March
2003

I haven't created many games lately . . . these days my design activities are pretty much limited to RPG-theory bull sessions held on the discussion forums at The Forge. The Forge is the central hive of the Indie (short for Independent) RPG sub-culture, created and maintained by Ron Edwards (author of Sorcerer, Elfs, and Trollbabe) and Clinton R. Nixon (author of Donjon, among other things).

At the Forge I learned about GNS, unified game theory used to classify game goals and identify play techniques. GNS was extremely useful in helping me realize what elements I enjoy in a RPG. Unfortunately for my design career, it also led to the discovery of many indie games alredy specificaly designed to meet my desires.

This is not really a bad thing, though. Most of the energy I previously devoted to designing games is now spent playing them. The Indie-Netgaming Yahoo Group (loosely affiliated with The Forge) is devoted to playing Indie games via electronic mediums like IRC (Internet Relay Chat), WEBRPG / OPENRPG (Dedicated RPG client / server software), and PBeM (Play By e-Mail). Currently our biggest turnout is for the semi-regular Indie-Netgaming Monday sessions, held on irc.magicstar.net in the #indierpgs channel. We meet around 8:00 PM (CST), ostensibly every Monday.

We play a lot of the games that have been produced by Forge denizens like Universalis from Ramshead Publishing, written by my buddies Ralph Mazza and Mike Holmes. Other games we've played include James V. West's The Pool and The Questing Beast, games by Zak Arntson (Shadows, Vampiros), Vincent Baker (Otherkind), and Jared A. Sorensen (InSpectres). If you're an Indie designer with a game you want people to try, drop us a line!