I'm new here...

Hi gang! Allow me to introduce myself. For those of you who don't know me, which is, you know, the majority of people, my name's Jason and I love games. For the past couple of years, I've been writing for Palladium Books. I mainly wrote about spaceships and giant robots as the primary writer for the Robotech RPG which, frankly, was pretty awesome. Well, with the economy the way it is I lost that job about a month ago.



What have I been doing with myself for the past month you ask? Well, aside from drinking at noon, waiting on hold with Michigan's unemployment agency and playing all the Mega Man games in order, I've been looking for work and thinking about games.

On the work front I've gotten offers from Heroic Journey Publishing and Crafty Games, both of which I'm pretty excited about. I've offered to help my friend and go-to rocket scientist Justin Kugler out with his hard sci-fi Sol System setting, which is the least I can do considering all the help he gave me with my Robotech books. I'm also learning more about the industry as a whole while trying to get name recognition and make contacts. We'll see how that goes.

As for the thinking about games part, let me give you a little back story. Back in August I started listening to the audiobooks of Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin books. They take place during the first fifteen years of the 19th century and follow the adventures of Captain Jack Aubrey of His Majesty's Royal Navy and his particular friend Dr. Stephen Maturin. They are, in a word, fantastic. Full of great writing and characters that leap off the page, they had me hooked from the first words of "Master and Commander".

Well, a couple of weeks ago I was at our semi-regular Friday night Battlestar Galactica game (not the MWP version, more on that later) and I mentioned to Zorak, our GM, that I'd love to play a game based on the Aubrey-Maturin setting. Zorak had never read them, and at my urging went out and got the first couple of the series. We talked on and off about the pros and cons of the setting, then a couple of days ago he sends me an email with a wiki link inside. He had sketched out a rough outline of what a game about the Royal Navy during the Napoleonic Wars would look like, and had put a Wiki together so we could both work on it. Awesome, eh? The game has a very "indie game" feel, as Zorak is an adherent of The Forge and an avid fan of the publications of Indie Press Revolution. If this ever comes out, and I'm not promising any of you that you'll ever see it, it promises to be a pretty fun game with emphasis on character development and equal attention paid to both combat and social scenes.

So, that's it for now. Next time I'll talk about the games I'm currently playing in, and ideas I have for future games I'd like to run.