Major Qualifying Project
For my yearlong Major Qualifying Project at WPI, my team built an original world called Khalyn and developed four different interactive experiences set inside it, including an audio drama, a live action role-play, a narrative archival research puzzle, and a tabletop roleplaying game. As a team we also collectively built a lore book for the world, documenting the history, rules, and fabric of Khalyn that all four experiences drew from. My specific contribution spanned both the world-building and the TTRPG. On the world-building side, my main task was designing the major playable species of Khalyn, defining what they were made of, where they lived, their characteristics, the cultures that shaped how they lived and interacted with one another, and the traditions that defined each species identity. That foundation is what gave the world its internal logic and made every experience feel like it belonged to the same universe.
Khalyn Lore Book
For the TTRPG, I designed the mechanics from the ground up, making sure every rule, stat system, and narrative element was a direct expression of the world itself rather than a generic ruleset applied on top of it. That process involved a lot of playtesting and iteration, adjusting rules based on what was creating friction and what was pulling players deeper into the world. It resulted in a 51-page rulebook and earned an A grade.
Echoes of the Salt Flats Rulebook and Guidebook (pg 16)
The Major Species I created for Kahlyn and Echoes of the Salt Flats
Here are some art, by Saida Bahtierova, some of the major species I came up with. You can read more about each major species in Khalyn: A Complete Lore Book. You can also see how these playable species work in 51 Pg rulebook/guidebook of Echoes of the Salt Flats, Tabletop Roleplaying Game.
Fluxians
Ignasians
Galatians
