[Q&A] Tim Dugger (Shadow Companion)

[1:00 PM]Rasyr: My name is Tim Dugger, and I currently own and operate Firehawk Games — https://www.firehawkgames.biz/index.php — producing role-playing games, including Novus, Novus 2e, and now Fantasy Express. I got my start with writing for games back in the mid to late 90s, working on fan-material for Rolemaster, and was one of the founders of an internet webzine called the Guild Companion. In the early 2000’s, I pitched to Iron Crown Entprises the need for a simpler game than Rolemaster, to help step into the hole left by the loss of MERP and thus HARP (High Adventure Role Playing) was born. I soon went to work for ICE full time, during which my bosses wanted to repackage and revamp RM2 (imagine my surprise when I realized that the core of RM2 was simpler than HARP, that simplicity was just lost in a lot of options), in preparation for later doing an RM Revision. So in 2007, we released RMX, to show how simple RM really was… I had actually authored an RM revision and it was ready to be released in late 2010 as an open beta, just before Mjolniir, LLC lost the ICE license. I then formed my own company, Firhawk Games (Pheonix was already taken), and created Novus, releasing it in late 2011/early 2012. Then real life happened and I did nothing rpg-related in the mid-20-teens, but I re-emerged in 2020, and finished my Novus revision and released Novus 2e in early 2022.Firehawk GamesFirehawk Games

[1:00 PM]Rasyr: Then late 2022, I learned tha Against the Darkmaster had an open license. Against the Darkmaster was based on MERP, but re-imagined and updated in ways that I found that I liked. Unfortunately, time had taken its toll and I was no longer enamored of percentile based games. So using that license, and everything I had learned over 20 years of game writing and development, I started work on my own version of it, which I called Fantasy Express. I released Fantasy Express late 2023, and spent over a year working on additional suppliements for it, as well as a few supplements for Against the Darkmaster — https://legacy.drivethrurpg.com/browse/pub/410/Firehawk-Games/subcategory/1085_45360/Powered-by-Open00 Then a few months ago, somebody asked me about converting my Fantasy Express content over to Against the Darkmaster.
The result was the Shadow Companion, a conversion of my Vocational Kit system, and my Scalable spells along with a few other items. You can find it here — https://legacy.drivethrurpg.com/product/528246/Shadow-Companion