Welcome to a new column from veteran game designer Owen K.C. Stephens! He's worked at Green Ronin, Paizo, and Wizards of the Coast, as well has his own company, and was co-author of the Star Wars Saga Edition RPG and Design Lead for the Starfinder Roleplaying Game. This first instalment covers his beginnings as a freelancer.
So, how does a tabletop RPG freelancer career begin?
Mike Selinker bursts out of his office, and looks around the RPG R&D department at Wizards of the Coast. The cubicles are nearly empty, but he spots me sitting at my new, largely empty desk.
“Quick, Owen!” Mike is clearly excited. “Can an 11-year-old-boy hold a wallaby one-handed?”
...
Okay, maybe that’s starting too late. Let’s go back a bit.
Stan! and Ed Stark are sitting at a table in the game-themed restaurant Dalmuti’s, connected to the Wizards of the Coast Game Center. There are a dozen or more D&D fans sitting at the tables around them, attendees of the 1997 TSR Writer’s Conference. Of all those attendees, I am the only one to walk up to these two titans of the RPG industry, in a room decorated with many of their genius works.
“Hi, I’m Owen. May I sit with you two for lunch?”
They smile. I nearly puke. But they invite me to sit.
...
No, even that is too late.
It’s 1996. I am the manager of a parking garage. While my friends get college degrees and technical certifications, I alternate between spending my days making people pay 75 cents per hour to keep their car out of the rain and playing RPGs with my friends. I could be improving myself, educating myself. But for me, there is only the drudgery of a job I hate, and time spent with friends in geeky pursuits.
It really was as sad as it sounds.
I desperately wanted a subscription to Dragon Magazine. I couldn’t afford all the game materials I wanted, and I didn’t always get out to the game shop (literally called The Game Shop, in my hometown of Norman, OK, before it eventually went under) every month. So, I missed some issues of the magazine, and I really wanted the slight savings in price I could get with a year’s subscription.
I just couldn’t afford it.
My wife and partner (and geek and gamer in her own right, who had publicly recruiting for her gaming group and guild before I met her, at a time when I was still playing with 2 friends in my mother’s garage and trying not to let people see my D&D books at school for fear of being mocked), suggests that if I want more hobby stuff I should use my hobby to earn the money needed to get it. I had dozens of notebooks filled with campaign ideas and details (hand-written, in pencil), and she and many of my friends thought they had good, fun, interesting ideas.
Why not, she proposed, write and sell some articles to gaming magazines, and use the money to buy a subscription to Dragon?
And that was how it started – very small. All I wanted was a subscription to a single magazine. I even figured I could do without Dungeon, because making THAT much money seemed unreasonable.
Though things like email existed, when I first began trying to get paid for RPG work, nearly every outlet I looked into wanted a typed piece of paper with 3-5 article pitches, mailed with an SASE. That’s a Self-Addressed-Stamped-Envelope, for those of you who never had to deal with it. Magazines wouldn’t even look at your pitches if you didn’t give them a pre-stamped envelope for them to send a respond back to you. Dragon Magazine editorials spoke of the “SASE Ogre,” who would eat such pitches with no one the wiser. Which meant that every pitch letter I sent cost me about 1 cent for paper (I wasn’t buying typing paper in bulk), 5 cents for an envelope, 32 cents for a stamp to mail it, and another 32 for the SASE.
It seemed like madness. I couldn’t afford the things I wanted, so I had to spend 70 cents to propose articles magazines could pay me for? I carefully noted down these expenses in a ledger. Pitches to Dragon Magazine, D8 (which I loved, but no one else seems to remember), Troll (which had only 1 issue if I recall correctly), Shadis (1996 winner of the Origins Awards for Best Professional Gaming Magazine), and at least one magazine I can’t remember. (They never got back to me.)
And Pyramid Magazine, from Steve Jackson Games. But they had electronic submissions already, so that didn’t cost me anything.
