Today is the 5 year anniversary of my releasing games under the moniker Għar Gremxul!

I thought I’d look back to the beginning of Għar Gremxul and take a look at games I made, the intent behind them, and some of the design processes that I went through for each game.

The Beginnings of Għar Gremxul

Għar Gremxul is an exploration of Maltese folklore, legends, and history through the medium of games, and is run by me, a Maltese game developer. It officially came into existence during the COVID pandemic in 2020, where in August I released my first game Rewwixta. Since it's been 5 years today since the release of that game, I thought I'd go back in time and explore the beginnings of Għar Gremxul, the various reasons and inspirations behind my wanting to start something like this, and dive deeper into each released game so far.

While the first game released under the name Għar Gremxul appeared in August 2020, in actual fact I had started thinking about the intersection between games and Maltese folklore, history, and culture way earlier. As early as 2017, I was digging into Maltese folklore and legends, cooking up Maltese recipes and serving Maltese desserts, buying books written in Maltese or about Malta, and finding unique and interesting Maltese words and digging into their etymology. One of the reasons behind this renewed interest, and a major inspiration for Għar Gremxul even existing, is the book The Maltese Bestiary by Stephan D. Mifsud, published by Merlin Publishers in 2014. The book rigorously describes and categorises various monstrous figures from Maltese myth, folklore, and legend.

In 2019, I started looking at the possibility of creating a tabletop RPG set in Malta. Here, I considered the Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition ruleset as a possibility; it was popular, I knew the system fairly well, and other similar third party products had been released that were based in regional folklore that people seemed to like. Up until April 2020, I had even done some preliminary writing exploring my thoughts on how to approach the setting, and some initial designs for character classes and monsters. However, the more I thought about it, the more I realised that while popular, Dungeons & Dragons was primarily inspired by a Western 70s fantasy and contained a collection of various archetypes, assumptions and baggage that didn't necessarily fit with what I wanted to do. This meant that I either had to fight the established ruleset to fit what I wanted into my game, find another ruleset (that may be more suitable, but probably less well-known), or come up with my own unique ruleset, which I thought was a monumental task for just one person. (I recall there was a similar project called Seħtet is-Swar by Chucky Bartolo that appeared at about the same time and was also about bringing Maltese monsters to the Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition ruleset, but that unfortunately seems to have vanished.)

While I have some experience as a game designer, my education and training is primarily as a software developer and games programmer. Since I didn't feel super comfortable with my game design skills in designing an entire tabletop roleplaying system from scratch, and not really having any experience with other roleplaying systems, I temporarily parked the idea. I'd love to revisit it later though, and if you have any interest in collaborating with me, please reach out!.

Core Pillars

When starting Għar Gremxul, I established a few core pillars that help guide me when making games.

Games based in Maltese folklore, history, and culture

Malta is not commonly featured in games (both digital and analog), and when it is, it's probably a backdrop for a completely different story. Furthermore, most of the games about Malta or featuring Malta are made by non-Maltese developers. Given Maltese history under a variety of different colonial powers, I instead wanted to centre the local population and make games for them and about them.

Now, the Maltese population only numbers about 500,000 (not including the Maltese diaspora around the world), so it's not exactly the most commercially viable of themes. This was corroborated by a Maltese game developer I was speaking to about the subject, who said something along the lines of “But who would be interested in playing such a niche game?”. I still vividly remember that comment, and while I didn't say anything at the time, I remember thinking to myself, “I would.”

Of course, I don’t expect that making games using such themes is ever going to be commercially viable, I get that. It would certainly help, of course, but I'm grateful that I have the luxury that Għar Gremxul doesn't need to be commercially successful for me to keep making games (it's not my day job, after all).

Available to play in Maltese

Maltese isn’t a language that has a particularly large digital footprint. This is primarily due to the small population of the country, but also because Maltese people speak both English and Maltese fluently. This means that most material on the Internet that is made by Maltese people and for Maltese people tends to be in English, with a few exceptions (those being Wikipedia MT, some news sites, some podcasts and blogs). This unfortunately means that Maltese has been deemed as being in danger of becoming "digitally extinct", since there's no real incentive to publish anything online in Maltese. In order to help prevent this from happening, and as a form of language reclamation , I try to make sure that every game I make is available in both English and Maltese (even though I'm no professional translator). I feel strongly about there being games that can be played in Maltese, especially if they involve local culture! Realistically however, I don’t expect most people to ever engage with or play the Maltese translations at all.

