Announcing Project Hajduk*

So I want to make an RPG. It will be about extraordinary individuals and their relationship with an Empire. Read on to see why and how it all began!

For the past months I’ve been playing more and more D&D. As you may know if you’ve ever DM’ed, nobody can cater to your taste as well as you yourself can. I’ve been dwelling on several mini-campaigns I ran in the past two years, that all shared a setting. I called that setting ‘Neo-Istanbul‘, it was a silly idea to set a game in an alternate history where the Ottoman Empire never collapsed but rather grew in power and strangeness, eventually spanning most of the world and defeating most of its opposition. Neo-Istanbul was then a monstrous metropolis whose northern neighbourhoods were Zagreb, Timisoara, and Bucharest; it covered the entirety of the Balkan peninsula, all the way down to the southernmost parts of Greece; on the other side its portside districts were the western and half of the northern coast of modern-day Turkey.

This is obviously impossible and ridiculous but makes for a great game setup!

The games I ran started with Chris McDowall’s Electric Bastionland and the idea of a ginormous city that’s so big it becomes the only important one in the world resonated with me deeply. I was clumsily translating and adapting Bastionland on the fly, but of course it wouldn’t work long-term. Although it’s an awesome game, Electric Bastionland was just too specific for my needs so I eventually switched to Into the Odd (same author). This worked a lot better given the looser and less developed setting, simpler characters, and the horror atmosphere. The reduction of first edition Dungeons and Dragons to three stats, discarding attack rolls, 3d6 DTL are all concepts I deem legendary and intend to borrow as the basis of my game. Don’t worry, there will be original mechanics too ;)

Parallel to this, I started getting reacquainted with Serbian epic poetry which is thematically the major inspiration. These are folk songs created collectively over a span of several centuries and only later written down. In general they cover the struggles, wars, and mishaps of the Serbian people. The poetry’s protagonists are usually greatly exaggerated characters, not always heroes but larger than life, accomplishing incredible deeds. As an artist, I feel this literature is ripe for adaptation and if done correctly I feel it can really reach people of today. Comparisons to anime would not be entirely misplaced, given how crazy some of the scenes are. The Ottoman Empire is a leitmotif of this body of work and dovetails nicely into our next subject: politics.

The Balkans are messy enough as it is. The history is all tangled up and people feel very deeply about it. There are very nasty and very violent bits throughout it and this makes it necessary that my game has a political identity and position. However, it is not a game about history or historical people or historical struggles.

There was a hierarchy of people in the Empire, and that was based mostly on religious affiliation, but the Empire had policies of toleration very early. People were not free or equal, that’s not what toleration means, but they could exist, live, and advance in the Empire. And the Ottomans themselves were a strange dynasty, having originated somewhere in central Asia, adopting many different cultural practices along the line of sultans, and they developed many specific and unique traditions and characteristics. I want the in-game Empire to bear the flavour of the real Ottoman Empire, not be its 1:1 equal. An interpretation and fantasy, not a copy or serious historical critique. I want the Empire to be a character in the game, present everywhere, always intelligent and dangerous, possessing secret science and occult knowledge. A fictional aggrandization of a real world thing. Because of this, I think the Ottoman Empire presents quite a decent antagonist. It is relatively unproblematic since the Empire doesn’t exist anymore, and its peoples were not one nation, ethnicity, or faith.

So, the game’s political stance is anti-imperial. I don’t want to be associated with anything else, anyone else, any movement or whatever. This is the only political view that’s being expressed in this work.

Onto the fun stuff! My plan is to finish writing everything for the game by the end of September so I know just how many pictures need to go in there. As part of my master’s program this game will be my practical project. I want to contribute many if not most of the illustrations and I intend to include some other people too. There are colleagues whose styles and approaches I really like and I will ask them to contribute work. On the other hand, there are people I know who truly understand the poetry which is the source for all this, but are not ‘artists‘ and I want their work in there as well. My goal is to finish the school year (so summer 2024) with a deluxe book, a finished product that will hopefully sell well. Somewhere in the future I may make one in Serbian as well, though the market here is much better for this kind of thing.

I hope to add more things to this blog and use it as an archive for the process, but I have failed with journals before so we’ll have to see :) Something that will hopefully follow are more elaborations and essays on the Empire and the game’s politics and social situation, all sourced according to the APA style guidelines. I want to talk more about which games and artists inspire me, and include some talk about game mechanics here too.

Titelbah,V. Around 1900. *Marko Kraljević i Musa Kesadžija*

*A Hajduk is an irregular infantry troop, but may also mean a freedom fighter, a bandit, or a mercenary depending on the context. I’m calling it project Hajduk until I have a really nice title that I’m satisfied with.

Writing and Drawing