Kenneth Hite | |
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| Nationality | American |
| Occupation | Game designer |
Kenneth Hite (born September 15, 1965) 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 .
Hite holds an M.A. in International Relations from the University of Chicago and a bachelor's degree in Cartography from East Central University.
Kenneth Hite has been designing games part-time since 1981 and full-time since 1995.[ citation needed ] Some of his early design work was featured in the Nephilim role-playing game for Chaosium before the game line was ended in 1997. [1] : 93 After establishing a freelance career, Hite came to Last Unicorn Games and joined the developers working on the "Icon system" for their line of licensed Star Trek role-playing games; to quickly get Star Trek: The Next Generation Role-playing Game ready for GenCon 31, Hite was one of the freelancers flown to Los Angeles for two weeks. After Icon was completed, Hite was made the line developer for the Star Trek: The Original Series role-playing game, and by 1999 he was a full-time employee of Last Unicorn Games. [1] : 315 In February 2001 Decipher, Inc. offered to hire the remaining staff of Last Unicorn after the company was purchased by Wizards of the Coast. Hite joined Decipher but eventually left and became part of the staff of Steve Jackson Games, [1] : 317–318 where he wrote GURPS WWII: Weird War II for the Generic Universal RolePlaying System. [2] He later worked on the fourth edition of RuneQuest . [2] He also did work on some Unknown Armies sourcebooks, and on its second edition. [2]
He wrote the "Suppressed Transmission" column for Pyramid magazine. [2] The column has been collected into the volumes Suppressed Transmission: The First Broadcast and Suppressed Transmission 2: The Second Broadcast. He also wrote the "Out of the Box" column, [2] initially for the GamingReport, and later for IndiePressRevolution. He also contributed a guest comic strip for Dork Tower in 2004.
Hite is also one of many contributors to the book Gamemastering Secrets, which won the 2002 Origins Award for Best Game Aid or Accessory. [3] In 2008, Atomic Overmind Press published some Cthulhu books Hite worked on, [1] : 95 and he wrote Where the Deep Ones Are (2008), The Antarctic Express (2009), "Cliffourd the Big Red God" (2011), and "Goodnight Azathoth" (2015) in the Mini Mythos series for Atlas Games as parodies of children's books with entities from the Cthulhu mythos. [1] : 260 His essay, “Cthulhu’s Polymorphous Perversity”, appears in Cthulhurotica, published by Dagan Books in December 2010. [4] [5] Hite produced a series of Lovecraftian gaming PDFs released by Ronin Arts. [2]
In February 2008, Pelgrane Press published Hite's Trail of Cthulhu , a role-playing game using the GUMSHOE System developed by Robin Laws. [1] : 384–385 [6] Hite won two silver ENnies in 2008 for his work on Trail of Cthulhu: Best Writing and Best Rules (shared with Robin Laws). [7] Hite has since added to the Trail of Cthulhu line with Shadows Over Filmland, Rough Magicks, Bookhounds of London, and Mythos Expeditions.
Hite's second GUMSHOE System game, Night's Black Agents , was released in 2012; players take the role of burned spies in the underworld of contemporary Europe who are suddenly confronted by the existence of vampires. Later that year, he joined the staff of Pelgrane Press full-time, [8] and began a series of monthly books of gaming material under the title Ken Writes About Stuff, which concluded in 2016 after three "volumes". The series alternated between examinations of creatures in H. P. Lovecraft's fiction and mythos, the Hideous Creatures series, and books exploring other role-playing gaming topics including optional GUMSHOE rules expansions, historical magic systems, and campaign settings. In 2015, he and Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan released a collaborative, improvisational campaign The Dracula Dossier for Night's Black Agents. This campaign proposes that Bram Stoker's 1897 novel Dracula was in fact the after-action report of a British Intelligence attempt to recruit a vampire. The published work includes the "unredacted" first draft of that novel, as annotated by three generations of MI6 agents. Hite subsequently authored the Fall of Delta Green RPG for Pelgrane as part of the Delta Green Kickstarter.
In addition to his work for Pelgrane, Hite has collaborated with Dennis Detwiller, Greg Stolze and Shane Ivey on the second edition of the Wild Talents RPG and the supplement Grim War. He wrote Day after Ragnarok, a genre-bending post-apocalyptic setting published by Atomic Overmind Press, and collaborated in Bubblegumshoe with Emily Care Boss and Lisa J. Steele, for Evil Hat Productions. In addition, he developed and designed the latest edition of the Vampire RPG.