Contained a bibliography of further reading material

I always liked the idea of Dungeons & Dragons' Appendix N as way to highlight works that inspired the game and shaped it to become what it now is. Additionally, the bibliography section at the end of Stephan D. Mifsud's The Maltese Bestiary was also pivotal in convincing me to find those sources for myself and learn more about the material. In a similar way, for every game I made, I wanted to take it a step further and approach it academically, a little bit like writing a research paper, by providing a list of sources that could be used as further reading material. This allowed anyone interested in whatever the game was about to be able to do their own research and learn more about the subject matter. It also gave me a way of giving credit to the authors and creators that shaped my thoughts and contributed to making the game in their own way.

Credited any images used

I knew from the beginning that I had little to no artistic talent and would not be able to add my own art to the games I made. However, I thought I could make it work by using public domain art, especially if I could use Maltese art or art from sources related to Malta that was in the public domain. I hoped that I would be able to commission artists for custom art at some point, but I first wanted to see if anyone was interested in the games I was making. It always annoyed me that people used public domain art without saying what it was or where it came from, so I wanted to make sure that every single game I made would give the proper credits for any art that was used.

Origins of the Name

I knew I wanted to make games under a Maltese name, but I wasn’t entirely sure if I wanted to use characters that were specific to Maltese in the name since I was worried about confusing non-Maltese players (which I expected to be the vast majority of my audience). I settled on having Maltese characters and providing a pronunciation guide using the International Phonetic Alphabet where I could, so that people would know how to pronounce it.

I spent a while going through a couple of options before eventually settling on Għar Gremxul, which means “cave of lizards” in English. I was mainly inspired by the Maltese legend that states that lizards on the island of Filfla have two tails. There were other names that I considered, but none of them had the right mouthfeel.

Due to my preference of releasing games anonymously under the name Għar Gremxul, people have assumed that this is my actual name; but that’s not the case at all! There's no real reason for remaining anonymous other than me wanting the work to speak for itself, and I'm sure I'll reveal my name when the time is right.

A History of Għar Gremxul

I spent a lot of time lurking on Twitter observing conversations related to tabletop roleplaying games, trying to learn more about the talking points that the TTRPG community considered important, what games and systems I should be looking at, as well as learning more about design and layout. There were several people during this period that influenced my work, such as Nova aka Idle Cartulary, Bee Scerri, Pam Punzalan, and Emily Pennyway, among many others. Unfortunately, ever since Twitter's demise, a lot of this community has scattered to the winds, and is slowly reforming on Bluesky.

Following the community's discussions led me to game jams on itch.io where people were encourage to make tabletop games, and since we were in lockdown in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, I thought I'd give it a shot!

Rewwixta

Rewwixta is a solo story-generation game where players recount tales of revolt, rebellion, and uprising against colonial powers. It was released on the 10th of August, 2020, and was the first standalone roleplaying game released by Għar Gremxul. It was made for the Unearthed Expansions game jam organised by Aaron Lim 林家丰. The name Rewwixta means “rebellion” or “uprising” in Maltese.

Since the theme of the game jam was essentially “take any game that doesn’t have a tabletop RPG adaptation and make one”, I thought I’d go for a local folk game. I quickly settled on brilli, a bowling folk game that is nowadays only played in a few villages in Gozo.

I hadn’t seen a dice bowling game before, and thought it could an interesting idea. Since the pins in brilli have names, I was inspired to wrap the mechanics in an anti-colonial message of rebellion, where knocking down the pins would determine whether or not the rebellion was successful or not.

Since Malta has several stories of rebellion in its history, I didn’t really want to specify which rebellion I was referring to, preferring to allude to some of them in the options I presented. This also meant that the game could easily be rethemed by players to represent other rebellions around the world if necessary.

Even though I didn’t really feel like I knew what I was doing for my first time making a tabletop RPG, I was nevertheless proud of the result.

