People reading this via my blog know I’m a tabletop roleplaying fan; for the LinkedIn crowd, here’s a piece of me that you probably didn’t hear a lot about at work. Unless you worked with me at a video gaming company.
I have spent a lot of my life playing tabletop roleplaying games: Dungeons & Dragons and the thousands of games of roughly that style. I was introduced to the hobby by a disreputable dude a couple years older than me in high school, who showed me this game called Tunnels & Trolls, which notably supported solitaire play in the style of those old Choose Your Own Adventure books, except with dice. I spent endless hours as a solitary kid randomly generating new dwarves, elves, humans, and so on and sending them into dungeons to live or die as the dice demanded. I still have many of the books I bought back then, sitting a couple of yards from me on my shelves.
It’s one of my creative outlets. Building worlds, whether in advance as a game master or at the table as player, is wholly satisfying for me. It’s also been a skill builder for my business career; I’ll refer you to my co-worker Rich Barham’s series of articles for more on that topic, since he’s covering it very well.
It was also how I actually got paid for writing for a few years. I’d expected to become a technical writer when I moved to Silicon Valley, which didn’t work out, but I still wanted to write. In 1993, I heard about this cool magazine called Alarums & Excursions, which was what we called an Amateur Press Association. The way it worked was that anyone could send in a zine of a few pages, and the editor photocopied them all into a hefty stack of a few hundred pages and sent a copy to everyone who’d contributed. It cost each contributor a couple of bucks.
I said sure, that seems like fun, and sent in a zine for issue #209. Fellow contributors included Greg Costikyan, who was about to make a name for himself in video games, along with many tabletop gaming writers of significance and a bunch of people who just loved gaming like me.
I can’t tell you what I wrote about; there are PDFs of those old issues but not available for free download. I had at least one product review in there, though, and Dave Nalle of Ragnarok Enterprises asked me if he could publish it in his magazine Ysgarth for a $10 fee. I said yes! That was exciting.
I wrote three zines for A&E before I got distracted, one of which contained some Over the Edge material. Either John Nephew, who published OtE, or Jonathan Tweet and Robin Laws, who wrote it, asked me if I could polish my work a bit and write a little more for an upcoming sourcebook they were working on. Even more exciting! So I did that.
Some time later, my college pal Rich Dansky (another tabletop guy who wound up with a great career in video games) asked if I could do a rush job filling in for a writer who’d been unable to complete their work for White Wolf’s Changeling: the Dreaming game. This was the first time I’d written a significant chunk of a book; I got paid all of three cents a word for it, proving my old belief that writing was never gonna be a full time career for me. $400 or so for the better part of a week’s work? Nah. Still, it was a blast and I kept dabbling in it for the sake of my ego.
Because there are people who obsessively document everything on the Internet, I even have an accurate bibliography available. Most of my work wound up being for the Trinity roleplaying game about psionic power, also from White Wolf. I’m particularly proud of Trinity Field Report: Psi Laws, half because I did a good job researching it and half because a real lawyer wrote fanfic based on that book. I felt like I’d made it as a writer.
I trailed off as I moved into management roles. Freelance writing is demanding, and I didn’t want to give up all my free time. I’ve done a few brief pieces since – standalone short games, that kind of thing. Now that I’m not spending much time worrying about making my teams better? We will see… but I’ve produced more zines for A&E’s successor, Ever & Anon, than I ever did for A&E. That’s promising.