Last week I
talked about professional publishers
releasing licensed roleplaying games based on popular media properties, particularly in the context
of West End Games’ often ambitious licensing designs in the
mid-1990s. But in a hobby often infused with a do-it-yourself spirit
nothing prevents individual gamers from running their own adventures
in their favorite film, television, novel, and comic book settings.
The roleplaying game hobby has always cultivated an informal
tradition of gamers doing their own thing, taking established games
or settings and developing them for their local player groups.
Reading
Jon Peterson’s Playing at the World one realizes how
the entire adventure gaming hobby evolved from people taking someone
else’s ideas and modifying them to varying degrees into something
different. In the same vein fans sometimes unofficially channel their
enthusiasm for a media property into their roleplaying games, often
in a more timely manner than professionally published licensed games
delayed by the production and approval process.
