Wednesday, September 12, 2012

Dorkland! Roundtable With Gareth Skarka

I seem to have fallen behind on posting the videos of my Dorkland! Roundtables here to my blog. Honestly, I thought that I had already posted this. I had a talk with Gareth Skarka of Adamant Entertainment recently. One thing that you'll notice is that this discussion took place before the announcement that ownership of the Icons role-playing game was transferred back to creator Steve Kenson from Adamant.


We talked about a few things on the Roundtable, but a lot of time got spent talking about pulps (you can see the stack of Doc Savage reprints behind Gareth's head in the thumbnail), and James Bond. We also spent a bit of time talking about the James Bond RPG (put out in the 80s from Victory Games, an imprint of Avalon Hill). Apparently the talk of James Bond has sparked some discussion of the game over on Google Plus.

As I've said before in my commentary on these discussions, I am enjoying the process of talking with other game designers and publishers. It is interesting to get into their heads a little bit and see what influences them as writers and designers. This discussion with Gareth is not different. I think that we get a little bit of a peek into how he thinks as a designer, and what motivates him to design.