For the past two years, and more rapidly over the past few months, I’ve been developing a tabletop game.
Ahadi is a synthesis of my loves both in and outside of the TRPG medium. It draws from history, wargaming, nation-gaming, and political simulations to create a game about the tools of power in the same way that D&D is about dungeon crawling or shadowrun is about extremely violent gig work.
And friends, it is going to be great.
What Is Ahadi?
Ahadi is a roleplaying game about people in, and seeking, power. Military officers, heads of state, high-profile activists, local nobility, and others whose actions steer the course of history. You are people with the resources to make real, substantive, and lasting change in the world.
But that doesn’t make it easy, and the power available to you makes the consequences enormous.
Even when you’re safe, governance is difficult. You have to decide what’s important enough to keep in a deal, and what can wait for another day or be discarded entirely. When do you submit to something you know is wrong in the hopes of making something better in the aftermath? When do you decide that enough is enough and put thousands of lives on the line to fight for what you believe in?
The System
Ahadi uses the Purchases system, which has been designed from the ground up for the game. Rolls are made with a pool of six sided dice, with a 4 or 5 generating one success and a 6 generating two. However, instead of a set difficulty, actions all have options associated with them that can be purchased with varying numbers of successes.
For example, you want to pressure a rival into supporting a policy via some leverage over them. This has a few important pieces: You want them to agree to do it, you want it to stay secret, and you want some extra information on an unrelated target. You roll the dice and get two successes. Now you have a choice to make. How important is that extra information? Is it worth this entire thing going public? Now that you’re faced with the choice, is information and a hush-up a better use of resources than your original goal?
The cost of individual options can also shift. If you’re actively being spied on, keeping this secret may cost two successes instead of one. If your rival is notoriously stubborn, pressuring them into helping out may have the increased cost instead. The goal is to create a system that forces players to make these choices on a regular basis while still being flexible enough that GMs can create new rolls with appropriate purchases as easily as they could declare a DC for a skill check in another system. It also front-loads information on the outcomes of a check, letting players make informed decisions on the risks they’re taking.
Supplementing this is Friction. Friction is a meta-currency that buffers against strings of poor rolls. Whenever you generate 0 successes, or roll vastly below average, you gain Friction. At any time, you may spend Friction to add successes to a roll or activate certain powerful abilities. This means even the worst die rolls won’t ruin your session indefinitely, as you will get the opportunity to give yourself the successes to do something cool, but it also incentivizes characters to act out of their specialty, getting into the problems that actual leaders often grapple with.
Mechanizing Peace
Ahadi aims to make peace as interesting and mechanically interactive as war. It gives players a variety of concrete levers with which they can interact with, and change, society. Political factions, infrastructure, resources, and population centers are all mechanized, and subsystems exist for high-stakes negotiations, project management, trade links and disruption, and similar interactions.
These systems give players an idea of the choices and incentives available to their characters without bogging them down in the minutiae of legal specifics. It lets you play out the need to balance factions in a coalition against each other, or negotiate with political enemies to get things done. It illustrates the resources necessary for a state to function, as well as those necessary for activists, politicians, and generals to enact their agendas. It shows why characters might compromise to get someone on side for a key decision, to scrounge up needed wealth or influence, to pass key legislation, and the consequences of such compromises.
Waging War
Combat in Ahadi is warfare. Formations of soldiers, long marches, elaborate campaigns, and grand battles where the skill at arms of an individual matters little but disciplined soldiers and keen commanders can change the course of history. It takes lessons from recent history to create playable military campaigns that aren’t limited to the battlefield itself.
Armies are fundamentally social constructs, created and driven by the polities who field them. Supplies and logistics, discipline and social cohesion, and political acceptability are all equally important factors in army composition as what would be ‘best’ on a battlefield. Ahadi portrays these truths in its systems, making an army that can take the field as important as one that can win on the field.
In battle, Ahadi’s health system tracks morale instead of injuries or dead soldiers. This simulates the tide of retreats and rallies common in pre-modern warfare, avoiding the ahistorical casualty rates of many wargames. The sum is a less attritional combat model, where players can expect to face off against the same enemy formations several times, win or lose, because a single defeat typically doesn’t result in the annihilation of a foe.
Personal is Political
Ahadi operates on two scales. The institutional, which is described above, and the personal. On the personal scale, the immense political or military power available to players doesn’t matter. A great army doesn’t stop you from dying to a knife in the eye, or from the object of your affections rejecting you as an oafish buffoon, or from deeply alienating yourself from everyone around you. You have more customization (and as such larger dice pools) on the personal scale, but everything is more difficult and the consequences are personal.
To augment this, Ahadi encourages players to build a social circle around their characters. The people who support them and make them what they are, who are at risk when they fail on the institutional scale, and who they might alienate when things go wrong on the personal scale. It gives stakes to all the larger-scale developments, and something to strive for on the human level rather than the institutional.
Historical
From the start, I wanted Ahadi to be a historical game. While this isn’t going to be the focus of crowdfunding efforts, support for historical play will still be in the final game. I aim to include full rules for playing in the Middle East and South Asia during the Gunpowder Empires. It’s a piece of history that isn’t talked about much and is commonly misunderstood when it is, the subject of centuries of orientalism and poor history. My desire to change that narrative was much of what launched Ahadi in the first place. While scale constraints limit how much historical content I can put in Ahadi at the start, it will be fully playable with the complete game.
