It was before the pandemic, I think ...
The Mobos were a Band making a run through a modified Deep Carbon Observatory using modified Dungeon Crawl Classics rules; on the other side of the dam, in a cave beneath the waters of the profundal zone, I put a big fucking dragon.
At this point in the campaign, the Mobos were averaging maybe 6th level or so, fairly powerful in the DCCRPG world at any rate. They had their share of demons and devils, orcs and goblins, and I figured ... you know, it's dragon time. Maybe it's just me or my age but I always felt the real measure of a character was whether or not they went toe to toe with the classics. Could you survive a run through a gauntlet of Tucker's Kobolds? Tangle with a tarrasque? Could you throw down with an Huge-Ancient of the red variety?
Anyway, the Mobos are coming out along the dam trying to make their way down to the profundal zone, when they encounter this dragon I had made up for them. Can't remember the color, not that it mattered anyway since the poor bastard literally lasted one round. The cleric blessed the wizard and rolled something ungodly, the wizard spellburned himself back to the stone age - long and short, my creation caught a magic missile turned tactical nuke in the face for something north of 100 points of damage, and that was that.
Now ... I wasn't mad. It was fucking epic, as playing these games should be. But when the dust settled I found myself back to trying to figure out how to balance things. I kept coming up with house rule after house rule, tweaking and fiddling to the point where my players were getting pissed off. Finally one of my players broke down and just said "... why don't you just write your own rules?"
The player who told me this had also been making the rounds with New York Red Box, much to my eternal envy, and he had run myself and a few other friends (breaking my Forever GM run) through Greg Gillespie's Barrowmaze using the old red box. This was also around the time of the absolute embarrassment of riches of OSR players and writers and artists on Google+; there wasn't a day that went by that I didn't read something that set my whole head on fire with ideas.
All of these things were kind of swimming around in the background when I first started writing my "fantasy heartbreaker." I loved Arnold Kemp's Goblin Law's of Gaming and stole liberally from there, as well as from Skerple's Many Rats on Sticks edition of the same. I think I must have read Logan Knight's Last Gasp Grimoire a few dozen times, no exaggeration. And I couldn't stop myself. Patrick Stuart. Scrap Princess. Emmy Allen. Luka Rejec. Gavin Norman and Greg Gorgonmilk. Gus L. David Black. On and on and on ...
End to end, I think I have been writing these rules for going on 4 years. It's kind of hard to believe looking back at it. 403 pages, written in LaTeX. My version and vision of the Goblin Laws of Gaming, and a dozen other things beside.
I'm glad to have finally gotten it all out of my head. They're free and published under the Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license.
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