“Our story has only just begun.It’s that time of year again.
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Hello to Plaid Hat Game’s new future and all the stories yet unwritten.Ĭollin smiled lovingly at them all and then nodded to the dark countryside that lay beyond the wall. Goodbye to my imaginary friends both furry and stuffed. Thanks to all who have been on this journey with me. So here we go, off into the great unknown.
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The world is dangerous, being kind is a liability, and being on the compassionate side of an issue doesn’t always mean winning. They inherit this responsibility that is so vastly different than that of their parents and elders. In Aftermath, the players are teenage rodents thrown into the role of being providers. I’m no longer young, and I no longer believe in that goodness. When I was a young man, I believed in the innate goodness of people. My understanding of heroism has shifted as well. I’m suddenly sensitive to issues such as environmental custodianship, excessive consumerism, civic and humanitarian responsibility, emotional isolation. I see my kids and I worry about their future in ways I never expected. I don’t know if it’s me, or if it’s that my kids are teenagers, but it just seems like the world nowadays has lost some measure of innocence. Those two things sort of go hand-in-hand if you think about it. She is an optimist, and she is all about the luck. There are true parallels between being a parent and being a Stuffy. To a Stuffy, taking care of the child is almost religion, and every shred of their existence is devoted to and dependent upon that child’s love. I imagined the Stuffies as sort of clocking in to work when the child falls asleep. They are something we put in our child’s bed to help them sleep so that we can sneak away and reclaim a little time for ourselves. At some point I realized that stuffed animals exist as surrogate parents. Everybody at some point in their life, has cuddled a stuffed animal.īut the stories in Stuffed Fables were drawn directly from my experiences becoming a new parent. I chose stuffed animals as the heroes of the story because they are universally relatable. When I set out to write Stuffed Fables, I wanted each character to represent a different aspect of the little girl’s personality, and I even color coded them. I don’t think I could have done it any other way. Imagining the characters this way really helped me make choices for them based upon how I imagined their real world counterparts would handle the situations. Nere’ from Heart of Glorm is my nature loving wife. Maginos was based on my grandfather, and Lilly and Collin are my kids. Nez was modeled after my best friend, and Tilda was modeled after his nurturing wife. When I was writing the story, I wanted to teach my daughter about heroic virtues, but having never written before, I wound up imagining that the characters were heroic real people I knew, but in mouse form. Many know the story of why I created Mice & Mystics, as I’ve told the story in so many interviews, but most people don’t really know who inspired the characters. My melancholy has solely to do with my selfish enjoyment of crafting stories for those characters that reflect my values and honor the people and ideas I care about. In fact, I can’t think of a studio I would rather have working on my creations. Steve Kimball and his team are top notch. On the bright side, I have good faith in Zman games. I will no longer have the pleasure of writing for those characters, many of which are based on people I love, and some who have even passed away. This means that the stories and characters I created fo those games, and the future of those product lines, are all out of my control. Mice & Mystics, Stuffed Fables, Aftermath, and Battlelands are all going to Zman Games. I started my career with Plaid Hat Games, and I'm excited and nervous about this new adventure!Īs part of the deal, Asmodee has kept several of my games. The changes I’m talking about involve the announcement that Plaid Hat Games, the studio I work for, has left it’s parent company Asmodee to, once again, be an indie studio.
Plaid hat games store professional#
However, there are some recent changes in my professional life that have cultivated a sense of loss in me, and I’m taking this space to work through that.
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If I write, it is normally part of my world building exercises, most of which gets used in one form or another.