Zach "Zafety" Townes

I got into TTRPGs around 2016, watching content creators stream D&D 5e and falling in love with the storytelling, especially homebrew worlds. I didn’t actually start playing until 2020, in a unique system called The Devil City and its Seventy Seven Vicious Princes, which opened my eyes to countless different settings outside the D&D and Pathfinder mainstream.

By 2022 I was running my own homebrew world for a dedicated group of players, and we had a lot of great sessions. But running a homebrew campaign requires a lot of notes, and I was never satisfied with the tools available. I experimented with many of them. None of them quite worked.

What the experiments taught me was that the gap wasn’t features, it was shape. Notion could store my NPCs but couldn’t tell me which ones were tied to a faction without me building the scaffolding by hand. Wikis held my lore but leaked my secrets, or buried them. And the moment I brought an AI assistant into my prep, it cheerfully contradicted my own canon, because nothing I used could hand it a structured, queryable version of the world I’d written.

That was the thing worth building: a tool shaped like a campaign, not like a doc or a database I had to bend into one. Typed entities that know how they connect, secrets that stay secret, and a world an AI can read faithfully instead of paving over with generic fantasy. Grimoire is that tool, built at my own table first.

When I’m not working on Grimoire I’m building adjacent projects: a Foundry VTT system for Caves of Qud, and an AI agent that plays Dwarf Fortress autonomously. All my projects seem to revolve around the same question: how do you represent a unique setting in a different format, and preserve its essence when the medium changes?