What is His Majesty the Worm?

His Majesty the Worm is a new-school game with old-school sensibilities: a classic megadungeon experience given fresh life through a focus on the mundanities and small moments of daily life inside the dungeon.

You can get the digital edition here!

What is the Worm Jam?

The Worm Jam is a time to make content compatible with His Majesty the Worm and release third-party material for the game. My goal with hosting this jam is to help new GMs find and create content to use in their home games of His Majesty the Worm.

Submissions to the jam will be linked to from the game's website to help promote your work. Participants in the jam are encouraged (but not required) to use the  “Adherent of the Worm" logo. 

As the creator, I will also be participating in the jam. I will share my progress, talk through the creative process, and microblog my thoughts on game design.

If you participate, I'll send you a copy of whatever I make for free and I will buy your product. That's His Majesty's guarantee!

What can you make? 

Make dungeons. Make extra rules. Make alternative rules. Make monsters. Make tools. Make art. Make random generators. As much as possible, I encourage you to make things that other folks can use - assets they can drop into their own game without too much fuss.

You can publish your content for free or sell it (without us taking a cut).

Some ideas for content I'd love to see can be found below. 

Dungeons

Make a dungeon of about 20ish rooms. You can build out one of the dungeon seeds, adapt an existing dungeon, or create a new, bespoke dungeon. My hope is by creating small dungeons together, we will collaboratively build an Underworld to challenge your players.

GM resources 

Create things for your campaigns and share them here. Build out a series of Meatgrinders for your Underworld. Create some custom monsters. Create new City events.

Tools

Is there some tool you're making to run your games? Adding tarot assets to a VTT? Making a new cartography tool? Share it here! 

Open license

His Majesty the Worm was designed to be accessible and easily hackable. As such, we've chosen simple language to communicate that you can create derivative or supplemental content. The text that governs the free spirit of innovation is below:

If your product declares compatibility with His Majesty the Worm, you must state the following in your legal text and on any websites from which a commercial product is sold: 

“His Majesty the Worm is copyright Joshua McCrowell. [product name] is an independent production by [publisher name] and is not affiliated with Joshua McCrowell or Exalted Funeral.”

Basically, if you adhere to these terms you are allowed to publish free or commercial material based upon or declaring compatibility with His Majesty the Worm without express permission. 

Full guidance on making third-party compatible works can be found here.

Guidelines

Collaborate

You don't have to solo this quest! Let me encourage you to collaborate with each other. If you're a good editor, you can trade projects with someone else in the jam and proofread each other's work. If you're a graphic designer, you can trade layout assistance in exchange for art. Use the jam space to advertise your skills. Form a guild and tackle projects together! 

Price

You can always create free or commercial third-party material for His Majesty the Worm using its permissive open license. You can provide your jam submission for free, as pay-what-you-want (PWYW), or sell it. Whatever feels right for you. 

Scale

Because the jam is only a month long, focus your work on something achievable—a small dungeon level, a single new kith, a sampling of new monsters. Outline your work over the course of four weeks and think about how many hours in the week you can dedicate to it. Build in time to get community feedback, edit, and host it on Itch!

Deadlines keep us focused, but they don't mean we have to stop creating. If you miss the deadline, I'd still love to see your content!

Promote

As you work on your submission, feel free to share your work using the #hismajestytheworm hashtag. 

Resources 

Creator's Kit: Create content that looks like the main book using a template compatible with InDesign and Affinity. Includes the book's fonts!

Adherent of the Worm logo: Declare compatibility by using the Adherent of the Worm logo.

Discord: Come chat about your submission or ask questions to the community.

Open license guidelines: Answers to frequently asked questions about making third-party materials for His Majesty the Worm.

Yochai's Big List of Public Domain Art: Need art? Yochai Gal can help!

Itch.io Page Launch Checklist: A guide to hosting your finished content on Itch!