News – Page 2 – The Designer Monologues

March 14, 2014March 16, 2014

Down But Not Out

I’ve been remiss, and have ignored this blog — but then again, everything has been on hold recently. The picture at left is a shot taken by my wife about a month ago — I was unexpectedly hospitalized with a sudden infection.

To copy the update that I posted on Adamant Entertainment’s site: I came down with a very severe case of diverticulitis which resulted in the removal of 12 inches of my colon, and a secondary severe abdominal abscess, which they thankfully caught before it burst (which, I am told, would have likely resulted in severe enough peritonitis to kill me). This resulted in a 9-day hospital stay, and an estimated 6-8 week recovery period involving at-home nurse care and an eventual secondary operation to repair the colon (another week-long stay in the hospital).

Basically, I’ve been getting down with the business of getting well, and as such, everything else has been paused. I’m slowly getting back to work (a few hours each day), and I’m even thinking that I’ll start updating this more regularly (I’ve been tempted to start up my old Friday Music series again, for example).

So for folks who’ve been checking in: I’m still alive, I’m getting better, and I’ll be back soon.

May 9, 2013May 9, 2013

My New-Old Gig

We just made the official announcement today: I’m taking a gig with Cubicle 7 Entertainment as the Line Developer for the tabletop games line of my creation Far West. So I’ll be continuing to helm FAR WEST, but will be doing it with an amazing amount of support!

Cubicle 7 will be the exclusive publisher of tabletop games for the setting, and will distribute them world-wide. I’ll shepherd the line, make sure it continues to mesh with all other FAR WEST releases (fiction, comics, web series, what-have-you) — which will still be released by my own company, Adamant Entertainment.

I’m thrilled about this. The delays in production of the FAR WEST Adventure Game core rulebook were due largely to the project becoming much larger than could readily be handled without assistance, and partnering with one of the top games publishers in the world will mean that I’ve got a great bunch of creative people at my back, as well as the infrastructure in place to handle things like distribution, warehousing, etc. — freeing me up to concentrate on line development, direction and creation.

Cubicle 7 has committed to a robust release schedule of support as well — so expect announcements soon about what we’ll have coming for the line in the first year.

April 7, 2013

BoardGameGeek Interview

I didn’t spot this when it went up at the end of March: Steve Donohue (The Other Other Steve) at BoardGameGeek did an interview with me for the site:

Click here to read.

An excerpt:

What was the first project you worked on? What was that like?

My first game design was a “war game” — or rather what I thought was a wargame based on looking at advertisements for Avalon Hill and other publishers in various SF magazines and comics. Using a bunch of Avery labels, I created a “game board” out of the only real-world map I could find at my Grandmother’s house — a map of Canada from an issue of National Geographic. I came up with a scenario where we’d discovered the Canadians had been tapping into the Alaska pipeline, and so we invaded (naturally). I called the game “Conquer Canada.” I was around 11 or 12. Obviously, it never saw print.

My first commercial release was in 1993 — a small-press science fiction RPG called PERIPHERY: SCIENCE FICTION ROLEPLAYING ON THE EDGE, which was a percentile-based generic space-opera game that I designed and published with several college friends. We only had a print run of about 500 or so copies, but I still occasionally come across one at the GenCon auction.

Check out the rest over at BoardGameGeek.com