Author

Zach "Zafety" Townes

GM since 2022. Ran a multi-year homebrew campaign and played across 10+ TTRPG systems on both sides of the screen, including a long-running Westmarch. Developer behind Grimoire, built after years of frustration with general-purpose tools at the table.

I got into TTRPGs around 2016, watching content creators stream D&D 5e and falling in love with the storytelling, especially homebrew worlds. I didn’t actually start playing until 2020, in a unique system called The Devil City and its Seventy Seven Vicious Princes, which opened my eyes to countless different settings outside the D&D and Pathfinder mainstream.

By 2022 I was running my own homebrew world for a dedicated group of players, and we had a lot of great sessions. But running a homebrew campaign requires a lot of notes, and I was never satisfied with the tools available. I experimented with many of them. None of them quite worked.

When I’m not working on Grimoire I’m building adjacent projects: a Foundry VTT system for Caves of Qud, and an AI agent that plays Dwarf Fortress autonomously. All my projects seem to revolve around the same question: how do you represent a unique setting in a different format, and preserve its essence when the medium changes?

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