About Us

Hello, my name is Adam Goudy, creator and lead designer for Aspects of Mana. This game has become a passion project for me, one that I have been working on for almost a third of my life. My hope is that you, dear reader, will see this passion shine through and enjoy playing Aspects of Mana.

My first experience with game design was in late 2015 or early 2016. I was a few weeks into a 13th Age campaign, and it was my first experience with tabletop roleplaying games. I felt the urge to design a few custom classes because there were builds I couldn't quite do with the base rules. Some were quite bad, both others were okay or even good. I eventually got to the point where they were just as balanced as the official classes.

Go forward a few months and I am at home for the summer at my mom's place. I don't know what to do that day, so I decide to start writing my own game. It started in a radically different place to where it is now with me picking mechanics I enjoyed from various games across genres and mediums while avoiding and learning from those I did not enjoy.

The early years for Aspects of Mana were a steady stream of prototyping as the game took form. Players came and went but a campaign continued until early 2023. The game progressed rapidly at this point with sweeping changes as I became steadily better at game design and worked on fixing some of the older rules I had written.

Then, at the end of 2023 there came a point after one of my deepest overhauls for improvements that things just clicked. Changes were smaller than ever before, and things felt like they fit rather well together. The game felt ready for the next step, preparing for public testing and publication. The next few months were a frenzy of research into official game design I never had before. In the beginning I was self-taught, my only training being practice and videos or articles on how to better run games rather than design them.

Little did I know how much work I still needed to do. Every single time I feel like the game is finished, that there cannot possibly be more to improve, I approach it from another perspective and something else comes up. This brings us to today, eight years later and all the better for it. I look forward to another eight years continuing to support the game with additional material after its publication.