Is-Saflenin

Is-Saflenin is a solo story-generation game set in a world deep underground. It was released on the 30th of August 2020, and was made for the Folklore Jam 2020 organised by W. H. Arthur, Lari Assmuth, Jessica Marcrum, and Litza Bronwyn. The name Is-Saflenin means “the undergrounders” in Maltese.

This jam was an obvious pick for me, since I already try to include Maltese folklore in my games whenever I can! (Though admittedly, I’ve not managed to participate in another Folklore Jam since…) The question now was, what should this game be about?

I’d always been intrigued by the urban legend that a race of giants lived deep underground in a cave only accessible through the temple of Ħal-Saflieni. As I did some more digging, Maltese folk tales turned up more links to the underground, all of which I made use of in the game. To get into the mood of the game, I listened to lots of Paleowolf.

Since I still felt like I had no idea what I was doing in terms of game design, I stuck with a solo story-generation game. However, I specifically wanted the game to be difficult, but not necessarily unwinnable. As I have a professional background in software development, I decided to approach this by writing some code and running some game simulations to see if the mechanics I had in mind would provide the gameplay and game feel that I was looking for, eventually settling on something I was happy with.

Ir-Raxx tal-Baħar

Ir-Raxx tal-Baħar is a personal lyric game about growing up by the sea. It was released on the 13th of September 2020, and was made for the d66 Game Design Tracks game jam organised by Idle Cartulary. The name Ir-Raxx tal-Baħar means “the sea spray” in Maltese.

I had been following Idle Cartulary on Twitter for a while and was intrigued with the idea of lyric games. When the game jam was announced, I thought that this was the perfect opportunity to try my hand at making my own lyric game. After rolling the dice and getting The Big Ship by Brian Eno (which I was not familiar with), there was something wistful about the piece that drew me towards making something a bit more personal.

I decided to frame the narrative of the game as a summer day from my childhood, and provided lots of options to players to add some variation to a game session. These options were inspired by events that happened to me throughout my childhood.

Saġġara

Saġġara is a lyric game about trees in Malta and their destruction. It was released on the 15th of November 2020, and was the first game not to be submitted to a game jam on itch.io. The name Saġġara means “foresters” in English.

While I had dabbled with quoting snippets of poetry in my games before (in particular, Rewwixta quoted two verses of Jum ir-Rebħ by Maltese poet Rużar Briffa), Saġġara was the first game to be fully inspired by a poem; this time, Iż-Żabra by Maltese poet Victor Fenech.

This was the first game where I felt it was necessary to include further reading. In this case, I was inspired by the frequent mention of the destruction of trees in local news, so I added several links to such news articles.

Other Events of Importance

There were two other events that stand out to me this early on in Għar Gremxul’s journey. The first one was Session Zero Online, a conference hosted and organised by Gamers and GMs Philippines on the Gather digital platform on the 30th of January 2021. While the time zone difference made it a bit tricky to listen in on a few of the talks, I still had fun walking around the environment, meeting people from around the world, and talking about tabletop role-playing games.

The other event that stands out to me was an article in Dicebreaker written by Lin Codega, entitled “Old stories, new forms: Rewriting folklore as RPGs brings fresh perspectives and cultures to the table” which was published on the 6th of October 2021. Codega had reached out to me over the summer asking if I would be interested in contributing to an article that they were writing about the use of folklore in tabletop role playing games. I happily accepted, and to be honest, it was an honour to even be considered at all among other well-known game designers and writers!

A Period of Silence

I started to see a lot of tabletop RPG bundles being organised on social media, and figured that I could submit the game Rewwixta to help contribute towards various causes. The first bundle I was a part of was Croatian Earthquake Relief organised by Filip from Ordoalea Publishing that ended on the 22nd of February 2021, but I was also a part of larger bundles such as the Indie Bundle for Palestinian Aid organised by Alanna Linayre that ended on the 12th of June 2021 and the Bundle for Ukraine organised by Necrosoft Games that ended on the 18th of March 2022.

