The Paid to Play Podcast Rob Farquhar

Tabletop Gaming Company Founder and Publisher Chris Birch loves the tabletop gaming scene, from roleplaing games to wargames and boardgames; he grew up on Dungeons & Dragons, Steve Jackson’s Ogre and 15mm historical wargames. He loves it so much that he long harboured a dream of making and publishing games.



Five years ago, Chris followed his dream to create and run a game company and founded founded Modiphius. The company used Kickstarter to enable their first project, Achtung! Cthulhu; since then Modiphius has become full-time employment for Chris and around twenty employees. Modiphius has created new games and secure the licenses for some of the biggest franchises around, including Infinity, Fallout, Conan and Star Trek.



Join Chris and I for a great chat about headphone-stealing squirrels, what a major convention does to your work schedule, preparing for the tabletop gaming business through the music and fashion industries and making sure you choose projects based on whether you genuinely love them!





Chris Birch and Modiphius

Official Website of Modiphius



Modiphius on Facebook



Modiphius on Twitter

Modiphius' Games

Achtung! Cthulhu



Fallout: Wasteland Warfare



Star Trek Adventures



Thunderbirds

Games, People and Events

Cubicle 7 (tabletop game company)



David Grant (Wikipedia)



Free League Publishing



Gen Con



The Lord of the Rings - 1981 BBC radio adaptation (Wikipedia)



Matt Leacock



Mike Pondsmith (Wikipedia)



Ogre



Starblazer - Space Fiction Adventure in Pictures (Wikipedia)

Tabletop roleplaying and digital game designer Jared A. Sorensen has been a mainstay of the indie scene since the turn of the millennium. He's probably best know for his roleplaying game InSpectres, about busting ghosts while balancing the budget, but he's worked across projects across the gaming spectrum.



Jared is one of my classic guests. I first spoke with him for Episode 8, all the way back in 2012, and I'm glad to have him back on to talk about his latest project, a hardcover compilation of his Parsely series of party games inspired by the text-based computer adventures of the seventies and eighties. As of this posting, the Kickstarter for the Parsely book has finished with over 300% of the requested target!



Join us for a chat about nightclubbing spiders, the great screenwriter in the sky, running a game at a planetarium, adjectives and expletives in Australia and the United States and being a travelling mad scientist!





Jared Sorensen

Jared A. Sorensen's web site and RPG brand, Memento Mori



Jared A. Sorensen on Twitter



Jared Sorensen's chat for Episode 8

Jared's Games

Parsely



* The Parsely Games Compilation on Kickstarter



InSpectres



* Steve Darlington's RPGnet review



octaNe



FreeMarket

Friends

Luke Crane



* Sorensen/Crane



Vincent Baker

Games, Gamers and Gaming

Atari 2600 game console (Wikipedia)



Burning Wheel and Burning Empires



Greg Costikyan



The Forge



Gen Con



* Gen Con 50 Retrospective Panels, including "Creative Millennium: RPGs at the turn of the century"  with Jared Sorensen, Jonathan Tweet, James Wallis, Vincent Baker and Ron Edwards; hosted by Luke Crane



Ghostbusters roleplaying game (Wikipedia)



Iello Games



* King of Tokyo

* a href="http://www.iellogames.com/Oceanos.

Game designer, writer, executive and philanthropist Ian Livingstone is one of the founding fathers of the UK games industry. He co-founded iconic games company Games Workshop in 1975 with Steve Jackson, creating hobby magazine White Dwarf and Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, which soon after spawned the juggernaut tabletop miniatures games Warhammer Fantasy Battle and Warhammer 40,000.



Ian also co-authored The Warlock of Firetop Mountain, the first interactive book in the Fighting Fantasy series, with Steve Jackson in 1982. Since, the series has sold 20 million copies worldwide. Ian has written 15 titles in the series, including Deathtrap Dungeon and City of Thieves. His new book, The Port of Peril, will be published by Scholastic in August 2017.



In 1995 Ian oversaw a merger that created Eidos plc where he served as Executive Chairman until 2002, and later as Creative Director. At Eidos he launched global video games franchises including Lara Croft: Tomb Raider.



Ian co-authored the influential Livingstone-Hope Next Gen review published by NESTA in 2011, recommending changes in ICT education policy. He chaired the Next Gen Skills campaign, working with government to introduce the new Computing curriculum in schools in 2014. He is opening Livingstone Academies in 2019 in association with Aspirations Academies Trust, with a curriculum focused on problem-solving and digital creativity.



Join us for a chat about saying "no" to partnering with the makers of Dungeons & Dragons, retaining control of your intellectual property, the Twittersphere posing a question Ian has never been asked before and Ian throwing a game mastering gauntlet down at the feet of your humble host!







A huge thank you to guest for Episode 111, Neil Rennison of Tin Man Games, who are republishing the Fighting Fantasy series as digital gamebooks for computers, tablets and smartphones, for getting Ian and I in touch!



Thanks also to Twitter fans MalcolmGarcia and furious george ☭‏ for your questions!

