Jeff Tidball | |
---|---|
Nationality | American |
Occupation | Game designer |
Jeff Tidball is a game designer who has worked primarily on role-playing games.
Jeff Tidball was a college student when he began working full-time at Atlas Games when the company expanded after the success of On the Edge (1994). [1] : 254 John Nephew and Tidball were the only staff that Atlas retained after the collectible card game field crashed in 1996. [1] : 254 Tidball became the Director of Creative Development and soon began developing the next role-playing game from Atlas Games, Ars Magica , which Atlas had acquired from Wizards of the Coast. [1] : 254 Tidball also became the line developer for Ars Magica, [1] : 255 and the Feng Shui line developer as well. [2] Tidball designed Cults Across America (1998) which was one of the board and card game releases from Atlas. [1] : 257 Tidball left Atlas Games in 2000 to take a Master of Fine Arts film script-writing program available at the University of Southern California. [1] : 255 Tidball later went to work at Last Unicorn Games, and Tidball and Jess Heinig were the only remaining employees by January 2004 in the Last Unicorn Games role-playing game division of Decipher Games, so Decipher shut down Last Unicorn Games and laid them off. [1] : 318 Tidball designed the Cthulhu 500 card game for Atlas. [2] Tidball worked as the line developer for Decipher's The Lord of the Rings Roleplaying Game . [2] Tidball designed Pieces of Eight (2006), a game by using coins as a game mechanic which Atlas published. [1] : 259 Will Hindmarch and Tidball later started a small press company called Gameplaywright. [1] : 260 Tidball subsequently worked as the senior developer and editor for the board and card game departments at Fantasy Flight Games, [2] before returning to Atlas Games on a contract basis as chief operating officer. He has also continued to write in the roleplaying industry, notably the massive Eternal Lies campaign he wrote with Hindmarch for Pelgrane Press's Trail of Cthulhu RPG.
Tidball wrote The White Box: A Game Design Toolkit (2017, Atlas Games) with Jeremy Holcomb in partnership with Atlas Games and Gameplaywright to make use of their mutual backgrounds in writing and teaching about game design. [3] [4] [5]
Tidball lives with his wife and sons in the Twin Cities area. [2]
Notable Works | Role | Year |
---|---|---|
Ars Magica | Line Developer | 1996 |
Cults Across America | Designer | 1998 |
The Lord of the Rings Roleplaying Game | Line Developer | 2002–2004 |
Cthulhu 500 | Designer | 2004 |
Pieces of Eight | Designer | 2006 |
Beowulf: The Movie Boardgame | Developer | 2007 |
Things We Think About Games | Co-Author | 2008 |
Horus Heresy | Designer and Producer | 2010 |
The Bones: Us And Our Dice | Co-Author | 2010 |
Ecotopia | Designer and Writer | 2011 |
Skullgirls | Writer | 2011 |
League of Legends | Writer | 2011 |
Dragon Age: Set 2 | Developer and Co-author | 2011 |
Mercante | Designer | 2012 |
Doctor Who: Time Clash | Designer | 2016 |
The White Box: A Game Design Workshop-In-A-Box | Designer and Writer | 2017 |
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.
Jonathan Tweet is an American game designer who has been involved in the development of the role-playing games Ars Magica, Everway, Over the Edge, Talislanta, the third edition of Dungeons & Dragons and 13th Age, and the collectible miniatures game Dreamblade. In 2015 Tweet released Grandmother Fish, a full-color, full-sized book about evolution aimed at preschoolers. In 2018 Tweet released Clades and Clades Prehistoric, two card games for children and adults which demonstrate the concept of a clade.
A campaign setting is a setting for a tabletop role-playing game or wargame campaign. Most campaign settings are fictional worlds; however, some are historical or contemporary real-world locations. A campaign is a series of individual adventures, and a campaign setting is the world in which such adventures and campaigns take place. A campaign setting is typically designed for a specific game or a specific genre of game, though some come from existing media. There are numerous campaign settings available for purchase both in print and online. In addition, many game masters create their own, which are often called "homebrew" settings.
Cthulhu 500 is a motor racing-themed card game designed by Jeff Tidball based on H. P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos. The game was released by Atlas Games at Gen Con 2004.
Robin D. Laws is a Canadian writer and game designer who lives in Toronto, Canada. He is the author of a number of novels and role-playing games as well as an anthologist.
Atlas Games is a company which publishes role-playing games, board games and card games. Its founder and current president is John Nephew.
The history of role-playing games began when disparate traditions of historical reenactment, improvisational theatre, and parlour games combined with the rulesets of fantasy wargames in the 1970s to give rise to tabletop role-playing games (TTRPGs). Multiple TTRPGs were produced between the 1970s and early 1990s. In the 1990s, TTRPGs faced a decline in popularity. Indie role-playing game design communities arose on the internet in the early 2000s and introduced new ideas. In the late 2010s and early 2020s, TTRPGs experienced renewed popularity due to videoconferencing, the rise of actual play, and online marketplaces.
Steven S. Long is a role-playing game author and one of the owners of Hero Games.
Kenneth Hite is a writer and role-playing game designer. Hite is the author of Trail of Cthulhu and Night's Black Agents role-playing games, and lead designer of the 5th edition of Vampire: the Masquerade.
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Last Unicorn Games (LUG) was a game publisher owned by Christian Moore that was eventually purchased by Wizards of the Coast.
A tabletop role-playing game, also known as a pen-and-paper role-playing game, is a kind of role-playing game (RPG) in which the participants describe their characters' actions through speech and sometimes movements. Participants determine the actions of their characters based on their characterization, and the actions succeed or fail according to a set formal system of rules and guidelines, usually involving randomization. Within the rules, players have the freedom to improvise, and their choices shape the direction and outcome of the game.
John A. Nephew is an American game designer, who has worked primarily on role-playing games.
Will Hindmarch is a game designer who has worked primarily on role-playing games.
Geoffrey C. Grabowski is a role-playing game designer and writer, known primarily as line developer for the 1st edition of the Exalted RPG for White Wolf games from 2001 through 2006. He was described as the "guiding force" of the first edition.
Jess Heinig is an American game designer best known for working on the Mage: The Ascension series of games in the early 2000s. Since then he has worked on several other role-playing games and served as a programmer for Fallout 1.
Jeremy Holcomb is an American game designer, writer, and professor. He was born in Nashville, Tennessee in 1975, moving to the Pacific Northwest early in life. He received an undergraduate degree in communications from the University of Washington, then moved to New York City in the late 1990s to write advertising copy. He returned to Seattle, Washington in 2000 and began self-publishing board and card games. He joined DigiPen Institute of Technology in 2012 and now serves as a program director and professor of design.
The White Box: A Game Design Toolkit or The White Box Essays is a set of books about tabletop game design by Jeremy Holcomb and Jeff Tidball and published by Atlas Games in 2017.