DANIEL SULLIVAN
GAME DESIGN & WRITING

Since my father passed me a dusty, dog-eared copy of Piers Anthony's A Spell for Chameleon when I was eight or nine I've been hooked on the fantastic. Novels, comics, books of theory, movies and TV, video games, and - of course - roleplaying games all were peeled apart and consumed.

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A game's first duty is to entertain. Without that, the rest doesn't matter - nobody will engage. The second duty is to bring something new to the players. It could be an emotion for which they're starved; it could be a novel idea or concept; it could be historical fact. The last duty is to allow the folks around the table to show their love for each other, for the game, for the time spent together.

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I've been playing RPGs since I was 11-ish, when my cousin got the Dungeons & Dragons 3rd Edition Player's Handbook and Dungeon Master's Guide for Christmas. We spent the evening building characters (incorrectly), rolling dice (we couldn't figure out how to read the d4), and telling stories (we got that totally right - it was a great time). In middle school I met a few other kids that wanted to learn D&D, and I started running short sessions for them after school or during lunches or on weekends when we could get together. When I was 14 I joined a game at my local game shop with older, more experienced players, and spent the next four years playing a thief that died a few times, stole a lot of gold, and carried more knives than seems feasible when you think about it. We put in ten to sixteen hours a weekend together, and I've been chasing that high ever since.

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At Beloit College I really started to learn what you could do with good roleplaying games. On a campus of 1,250-ish students the largest organization was BSFFA, the Beloit Sci-Fi and Fantasy Association with something like 70 to 80 members at a time and a  20-student club dormitory. I was among my people. I became the youngest-ever president, ran one or two games each semester, participated in another two or three as well as the club-wide LARP, and organized dozens of games, events, a club constitution re-write... This was the period in which I learned that my skills - creativity, organization, leadership, storytelling, editing - didn't have to be restricted to the weekends.

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Since graduating the time spent playing has been necessarily limited as we all got jobs, moved, started families, took up new hobbies, and so on. Nevertheless, game design and writing remains a central pillar in my life. I've written thousands of pages of content for use in my own games, for others to use, or just to get an idea on paper that I can return to at a later date. You never know when you're going to need a [checks notes] lich that uses other dead bodies as makeshift reliquaries to use as a body-jumping bad guy. 

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I write, I cook, I paint, I try to learn something new every day.

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Mostly, I play games!