my GAME design story

Hello, my name is James and I love playing and designing tabletop games!

I created my first game in 1984 when I was just 12 years old. It was a simple professional wrestling roleplaying game that used a d20 for wrestling moves, a d6 for pin attempts, and graph paper to keep track of time limits. I still have the original pages of rules that I produced on my type writer!

Over the years, I have dabbled quite a bit in game design, mostly focusing my efforts on creating supplemental rules for existing roleplaying games. I did this particularly for The One Ring Roleplaying Game designed by Francesco Nepitello, which led to the great honor of creating an expanded index for the core rules and eventually writing the opening adventure, Nightmares of Angmar, published in a game book called Ruins of the North by Cubicle7 Games.

Sometime around 2015, my wife was at a yard sale and came across an intriguing roleplaying game in a thick red box called DragonRaid. The box said it was an “Adventure Learning System” and its purpose was “Building Warriors for Spiritual Battle.” It looked outdated by modern standards, so I stuck it on my shelf without really taking a look. Years later, when I finally gave it a read, I discovered that it was published in 1984. I had never heard of it before, but I thought it was pretty innovative, not just another version of Dungeons & Dragons, like so many others.

I tracked down the new owner, award winning Christian author, James R. Hannibal, who was given the task of reviving it. To make a long story short, he invited me into the process and we began redesigning DragonRaid into a game called Lightraiders. We did this for several years, and I was grateful for the experience, but eventually the work became too much for me considering all my other duties in life, so I bowed out. However, he pressed on and published the work in 2024. You can find it for sale at lightraiders.com (WARNING: High security settings. You may have to clear caches before the site will let you in). My part of the work was done out of love, so I make no royalties, but if you’re interested in how Christian discipleship and roleplaying games can come together in a cool way, please check it out, along with the novels James R. Hannibal has written to build out the world of the Lightraiders.