It was around this time when I began to become unsure of myself and what I was doing. I started to question why I was even making these games in the first place. No-one online seemed to be interested in them, and at times it felt like I was creating things and releasing them into the void. I was also reluctant to put myself out there and talk about the games, since I believed that they were too niche to be of interest to a mainstream audience, and I wasn’t a big fan of constantly promoting myself either. This meant I got little to no engagement with my work. I started accumulating lots of game ideas, but abandoning them half-way through since I was always second-guessing myself, my design skills, and my ability to deliver something interesting, as well as whether or not anyone would be interested in them.

While I would often follow conversations by peers and other tabletop game designers on social media and learnt a lot, I would rarely contribute to the discussion due to being aware of my lack of knowledge of other tabletop RPGs. I also did not really consider myself as a game designer with enough knowledge to contribute to such discussions. Eventually, when Twitter collapsed and the tabletop RPG community splintered to different platforms, I found it difficult to keep up with so many ongoing discussions.

I eventually found the motivation to continue making games again once I came to the conclusion that whether or not people were interested and talking about my games was ultimately irrelevant. I had started to make these games mostly because I was interested in playing them and interested in them existing to begin with, and ultimately that wasn’t going to change.

With tabletop game designers eventually settling on Bluesky as their social media platform of choice, and with Discord communities springing up that I could lurk in and learn from, I finally found the energy and willpower to make games again!

Finding Inspiration Again

Ara Ġejja l-Mewt Għalik

Ara Ġejja l-Mewt Għalik is a tabletop role-playing game about the inevitable nature of death, and is the first multiplayer game I made as Għar Gremxul. It was released on the 10th of November 2023, and was made for AFTERWORDS: The Death Jam organised by Marx Shepherd and the Far Horizons CoOp. The name Ara Ġejja l-Mewt Għalik loosely translates to “Watch out, Death is coming for you” in English.

Given that the game jam’s theme was death, I immediately thought of the children’s playground game, known by various names but most commonly as “Ara Ġejja l-Mewt Għalik”. I also wanted to use Ċensa l-Mewt, the female figure of the grim reaper from Maltese folklore. I added some story elements to the game by allowing players to pick roles and then describe how their actions caused the death of another player’s character, and any remaining characters at the end of the game could die peacefully.

Għosfor

Għosfor is a lyric game about birds, hunting, and remembering the dead. It was released on the 24th of July 2024, and was made for the Say hi to a bird jam organised by Logan Timmins. The name Għosfor means “vanished” in English, but is also related to “għasfur”, the word “bird” in Maltese.

Initially, I thought of taking inspiration from some of the birds from Maltese folklore. However, the more I thought about it, the more I leaned towards representing hunting in Malta. I decided to do this by having players discover a dying bird and creating a santa, a Maltese commemorative funerary card to remember them by. I also made to provide a list of birds that had been shot at in Malta (legally or otherwise) with relevant references for each bird.

Ibħra Qawwija

Ibħra Qawwija is a cooperative role based tabletop RPG where you try to avoid tragedy at sea. It was released on the 30th of November 2024, and was made for the Deep Water Jam organised by Sinta Posadas. The name Ibħra Qawwija means “rough seas” in English.

This game is possibly the biggest game I’ve made as Għar Gremxul, and tackled a theme that I had been struggling to fit into my work for a while; the relationship between the Maltese people and the sea. I had read the book Il-Baħar Rasu Iebsa by Lino Psaila, a book that talked about various tragedies and deaths at sea by Maltese fishermen in the late 1800s and early 1900s, and had been trying to make a game inspired by it with no success, and I’m quite happy with the attempt I made with this game.

In a similar manner to Is-Saflenin, I knew I wanted the odds to be heavily stacked against you, but I also wanted you to have some agency in the game. To do this, I introduced different roles that players could take, and I wrote code in C# to simulate 100000 games to make sure that the roles worked well together and that the game mechanics conveyed the feeling that I was looking for.

This project was also strange in that since I had just had a newborn kid, but still wanted to submit something to this game jam, so I ended up working on the game between 4am and 6am every morning before they woke up, as well as on my commute to work when I had the energy to do so.

Kewkba Wikkiela

Kewkba Wikkiela (The Star That Hungers) is a Maltese cosmic horror low-level adventure for any OSR system. It was released on the 31st of July 2025, and made for the Appx. N Jam organised by Dank Dungeons and jorphdan.

