About Me and Nyora the TTRPG
Hi there! I’m Jonas – a filmmaker and storyteller who accidentally fell in love with tabletop RPGs.
What began as a messy attempt to fix D&D 5e 2024 slowly turned into a growing project called Nyora, a tabletop RPG where cinematic storytelling and tactical gameplay meet. My ongoing experiment in learning how to craft and write worlds, systems, and stories that feel alive.
How it Started
It started with a hunter – and a snow leopard cub.
Varn was cast out from his frozen mountain village, guided only by a stubborn sense of justice.
In a blizzard that should have killed him, he found Eira, a starving cub trembling in the snow.
He carried her back to life, and from that day on, they hunted together – hand in hand, or paw?
When death finally found them, Firun, the god of the hunt, spared them instead.
He marked their bond and gave them a gift: ice – the power to bring change to a world they did not yet understand.
That story was where Nyora truly began.
At first, I just wanted to play that character – a hunter with a real companion, not a spellbound spirit.
But in DSA, I couldn’t build him the way I imagined.
And in D&D 5e (2024), I ran into the same wall:
I couldn’t focus on frost magic, my beast was just a temporary summon, and the ranger felt like anything but a hunter.
Our group quickly realised we wanted something else – a system that rewarded creativity, didn’t punish imagination, and allowed stories to breathe without a hundred rulebooks in the way.
So I started building.
Nyora grew from that desire for freedom:
- Deep character creation rooted in profession, childhood, and connections to the world
- Tactical combat where the environment truly matters, you can do cinematic combos with allies, and can do more in a round than bonk someone with a 1d8 stick.
- Encounters beyond fighting – negotiations, chases, bluffs, exploration
- Travel and downtime that turn moments of rest into stories worth telling
The goal was simple: make a system where imagination feels natural, and mechanics amplify storytelling instead of limiting it.
What Drives Me
I’ve always loved stories that begin long before the first chapter. The feeling of getting thrown into a living world, shaped by thousands of years of lore, power plays, wars, and times of peace and progress.
In most TTRPGs, characters are born the moment the dice hit the table. But in Nyora, I want them to carry the echoes of who they were before the adventure began – their craft, their childhood, their ties to mentors, towns, and forgotten oaths.
Every roll should feel like it’s pulled from something real – a memory, a promise, a scar.
A character in Nyora doesn’t start from nothing.
They start already in motion, just entering the next chapter.
Beyond the Dice
When I’m not rolling dice or designing mechanics, I’m behind a camera – a videographer crafting stories for businesses through light, timing, and emotion.
It took me a while to notice how connected those worlds are.
My film work taught me pacing, composition, and tone – my love for tabletop games taught me collaboration, tension, and heart.
Somewhere between those two, Notion boards turned into world maps, production schedules became encounter flowcharts, and what began as a rough homebrew patch for D&D 5e turned into a complete system – a world shaped by design, story, and experimentation.
That’s how Nyora found its shape: through chaos, structure and a loooot of trial and error.
Join the Journey
Right now, I’m preparing the first demo of Nyora – a story driven and tactical TTRPG born from countless playtests and late-night design sessions.
If you want to help shape the system from its earliest stage, you can join the Early Access waitlist for the free playtesting coming early next year.
Until the next time! Cheers, Jonas