Ian Livingstone

Ian Livingstone on Twitter



Official website of Fighting Fantasy



* The Fighting Fantasy section of Gamebook Adventures, app versions of game-books

* Fighting Fantasy Legends by Nomad Games



Games Workshop

Tabletop Gaming

Dungeons & Dragons

Video Gaming

Eidos Interactive (Wikipedia)



Tomb Raider (Wikipedia)

3D character artist Delaney King has worked on a swathe of triple-A video game titles, including Unreal Tournament 2004. She was instrumental in developing the Australian video game design scene by starting professional courses based on her education during trips to the United States.



Delaney has also started the brands, King’s Minis and Darkling Games, and is preparing Skulldred, a set of tabletop miniatures gaming rules designed specifically to allow those who have impairments with numerical literacy to enjoy the full competitive experience of miniatures wargaming, for release.



If those weren't enough, Delaney, identifying as queer herself, is a tireless advocate for the LGBTIQ community within the video game industry.



Join us for a great chat about the good old days of miniatures gaming, the struggles of unionising in a digital industry, the three main qualities people look for when hiring game designers, the relative densities of hobbits and lava, how hard it can be to ask for help and how you really, really, really need to back your stuff up!







Thanks again to my guest for Episode 80, Sim Lauren, for recommending Delaney to me, and my fantastic backers on Patreon (including Sim) for the questions!

Delaney King

Official Website of Delaney King



* Delaney King on Twitter



King's Minis



Darkling Games



* Skulldred



Enemy Infestation (Metacritic)

Tabletop Miniatures Gaming

Batman Miniatures Game (Knight Models)



Games Workshop



* Warhammer 40,000

* White Dwarf (Wikipedia)



* Volume 1, Issue 95 (by fan site Chilvers Industries)







Eureka Miniatures



* Hawkmoon



Lead Adventure



Malifaux (Wyrd Games)



Ral Partha



Warzone: Resurrection (the Mutant Chronicles wargame) by Prodos Games

Tabletop Roleplaying Games

Paizo, Inc.



* Pathfinder Roleplaying Game



Song of Blades and Heroes (Ganesha Games)

Video Game and 3D Design

Academy of Interactive Entertainment



Blender 3D Modelling



GIMP



Maya



Modo



Shoot 'Em Up Construction Kit (SEUCK) (Wikipedia)

...

Narrative designer for computer and video games Evgeni Puzankov works as a freelancer in the video game industry from his home base in St. Petersburg in Russia.



After working as an employee doing scripting and production for video games and becoming a lead narrative designer on Suricate Games’ title Panoptes, Evgeni went full-time as a freelancer in October 2016.



Since, he’s crafted narratives for the Steam Greenlight game The Long Reach and a few more games yet to be announced.





Evgeni Puzankov

Evgeni Puzankov on Twitter

Evgeni's Games

Depths of Betrayal



The Long Reach



Panoptes



Phantom Trigger

Evgeni's Favourite Games

Darkwing Duck (Wikipedia)



* Darkwing Duck Video Game (Nintendo) (Wikipedia)



Video Game Design

Source Engine (Valve)



Unity



Unreal Engine

Miniature model maker Fon Davis has worked on over thirty feature films across a two decade career. He’s an alumnus of the Industrial Light and Magic Model Shop and Disney, having produced concept art and made models for Starship Troopers, Galaxy Quest, The Nightmare Before Christmas and Coraline. Recently, he’s worked on Interstellar, Guardians of the Galaxy and Neill Blomkamp’s Elysium.



Fon founded his own design and fabrication studio, Fonco Creative, in 1997 in San Francisco, and after setting up shop in the premises of Vanaheim Studios in Los Angeles, he bought the whole 16,000 square foot facility out at the end of first quarter 2017, renaming it Fonco Studios.



Join us for a fantastic chat about the importance of a portfolio in the special effects industry (and why Fon didn't wind up needing one when he interviewed at ILM), the possibilities of virtual reality in entertainment, how special effects folks insert themselves into the movies they work on and the questions from the show's Patreon backers!







Thanks again to my guest for episode 86, Lauren Matesic of Castle Corsetry, for getting Fon on the show, and thanks to Patreon backer Matt Dawson for your questions for Fon!

Fon Davis, Fonco Creative and Fonco Studios

Fon Davis on Facebook



Fon Davis on Instagram



Fon Davis on Twitter



Fonco Studios / Fonco Creative



Fonco Creative on Facebook



Fonco Studios on Facebook

Movies

Coraline



Galaxy Quest (Wikipedia)



James and the Giant Peach (Wikipedia)



The Nightmare Before Christmas (Wikipedia)



Starship Troopers (Wikipedia)

Fon's Projects and Loves

Kaiju movies (Wikipedia)



MORAV

Movie and Effects Companies

Colossal Pictures (Wikipedia)



* Henry Selick (Wikipedia)



Disney



Industrial Light and Magic



* Mark Anderson (IMDb)



Lucasfilm



Stan Winston School of Character Arts



Tippett Studio (Wikipedia)

Television

BattleBots

Other Projects

Hyper-Reality



MegaBots