1. How did your start making games? What was your published work?
I’ve been a game player for a long time, and many years ago got to work as an editor and occasional writer for the first incarnation of White Wolf Publishing, doing work on Hunter: The Reckoning, Aberrant, Mind’s Eye Theater, Mummy: The Resurrection,and (eventually) my dream job: being part of the team for the revised version of Traditionbook: Celestial Chorus for Mage: The Ascension. But as much as I loved that last assignment, I was broke then, and the money RPGs were bringing in couldn’t compete with what I was making from other jobs and clients.
When I went back to freelancing in 2014, I discovered the thriving indie scene on Google+. I knew I wanted to get back to creating adventures, settings, and even stand-alone games, but wasn’t sure where to start. In 2015, I started writing material for my local game store’s organized play program. In 2017, I created and ran early drafts of what become Enoch’s Wake, and in 2018 published my first OSR adventure, The Wreck of the Void Hatred.By 2019, thanks to The Gauntlet’s zine Codex, I’d published a short game about post-apocalyptic queer life in Oz’s Emerald City, “Dark Designs in Verdigris.” By 2020, I started working on my own zines and crowdfunded Barrow Keep.
2. Most of your games are centered around the LGBTQ+ community, how important do you think it is for people to have their identity reflected in the games they play?
I want to push back a little on that. While most of the titles I’ve worked on specifically include queer NPCs and/or specifically welcome queer players, I think only Moonlight on Roseville Beach and My Chivalric Bromance are primarily about queer people and communities.
Moonlight on Roseville Beach came to be when another LGBT+ creator I admire posted about wanting to play a Hawaii 5-0 inspired RPG series about beach detectives. I tried to imagine what that might be like in a queer beach town, but historically cops have a history of doing more to harm queer communities than to protect them, so I knew that if someone was going to keep a queer community safe, it would have to be the people who lived and worked there. I don’t just want queer players to see their identities reflected in a paranormal mystery game: I want them to have some sense of agency over, connection to, and stakes in their communities. I also want to make sure that when I write a supernatural or occult mystery setting, a see a place for some version of myself in it.
3. What authors do you read to inspire you?
For game texts, I keep turning to a group of writers who are wildly different from each other: Jared Sinclair, Meg Baker, Diogo Nogueira, Zedeck Siew, Zzarchov Kowolski, Lucian Kahn, Noora Rose, and Catherine Ramen (I was very lucky to work with the latter two on Roseville Beach).
For fiction and non-fiction, it varies by project. I really love it when I start a project and start giving myself homework. For Roseville Beach, I took a deep dive into lots of queer pulp, focused on the work of Ann Bannon. I sometimes joke that my setting book Barrow Keep is where Mercedes Lackey meets George R. R. Martin, but Robin Hobb, Robin McKinley, and Tamora Pierce were just as important. For Sherwood, it was every Robin-Hood or outlaw-themed work I could get my hands on, from medieval exile romances and the surviving Robin Hood ballads to the Maid Marian novels of Jennifer Roberson (and a ton of Hollywood and indie movies). Those exile romances inspired My Chivalric Bromance, mixed in with gay fantasy romance from TJ Klune and gay historical romance from KJ Charles. I also love digging into really intriguing academic work. For Roseville Beach, I got to read queer literary historian Jack Parlett. For Sherwood, I got to read medievalists like Thomas Ohlgren, Leslie Hult, and Steven Thomas Knight.
1. How did your start making games? What was your published work?
I’ve been a game player for a long time, and many years ago got to work as an editor and occasional writer for the first incarnation of White Wolf Publishing, doing work on Hunter: The Reckoning, Aberrant, Mind’s Eye Theater, Mummy: The Resurrection,and (eventually) my dream job: being part of the team for the revised version of Traditionbook: Celestial Chorus for Mage: The Ascension. But as much as I loved that last assignment, I was broke then, and the money RPGs were bringing in couldn’t compete with what I was making from other jobs and clients.
