I've been learning Godot in between drawing comic pages, hoping to translate Gemfarers into a videogame. One of the first issues that cropped up is that Gemfarers has always been about customization, due to starting as a miniatures game. Fortunately, I learned that 2D sprites have advanced quite a bit since I last looked into it. I spent an evening making a cut-out doll to practice with, and it turns out there are a lot more shared parts than I thought. So it looks like I can keep the same variety in a videogame.

The simplicity of the costumes also means they work at any size, so I can scale them for both on-field graphics and profile art (possibly with more detailed faces, if I can figure that out).  Elf hands and digitigrade feet won't require entirely new art. The ogres and some other creatures would require their own set of parts.

By using 2D skeletons, I can animate the dolls in the game engine, instead of having to draw frames. I will have to make front and back versions, though.

My current plans are to start with creating a dollmaker for the site, essentially a character creator game. Following that, I'd like to upgrade it to a dress-up game, where you play as a tailor making outfits for gemfarers that match their gemaster's aesthetic. This will give me an opportunity to work the kinks out of the dolls and animations before working on a larger game.

I am planning on doing a simple dungeon crawler next, with exploration in the style of Steven Universe Attack the Light. It would involve a team of four gemfarers, so I might incorporate the four face buttons on a controller with the character's positions in a diamond.

Once I have the character creator and dungeon crawler, I will use them as the basis for the actual Gemfarers strategy game. The dungeon crawling would be side quests a single unit of four gemfarers from your larger team can go on to strengthen their bonds.

I am looking forward to adding videogames to the Gemfarers canon, but I am still planning on releasing the tabletop version, probably without miniatures at first. Hopefully Gemfarers and Bear Corner can grow into an unwieldy ecosystem of nonsense. And I promise to keep all of it in online right here for as long as possible. 

I have tentative campaign rules for Gemfarers, which required coming up with recruitment rules. How best to give players a meaningful choice without stifling them? I settled on grouping everyone into three groups (because the game uses six-sided die): Humans, Fae, and Other. This provided for random chance but still allowing the player some control over how their army looked. Here's all the freaks of Gemfarers (which coincidentally exist in Around Bear Corner, since they share a universe).

Humans (and derivatives)

Humans (Earth): The people of Earth. They recently learned about gemfaring after the Fae Realm was rediscovered in the 90s. According to faeries, the magic of Earth humans tastes different. Faeries can tell which humans were born on Earth by their scent.

Humans (Fae-born): Humans who were born in the Fae Realm. These humans are descended from humans who either wandered into the Fae Realm or were kidnapped. There is no real difference between them and their Eath-born counterparts, except how their magic "tastes" to faeries.

Human Furries: Unlike Faerie furries, who get their forms from a god, human furries rely on gem technology. Faeries do not consider them to be real furries, and treat them as they would any other humans.

Mutants: The ESPers of Gemfarers. They have inborn magic abilities similar to those granted by gems. For millennia, they were rare, but the event that caused the rediscovery of the Fae Realm in the 90s also increased the birthrate of new mutants.

Numen: A small, isolated ethnic group where everyone is a mutant. Inspired by Marvel's Inhumans, because as annoying as they were I always liked the idea of a society of super-jerks. All numen wear masks, another reference to the Inhumans.

Godlings: Long-lived, divinely-touched humans created to serve the gods. They live in the Fae Realm in a Warcraft-inspired region. A few of them are active on Earth as superheroes because why not?

Orcs: I took a long time figuring out how to add orcs to gemfarers. Eventually I made them a cursed group of humans. They live in the Warcraft-inspired region and are few in number. Their culture is very Scottish.

Lichlings: The counterpart to Warcraft's forsaken. They are created by daemons from human corpses, but are very much alive and not rotting. Their faces resemble skulls, with sunken, empty eye sockets. A small, glowing gem sits in one of the eye sockets.

Faeries

Faeries: Horns, pointy ears, and tails. Faeries feed off magic (and food). They were the first gemfarers. Faeries do not have names for genders and instead use "orii" (smaller) and "ogre" (larger). These words can also apply to the two types of faeries. The normal-sized are orii, while the rare few who choose to magically increase their size are ogres. Ogres are powerful gemfarers who absorb enough magic and grow to nine feet tall. Ogres are usually fat, but rather than the fat organ, most of their mass comes from a magic-absorbing organ that conveniently behaves exactly as fat would on a similarly-proportioned humanoid that wasn't scaled up. For narrative convenience.

Furries: Furries come in a variety of forms, which conveniently translate to the English anthro, feral, taur, naga, kemonomimi. One of the rules of Gemfarers is that names should be simple whenever possible, so why not use the real-life furry terms? Most furries follow the goddess Ligra, a tiger-headed serpentine dragon. Furries can be ogres, and a rare few are pixies, a very orii form that is only a few inches tall. Pixies are mostly small religious sects, as it is very hard to live at that size.

Elves: An off-shoot of faeries covered in velvet fur and with three fingers and shorter, monkey like tails. Elves adapt to their environment. You can usually tell where an elf is from by their fur or unique features.

Duegers: Basically dwarves, with mouse-like features. Like all faeries, they can be ogres, sometimes simply increasing their height to a respectable 6 feet, sometimes more. Very rarely, a dueger will grow themselves to eighteen feet, becoming sedentary mountain kings.

Gnomes: Orii monkey people. They can often be found living with dwarves, but also far from civilization or in Lichling lands.

Others

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.