Do you have any advice to anyone who might want to do such a large-scale Forged in the Dark project?
- all advice is autobiographical. take mine with a grain of salt
- playtest early and playtest often, or ask others to do it for you. don't be afraid to start with incomplete playbooks; 2-3 with 2-3 abilities each might be enough (assuming your game even has these!)
- don't port anything over from the blades SRD until you absolutely need to. i'm really serious about this; literally don't write xp rules until you move from playtesting oneshots to actually testing out a campaign. carefully consider which aspects of blades' structure your game actually needs, and which you're just including because blades did it
- do your best to carve out a distinct niche from blades. you don't have to fundamentally change FITD gaming here, but one thing that i'm always a bit disappointed by when i read FITD hacks is to just see playbooks that are reskinned lurks and spiders and leeches. think about the archetypes you want your players to be carefully, and don't include any you don't need
- the fewer words you can get away with, the better. accept now that much of what you write will not be read by the majority of people who actually play your game; make your peace with things going wrong and minimize that chance by simply saying less to begin with
actually, for the record: 1 and 2 here are mistakes i feel i've made and wish i'd been smarter about and i'm still doing the damn thing, so you can get away with skipping them! part of why i built out songs so much was that i didn't know very many RPG players, so i figured a more complete offering would entice more playtesters. this did end up creating more work for me in the long run, but also if you're the same situation i used to be in, do not let a lack of playtesters stop you from being creative. just be prepared to have more editing to do in the future