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As I work towards publishing A.R.C.H., one of the questions I have found myself thinking about is why I decided to begin with a system-neutral product rather than tie the setting to a specific game system.
Looking back, I suspect the answer lies in how I create settings in the first place.
Most of my projects begin with a world or a premise. Long before I start thinking about character sheets or mechanics, I am usually wondering how a setting functions and what sorts of stories it naturally produces.
When I first came up with the idea that would eventually become A.R.C.H., I was still relatively new to tabletop roleplaying games.
Although I had been involved in gaming communities for years, I had only recently joined a dedicated gaming group. My experience with game systems was fairly limited and consisted mainly of Fate, Numenera and Cortex.
In reality, A.R.C.H. did not begin with a conscious decision to be system-neutral.
It began as a setting premise first and the mechanical layer emerged in a very specific and somewhat unusual way.
At the time, I wasn’t thinking in terms of RPG systems at all. My focus was entirely on the setting problem itself: how a contemporary Earth-like world would actually respond to a persistent invader threat operating through timeline interference and dimensional intrusion.
That question naturally forced me into thinking about structure and response rather than character-facing mechanics.
Out of that process, I ended up developing two game elements arising from the internal response of Earth to the invader presence. These were not designed with any existing RPG system in mind. They did not originate from Fate, Cortex, Numenera or any other framework I had encountered. In fact, I didn’t yet have enough system literacy to even consciously map them onto established mechanical paradigms.
These elements functioned like mechanical blocks that affected how play would actually unfold but they were not originally conceived as “rules” in the sense of belonging to a specific system. Because of that, they also didn’t translate cleanly into any single RPG framework I was familiar with.
I did eventually run A.R.C.H. as a game once, using a heavily simplified version of the concept framed loosely through Fate Accelerated. At that stage I was still relatively early in my experience as a GM, and my understanding of Fate itself was incomplete, so the result was more of a reduced, playable approximation of the original idea rather than a faithful expression of any system.
That version of the game did not continue beyond its initial session due to real-world interruptions and practical constraints.
Now, when I decided to create a product line from A.R.C.H back in June, I felt the setting was flexible enough to work across game systems beyond the ones I am personally familiar with. More importantly, I did not want A.R.C.H. to be tied exclusively to my own preferred way of running games. And that’s why the early A.R.C.H. products are intentionally system neutral. But if you happen to be a Fate or Cortex GM, translation guides for these two game systems are in the works. In fact, the first round of rule customisation is already done.
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