The Shaman said:
What is "The Forge?" I've seen a couple of passing references to it - it sounds llike some sort of gaming think-tank.
(Please feel free to ridicule my weak gamer-fu.)
Well... there are two entities who call themsevles 'The Forge'. The first of these is a kind of rolepaying thinktank and the second is a publishing company unaffiliated with the first. The former Forge has, through years of claiming to be The Illuminati of RPGs (i.e., some kind of secret cabal responsible for all important innovation in the hobby), alienated the vast majority of the roleplaying community. The height of this delusion was revealed in a recent thread on RPGnet.
In this thread Luke Crane (the creator of the Burning Wheel) and other Forge members claimed that their theory was the driving force behind the success of D&D 3x, Shadowrun 4e,
Hero and a lot of other games that really have very little (if anything) to do with The Forge. They went so far as to openly suggest that several respected designers such as Bruce Baugh, Justin Achilli, and others were deeply in debt to The Forge, but refused to pay them homage
for fear of The Forge's vast superiority (I kid you not).
What's really sad is that The Forge
might have had an impact on the hobby if they hadn't been so given to hubris and delusions of grandeur that they actually started to believe much of their own propaganda. That recent thread on RPGnet (I believe it is entitled "Ron closes Theory and Design forums" or something) really puts things in perspective. For years, a lot of people have jokingly referred to The Forge as "The Cult of Ron" - but if that thread is any indicator, it's no longer a joke
[Edit:
Here is a link to the RPGnet thread. Sorry, I know cross-posting is frowned upon, but I didn't want to say what I did and not offer proof to back it up. So there it is - crazy at its finest.]