Max Arnold
Game Designer
Tabletop Gaming
While video games are the medium that calls to me the loudest, tabletop gaming is the one I’ve been a part of the longest. With more than 20 years of my life spent building worlds and collaborating on stories with my players, little gets me more excited than seeing others revel in their triumphs, share in their struggles, and defy the odds. I have always felt a deep sense of ownership and responsibility for the enjoyment, engagement, and accessibility of my games, and take pride in the hard work I put into every campaign to make it a unique and inspiring experience.
Pathfinder 1e - Curse of the Crimson Throne
For the last several years I’ve been running a modified version of the iconic “Curse of the Crimson Throne” Adventure Path for Pathfinder First Edition. As an insight into my methods and a demonstration of my work, I’m posting my take on the action-packed chapter “Skeletons of Scarwall” with a breakdown of my own variation on the chapter’s namesake - “Castle Scarwall”.
You can follow the links below to a the main design document outlining the adventure, NPCs, and encounters, as well as additional map, treasure, and character sheets.
Online Courses
As a game developer it's important to work on improving your technical skills whenever possible, and I cannot recommend gamedev.tv enough for all the fantastic courses they have available. While not every course I take ends with something worth showing off, whenever there is I'm sure to load it up to my itch.io account and link it here for folks to check out!
Unity 2D RPG: Complete Combat System
This course was an interesting challenge for me to dig into, building up my C# skills and introducing me to 2D sprite based workflows, animation and VFX setup, and basic combat scripting. By the end of it I'd learned how to set up singletons and managers, apply inheritance between classes, and use scriptable objects in Unity.
If you want to give it a try you can find it on my itch.io account linked below!
Design Presentations
As a community, game developers are some of the most passionate and proactive people when it comes to sharing knowledge. Being a part of that community means doing my part to share my own experiences and insight whenever possible.
Full Indie - Fairest of Them All: Fair vs. Unfair In Games
In 2026 I was given the chance to do a short design talk about fairness in games and how it relates to difficulty, communication, and expectation. In it, I go into detail about how fairness is different from difficulty, how something can be fair and unfair at the same time, and how to handle unfairness when it arises.
Apologies for the choppy start, we had a few technical difficulties that night, so the recording jumps in a few seconds late!