RPGaDay 11: Favorite RPG Writer
I don't know if I have a favorite. Aaron Allston write Strike Force, my favorite sourcebook of all time, and a host of Star Wars novels. Bill Slavicek is considered one of the foremost authorities on Star Wars and his SW RPG material was practically canon by LucasArts. Monte Cook cranked out a ton of stuff under the D&D masthead, and is now doing really interesting things with Numenera and The Strange.
But I'm going to go with Andrew Watt. I met Andrew in the first few months of being in college, and we became best friends from then on out. Andrew introduced me to the gaming community at our college, a group that became the social and emotional nexus of my life for the following years. Andrew was and is a kind, intelligent, creative human being who patiently tolerated my inevitably overly-flamboyant PC's: a Crazy in Rifts, a Smuggler in Star Wars, a Barbarian in Fantasy Hero. He himself would bring in meticulously-wrought PC's into whatever I was running, like the Celtic Demigod Bard who ended up in my very New Warriors-esque Champions campaign.
Andrew could crank out a ton of backstory to whatever he was working on, literally inches of pages of history, culture, even poetry to his worldbuilding. He would go onto contribute to the creation of Exalted and Scion for White Wolf, and wrote the introduction to Aria: Canticle of the Monomyth (which sounds so much like a title of something Andrew would be a part of).
He's got a blog out there now and you can see what he's up to these days, which includes apparently still cranking out a ton of material from his fertile imagination.
But I'm going to go with Andrew Watt. I met Andrew in the first few months of being in college, and we became best friends from then on out. Andrew introduced me to the gaming community at our college, a group that became the social and emotional nexus of my life for the following years. Andrew was and is a kind, intelligent, creative human being who patiently tolerated my inevitably overly-flamboyant PC's: a Crazy in Rifts, a Smuggler in Star Wars, a Barbarian in Fantasy Hero. He himself would bring in meticulously-wrought PC's into whatever I was running, like the Celtic Demigod Bard who ended up in my very New Warriors-esque Champions campaign.
Andrew could crank out a ton of backstory to whatever he was working on, literally inches of pages of history, culture, even poetry to his worldbuilding. He would go onto contribute to the creation of Exalted and Scion for White Wolf, and wrote the introduction to Aria: Canticle of the Monomyth (which sounds so much like a title of something Andrew would be a part of).
He's got a blog out there now and you can see what he's up to these days, which includes apparently still cranking out a ton of material from his fertile imagination.
I'm honored. Touched, really. I think that one of my great challenges as an RPG writer was that I was always not very good at coming up with the stats and numbers that made the characters I created, useable.
ReplyDeleteMore recently, I found out that a group of geeks tried to get Gene Roddenberry to explain how fast Warp 1 was, so that they could work out how fast warp 10 was. He apparently just looked at them, and said, "The Enterprise goes at the speed of plot." And that made me feel much, much better about skipping numbers. The fans/game buyers never really bought into that, though.
I'm there with you on that one. At this point in my gaming career I have neither the time nor inclination to both incorporate a lot of "crunch" into my mind or then parse it out when it comes to creating campaigns. One of my small hang-ups about sci-fi campaigns is because so much of sci-fi RPG's tends to hang on this kind of stuff.
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