Neopets TTRPG Kickstarter — interview with the creators

You read that right, Neopets is making a tabletop RPG. After 25 years of games, lore, drama, and innumerable trades, the longtime fantasy site is branching out of the computer and onto your kitchen tables. Funded on its first day, the campaign is sailing through stretch goals, and at time of writing they approach premium covers for the physical books.

I’ve had an odd relationship with Neopets. Not in what I imagine is their target audience, I never encountered it until recently. My COVID binge was niche film, but my wife’s took her to her ancient Neopets account, where she has since spent a portion of every day. Through her I’ve gotten to know the site, and been astounded at its breadth of content. They have battles, events, a surprisingly complicated economy, and a large collection of games built on decades of different architecture. With the little I know about Neopets and the lot I know about RPGs, I was interested to learn more about this project and where it’s heading.

How did the idea to create a Neopets RPG come about?

We’ve long been fans of the Neopets world. A few years ago we got the license for Neopets and have been actively working to make merch that we would have wanted as kids, and that we definitely want now that we’re adults. Neopets touched a lot of our lives as a generation growing up in the Wild West years of the Internet and a lot of those people stayed true to their geek roots, including getting into the D&D and tabletop RPG scene. Neopets seemed a natural fit for making a TTRPG, since there is so much lore and storyline existing already, an expansive world to explore, tons of mini-games and developed concepts that setting a tabletop roleplaying game in that setting just made sense.

Who are the writers/developers working on this? Are they longtime Neopets staff or did you reach out into the community to find the right people?

We’ve been working with the community for the last several years as part of our merch-making, and they’ve had a big hand in influencing what we make. We floated the idea a few years ago of making a TTRPG and got some really good response, and put out a call for writers, loremasters, and tabletop game developers. We’ve had a team of about 12 people working on this project. Some are former staffers, some of them are occasional writers for the site, and most are still pretty active on a daily basis. We’ve been really fortunate to be working with some of the biggest fans of the game who have been playing and enjoying it continuously for 25 years and bringing their enthusiasm and experience to the table. After the vetting process, the work began of scoping and breaking down what we’d need to make a core set of rules, and determining what would be the important pieces to incorporate.

What can you tell me about the form this will take (in terms of being one core book or split into other supplements)?

There’ll be a Core Rulebook for people wanting to know the mechanics and the how-tos of the game, and we’re doing a first campaign module of the Faeries’ Ruin plotline, The Fall of Faerieland. It’s one of the later plots lorewise, and was the reason the fabled Faerieland came crashing to the ground.

Neopets has a huge setting that’s been iterated on for 25 years, but this is the first time that you will have to map, document, and codify many of its elements into a setting book. How do you go about that process?

Fortunately, the fan base has been extremely diligent in documenting, recording, and wiki-fying the entirety of the Neopets lore for the past 25 years, so there’s a lot of resources to draw on, but some of those fan loremasters have also joined the team to help direct and guide things to be more lore-accurate, as well as helping us find ways to take game mechanics and give them a canonical reason for the why. It’s been really fun getting to build the framework of physics, magic, and social interactions that happen in a world like Neopets from a game-perspective, while simultaneously building it in such a way that it explains how the Neopets world has been that way all along.

What are you able to say about the game’s main mechanics?

It’ll be familiar to players of D&D and Pathfinder, using a dice-driven d20 decision and resolution system, but made unique in its own ways to hybridize some of the best things of various systems. One thing we’ve been excited to introduce to the world has been a new Pacifism system for players wanting to play through the game in a non-violent manner, and exploring how to resolve conflicts with a wide range of non-combat approaches. It’s been tricky, especially when it comes to your boss fights and Big Evil Bads that don’t want to back down from their mission, but makes for a much richer experience when you can explore (and exploit) enemy motivations, and when you’ve got more tools than just bludgeoning an enemy into submission.

Are there any major themes you want to explore in this game that you haven’t been able to in prior Neopets releases?

The transmutability of the inhabitants of Neopia is a really intriguing one to play with, especially in terms of game mechanics. On the site, you can morph, transmogrify, re-color, and alter pretty much anything about your pet’s physical exterior, and no one in Neopia seems to bat an eye at how easily you can change physical form. That plays heavily into the game mechanics since you can alter and adjust so much about yourself continuously, including your skill trees, style of playing, and for playing with the story as you and your party morph and change.

Will these adventures have any crossover potential with the site?

We’re really hoping so! Neopets has just started a new plotline, the first in years, titled The Void Within, with the aim of revitalizing the site and sweeping out some cobwebs from parts of the site that haven’t seen much action in the past decade. Each plot arc is a potential candidate for a campaign setting, and this new one is still unfolding as we speak, and we’ve got our sights set on developing for it later down the road if this project is successful.

You can check out the campaign now to learn more, and see where it heads over the next two weeks.

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