An Epoch (on paper)

You've heard of collaborative storytelling? Well, get ready for competitive storytelling! An Epoch on Paper is a playable creation myth that weaves a tale of Gods, Heroes, Artifacts, Ancient Lands and Civilisations from the natural friction of board game night. Create your own pantheon with its own symbols, holy lands, champions and sacred relics. Record the many battles and regions that form from your petty contest and watch your own personal myths form.

To be specific, An Epoch (on paper) was something I cooked up as a worldbuilding aide for people trying to make TTRPG campaigns, but have trouble making believable myths and legends (or one that the players care about) A good way to make people care about something was to involve them directly, but getting creative input from your players can be difficult, so gamifying it could help.

How I came up with it:
I tried starting a D&D game that I built with the idea that the players would work together to create magic items that they would one day fend off a great evil. I even planned for those magic items to return in future campaigns to give a feeling of timelessness to them inspired by the Legend of Zelda series. One of my players tried playing a cleric, but I immediately realised that I had no gods prepared. The campaign did not get very far. I can't tell if it's because I'm bad at communicating or if the players wanted a game with far more immediate action.

During the jam, as I was preparing to play a D&D campaign run by a friend, he told me that religion was always the hardest part for him, so he phones it in. That didn't sit well with me, so I wondered if there was a way to outsource part of the workload to the players.

For the jam I started making a game about making magical artifacts being built to one day stave off a great evil and reveal that a year later in a D&D campaign that it was the items they created in this silly hour-long game all along. I wanted these artifacts to feel unique with a personal connection to them. I planned having the players have domains of the land, the sea or the sky. Unfortunately, I was struggling to think of how to turn it into a game.

I was reading one of the RuneQuest's Mythology book and saw the maps of the many stages of the mythic era they had. The land-dominated Green Age, the sky-dominated Golden Age, the fractured Storm Age, the incursion of the seas in the Lesser Darkness, the winter that consumed the North in the Greater Darkness and finally, the mortal-dominated Time. When I saw these maps, I thought they looked like pictures taken of a board game in the middle of particularly wild turns. That's when I got the idea. Turn that into a real game with the land literally going to war with itself guided by the players! I then realised that I still liked my artifact idea, so I incorporated that into the game complete with ancient heroes to wield them. I also added journaling elements so every strategic decision, battle, alliance and betrayal becomes a myth in its own right.