During Origins Game Fair 2025, I got to meet in-person with Heather from 9th Level Games for an interview!  We talk about her XP in publishing, how making a TTRPG focused on younger players differs from other material… and more!

What’s your backstory?  What interesting things do you do? 

I’m Heather O’Neill from 9th Level Games, and I do a lot of interesting things!  I’m probably a bit of a workaholic.

I started as a project manager and marketing person who tangentially liked games… and started coming to gaming conventions and realized I REALLY liked games.  

I started designing games; I was definitely more on the board and card game side, but my husband’s company was about role-playing games.  I thought that was his thing and board games were more my thing, then, as it got to maybe 2015 – 2016, I wanted to do those more.  I started getting a little deeper into the water of gaming to get my start, and now I’m doing full time games. I own a RPG company with him, I design role-playing and board games.  

I took baby steps, and now I’m full in!

Once you get in it, you can’t get out!

Yep, once you pop, you can’t stop!

Now, you make a wide variety of games, so they are games that kids can play and that adults can play together at the same table and still have fun with it.  So, what all-ages games have you made? 

I’ll start with Schrodinger’s Cats, which is a card game where you try to guess how many dead or alive cats are in boxes and everyone’s hands, so there’s a bit of math and probability and bluffing and cute cats!

Then we did Pavlov’s Dogs, so that’s the perfect follow up to that.  You’re trying to condition your friends and family to follow rules.  Every round, there’s a rule that modifies a very simple card deck with numbers and words like “sit”, “stay”, and “bark”.  

Then I did Meeple Party, which is a cooperative game with little wooden meeples having a party.  

My next big project that I did was Venture Society, which is an all-ages introductory role-playing game.  It’s super light and aimed at the 5-12 year old age group. 

How was Venture Society different from other games that 9th Level has made? 

It was definitely different from anything else that I had been on or made before, but, over the years, probably in about 2018 – 2019, 9th Level had created the Polymorph system.  It’s a very simple and quick ruleset for introductory play. 

Because of that, the other designers on the team and I had a framework to use. 

For me, the design process was very different because it wasn’t coming up from scratch, I already had a system, and then it had to be about how it is working, how we can make this for kids and parents, and all that. 

Of course, we wanted it to be something fun, but we also really wanted it to be something that could be used as a tool by parents, teachers, and therapists to use in professional settings or to work on things at home.  So, we had two play therapists and a 4th grade teacher and myself on the core team, and a number of TTRPG designers, teachers and therapists on the writing team as well.  There was a lot of input and writing and collating and meetings, so it was a lot more effort than just writing a game based on a spec. 

I’ve been working on that from… 2021 to it just coming out about 6 months ago.  It was a long process. 

We thought it was an important game to make because, as you probably know, games that are made for education or therapy look like that, and the kids know and don’t want to do it.   Or maybe it just doesn’t look fun to them. 

We wanted kids to have fun with the game first and underneath it all have it contain application. 

It sounds like you were very intentional about what you did, so it was a big team of a lot of folks weighing in, but that also shows the amount of perspectives and effort that you put into making it an applied game.  You didn’t just say “here is a game that can be applied”, you said “this is made with that purpose”.

Absolutely, and I think that’s why it took so long.  

We had that framework and knew what the system was going to be, so we could get that together, but then we needed to say how we were using social-emotional learning as a game mechanic and as powers of play.  

We mashed together SEL and powers of play to make it more understandable, so there’s an economy where if players are doing well in social awareness and personal strength and wellness, they earn Venture Points.   When your group earns 5 VP, you basically get to level and earn skills and items.  They’re rewarded for doing this, but it’s part of the game.  

It’s like… you did great showing empathy to that sad turtle!  Versus, let’s go down this list and talk about what this emotion means. 

That’s the part that took a while.  

Then there was peer review on the therapy side.  Dr. Brian Quinones and Timothy Grant took this around to many people after the professional therapy guide was written to make sure that they were not just putting their perspective on their method.  

There’s intention where the game is, but there’s a lot of room for where you can use it as a tool too, which was really nice. 

We were aiming at ONLY 5-12 year olds whereas most of our games are aimed at 5 to 99.  We had to think about shorter adventures and a more hand-on focus to keep the attention at the table. 

A lot of effort went into it, but, having played it myself, it works and does what I think you intended. 

Now, 9th Level also makes the Awesome World series, which has a great all-ages vibe!  What is your favorite Awesome World adventure and why? 

There’s so many; I forget the exact name of the adventure, but in the main book for The Excellents, there are two adventures, and one is about how Awesome World, a beautiful cartoon world, is losing its color.  It’s turning black and white, and players have to find out why. 

The other adventures are much more fun and light themed, but this one takes a dark topic and makes it make sense without being scary in that world.  I’ve seen adult groups play that in a different way than a family with, say, a 4 and an 8 year old would.

Yeah, it’s more open to interpretation and feeling those hard feelings, but in a more fun kind of frame.

Before we end our interview, do you have any shoutouts or final words? 

Actually, I do!  Yesterday was Free RPG Day, and what you may not know is that 9th Level also makes Level 1, which is an indie RPG anthology, not necessarily for kids, but it is a cool free item that features a lot of up and coming designers.  It came out today (6/22) physically, and it will come out digitally in about a month, free, as a PDF. 

And, as a second shout out we’ve started to add friends of 9th Level products!  We are now selling games, like Bakers, Charge!, and other items from like-minded creators that we think our crowd would like and taking them to conventions.  

Thank you very much for stocking Bakers, Charge!, and it’s always nice to see it out there in the wild, but particularly at your booth!

Thank you too for the interview, and I hope you have a great final hour of Origins before you probably have to dash off straight to another one!  I appreciate you sharing your XP, and it was awesome getting to chat again. 

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