STORYFORGE
A Genre-Agnostic, Narrative-First TTRPG Powered by the Bone Engine
🎙️ A WARNING FROM GRUMBLY OGRE
(Founder, Reluctant Manager, & Chief Complainer)
"Bah. Look, I’m only saying this once because Gelt is currently hyperventilating into a gold foil bag in the corner.You want to back physical books and custom dice? Fine. But we aren't taking your money and leaving you with empty hands for months while factory machines spin. If you pledge for a physical tier on this campaign, you get immediate 'On-Loan' access to the digital rulebooks and play tools the moment you back. You play today. When the physical books and dice ship, the digital access becomes permanently yours.Gelt says I shouldn't give away digital access before the funds clear. I told him to shut his coin-trap. Features are free while you wait. Don't ask me twice."— Grumbly Ogre
💸 A DESPERATE INTERJECTION FROM GELT PENNYBITE
(Chief Financial Goblin & Revenue Extraction Specialist)
"OUR LEDGER IS BLEEDING! HE IS GIVING AWAY THE STORE!Ahem. Valued Revenue Sources—er, Adventurers! What the Ogre means to say is: Yes, physical backers get instant digital access during the campaign! BUT! If you don't care about physical paper and want to buy the digital PDFs or digital modules directly RIGHT THIS SECOND—without waiting for BackerKit—you can buy them immediately on the Tableweave Marketplace!Please! Buy on the marketplace! My golden calculator is weeping! I need to buy lunch this week!"— Gelt Pennybite
Behind the Forge: Our Story
I’ve been sitting at the table since the early '80s—back when Dragon Magazine was still in print, d100s were new, and we were playing through the original colored box sets. I drew maps by hand, crafted physical handouts, and lost countless weekends to games like Rifts, Vampire: The Masquerade, Mage, Changeling, and early Cyberpunk.
Then life happened. I got married, stepped away from gaming for years, and eventually came back to find a hobby dominated by 5e—along with corporate license drama, rigid open-rules mess, and a whole lot of corporate noise.
Every time I ran a game, the same friction kept coming back:
- Taking notes and keeping story threads in order felt like a second job.
- Most campaign tools were built around a specific corporate ecosystem, rather than the way I actually wanted to run my games.
- Rigid spell structures, leveling treadmills, and math-heavy mechanics left players behind—especially anyone dealing with dyscalculia, or anyone who simply wanted to play without stopping the story to calculate modifiers.
- Turn-based initiative often made little narrative sense, and failed rolls constantly stalled momentum instead of giving the story somewhere new to go.
I got frustrated while trying to build a campaign that mashed multiple game systems together. So I sat down and started coding a personal, system-agnostic campaign manager—the seed of what would eventually become Tableweave.
Then, classic solo-dev ADHD butterfly brain kicked in.
Right in the middle of building Tableweave, a shiny new idea took over: I have the opportunity to build the exact system I’ve wanted to play for decades.
So I put the platform code on pause, shifted focus, and built StoryForge from the ground up:
- Level-less & Class-less: No being stuck with an ability that doesn't fit your character concept. Build what fits the story you want to tell.
- The Bone Engine: Throw the Bones, read what they say, and let symbolic faces tell you what happens instead of stopping the table for arithmetic.
- Myth Forger Momentum: A failed throw doesn't have to slam the brakes on the story. The Myth Forger uses the result to create complications, consequences, dramatic twists, and new directions.
- Genre-Agnostic: Fantasy, cyberpunk, horror, weird sci-fi—or something nobody has invented yet. Fuck boxes. Fuck canon.
Once StoryForge was complete, I looped back to finish what I started—bringing Tableweave across the finish line as the web-based companion platform designed to weave those digital tools directly into your physical tabletop experience.
Over the last couple of years, Grumbly Ogre Productions—named after my old gamertag—was born to bring both of these creations to your table.
We build for fairness.
We build for the love of the game.
And we build without the corporate fluff.
Production Status & Physical Proofs
We don't run campaigns on empty promises.
Our core rulebooks—The Echo Codex (Player & Worldbuilding Guide) and the Tableweaving Guide (An MF Toolkit)—are written, laid out, and sitting on our desk as fresh, loose-leaf printer proofs. We are actively running live table sessions with them right now!
Why We Are Crowdfunding:
- Custom Bone Engine Dice: Manufacturing custom d10s with unique symbol faces requires upfront factory tooling ($4,900 quote locked).
- First Edition Physical Print Run: Funding our initial physical production run so we can get high-quality physical books into your hands. We are keeping the first-run physical prints special, hand-numbered, and signed for campaign backers.
Powered by Tableweave (Bonus Companion Tool)
While StoryForge is built to be played anywhere with paper and dice, it also features native integration with Tableweave, our web-based campaign companion platform.
- Pre-Loaded Mechanics: StoryForge rulesets and character frameworks come ready to import so you don't have to build system rules from scratch.
- Myth Forger Free Tier: Every free Tableweave account includes 1 active campaign slot, so any Myth Forger can run a game without paying a subscription. Players play completely free.
- 1 Month Included: Every physical backer gets 1 Month of full access to Tableweave tools to run their campaigns online if they choose!
Hit "Notify me on launch" at the top of the page to lock in your day-one backer status and get immediate "On-Loan" digital access the second we go live!
