Contributors

Posted by Bryant on November 18, 2003 at 04:00 PM

Our contributors are:

Vincent Baker

I had kind of a funny start roleplaying. When I was 8 or 9 I was playing Zork on my uncle's new Atari 800 with a couple friends, and we dug it. At some point we wanted to play it but we weren't at my uncle's house, so I volunteered to "be the computer." We even played it text-based! I'd write a description, pass the notebook, my friends would read it and write their actions, I'd write the results. We kept that up for a while, actually, several sessions, before we figured out that we could just talk instead.

I kept playing my own made-up games with my friends. As a teenager I finally had a chance to play real D&D. I expected it to be much better than the games I'd made up, because, I mean, it was a real game, right? Published = better, right? I was disappointed.

I lived and gamed with the Ennead in 1995, for those of you who followed RGFA in those days. That's when I started thinking hard about roleplaying theory, and also when I started designing games with other people playing them in mind -- although it wasn't until 1999 that I finished one. Right after I finished my second (infamous) game, I found the Forge, and that was a good thing.

I guess that now I'm a successful indie game designer, because sometimes people I don't know play my games!

Bruce Baugh

Jason Corley

I'm usually a GM. I'm well-known for screwed-up web.supplements and tearing published settings apart. During the Prickly Usenet Years, I was in and out of nearly every White Wolf developers' killfiles due to my strident (okay, loud) postings on alt.games.whitewolf. The Prickliness Factor has declined drastically since that time, either that or age has mellowed me.

Emily Dresner-Thornber

While I dabbled when I was very young, I started really playing roleplaying games with the old SSI gold box games, especially Pool of Radiance on my old Tandy 1000 SX -- from Radio Shack! This got me through most of high school and prepared me for the onslaught of gaming in college.

In my long time of playing RPGs, I've played: Call of Cthulhu, Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, Battletech, Shadowrun, Amber Diceless, GURPS, Nephilim, Vampire: the Masquarade, In Nomine, d20, BESM, 7th Sea and Mutants and Masterminds. I've written for Pyramid Magazine, wrote on the In Nomine line, wrote some Kindred of the East material, co-authored on Dark Ages: Inquisitor and... wrote, yes, Cute and Fuzzy Seizure Monsters. It's true, I was there, and I have the photos to prove it. I currently write for Guardians of Order... and friends. I also, occasionally, wonder where all my time goes.

As I've gotten older, my interest in games have less been focused on playing and more on building, design, and construction. I spend hours trying to put together the perfect game -- never to see it come to any fruition. I have interests in how to plan, design, fund, and build a game without everyone dying in the process.

Bryant Durrell

I've been a fairly obsessive roleplayer since I found Tunnels and Trolls solo adventures back in high school. I'm all over the map when it comes to preferences: I like D20, Over the Edge, Unknown Armies, Trinity, and HERO. Go figure.

From time to time I dabble in freelancing, but when you get right down to it that's mostly a hobby, albeit one I enjoy a lot.

Jere Genest

I'm a second generation gamer; my father was active in historical re-enactment (Revolutionary and Civil War), wargaming, and was my first GM (Chivalry and Sorcery) back in 1980, which means I've been involved in this crazy hobby for about 22 years.

I've most recently run Ars Magica, Nobilis, and various homebrews ranging from historical fiction, to secret-magic, to alternate history. I've got a few publications under my belt but I consider myself too sane to commit to freelance writing for more than one product every 2 years (which means I'm about due, that could be troublesome).

I think my favorite of the current game designers is Robin Law. My all time favorite is Jonathan Tweet. And I'm rather addicted to Ken Hite's mytho-historical meanderings.

The Ghoul

I was introduced to RPGs by seeing the cartoon of a capering Umber Hulk that illustrated Otto's Irresistible Dance in the AD&D Player's Handbook, which was then pretty new. It was the fall of '79 and I was riding the bus home from school. Pretty soon, I was hooked. I played D&D, AD&D, Gamma World, T&T, RuneQuest, Boot Hill, Call of Cthulhu, Gangbusters, Villains & Vigilantes, and Champions, and all that was before heading to college and getting even more diverse in gaming styles. Oh, and we also designed our own game... An odd little game derived nominally from Thundarr the Barbarian. I still have the notes.

