When I first decided that I wanted to publish my own role playing game material I really had no clue what I was doing. It was in early 2007 and I had just discovered OSRIC and Labyrinth Lord and finally realized what the Open Game License truly meant. I then found our about www.lulu.com and something that existed back then called guru (not sure if it is still around, but it was a way to contact professionals, such as writers and artists, and hire them). It dawned on me. I COULD PUBLISH MY OWN BOOKS! Armed with a handful of not quite fully fleshed out ideas and a small budget (taken from my drinking money) I began to work on Forgotten Arcana.
Forgotten Arcana was an attempt to make a supplement for OSRIC that provided optional rules based on the rules from 2nd edition AD&D. It was executed horribly. The proofreading was bad, the writing was bad, the layout was horrid, the art was all stock images (except a few commissioned pieces), it was overall bad. But I didn't realize that and I went ahead a made a second book. Forgotten Arcana Book II: Artifacts and Adversaries. The intent of the second book was to provide stats for all of the monsters that were listed in the various spells and encounter tables in OSRIC that at that time were not in the OSRIC book. A noble idea.
Again poorly executed.
After that I moved on to my own setting for Berlin '61 which was based on the GORE rules from Goblinoid Games. It was a horror espionage pulp adventure game set during the cold war in East and West Berlin just prior, during and after the wall going up. It was better received, had two supplements and the adventure I wrote for it even won second (or third or some other runner up place) in Chaosium's Adventure Design Competition a few years later. The neat thing about Berlin '61 was that Chaosium actually picked it up and published it as one of their Monographs, so it technically became my first paying work. But much like Forgotten Arcana, Berlin '61 fell to the side and was forgotten by most.
Dark Heresy was released and for several years I was chasing that dragon. I wrote a short lived fanzine called Unearthed Apocrypha for Dark Heresy where I covered articles about Commissars, Dark Elves, the planet K'Otal, new rules and so forth. It lasted probably six or seven issues (and by issues I mean articles) and I even had a few people write their own submissions for Unearthed Apocrypha, most notably Nathan Dowdell who went on to actually write for the 40K RPGs and now works with Modiphius on such titles as Mutant Chronicles and Conan.
Dark Heresy was replaced by Dust, which I became heavily involved in. Heavily. I wrote articles for Dust Chronicles, became a playtester for Dust Warfare, became a writer for Dust Warfare and then one day I was contacted by Chris Birch at Modiphius who offered me a job writing Dust Adventures the Role Playing game. I worked with Chris Lites and we produced what I consider to be a pretty good game. Though Modiphius didn't put their support behind the project because of the results of a Dust Tactics Kickstarter SNAFU. So like all my other works, Dust Adventures fell to oblivion. But it was my first true experience as a game designer, and a paying gig that allowed me to learn the system and make connections. Such as Chris Lites.
I decided then to create my own products again, with my own setting and publish the damn thing myself.
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