About

Peril Planet is a game design experiment. It is home to the fevered, half-mad, and completely awesome Nathan Russell (that’s me!). It is primarily a place where I can share my hobby with others, and a big part of my hobby is creating games, tweaking rules and creating new and exciting ways to enjoy the tabletop gaming hobby. This site is a place you can learn about my current projects, keep up with my goings on, and give feedback. It is my creative dartboard, fortress of solitude and peepshow, all rolled into one.

A Hobby

While I will always endeavor to keep this site a professional, informative and useful resource, Peril Planet is a hobby. It is where I share my ideas and thoughts on my favourite pastime, along with completed projects. Like the podcast Here Be Gamers! and the Stockade project, it is something I do because I find it fun.

I do sell the occassional game or resource and all profits from such go directly back into my projects – mostly the hosting of this website and the podcast.  It is not my intention to become a billionaire game designer (I buy lottery tickets for that!). It is my intention to support gamers and the gaming community. My game design and publishing adventures have provided me with some genuine insight into the game industry that I use when writing reviews and hosting Here Be Gamers!  

The Vision

A world of adventure, whatever you like to play. I try to create entertaining tabletop hobby games that everyone can enjoy. The foundations of my game designs are;

  • Simplicity: Peril Planet games are easy to learn and based on simple premises that players can quickly grasp.
  • Ingenuity: Peril Planet games utilise industry best-practice and innovations in play and design processes to achieve the desired outcomes for each game.
  • Bad-Assery: Peril Planet games exlore genres, fill niches and reinvent the tired or mundane into NEW! and WICKED! settings and concepts filled with action and bad-assery.

The Man

My name is Nathan Russell and I am a writer, gamer and adventurer. It has been six days since my last game… Heck, I am far too modest to really express how awesome I am, so I will let my good friend Andrew Smith do it for me:

Nathan is an active figure in the indie RPG scene, with many achievements to his name.  He’s published his own game Space Rat, as well as one or two other smaller games.  You can see them on his website Peril Planet.  He’s also one of the organisers for Newcastle’s premier gaming club, the Every Gamer’s Guild.  And while not travelling about the country running games at Gencon Oz or Go Play Brisbane, he also takes the time to host and produce Here Be Gamers, the podcast.

What Are Indie Games?

The answer to this question will vary wildly depending on who you ask. There are many forum threads filled with debate over what the term means, but few that come to a consensus. Some of the common responses include:

  • A game produced by a single person. This one’s pretty close. Many people consider a game to be independent if a single author has written the majority of the text (if not all of it), and if the same author has laid out and illustrated the work or has specifically commissioned an artist and layout person to make the text into a finished product. Where this becomes a grey area is trying to define how many people involved in a book’s process stop it being independent.
  • A game produced for the love of the hobby, rather than for profit. This one is also considered pretty close by a lot of people. But there are certainly people in the independent gaming community who are making money from their games.
  • A game that can’t be bought in a hobby store, it has to be bought online. This isn’t entirely true, a better response might be to say that an independent game won’t be stocked in Border’s Books, Kinokuniya or Angus and Robertson; D&D and White Wolf books have been spotted in these retailers and they certainly aren’t considered independent games.
  • A game that doesn’t use a d20. Given the high profile of D&D within the gaming community, many non-gamers could believe this. But the roleplaying games from Games Workshop, White Wolf, Chaosium and some of the other large gaming companies don’t use a d20, and a great number of these games aren’t considered independent.
  • A game about a specific theme rather than a generic set of rules that can be applied to a wide variety of situations. There is a subgroup within independent games often referred to as “Forge Games”, these games often have a very narrow premise and confront the players in ways that mainstream games don’t. The designers of such games don’t seek to get wide appeal for their product, but seek to connect at a much deeper level with a narrow audience.

There are dozens of other definitions of independent roleplaying, but few people can agree on the specifics. Considering the above list, if a game meets more than half of the criteria mentioned, then the odds are that people will consider it an independent game.

The above came from indie Games on Demand.