I am Probie Tim!

"Who are you, and what makes you famous?"

That was the first question asked of me during my debut episode of the Happy Jacks RPG Podcast.  Truth be told, I was quite taken back and stammered out some sort of nonsense which, upon later listening to the episode, made me think, "Bags of sand!? C'mon, man!"  (Kudos if you can pick the movie from where I pulled that quote and can explain why it applies here.)

So!  My story begins much like many other gamer's stories: I started gaming in the summer of 1981 with the Moldvay edition of Basic Dungeons & Dragons, having seen some kids playing at my junior high school during lunch and pestering my parents until they got it for me.  I didn't have anyone to play with - I wasn't part of the "cool kids" who played at school, and none of the neighborhood kids or my family wanted to play either.  But that didn't stop me from reading the rule book and the Keep on the Borderlands module until I had them memorized, rolling up my own characters (Glana Brano the Magic-User and Blackpawn the Thief still show up in my games today), and running myself through the module solo.

It didn't take long before I found other gamers at my junior high who were also not cool enough to hang with the lunchtime gaming group, and before I knew it I had my own lunchtime group.  It's been downhill ever since, and while I've collected and played a list of RPGs as long as my arm since then, D&D (and all of its derivatives, including all the super cool OSR stuff) still remains one of my favorites to this day.

In the early 2000s, along with almost every other gamer who owned a word processor and a PDF distiller, I decided to open up an RPG publishing company.  My business partner and I started the business with a plan to market our own stand-alone d20 System derivative, but we quickly discovered that was a hard road to hoe.  So we looked strongly at merger & acquisition options, specifically focusing on the acquisition part.  We managed to procure a number of fairly decent properties, going so far as to acquire the first two commercial games ever released for the Fudge system (which would have gone out of print were it not for us), and that certainly became one of our selling points.

During that time, I conceptualized and developed the Fudge Treats line - a collection of PDFs each containing a cool rules subsystem a player could patch into their games - for the  Fudge RPG.  I was also the initial impetus behind the development of the Open Core system, a generic RPG system built by leveraging all the available open content released under the OGL at that time.  Finally, the "plain wrap" line of no-frills RuneQuest compatible accessories was my brainchild as well.

I later wound up selling the business; a decision I regret to this day but required by my situation at the time.  The Fudge Treats line is currently being sold by Avalon Games, Open Core is made available by Battlefield Press, and the "plain wrap" line is published by Seraphim Guard.  As for the d20 System derivative which spawned the whole thing?  I think it sits on an archive CD somewhere in my closet.

In recent years, I've started and ended several RPG related blogs, I have some play-tester credits, and I'm a contributor to both the original and revised editions of Petty Gods.  I was also a part-time host on Happy Jacks RPG Podcast, which is where the nickname "Probie Tim" came from.