Welcome, TTRPG and monster-taming enthusiasts, to JourneyMon: Monster Trainer Roleplaying!

A few weeks ago, we officially launched the Quick Start Guide of the JourneyMon roleplaying game. Alongside that release, we were thrilled to announce that the full JourneyMon game is coming soon to Kickstarter. 

 Follow the campaign here!

Like any project seeking crowdfunding of this kind, it's critically important that potential supporters sign up to be notified on launch. It helps us gauge the viability of our project, scale our funding goal and stretch goals appropriately, and drum up enough interest that the project hits the ground running when we hit that magical launch day. With that in mind, I wanted to share a bit about the history of JourneyMon, and how we arrived at the game we have today. I won't be going into much detail into mechanics just yet - stay tuned for more mechanical previews of the full game!

The Distant Past

According to my Google Drive history, JourneyMon began life exactly 5 years ago today, on July 15th 2020. Yes, yes, like so many other projects... it was a COVID baby. My aim in opening that document was to create my own TTRPG that aimed to replicate monster training classic video games like Pokemon, Digimon, and Dragon Quest: Monsters. I'd played a few others at this point, usually ones trying to directly replicate Pokemon and all it's mechnical quirks. Often I found them a little more mechanically weighty than I'd prefer, as they often chased mechanical parity with the source material (more or less). I decided to strip everything back and start from scratch. What matters to the genre? How can I evoke it best without getting bogged down in doing everything? During that first ideation phase, the was known by the codename "Choose Your Monster".

Drafting

It wasn't until February 2021 that Choose Your Monster became an actual game rather than a loose string of thoughts and ideas. Some of those early design ideas are still a part of JourneyMon, including the four Aspects (Moxie, Style, Brains, and Heart) and the first four playbooks (Ace, Rival, Researcher, Caretaker), although the playbooks changed significantly over the course of development. Even the type chart was very different back then, but I'll dive into that more in a later development diary. One of my big influences at the time was Wanderhome by Jay Dragon, and so one of part of the game that has stuck around since its earliest incarnation is that the first phase of every session is a collaborative discussion (with dice rolling) to determine where the Episode would take place, and what the Monster of the Week would be. 

I ran a very, very early playtest of Choose Your Monster that year, and came away feeling like I was missing something. Initially, battling mechanics were very loose. It was more like the Quick Battles and "Unleash Your Monster" move that's still part of the full game today, but (naturally) with even less guidance on adjudication. Those early experiences were what convinced me to depart from something purely Powered by the Apocalypse, to the (slightly) more mechanical implementation of tactical battles you can read about in the Quick Start Guide (andother one for a future design diary). 

With that change in approach, JourneyMon was born!

Alpha Playtesting

Refinement of playtesting of JourneyMon continued on and off through the years, as I was working on it alongside some major projects with Keith Baker (Chronicles of Eberron, Frontiers of Eberron), MCDM (Flee Mortals, Where Evil Lives), and of course Brotherwise Games' record breaking Cosmere RPG. 

In January 2024, JourneyMon had its first public playtests in January 2024 at a small TTRPG convention in the UK called Contingency. It's always scary the first time a designer putts a game in front of players and GMs that haven't been involved in development, but I'm so pleased to say it was a hit! Some of the monsters from that first playtesting period have even made it into our key art, including the Mayhem-type monster Paintapir.

Paintapir by Juno "Crowva" Kurtin

The Present State

After a year of futher playtests and refinement, I was confident enough in the game to start pushing to that magic publication.  The main handbook has been through editing, and I wrote the Quick Start Guide in Spring of this year. The uncertainty around tariffs in the first half of this year threw some of plans into uncertain territory, but now the dust has settle the time seemed right to make the final push and go for a crowdfunded print run. In June 2025, the campaign (or well... it's pre-lauch) has officially begun!

So what's next? 

Expect to see more previews and design diaries in the coming weeks and months as I prepare for the Kickstarter!

If you'd like to know what motivated my design decisions, or what the Journey Moves and Apex Powers aluded to in the Quick Start Guide actually are, then keep an eye on this very page! You can also follow me on BlueSky, and of course please sign up to the Kickstarter. You can also chat with other JourneyMon players by joining our Discord community!

Sneak Peak

For now, I'll leave you with  a sneak peek at the Heir trainer class, a playbook for specialising in one monster type. The Heir's Legacy encourages you to define tenets of your culture in play, which you fulfill or break to affect the story. We've had some really fun and varied Heirs in playtests so far. Some standouts were a young Heroic-type specialist hoping to join a colourful Sentai team, and a Machine-type specialist who grew up on a space station.