When I went back to freelancing in 2014, I discovered the thriving indie scene on Google+. I knew I wanted to get back to creating adventures, settings, and even stand-alone games, but wasn’t sure where to start. In 2015, I started writing material for my local game store’s organized play program. In 2017, I created and ran early drafts of what become Enoch’s Wake, and in 2018 published my first OSR adventure, The Wreck of the Void Hatred.By 2019, thanks to The Gauntlet’s zine Codex, I’d published a short game about post-apocalyptic queer life in Oz’s Emerald City, “Dark Designs in Verdigris.” By 2020, I started working on my own zines and crowdfunded Barrow Keep.
2. Most of your games are centered around the LGBTQ+ community, how important do you think it is for people to have their identity reflected in the games they play?
I want to push back a little on that. While most of the titles I’ve worked on specifically include queer NPCs and/or specifically welcome queer players, I think only Moonlight on Roseville Beach and My Chivalric Bromance are primarily about queer people and communities.
Moonlight on Roseville Beach came to be when another LGBT+ creator I admire posted about wanting to play a Hawaii 5-0 inspired RPG series about beach detectives. I tried to imagine what that might be like in a queer beach town, but historically cops have a history of doing more to harm queer communities than to protect them, so I knew that if someone was going to keep a queer community safe, it would have to be the people who lived and worked there. I don’t just want queer players to see their identities reflected in a paranormal mystery game: I want them to have some sense of agency over, connection to, and stakes in their communities. I also want to make sure that when I write a supernatural or occult mystery setting, a see a place for some version of myself in it.
3. What authors do you read to inspire you?
For game texts, I keep turning to a group of writers who are wildly different from each other: Jared Sinclair, Meg Baker, Diogo Nogueira, Zedeck Siew, Zzarchov Kowolski, Lucian Kahn, Noora Rose, and Catherine Ramen (I was very lucky to work with the latter two on Roseville Beach).
For fiction and non-fiction, it varies by project. I really love it when I start a project and start giving myself homework. For Roseville Beach, I took a deep dive into lots of queer pulp, focused on the work of Ann Bannon. I sometimes joke that my setting book Barrow Keep is where Mercedes Lackey meets George R. R. Martin, but Robin Hobb, Robin McKinley, and Tamora Pierce were just as important. For Sherwood, it was every Robin-Hood or outlaw-themed work I could get my hands on, from medieval exile romances and the surviving Robin Hood ballads to the Maid Marian novels of Jennifer Roberson (and a ton of Hollywood and indie movies). Those exile romances inspired My Chivalric Bromance, mixed in with gay fantasy romance from TJ Klune and gay historical romance from KJ Charles. I also love digging into really intriguing academic work. For Roseville Beach, I got to read queer literary historian Jack Parlett. For Sherwood, I got to read medievalists like Thomas Ohlgren, Leslie Hult, and Steven Thomas Knight.
4. Moonlight on Roseville Beach your roleplaying game centered around queer characters and cosmic horror is set in the 70’s was there a reason you chose to set it in that era?
There’s a great quote from an AIDS activist about the late 70s and early 80s on Fire Island: “Everyone was still alive.” In 1979, so much of the world was in a post-Stonewall moment: courts started pushing back on local cops who were abusing queer people, antiqueer campaigners like Anita Bryant were starting to lose ground, and politicians like Bella Abzug and Harvey Milk had shown that urban queer communities could organize and elect their own leaders. Most importantly, the fear and despair brought on by the AIDS epidemic wasn’t a reality yet. LARPs like Just a Little Lovin’ have done an incredible job remembering the grief and loss of the plague years in the 1980s and 90s, and the ways the community organized to face the incredible amount of destruction and death. Since Roseville Beach is a historical fantasy, though, I wanted to focus on a time where queer people could look forward to living without fear.
5. I saw your latest release Boardwalks & Sorcery: A Roseville Beach Creators’ Kit was released under the creative commons, had you always intended to do that or was it a reaction certain other publishers?
