So. Gemfarers.

I first started coming up with the idea of Gemfarers in 2015. I have been playing table-top miniature games since 2004, and longed for a proper Warcraft miniature war game. That never happened, so I made my own game. I wanted to blend the Warcraft aesthetic with magical girls and dapper outfits.

Originally, Gemfarers was set in space, hence the name. Adventurers would travel the stars using gems. I eventually decided to set it on a single fantasy world, and made it a parallel to Earth so I could create a queer-friendly fantasy world without losing queer history. Also superheroes.

The main theme of Gemfarers is having one large general commanding squads of petite troops. This is inspired somewhat by Warcraft, where commanders are typically scaled up to ridiculous heights. It's also inspired by my just liking size differences. The squad size was set at four, to mimic the five-man band trope. For example, in Sailor Moon or Samurai Troopers, there was a main team of five, with a further team of four that the leader would also fill the fifth slot for.

The general (called a gemaster) has a special assistant unit. This was originally lifted from another war game, Wargods of Aegyptus, where the priest unit existed solely to give buffs (and command archers, if you're short on commanders). I changed assistants over time to be more of a romantic partner, like Tuxedo Mask from Sailor Moon, or Pearl from Steven Universe.

I wrote up a draft of the rules over the course of a year, going through numerous iterations of how special attacks worked. They were always based on DiC Sailor Moon rules, where attacks usually had three words in their name, starting with the planet. Eventually I settled on a system where the first two words have no game effect. The finalized special powers use the naming scheme [Gem] [Talisman] [Power], where power is one of the special skills available in the rules. For example, one gemfarer's special attack might be "Jade Sword Slash".

There were a lot more pit stops along the way, but that's the gist of how I got from writing up Warcraft army lists to having the skeleton of a magical girl war game.