In his graphic design manifesto, Frank Chimero throws down some essential design knowledge by saying “Take things away until you cry.” Antoine de Saint Exupéry, known for creating the Little Prince, declares “A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”...
Read more →Guess what my least favorite part of my job is. Go on, guess. Nope. It is not being broke from time to time waiting between publisher checks and book sales. And no, it isn’t dealing with angry fans or angrier trolls. Hell, it isn’t even the occasionally hostile environment I’m treated to within the...
Read more →Gillian Fraser is the lead designer for Wicked Fantasy. Wicked Fantasy, currently KSing here, is a project where she and veteran designer John Wick are re-imagining fantasy races from scratch. As soon as I saw this Pathfinder supplemental had a woman as lead, I knew I had to talk to Gillian, and I was not disappointed! Here’s her fantastic...
Read more →I believe that there are games that bring totally new setting, systems and experiences that are entirely new and based on nothing else but perhaps genre. I’m not currently writing any of those games. I’m writing a genre emulator for a pre existing system. And what’s more? I am SHAMELESSLY plundering fan fiction, fandom...
Read more →Filamena: So a thing happened on the intertubes a few days ago, and I guess it’s important I talk about it here. The short version is, someone asked ‘why are there so few lady developers?’ I answered him. Actually, and I want this to be very very clear, a LOT of women answered him. The...
Read more →I have been incredibly lucky to have the opportunity to do an e-mail interview with Judy Bauer, an editor at Paizo Publishing. Judy primarily does editing for Pathfinder, and she has been kind enough to provide us with some extensive and awesome responses to our questions about her history, being a woman in the...
Read more →It kind of comes back to the Joan of Arc thing for me. Joan is a well known Unicorn. When you talk about war and combat and battles and being epic and awesome in that way, people talk about heroes of war and they talk about men. (There are a LOT of games that...
Read more →I recently had the opportunity to speak with creators of the Pathfinder RPG at Paizo Publishing, James Jacobs (Creative Director) and F. Wesley Schneider (Editor-in-Chief). The subjects at hand were: the inclusion of the “forced-sex” origins of Half-Orcs in the Pathfinder Core Rulebook (discussed here), and some of the art in the Pathfinder Advanced...
Read more →Role-playing games tend to have reams of pages dedicated to creating characters. However, very few spend time on creating the dynamics of the character group and establishing existing relationships between the characters. Apocalypse World is a rare exception but even Apocalypse World (which is one of my all time favourites!) doesn’t give as much...
Read more →I am a writer. I write my own stuff. I write freelance for a number of gaming companies. I feel like the ideas that a lot of people have weird ideas on how freelancing works, so I thought I’d give you get a quick peek behind the curtain, scrape something up off the cutting...
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