Other Endeavors
By Tom. Filed in Gaming |Tags: publishing, role-playing, Star Frontiers
I seem to have an infinite number of side projects that I’m always working on. Today, however, I just want to give a quick shout out to a couple of them that take up the majority of my time.
I like to play (what is now considered) “old school” pen-and-paper role-playing games. When I started down that hobby decades ago all the adjectives weren’t needed. You just said role-playing games and people knew what you were talking about. But today with the computer role-playing games as well other developments, you have to be more specific.
Specifically, I’m a big fan of the old TSR game Star Frontiers. So much so that I run a Star Frontiers website, The Star Frontiers Network, which primarily hosts gaming forums and a wiki, and I provide hosting for a second site on my server. You’ll find me hanging out there and on other Star Frontiers sites under my handle Terl Obar, the name of my first major Star Frontiers character.
Related to my love of that game, I let a good friend of mine from the on-line community, Tom Verreault (aka jedion357), talk me into working with him on starting up a science fiction fan magazine, devoted initially to Star Frontiers but with a focus on sci-fi RPGs in general. The magazine, called the Frontier Explorer, has now published two issues and we’re hard at work getting the third one ready to go. It’s been a lot of fun and a lot of work. You can expect to see posts about the magazine and my experiences working with it appearing here in the future.
The other activity that seems to consume the rest of my spare time when I’m not working or spending time with my family is my small publishing company, New Frontier Games. I haven’t done a lot with this as of yet but things are starting to pick up. I wrote a book last year (2011) called Discovery which published just as a free e-book. Just recently I’ve made a print on demand copy available for those that like to have physical copies of their books. The other thing I’ve been working on is a spaceship combat card game, Star Clash, which I just released as well. Right now it is available as a “print and play” game. However, the company we do our distribution through (DriveThruRPG and its related sites) is launching a print on demand card site that Star Clash is specifically suited for. I’m currently working on preparing the cards to be printed so that people can order the card game ready to play instead of having to print them themselves.
If any of those projects sound interesting, follow the links to check them out. I’ve had a lot of fun working on them. Hopefully you’ll enjoy them as well.
