I am a game designer with over 15 years worth of game credits and industry experience. My work includes licensed games based on worlds like Star Wars, Star Trek and Firefly, classic game worlds like Dungeons & Dragons and Shadowrun and my own creations like Camelot Trigger and Save Game. I play a wide variety of games as part of Theatre of the Mind Players and have been the guest of honor at several conventions. I live with my family in Wisconsin, born near the heart of RPGs (and just a few short years younger than they are).
When Star Trek: Discovery came out in 2017 it became one of the most polarizing shows in all of Star Trek. Some fans enjoyed the modern take on the story with season-long arcs and big bad...
Props are one of the things that set apart tabletop role-playing games apart from other entertainments. I truly enjoy seeing a players face light up when I hand them a prop to study rather than...
Blade Runner looms large over the RPG landscape. Two of the hobby’s biggest games, Cyberpunk and Shadowrun were inspired by Ridley Scott’s science fiction neo-noir full of high tech devices and...
Magic is everywhere in the world of Soulbound: Age of Sigmar. The characters are traveling through the Mortal Realms, each one suffused by one of the Winds of Magic. Many of these characters have...
What do Dungeon Masters and Real Estate Agents have in common? They know the importance of location, location, location. The first book of Free League Publishing’s One Ring line, Ruins of the Lost...
Dungeons & Dragons Third Edition loomed large in the gaming landscape twenty years ago. Wizards attempted to spin off a few products from its monolith. One of the most fondly remembered is D20...
One of the hardest parts of getting people into role playing games is the paperwork. Pitching friends on a game of Let’s Pretend is easy compared to then sitting down and filling out character...
Most of the cyberpunk games on the market have the cyber part of the game well covered. There are books chock full of cool gadgets and futuristic weapons to equip characters. The punk side, on the...
Despite their reputations as unprofitable, I think that adventure books are vital to game lines. The best ones show how the designers expect their game to be played while also offering tools for...
Heists are at the heart of many of our most popular stories and games. Bilbo is tapped by Gandalf for his skills as a burglar. What is a dungeon crawl if not a fantasy version of a bank vault...
The word “cyberpunk” has different meanings based on the medium. In film, it connects to films like Blade Runner, The Matrix and Robocop that ask questions about where humanity and technology...
Dark fantasy has been having a moment these past few years. Whether you’re talking House of the Dragon or The Witcher it seems like many tables want their swords and sorcery to come with some doom...
Monty Python seems to span gamer generations. The true test may be the success of the RPG Kickstarter, but chances are if you make a Python reference at a gaming table, someone will laugh. And...
There are some impressive character options in Age of Sigmar: Soulbound. Flipping through the main book offers everything from tree people to blood cultists ready to fight against the forces of...
By the time I got into role playing games in the late 80s, I already had found my sci-fi space opera game. I only had eyes for WEG’s seminal Star Wars D6 ruleset. Other gamers spoke fondly of the...
It must be a perilous time to be a third party Dungeons & Dragons company. The One D&D discussion quickly sucked all the air out of the room. Even though the next iteration of D&D is two years...
Chances are if you’re like me, you’ve got a few cardboard skeletons in your closet. Magic: The Gathering has been around since 1993 and in the intervening years hundreds of games have tried to...
When Cubicle 7 announced a Doctor Who RPG book that used Dungeons & Dragons Fifth Edition as its basis, there was a great hue and cry on social media. Eventually two basic camps emerged; one that...
I convinced my mom to drive me and a few of my friends down to Chicago to experience a Battletech Center when I was thirteen years old. For those unaware, these were an early format of multiplayer...
One of the most fascinating things to come out of the OSR for me is the concept of “the funnel”. These adventures encourage players to make multiple low-level characters that are meant to be...