 | This biographical article is written like a résumé .(February 2017) |
Christian T. Petersen | |
|---|---|
| Born | |
| Nationality | American |
| Education | BA in Economics, St. Olaf College |
| Occupation | Game designer |
| Known for | (founder) Fantasy Flight Games, President of Asmodee North America |
Christian T. Petersen is a game designer who has worked primarily on board games and role-playing games.
Christian T. Petersen was born in the United States, but grew up in Denmark; he was still in high school there when he founded Pegasus Spil Import – a company that imported Avalon Hill games into Scandinavia – and Games Weekend – Denmark's second gaming convention. [1] : 344 Petersen returned to the United States in 1991 and began studying for his BA in Economics at St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota.
In June 1995, after four years of college, Petersen founded Fantasy Flight Publishing. [1] : 344 The name for Fantasy Flight originates with Petersen's first company, Pegasus Spil Imports; Petersen originally wanted to call his new company Pegasus Publishing but he found Pegasus used too often by other companies and instead he chose a name that was representative of the pegasus: a fantasy flight. [1] : 344
The original idea for the Fantasy Flight Games company came from Petersen's love of European comics, and by negotiating with European publishers Petersen came up with the rights to three comic books: Lucky Luke , Spirou & Fantasio and Percevan . [1] : 344 He started off publishing the comics he had licensed, and when he found out that people wanted more popular European comics like Asterix and Tintin , he started importing and distributing those and when he discovered that people were interested in him distributing even more books, he started doing that too, creating Downtown Distribution. [1] : 344 From reading Comics & Games Retailer , Petersen had good data about the gaming field available to him, so, combining this with his Danish gaming expertise, Petersen started getting into game publication by designing Twilight Imperium (1997). [1] : 344
Fantasy Flight Publishing became known as Fantasy Flight Games (FFG), and by early 1998 Fantasy Flight sold off Downtown Distribution – which represented the last remnant of its comic business – and thereafter focused almost entirely on the gaming market. [1] : 344 Petersen was a long-time fan of Chaosium's Call of Cthulhu , and because of this interest, Petersen decided that he would like his new publishing company to produce Call of Cthulhu material – and so he acquired a license from Chaosium to publish a series of supplements. [1] : 344 With Darrell Hardy, Petersen wrote the Nocturnum trilogy of adventures for Call of Cthulhu: Long Shades (1997), Hollow Winds (1998) and Deep Secrets (1999). [1] : 345 Petersen and Kevin Wilson designed the Game of Thrones (2003) wargame, and Doom: The Boardgame (2004). [1] : 347
As CEO of Fantasy Flight Games, Petersen led the company to publish more than 400 titles, making it one of the most successful publishers in the hobby games industry. [2] In addition to his responsibilities as CEO, Petersen managed the day-to-day operations of Fantasy Flight's development and design department. [2] Petersen designed many of Fantasy Flight's games throughout the years, including Twilight Imperium (all editions), the A Game of Thrones board game, World of Warcraft: The Board Game , and The Lord of the Rings Trivia Game, and his credits as co-designer include Diskwars and Vortex (also entitled Maelstrom) with Tom Jolly, the A Game of Thrones CCG with Eric Lang, and The StarCraft Board Game with Corey Konieczka. [2] Christian T. Petersen served as its CEO until FFG's merger with Asmodee in 2014, at which time he moved into his role as CEO of Asmodee North America. On Jul 30, 2018 it was announced that Petersen would be stepping down from his role as CEO of Asmodee North America at the end of 2018. [3]
Basic Role-Playing (BRP) is a tabletop role-playing game which originated in the RuneQuest fantasy role-playing game. Chaosium released the BRP standalone booklet in 1980 in the boxed set release of the second edition of RuneQuest. Greg Stafford and Lynn Willis are credited as the authors. Chaosium used the percentile skill-based system as the basis for most of their games, including Call of Cthulhu, Stormbringer, and Elfquest.
Call of Cthulhu is a horror fiction role-playing game based on H. P. Lovecraft's story of the same name and the associated Cthulhu Mythos. The game, often abbreviated as CoC, is published by Chaosium; it was first released in 1981 and is in its seventh edition, with licensed foreign language editions available as well. Its game system is based on Chaosium's Basic Role-Playing (BRP) with additions for the horror genre. These include special rules for sanity and luck.