Hite and fellow author and game designer Robin Laws have released a podcast titled Ken and Robin Talk About Stuff each week since August 2012. [9] Development of Vampire: The Masquerade 's 5th edition was led by Hite; the edition was released in early 2018. [10] [11]
Hite lives in Chicago with his wife Sheila. [2]
In his current employment with Pelgrane Press, Hite has contributed extensively to the GUMSHOE System, as author of Trail of Cthulhu , and the supplements Shadows Over Filmland, Rough Magicks, Bookhounds of London , and Mythos Expeditions; also the RPG Night's Black Agents and its major campaign The Dracula Dossier .
Previously, Hite wrote or contributed to several GURPS supplements, including:
In addition, he worked on the Decipher/Last Unicorn Star Trek RPGs
He has also contributed to the Nephilim games
as well as to supplements for other role-playing games like:
Books by Hite:
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.
The Origins Awards are American awards for outstanding work in the gaming industry. They are presented by the Academy of Adventure Gaming Arts and Design at the Origins Game Fair on an annual basis for the previous year, so the 1979 awards were given at the 1980 Origins.
Delta Green is a contemporary era setting for the Call of Cthulhu role-playing game created by Adam Scott Glancy, Dennis Detwiller, and John Scott Tynes, a.k.a. the Delta Green Partnership, of the Seattle gaming house Pagan Publishing. The setting first appeared in a 1992 RPG scenario and revolves around a secretive organization tasked with protecting the United States from paranormal and alien threats. Delta Green combines the classic 1920s Cthulhu Mythos of H.P. Lovecraft with modern conspiracy fiction.
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.
Greg Stolze is an American game designer, writer and novelist, whose work has mainly focused on writing for role-playing games and related intellectual properties.
Wild Talents is a superhero role-playing game published by Arc Dream Publishing and written by Dennis Detwiller, with Greg Stolze, Kenneth Hite, and Shane Ivey, with illustrations by Christopher Shy, Sam Araya, and Todd Shearer. The game was shipped to customers worldwide on December 18, 2006.
Pelgrane Press Ltd is a British role-playing game publishing company based in London and founded in 1999. It is co-owned by Simon J Rogers and Cat Tobin. It currently produces GUMSHOE System RPGs, 13th Age, the Diana Jones award-winning Hillfolk RPG, The Dying Earth Roleplaying Game, and other related products. It publishes fiction under the Stone Skin Press imprint.
The following is a timeline of tabletop role-playing games. For computer role-playing games see here.
The Gumshoe System is a role-playing game system created in 2007 by Robin Laws, designed for running investigative scenarios. The premise is that investigative games are not about finding clues, they are about interpreting the clues that are found. The Gumshoe System is used in various games published by Pelgrane Press. As a result of the Hillfolk kickstarter, the SRD for the Gumshoe System has been made available for use under two open licenses: the Open Game License (OGL) and Creative Commons Attribution.
Trail of Cthulhu is an investigative horror role-playing game published by Pelgrane Press in 2008 in which the players' characters investigate mysterious events related to the Cthulhu Mythos. The game is a licensed product based on the horror role playing game Call of Cthulhu published by Chaosium, which is itself based on the writings of H. P. Lovecraft.
Free RPG Day is an annual promotional event by the Tabletop role-playing game industry. The event rules are fairly simple: participating publishers provide special free copies of games to participating game stores; the game store agrees to provide one free game to any person who requests a free game on Free RPG Day.
Phil Masters is a British role-playing game designer and author.
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.
Robert Hatch is a game designer and writer who developed key role-playing game releases for White Wolf Publishing from 1993 to 2001. He is known primarily for three games he co-created: the science fiction game Trinity, the super-hero game Aberrant (1999), and the epic fantasy RPG Exalted (2001).
GURPS Vampire: The Masquerade is a licensed adaptation of White Wolf Publishing's horror role-playing game Vampire: The Masquerade, written by Jeff Koke and published by Steve Jackson Games in 1993 for the third edition of their GURPS rules.
GURPS Werewolf: The Apocalypse is a supplement published by Steve Jackson Games (SJG) in 1993 that translates the role-playing game Werewolf: The Apocalypse to the GURPS rules set.
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