And then I waited. And waited. Weeks passed. Mail is, after all, slow. And while I have never had to deal with a physical slush pile of new writer pitches, I have done the task with electronic submissions and know that it’s rarely the thing a developer or publisher is most looking forward to or putting the highest priority on.
But eventually, Dragon editor Dave Gross wrote back to me. I had pitched five articles for 2nd edition D&D—three I knew were brilliant (which Dave noted he had no interest in seeing any version of), one I wasn’t sure about (which Dave ALSO had no interested in seeing any version of), and just so I got the maximum value out of my SASE, a throw-away concept for a random Dwarf Name Generator.
Which, Dave noted, he couldn’t use for at least a year, because Dragon had just done their annual dwarf-themed issue.
I hadn’t ever noticed Dragon did an annual dwarf-themed issue. I realized I hadn’t really done any research (beyond my impressions as a casual reader) into what Dragon published, and when. That realization was one of my first steps into a larger, more frightening, more professional world.
But despite pitching him five things he couldn’t use Dave was kind enough to say he WAS interested in an elven name generator article... if I could get it to him in a month.
It was a little over 1,000 words. And I spent an agonizing month with every spare hour going over it. Mornings, evening, weekends, I crafted what I wanted to be the next-best thing to happen to elf language since Tolkien. I spent hours using drafts to generate random names, looking up the names of elven characters in TSR sourcebooks and novels and breaking their names into syllables I then gave definitions that would be appropriate for each character.
And then, since I had written it in pencil, on notebook paper, I asked my wife to type it for me, and I sent it in. And waited.
And waited.
And got an acceptance letter. And a check. And a publication date—Dragon Magazine number 251.
And Dave Gross asked if I had any other ideas and gave me an email address to send him pitches. I cashed the check, got the magazine subscription, sent Dave more pitches, and began to work on the ones he liked.
And then my wife let me know that she wasn’t going to type any more of my manuscripts, as she handed me educational typing software. She waited until I had a second pitch accepted and had basked in the glory of being the first of my close circle of friends with a professional RPG credit.
So, despite my long history of playing games instead of working to better myself, I set about to learn how to type.
And that’s how my freelance career started.
So, how does a tabletop RPG freelancer career begin?
Mike Selinker bursts out of his office, and looks around the RPG R&D department at Wizards of the Coast. The cubicles are nearly empty, but he spots me sitting at my new, largely empty desk.
“Quick, Owen!” Mike is clearly excited. “Can an 11-year-old-boy hold a wallaby one-handed?”
...
Okay, maybe that’s starting too late. Let’s go back a bit.
Stan! and Ed Stark are sitting at a table in the game-themed restaurant Dalmuti’s, connected to the Wizards of the Coast Game Center. There are a dozen or more D&D fans sitting at the tables around them, attendees of the 1997 TSR Writer’s Conference. Of all those attendees, I am the only one to walk up to these two titans of the RPG industry, in a room decorated with many of their genius works.
“Hi, I’m Owen. May I sit with you two for lunch?”
They smile. I nearly puke. But they invite me to sit.
...
No, even that is too late.
It’s 1996. I am the manager of a parking garage. While my friends get college degrees and technical certifications, I alternate between spending my days making people pay 75 cents per hour to keep their car out of the rain and playing RPGs with my friends. I could be improving myself, educating myself. But for me, there is only the drudgery of a job I hate, and time spent with friends in geeky pursuits.
It really was as sad as it sounds.
I desperately wanted a subscription to Dragon Magazine. I couldn’t afford all the game materials I wanted, and I didn’t always get out to the game shop (literally called The Game Shop, in my hometown of Norman, OK, before it eventually went under) every month. So, I missed some issues of the magazine, and I really wanted the slight savings in price I could get with a year’s subscription.
I just couldn’t afford it.
