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Hello Joe! I created this variant when I was visualising a 5x5 square grid with a piece in the middle square, and I realised that all squares are accessible by regular chess pieces except the ones that require orthogonal and diagonal jumps. So my main idea was to include those two movements in a variant.
I wanted an 8x8 variant but I felt that the pieces would be too overpowered if I add leaps to existing long range pieces. So that's why I decided that I would shorten their range.
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It's nice to see that short range pieces are still capable of interesting designers. Welcome to the ShortRange Project, Petar!
The general tendency for chess variantists (and wargamers) is to make games with pieces that are as powerful or more powerful than the games they are playing. Few of us start out thinking "Gee, wouldn't it be a great idea to make weaker pieces!" And I didn't. I was making stronger pieces, but starting from shatranj. Amping up the ferz and alfil isn't very hard, especially considering the ferz is sitting between the king and the alfil at the start of a shatranj game. The game is telling you what to do to fix it, or at least giving very strong hints.
What pushed me to actually write up Modern Shatranj was a kibbitzer's comment on a shatranj game I was playing. I was complaining about how useless so many shatranj pieces are, and how easy it would be to fix them, and got a kibbitz comment that if I had promotion rules and wrote it up, I'd have a publishable variant. So I did...
Might I ask what led you to create short leaper chess?