For this jam, each individual participant was assigned a name of a fictitious pulp adventure book that could possibly have been included in Appendix N, and was expected to create an adventure that could fit on four A5 pages inspired by the assigned name. In my case, I was assigned the name The Star That Hungers. In all honestly, I struggled a bit with this since I needed to find an angle that accommodated both the celestial imagery that the title evoked, as well as the Maltese angle that I always want to give to my games. I also struggled since the title I was assigned was in English, and I always give my games Maltese names, but as luck would have it, I managed to find a hard-to-find book in Maltese called Kewkba Wikkiela by Ġużè Grioli that involved cosmic horror, and that had a title that almost directly translated the assigned title The Star That Hungers to Maltese (a more precise translation of Kewkba Wikkiela would be "The Ravenous Star"). Had I not rediscovered this book in my collection, I may have gone down a Spelljammer route instead. In terms of setting, I decided to set the adventure in a location heavily inspired by the Devil's Farmhouse in Mellieħa, Malta and the various legends that surrounded it.

This was the first project I worked on that was a supplement to an existing game or system rather than an entirely brand new game. In this case, I wasn't super familiar with the OSR style of role-playing, so I made sure to learn a bit about the differences compared to other systems I was familiar with. I settled with making something that was system neutral, but heavily inspired by AD&D (mostly since I owned physical copies of those books).

I spent quite a long time trying to figure out how to build the dungeon for this adventure. I knew I wanted it to use the layout of a real Maltese farmhouse, but was worried that I wouldn't manage to find something that worked in the time I had. After looking through a series of floor plans of existing Maltese farmhouses, I went back to my original idea of using the Devil's Farmhouse (which was originally actually meant to be a horse-riding school), figured out a floor plan based on an urban explorer's video, and then retrofitted a farmhouse layout to it as best I could.

In a similar manner to my other game Ibħra Qawwija, I was on parental leave taking care of my kid at the time. This meant I could only really work on writing Kewkba Wikkiela in the limited amount of time I had during their naps.

Looking Forward

While I'm happy overall with the quality of my work, there's always room for improvement!

First of all, the layout is super basic and definitely makes the games feel more amateur-ish and less polished, especially compared to some other games I've seen that have fantastic presentation. While I have a rudimentary knowledge of Affinity Publisher 2, learning the tools I use will ensure that I can present better looking games. On a related note, I would also like to be able to offer more accessibility features for my games, such as printer friendly layouts, mobile friendly layouts, selectable text, alt text for any images I use, and maybe even text-only layouts or audio formats.

While I've spent a lot of time exploring a variety of different types of games, perhaps it might be more sensible for me to focus on a particular style of game, rather than trying to make everything. On the flip side, there are several styles of games that I haven't yet explored, such as system-heavy designs.

I should probably also find a way to become better at marketing my games and putting them in front of people. Historically, I've always worked on my games, posted them to itch.io, shared the game to my few followers on social media, and then called it a day without ever resharing the game's announcement again. This meant that not many people ever learnt about the games I made. I also never made use of itch.io's devlog feature to let my itch followers know about any new games. There are multiple ways I think I can go about being better at marketing; I just need to commit to an approach and see if it works for me.

While the Maltese translations are adequate, I would love to be able to run them by a professional translator or a proof reader to make sure that the language makes sense and is as accurate as possible!

There are also lots of new things that I'd love to do as Għar Gremxul if I manage to! I'd love to collaborate with other designers and work on a project together, and I'd also love to work with professional artists and layout designers! I also have a ton of project ideas, both big and small, that I'd like to work on, and I'd also love to work on a digital game at some point too! I would also love to make something physical; either a zine, a collection of lyric games, an anthology of games, or perhaps even one big game.

Finally, just because a game has loads of downloads doesn't necessarily mean that it's popular, or even good. Rewwixta features in a lot of indie bundles and has gotten thousands of downloads, but that's no guarantee that people are playing it! (I know this because the Maltese version of the game has gotten way more downloads than I expect it to have)

Conclusion

I hope that this retrospective on the last 5 years of my making games as Għar Gremxul was interesting to you! I’m grateful to everyone that has downloaded and played the games I’ve made, and I look forward to making more games that I hope you will enjoy.