world, playtest experiences, design decisions, worldbuilding notes, convention stories, and the occasional lesson learned the hard way. Some posts will focus on the setting itself. Others will focus on what it’s like to build an RPG as a solo creator.

For now, though, I simply wanted to say thank you.

Whether you’ve been following Driftborn from the beginning or you’ve only just discovered it, I’m genuinely grateful you’re here.

The road ahead is still long, but I’m looking forward to sharing it with you.

Until next time,

Bruno
Studio CatRabbit