Revanchism
The year is 2325, and humanity has expanded to the inner solar system. Mars is terraformed, a green jewel home to two billion people, while the terraformation of Venus is underway. Space stations stretch throughout the inner solar system, with some as far as Jupiter. Beam projection stations allow easy, safe travel throughout the system via magnetic sail. It should, by all rights, be a time of plenty.
But it isn’t.
The outer space colonies are overcrowded and miserable. Earth’s climate has begun to backslide to the bad days of the 21st century. Martian nations chafe at Terran rule. Drone technology allows for horrific abuses of civilian populations by ever-smaller, ever-less invested military garrisons. Independence movements rise in the outer system, the UN is wracked by open militarism and partisan radicalism, and the Revanchist movement, demanding the return of Imperialism and true subjugation of all peoples off of Earth, grows ever more powerful.
On June 21st, 2325, a day that will live in infamy, the Revanchist movement attacks. The UN is destroyed by a Revanchist fleet, Earth either joining them or being besieged from orbit. Garrisons and drone legions throughout the system demand compliance on pain of death. The flag of rebellion raises across the solar system, and with the help of brand new combat mechs it survives the first brutal days of fighting.
Now a thousand fledgling movements have become nations, fighting to survive their birth against the brutal regime on Earth. You are among their number. Union bosses turned squadron-leaders in the asteroid belt, activists turned government officials in the Jovian systems, insurgents turned generals on Mars. You are the unlikely, revolutionary face of a free humanity. Should you survive you will define the face of the solar system and the age to come.
Revanchism is the primary original setting for Ahadi. It is inspired by The Expanse, Mobile Suit Gundam, Atomic Rockets, and hard science fiction. It leans into the rage of a future betrayed, a brighter future that could have been but has been ripped away by greed, ambition, and simple, human failure. In the best traditions of the mecha genre, it’s a war that shouldn’t have been, and that people by and large didn’t want, but that you’re stuck with anyways and that threatens to recur if you don’t create something worthwhile with victory. However, the scale of Ahadi means that that’s an achievable goal.
Guns and Gore
Look, I get it. Sometimes you don’t want all the complex political maneuvering, high stakes warfare, and nation-building as political or military potentates. Sometimes you just want to play some absolute disasters with your friends, find something real fucked up, and kill it in a display of truly gratuitous gore. For you, my friend, there’s the Gunfighting Module.
The Gunfighting Module takes the basic system of Ahadi and creates a positioning-focused, lethal gunfighting RPG with those tools. It’s an exercise in the system’s flexibility, aiming to do with wargames like Infinity and video games like Titanfall what D&D did with Chainmail way back when. It’s a more traditional RPG experience, and a lighter way to introduce (or learn) Ahadi’s various core mechanics.
Nar
It is Earth, in the early 20th century, but the history is not our own. In the 17th century, a Persian inventor breached the barrier between our realm and the unseen lands of the djinn beyond Mount Qaf. Since, more breaches have been constructed, allowing a free flow of people, information, and resources between the realms and driving a history ever-more divergent from our own.
Now the world is on the cusp of a new era. Revolutionary and independent movements promise a brighter future across the world, economies boom, and the empires of the old world are on their last, doddering legs, and new, stranger types of djinn cross into the world. The radioactive scions of a revolution yet to come, the patchwork horrors of industrialized war, Ifrit and Marid and Ghuls adapted to the modern age. The heroes of this age will navigate the tensions of a multipolar India, fight the Dutch in Indonesia, the horrors of the False Ma’jooj in the Ottoman Empire, or the excess of the British Empire and its parasitic armies across the world.
Nar is the working title for Ahadi’s interwar setting, which will be the primary setting for its Gunfighting module. The setting is inspired by the art of Keith Thompson, tales of Djinn from throughout history, and the dieselpunk genre. It’s a world of pulp adventure, new monsters, and a dieselpunk setting that’s less myopically monofocused on Europe than its contemporaries.
Crowdfunding
Due to the scale of Ahadi, and the fact that it’s my first time running a project of this scale, I’m aiming to crowdfund in two phases. The first phase, in late August or September, will be a small-scale digital-only crowdfunding attempt for Ahadi’s core dice system and the gunfighting module. The aim is an extremely quick turnaround at a manageable scale while still providing a satisfying, independent product for my first crowdfunding campaign.
The second, larger crowdfunding campaign will be for the game proper. It will include a physical release, original and historical setting rules, and as much of my boundless ambitions as people are willing to fund. This will have all of the institutional-scale rules like warfare and factional politics, the Revanchism setting and History primer, and design notes for game developers who want to build on the system.
Supporting Ahadi
If you’re interested in getting updates on both projects and opportunities to sign up for playtests, you can sign up for a mailing list below. Alternatively, you can sign up to my Patreon, which will have monthly development diaries as the project progresses as well as mechanical snippets. You can also follow me on Twitter, or follow the development thread on Sufficient Velocity.
If you want to talk to me about the game, officially or unofficially, my twitter DMs are open.
Fear The Swarth 
Very exciting! Congratulations!