RPG Jobs Roundup: io9, AAW, and Wizards of the Coast

Looking for a gaming-related fulltime job? Interested in a part-time, freelance position? Do you have a short story you’d like to be paid to write? In this RPG jobs roundup, there are opportunities to share your work while being paid for, to raise your profile as a creator, game organizer, as an author, or a combination. These are not all of the gaming jobs available, and they may close at any time, but these give an idea of what employment awaits you.

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io9

• Type of employment: Freelance Flash Fiction
• Assignment: Flash fiction about the future of death
• Rate of pay: $.50/word
• Deadline: October 25^th, 2018

If you’re not familiar with io9, they’re a blog with a focus on science fiction, science, technology, futurism, and the like. WARNING: This freelance opportunity – flash fiction for up to a grand – is like the lottery, everyone’s gonna give it a shot. With that in mind, expect stiff competition. To make matters worse, the subject matter, the future of death, makes it hard to imagine going wrong with your topic, which adds to the difficulty in making this one happen. Need another challenge? Keeping the scope of your story down to flash fiction levels – 2,000 words maximum – means every sentence has to be individually retweet-able. Wasted words, as well as poor grammar, will lead to the death of your submission. [Poor grammar and pun not retweet-able.] For more details about this opportunity, check the post on io9 here.

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Adventure A Week

• Type of employment: Freelancer with a year or more worth of assignments
• Assignment: “Conversion Expert” for Pathfinder 1e to D&D 5e
• Rate of pay: Not disclosed
• Deadline: Not disclosed

Adventure A Week is an excellent idea grown into a phenomenal company. An RPG company with some well-funded Kickstarters, a subscription service (that provides exactly what the title of the company suggests), and a DriveThruRPG storefront that demonstrates the depth of products that they've created (872 as of this writing). They have a tremendous number of Pathfinder 1e modules that they intend to convert to D&D 5e and they’d like to hire you to assist in the task. You’ll be assigned to convert statblocks, magic items, relevant skill checks, and more quickly and correctly. For the right creator, this assignment will be a perfect fit. If this opportunity speaks to you, check out Adventure A Week’s website for more details here.

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Wizards of the Coast

• Type of employment: Fulltime
• Assignment: “Game Designer”
• Rate of pay: Not disclosed
• Deadline: Not disclosed
• Note: This job requisition lists Seattle and Bellevue, WA as the nearest markets for this position.

Wizards of the Coast, subsidiary of Hasbro, is hiring a new game designer for their Dungeons & Dragons team. I could go into why should you consider this opportunity but writing for D&D is the Holy Grail of many RPGers. Full stop. Since there is no need to sale the position, let’s look at two key components of the job to consider:

• “Tackle the people problems that arise in working on a group project, such as keeping someone motivated after delivering tough feedback.”
  This note is an alert that some of your ideas will be rejected, and sometimes you’ll be expected to reject the ideas of your peers but in a professional manner to keep your peers motivated.
• Several of the responsibilities relate to time management. As a job, you will not be able to create when you want to, you’ll have to create to a deadline. This is a key difference from hobbylancing (as Ben McFarland, frequent Kobold Press freelancer, dubs it); your best material has to happen on command, not just when you’re inspired.

There are additional boxes to check, but those two are the ones to keep in mind when trying to determine the corporate culture you’d be working in, you have to be able to accept that your ideas may be rejected yet stay motivated to meet deadlines that cannot be moved. While Wizards of the Coast has a number of opportunities, this one can be found here.

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This article was contributed by Egg Embry as part of EN World's Columnist (ENWC) program. Do you have a tabletop RPG related job you’d like to share? Contact Egg Embry here to share the details.