Thanks so much to everyone who has checked out Pillars: What Remains in its first week on itch.io! I hope some of you have been able to bring it to your table, or are planning to do so soon. I’m really proud of this strange little game, and even more excited to see how other groups use it to tell stories of their own. If you’ve played, leaving a comment, rating or share would really help the game reach more players who might connect with it too.

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Now, where was I? I had the idea for a game where the players worked together as a single character and where the dramatic action of that character’s story would serve the development of their inner life. I knew I wanted this idea to be central to the game, but I also expected that it would be unusual waters for players to navigate. To balance that unfamiliarity, I thought it would be important to ground the challenges this character would face in a recognizable genre – ideally one that already expects a lone protagonist. In April 2024, I laid this half-idea out to my D&D trio on our Discord and after a bit of batting around, including the idea that players should each play as “Inside Out”-esque “facets” of the character’s mental life called “pillars”, there it sat.

It wasn’t until August of that year that I pulled these threads together into my first sketch of the game, though it looked very different than what it is now. It used the genre of the psychological thriller - think “The Game” (how badly does that reference date me?) - to pit one character, controlled by many players, against the escalating machinations of the GM. This version of the game didn’t last long, but it did uncover a cornerstone of what would become Pillars: What Remains – that the protagonist would begin as a blank slate and their history would be revealed by both players and GM throughout the action of the game. Mind you, the idea was more adversarial at the start; the players would create flashbacks that would help them solve problems (“Our character took horseback riding lessons as a kid!”) and the GM would create flashbacks that introduced complications (“It turns out, the serial killer is your long lost twin!”) It’s possible that this game has legs of its own, but while it was fun to tinker with, it didn’t inspire me, so my thoughts on this nascent game returned to the back burner.

The next step is hard to describe, partly because it involves the unpredictable neural spreading of ideas and inspiration, and partly because I have a super clear memory of how it happened that I now realize can’t actually be true. (Sidebar: there’s something awesomely meta-textual here, where in my recounting of the creation of a game based on the frailty of memory, I have based so much of my own narrative of it on a misrememberance.) I have a memory of watching a Quinn’s Quest review on Youtube and seeing the word “courier” written in a TTRPG rulebook that he was waxing about. I’ve tried to track down this review and honestly can’t find it. The most sense this could make would be him talking about Wanderhome, but I can’t find his review of it anywhere...maybe a helpful commenter could help me with this mystery!

Either way, this minor mention of the word “courier” in the context of a roleplaying game ignited something in me – my game didn’t need a genre for players to ground themselves in, it needed a task. This many-as-one protagonist needed something clear and easily understandable to do that would be consistent across every playing of the game. The real narrative strength, then, wouldn’t be completing this task, it would be finding out why the character was trying to complete it. Plot serves character, not the other way around.

Though I tinkered with other possibilities, the idea of a courier itself stuck because it so cleanly addressed the other requirement I’d already set out – that the protagonist would need to work alone. Here is where Pillars: What Remains really began to take shape. At this point, it was no longer an idle thought to be tossed around, writing it became an active, at times consuming, pursuit. The next big hurdle then, was to define the world where this Courier would find themselves, starting with creative constraint that it would need not just need to just suggest isolation, but to demand it. Next time, the Wastes and What Remains!

-HM