Introduction

My gaming background came from a family that loved board games, but in my teens I moved via (figure) wargames into roleplaying games, and I was essentially a roleplayer in the early 1990s when I first encountered megagames (Jim Wallman continues to scoff at my protestations that I am Not A Wargamer). A group of ex-Uni friends found Jim's Star Trek-based 'Final Frontier' megagames, and we started turning up en masse as a team. They were really only interested in the Sci-Fi ones, but I personally started to find the military and political ones equally engaging for the elements that other games of my experience lacked - 'fog of war', complex negotiations with many interested parties etc, and I got drawn into megagaming as a hobby.

I enjoyed the alternate history element of some games, and finally found myself brave enough to try my hand it it myself in 2001 with the megagame of the Third Crusade, 'City of God'. Some people have fond memories of it, but it was a very steep learning curve and it only barely survived contact with the players. Since then I've hopefully learned a few things each time, running two iterations of a game on the end of the Roman Republic (Alea Iacta Est), and returning to the Middle Ages with City of the Devil, which had a broader, pan-European scope to it. Designing and running megagames I still find stressful and time consuming, and I'm still essentially a roleplayer in my gaming life. However, that did come in handy as a collaborator on the Call of Cthulhu-themed game 'At Right Angles to Reality'.

Game Designs