My wife and partner (and geek and gamer in her own right, who had publicly recruiting for her gaming group and guild before I met her, at a time when I was still playing with 2 friends in my mother’s garage and trying not to let people see my D&D books at school for fear of being mocked), suggests that if I want more hobby stuff I should use my hobby to earn the money needed to get it. I had dozens of notebooks filled with campaign ideas and details (hand-written, in pencil), and she and many of my friends thought they had good, fun, interesting ideas.
Why not, she proposed, write and sell some articles to gaming magazines, and use the money to buy a subscription to Dragon?
And that was how it started – very small. All I wanted was a subscription to a single magazine. I even figured I could do without Dungeon, because making THAT much money seemed unreasonable.
Though things like email existed, when I first began trying to get paid for RPG work, nearly every outlet I looked into wanted a typed piece of paper with 3-5 article pitches, mailed with an SASE. That’s a Self-Addressed-Stamped-Envelope, for those of you who never had to deal with it. Magazines wouldn’t even look at your pitches if you didn’t give them a pre-stamped envelope for them to send a respond back to you. Dragon Magazine editorials spoke of the “SASE Ogre,” who would eat such pitches with no one the wiser. Which meant that every pitch letter I sent cost me about 1 cent for paper (I wasn’t buying typing paper in bulk), 5 cents for an envelope, 32 cents for a stamp to mail it, and another 32 for the SASE.
It seemed like madness. I couldn’t afford the things I wanted, so I had to spend 70 cents to propose articles magazines could pay me for? I carefully noted down these expenses in a ledger. Pitches to Dragon Magazine, D8 (which I loved, but no one else seems to remember), Troll (which had only 1 issue if I recall correctly), Shadis (1996 winner of the Origins Awards for Best Professional Gaming Magazine), and at least one magazine I can’t remember. (They never got back to me.)
And Pyramid Magazine, from Steve Jackson Games. But they had electronic submissions already, so that didn’t cost me anything.
And then I waited. And waited. Weeks passed. Mail is, after all, slow. And while I have never had to deal with a physical slush pile of new writer pitches, I have done the task with electronic submissions and know that it’s rarely the thing a developer or publisher is most looking forward to or putting the highest priority on.
But eventually, Dragon editor Dave Gross wrote back to me. I had pitched five articles for 2nd edition D&D—three I knew were brilliant (which Dave noted he had no interest in seeing any version of), one I wasn’t sure about (which Dave ALSO had no interested in seeing any version of), and just so I got the maximum value out of my SASE, a throw-away concept for a random Dwarf Name Generator.
Which, Dave noted, he couldn’t use for at least a year, because Dragon had just done their annual dwarf-themed issue.
I hadn’t ever noticed Dragon did an annual dwarf-themed issue. I realized I hadn’t really done any research (beyond my impressions as a casual reader) into what Dragon published, and when. That realization was one of my first steps into a larger, more frightening, more professional world.
But despite pitching him five things he couldn’t use Dave was kind enough to say he WAS interested in an elven name generator article... if I could get it to him in a month.
It was a little over 1,000 words. And I spent an agonizing month with every spare hour going over it. Mornings, evening, weekends, I crafted what I wanted to be the next-best thing to happen to elf language since Tolkien. I spent hours using drafts to generate random names, looking up the names of elven characters in TSR sourcebooks and novels and breaking their names into syllables I then gave definitions that would be appropriate for each character.
And then, since I had written it in pencil, on notebook paper, I asked my wife to type it for me, and I sent it in. And waited.
And waited.
And got an acceptance letter. And a check. And a publication date—Dragon Magazine number 251.
And Dave Gross asked if I had any other ideas and gave me an email address to send him pitches. I cashed the check, got the magazine subscription, sent Dave more pitches, and began to work on the ones he liked.
And then my wife let me know that she wasn’t going to type any more of my manuscripts, as she handed me educational typing software. She waited until I had a second pitch accepted and had basked in the glory of being the first of my close circle of friends with a professional RPG credit.
So, despite my long history of playing games instead of working to better myself, I set about to learn how to type.
And that’s how my freelance career started.