Chaosium Inc. is a publisher of tabletop role-playing games established by Greg Stafford in 1975. Chaosium's major titles include Call of Cthulhu, based on the horror fiction stories of H. P. Lovecraft, RuneQuest Glorantha, Pendragon, based on Thomas Mallory's Le Morte d'Arthur, and 7th Sea, "swashbuckling and sorcery" set in a fantasy 17th century Europe.
RuneQuest is a fantasy tabletop role-playing game originally designed by Steve Perrin, Ray Turney, Steve Henderson, and Warren James, and set in Greg Stafford's mythical world of Glorantha. It was first published in 1978 by The Chaosium. Beginning in 1984, publication passed between a number of companies, including Avalon Hill, Mongoose Publishing, and The Design Mechanism, before finally returning to Chaosium in 2016. RuneQuest is notable for its system, designed around percentile dice and an early implementation of skill rules, which became the basis for numerous other games. There have been several editions of the game.
Carl Sanford Joslyn "Sandy" Petersen is an American game designer. He worked at Chaosium, contributing to the development of RuneQuest and later creating the acclaimed and influential horror role-playing game Call of Cthulhu. He would later join id Software where he would work on the development of the Doom franchise and Quake.
Stephen Herbert Perrin was an American game designer and technical writer/editor, best known for creating the tabletop role-playing game RuneQuest for Chaosium.
Francis Gregory Stafford, usually known as Greg Stafford, was an American game designer, publisher, and practitioner of shamanism.
David Allen Hargrave, known as The Dream Weaver, was a prolific and sometimes controversial game designer and writer of fantasy and science fiction role-playing games (RPGs). Hargrave's most notable written works were based upon his own mythical world of Arduin.
Call of Cthulhu: The Card Game is an out-of-print card game produced and marketed by Fantasy Flight Games. It is based on Chaosium's Call of Cthulhu role-playing game, the writings of H. P. Lovecraft, and other Cthulhu Mythos fiction. In 2008, Fantasy Flight moved the game over to its Living Card Game (LCG) format, which retains the deck-building aspect of collectible card games, but without the random distribution.
Fantasy Flight Games (FFG) is a game company based in Roseville, Minnesota, United States, that creates and publishes role-playing, board, card, and dice games. As of 2014, it is a subsidiary of Asmodée Éditions.
James Daniel Lowder is an American author and editor, working regularly within the fantasy, dark fantasy, and horror genres, and on tabletop role-playing games and critical works exploring popular culture.
Descent: Journeys in the Dark is a two to five player high fantasy dungeon crawl published by Fantasy Flight Games in 2005. Descent was designed and produced by Kevin Wilson. The game is based on an improved version of the mechanics of FFG's licensed Doom: The Boardgame. In Descent, players take the roles of adventurers who delve into underground complexes in search of treasure. One player takes the role of the Overlord, who controls the enemies and plays cards to hinder the hero players. Descent differs from other games in the genre in that the Overlord player's goal is to win by exhausting the other players of victory points, rather than merely to facilitate play. The Overlord's resources are limited by the rules of the game, which require them to hoard and expend "threat" points, which are generated in response to the hero players' actions, in order to hamper the other players and to bring out additional monsters to defeat them. This mechanism is very much reminiscent of The Lord of the Rings when playing with the Sauron optional expansion.
Twilight Imperium is a strategy board game produced by Fantasy Flight Games. It was designed by Christian T. Petersen and was first released in 1997. The game is in its fourth edition (2017), which has large changes over previous editions. It is known for the length of its gameplay, and its in-depth strategy.
Asmodee is a French publisher of board games, card games and role-playing games (RPGs). Founded in 1995 to develop their own games and to publish and distribute for other smaller game developers, they have since acquired numerous other board game publishers.
Lynn Willis was a wargame and role-playing game designer, best known for his work with Metagaming Concepts, Game Designers' Workshop (GDW), and Chaosium.
Marc Gascoigne is a British author and editor.
An adventure board game is a board game in which a player plays as a unique individual character that improves through gameplay. This improvement is commonly reflected in terms of increasing character attributes, but also in receiving new abilities or equipment.
Cubicle 7 Entertainment Ltd is an Irish games company that creates and publishes tabletop games. Best known for its Doctor Who and Lord of the Rings games, Cubicle 7 offers titles covering a range of licensed and self-developed properties.
Kevin Wilson is a game designer who has worked primarily on board games and role-playing games.
S. Petersen's Field Guide to Cthulhu Monsters is a sourcebook published by Chaosium in 1988 for the horror role-playing game Call of Cthulhu.
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