About Us

Randal Snyder

Randal is the author, creative director, play-tester, director, publisher, artistic director... yeah, pretty much everything!

I am an avid fan of science fiction, horror, and fantasy. When I was a kid, living in Haiti, my parents took me to see the Citadelle Laferriere that opened my imagination to the wonders of history.

Growing up in the 1980's, my mind was starved for quality fiction that captured my imagination. Then I discovered Monte Python and the Quest for the Holy Grail. Seriously! I think that movie broke me.

My love of medieval fantasy persisted and I was introduced to Dungeons & Dragons in middle school via Choose Your Own Adventure books. From then on, I was hooked on the idea of writing and running my own adventures. I introduced friends to the game and made dozens more with this silly game of rolling dice and story telling.

From there, I was introduced to Battletech and giant mecha of Robotech, and Shadowrun and its mutants and cybernetic dark future. These games helped to develop my ideas of what good games were. But they never achieved quite the feeling of the books that I had read or the movies that I had been watching.

So I tinkered and tweaked. I spent hours trying to figure out simple, but effective modifications to rules systems to make them work the way that I wanted. In the end, I realized that I had to start from scratch.

And now for something completely different...

Sundered Epoch: Generations

About 1990, I began designing what would become the Sundered Epoch: Generations system (SEG). I was inspired by many different games including Dungeons & Dragons, Shadowrun, Leading Edge, and GURPS, but none of them quite lived up to my expectations. So I tweaked and tinkered trying to get away from the endless tables. With every major change to the system it got closer and closer to what I was looking for.

The first version was written on an old hand-me-down computer running DOS and was printed with hand drawn page numbers. It was gloriously horrible and my friends joked that we needed to use calculus to play the game.

The second version was printed in 1997 and I printed version 2 with a giant print volume of five whole copies. This was a huge step forward as I was able to include artwork and a semi-professional binding.

With each successive change came a new edition. We moved away from using d20s and shifted to the d5 standard. The skill system got simplified yet more detailed. And finally, we came to version 5 at the end of 2015.

SE:20

In 2020, we decided to take our streamlining to the extreme. Everything was on the table and we asked what worked and what didn't. Although we loved the idea of the Xd5 system, it was clear that the method was cumbersome. As a result, we went back to our original system using 1d20 for skill checks and Xd6 for damage. Second, we tore into the Attributes and boiled them down into the basics. We looked at every skill and how it might have been used in movies we loved and then compared the skill lists and attributes to make sure that they were balanced. 

There were several core concepts we loved and wanted to keep from the SEG system. Keeping the system classless and skill based was critical. We didn't want to maximize player freedom to create their own character concepts. Retention of the "Hard Success" system that granted bonuses for high success allowed us to eliminate pages of "feats" while emulating action movie heroics. The Stun system eliminated the problems we had with Hit Points. We even reduced skill modifiers to the bare minimum to allow for easier math. 

When we were done, we had the new skeleton, the framework of what would become the SE:20 RPG System. We started by boiling down the game to its most basic components and so the Source Reference Documents were born.