While I’d previously released some work under the OGL, it had just been because I need to ensure compatibility with other OGL work. I’d always intended to do a CC-BY creators’ kit for the final version of Moonlight on Roseville Beach. Sherwood is also CC-BY, and I’m working on a CC-BY SRD/creator’s kit for My Chivalric Bromance. I plan to eliminate all of the OGL materials in my catalog by the end of 2023.
6. What is the next project you are going to be working on?
At some point in 2023, I’m going to release Saturday Morning Mysteries, a short game that’s an homage to Hanna-Barbera’s mystery-format cartoons like Scooby Doo and Josie and the Pussycats. I also plan to do Greenwood, a bestiary and adventure book for Sherwood, and Dim All the Lights, a book of player options and mysteries for Roseville Beach. I’m also figuring out what’s next for the Barrow Keep project, though I can’t talk publicly about that right now. Currently, I’m blogging about two #City23 projects on Tumblr and Cohost: one is the fictional town of Cape Crescent, Maine, which is likely going to be an alternate setting for Moonlight on Roseville Beach, and the other is Nottingham, a focused look at that city for my game Sherwood.
7. If people want more info about you or your projects where should they go?
I’m around on a lot of social media as rrook, rrookstudio, or r-rook-studio, including Twitter, Tumblr, Cohost, and Dice.Camp. Occasionally, I even make an appearance on Instagram. I also have a Web site, R-Rook.com and people can sign up for my monthly newsletter.
8. When the zombies take over the world where will you be?
Probably on the phone with Spectrum trying to figure out why I can’t access Twitter.
9. What is your favorite Fandom?
I’ve learned not to admit publically that I’m on Teen Wolf fandom’s Team Sterek.
10. What piece of art, be it in the form of music, a book, a film, or picture, do you think people must experience before they die?
Lavie Tidhar’s The Hood.
11. Give one fact that most people would not believe about you?
Very few things about me surprise anyone who’s met me, so I always lose at Two Truths and a Lie.
5. I saw your latest release Boardwalks & Sorcery: A Roseville Beach Creators’ Kit was released under the creative commons, had you always intended to do that or was it a reaction certain other publishers?
While I’d previously released some work under the OGL, it had just been because I need to ensure compatibility with other OGL work. I’d always intended to do a CC-BY creators’ kit for the final version of Moonlight on Roseville Beach. Sherwood is also CC-BY, and I’m working on a CC-BY SRD/creator’s kit for My Chivalric Bromance. I plan to eliminate all of the OGL materials in my catalog by the end of 2023.
6. What is the next project you are going to be working on?
At some point in 2023, I’m going to release Saturday Morning Mysteries, a short game that’s an homage to Hanna-Barbera’s mystery-format cartoons like Scooby Doo and Josie and the Pussycats. I also plan to do Greenwood, a bestiary and adventure book for Sherwood, and Dim All the Lights, a book of player options and mysteries for Roseville Beach. I’m also figuring out what’s next for the Barrow Keep project, though I can’t talk publicly about that right now. Currently, I’m blogging about two #City23 projects on Tumblr and Cohost: one is the fictional town of Cape Crescent, Maine, which is likely going to be an alternate setting for Moonlight on Roseville Beach, and the other is Nottingham, a focused look at that city for my game Sherwood.
7. If people want more info about you or your projects where should they go?
I’m around on a lot of social media as rrook, rrookstudio, or r-rook-studio, including Twitter, Tumblr, Cohost, and Dice.Camp. Occasionally, I even make an appearance on Instagram. I also have a Web site, R-Rook.com and people can sign up for my monthly newsletter.
8. When the zombies take over the world where will you be?
Probably on the phone with Spectrum trying to figure out why I can’t access Twitter.
9. What is your favorite Fandom?
I’ve learned not to admit publically that I’m on Teen Wolf fandom’s Team Sterek.
10. What piece of art, be it in the form of music, a book, a film, or picture, do you think people must experience before they die?
Lavie Tidhar’s The Hood.
11. Give one fact that most people would not believe about you?
Very few things about me surprise anyone who’s met me, so I always lose at Two Truths and a Lie.