I spent several years after college gaming on the RPGames area of CompuServe, including a long stretch as editor and main reviewer for the forum 'zine, during which time I probably upset a lot of people by giving around as many pans as praises. In real life (such as it is), I'm an actuary, and that comes through in how I look at games... I like the math to work, and I'm not at all afraid to say when it doesn't.

Which doesn't prevent me from loving simple, stripped down games. In fact, it almost leads directly there. I co-wrote a little-seen licensed Teenagers From Outer Space supplement, co-designed and co-Gmed several GenCon Dream Park, TFOS, Castle Falkenstein and Feng Shui events. I'm a regular at AmberCons, and have been on the organizing staff of AmberCon North for the last 4 years.

Yeah, Amber... I've been playing since before publication, and for all its flaws, I have to think it at least it's flexibility attracts some great, creative people, and that alone makes it worth-while. (And if you've ever looked at the game list for an AmberCon, you'd likely agree.)

Most recently, my RPG attention has been shifting a bit back to basics (I'm playing in a few d20 games with friends) and to odd experimentation in genre and structure. My current fave is mixing two or more sources to create something original, which frequently end up as odd one-shots at Ambercons. This has lead to Puppetland Amber, Memento-based Amber running backwards from story-end to beginning, Baron Munchausen Amber, and Nine Princes in Hong Kong.

My strangest RPG experience... Playing an Aberrant face-to-face campaign without ever being less than 100 miles from the sessions. My Cyberkinetic PC was represented via IM, email, and cell phone calls in game, so I did the same as a player.

Robin Laws is the active designer I most admire, though I have to credit Costykian and Pondsmith with influencing a lot of what I do. And when it comes to trying to model RPGs (and I've engaged in more than a few such debates), I have to say it's just like any other type of modeling... It works for a while, then it blows up at the edges. And sometimes, the edges are very near the starting point.

Jim Henley

Scott Knipe

Didn't Henley have to write one of these? No? Well, at least I get to claim WYRD as my own then.

That's right, I wrote WYRD, which garnered me a modicum of fame, at least around The Forge and RPG.net. I followed that up with the award-winning Charnel Gods, a mini-supplement for Ron Edwards' Sorcerer. I suspect it's on the coattails of Charnel Gods that I coast into the 20' By 20', where I get to throw elbows with the big guys. That's okay, I'm hell in the low post.

Neel Krishnaswami

Rob MacDougall

I imagine these intros will begin to look similar in outline before too long: I too started playing D&D around the era of the red box, and kept with it right through the original Dragonlance modules and Unearthed Arcana. Then Toon, Paranoia, Call of Cthulhu. A little more CoC in college, then I basically quit cold turkey for five or six years. After grad school I got the gaming itch again, and was lucky enough to hook up with Jere's gaming circle. Now I'm running Unknown Armies and trying to get people to play more of the clever little doohickeys coming out of the Forge.

Patrick O'Duffy

I've been gaming since I was 12; since I'm now 32, that's an embarassing amount of years to have been at this game. I started off with old-school red-box D&D, then "graduated" to various Palladium games (gimme a break, I was 13), Call of Cthulhu, Paranoia and so on. After that first, brief affair with D&D, I left it behind completely, never playing or running it and eschewing it as being wholly incompatible with my gaming needs.

People change, systems change. Right now I'm running a low-level Ravenloft game and a high-level 'volume to 11' D&D game, both under 3.5 rules, and pretty much 90% of my gaming thoughts tie back to d20 or d20 Modern. Craziness. I like the structural tightness of d20 and its transparent nature; I look at a rule, a system or a character and I can see what it does and _why_ it's developed that way. As far as non-d20 games go, my faves are Exalted, Over the Edge, Unknown Armies, Everway and the Aeon set -- Aberrant, Adventure! and (especially) Trinity.

