An Intro To This Site

Hello, and welcome to the Indie Gaming Scene, a new blog about indie, small-press, and alternative role-playing games that I’m really excited about starting!

Just a little background on me—my name is Cornell Richardson, and I’ve been an advocate of Forge-type games ever since a fateful run-in with an enlightened soul named Professor Kory Curtiss. Professor Curtis (well, he’s not technically a professor, but he is only 5 years of college away from that worthy title) introduced me to narrative-style, narrow-focus thematic gaming at one fateful convention about two years ago. Here’s how it started: I had been having a wonderful time playing Shadowrun and Rifts all weekend (how I grimace to say that now!) at our college convention and was looking to round out the week’s action with a game of D&D when I saw a man sitting by himself at a gaming table. I asked him if he was interested in playing D&D, and we fell into talking. It was so amazing—he talked about gaming in terms I had never heard anyone use—and he used such very impressive professional and technical-sounding terms to do so. It was amazing—I learned that day that sure, I might be having fun playing Dungeons & Dragons, I might really like the system, and might find it comparatively easy to find folks I wanted to play it with, but, he, asked, was I exploring heavy social and morally relative themes with my gaming? At this, I could only hang my head in shame. But did the Professor chide me for my ignorance? Well, yes, but afterwards, he let me play his “thematic” game Cats In The Cradle, which is all about the choices we have to make regarding giving up pets if we have children. And it just totally blew my mind. From that day forth, I’ve loved all sorts of indie games, so long as they explore deep moral or philosophical questions. And that’s what I’ll talk about on this site.

Now, some of the topics we cover here might be a little heavy for those of you still enthralled with D&D or some other intellectually lightweight fare, but I believe in reaching out to new audiences and really spreading the good word about my type of indie RPGs. Remember, just because you’re having fun gaming, doesn’t mean you’re doing it correctly.