And, of course, Demon: The Fallen, since I helped write it. I've been working as a freelancer for about 3 1/2 years now, almost exclusively for White Wolf; I've just finished my 20th book, the 15th for WW, and my typing fingers are REALLY GODDAMN SORE. As well as contributing to over half of the Demon line, I've co-written books for Hunter, Vampire, Gamma World and In Nomine, and I look to be doing at least something for the new version of the World of Darkness. I've done a little d20 work, but I want to do a lot more next year, as well as devoting more time to non-gaming writing.

Jonathan Tweet and Monte Cook are my design heroes; Greg Stolze and John Tynes my setting development gods; Bryant is my homeboy.

I'm 6'5" and currently rather skinny. I drink too much bourbon, swear constantly and spend all my time thinking about girls. I listen to break dance music and talk excitedly about structure. And I am not The Man From Atlantis.

Ryan Pitts

Carl Rigney

If memory serves, May next year will be my 30th anniversary of gaming, starting with original D&D (ahhh, the excitement when Greyhawk came out!), then Boot Hill, Empire of the Petal Throne, Traveller, Runequest, Champions, lots more Champions, Morrow Project, Shadowrun (in more and more mutated setting and form, including influences from Legends of the Five Rings and Feng Shui), Torg, Shatterzone, assorted one-night stands, Feng Shui, even more Champions (World of the 400), and most recently, "by the book, suck it up and no whining" D&D Third Edition, to sate a retro craving for tactical crunchiness and loot, adapting the WoTC Adventure Path to my own setting, roughly post-Roman Britain where the Roman Empire was run by Lawful Evil elves.

After 2.5 years we're about to switch to D&D 3.5. 95%+ of my gaming is as GM, including running dozens of games at conventions.

My only published game writing was a few pages in a Feng Shui supplement. I wrote for the Alarums & Excursions APA in my pre-Internet days, and enjoyed reading that and The Wild Hunt. I also played in and ran Shadowrun PBEMs for a while, with one game that lasted 770 turns and nearly four years.

In terms of game design, I like the usual suspects others have already named: Tweet, Stolze, Laws, plus Greg Gorden for DC Heroes and Torg.

Over time my preference has migrated towards fast, simple mechanics like Torg, Feng Shui, and D20, ignoring the thick undergrowth of feats and prestige classes strangling the simple core mechanics of the latter. The holy grail I seek is either a fast-moving log scale based supers game, or something suitable for a near future "magic returns" setting that could capture the mindfeel of Sean Stewart's Resurrection Man / Galveston / The Night Watch setting.

I confess to owning more games than I've had time to read, and having read more games than I've run. I admire Bryant's attempt to run single sessions of all 100 games he owned but hadn't run before, even if did wind up fleeing cross country instead of completing his self-appointed task.

Matt Snyder

I'm an avid gamer and game design hobbyist, and I've helped with layout and design on many other indie games. Through my imprint Chimera Creative, I published Dust Devils, the truly gritty Old West role-playing game. And, I constantly work on new designs like Nine Worlds and other future projects for both personal use and publication. I also headed, briefly, the hobby e-zine Daedalus.

I'm interested in getting this hobby to take itself seriously enough to think critically about what it's doing and learn how to address and solve its own dysfunctions. My ambition is to contribute to a broader, more robust community of hobbyists who see this great, entertaining tradition survive. Of course, I'm all for having fun while doing it. I enjoy a huge variety of games, and I'm always happy to discuss them, play them, design them, and just about anything else I can do with them!

Ginger Stampley

I started gaming as a senior in high school, although I would have gotten into it in junior high if I could have found boys who didn't think I had cooties. Currently I do most of my gaming online; my FTF GM moved to Oklahoma and I have yet to find a new local group. I co-GM two PBeMs with my husband and play in several more.

I have no professional gaming publications, and don't plan to change that, although I'm happy to playtest stuff for some of my friends. I've been involved in a lot of unpublished system design and will spout opinions about it at the drop of a hat.

I used to paint 25mm gaming minis, but I had to give that hobby up a few years ago and gave all my minis to a fellow gamer who uses them on a regular basis.