Role-Playing Games Companies &c.

	Web www.philm.demon.co.uk

• Atlas Games do fine work.
• Basement Games made the Forge: Out of Chaos RPG.
• BITS (British Isles Traveller Support) are, as the name suggests, a bunch of UK-based Traveller enthusiasts. They even publish professional-grade material for the game, as well as doing a lot of con demos and such. Admirable people.
• Brittannia Game Designs are -- yes -- British.
• Chaosium have a highly distinguished history. I'm not a huge fan of their stuff (Call of Cthulhu = adventures in social history with insanity, and let's not talk about Nephilim), but I have a lot of respect for them. (Any company that published Credo is fine by me.)
• The Epic Experience (a UK LARP-creating outfit).
• Gold Rush Games.
• Grey Ghost Press ("small but dedicated").
• The Guild of Blades.
• Heliograph have an attractively enthusiastic approach to historically-oriented RPGs.

• Hero Games. (I have a soft spot for Champions from way back.)
• Hobbygames are a major UK distributor.
• Hogshead Publishing. (Old name, newer people.)
• Holistic Design produce Fading Suns -- which looks a bit too gothic and White Wolf-ised for me, but it works for some.
• I.C.E. (Iron Crown Enterprises).
• The Knights Of The Dinner Table.
• And "Ko" comes right after "Kn"... John Kovalic's home page has a number of fine Dork Tower cartoon strips. John is an immensely nice guy as well as a highly talented cartoonist (and the RPG industry's other token economics graduate).
• Leisure Games is an admirable London shop, a little further out than some, but with an amazingly good stock.
• Marcus L. Rowland is a one-person games publisher. (Those interested in his Forgotten Futures RPG might alternativley try its American site.)
• Mongoose Publishing are a UK company specialising in d20 material and licensed stuff.
• Orc's Nest is a Central London shop.
• Pelgrane Press produce the fine, elegant, and appropriately verbose Dying Earth RPG. Gaze upon its Vancean formulations with the awe which such loquacious facility mandates.
• PHD Games, Inc. do miniatures for Tekumel-based games (if you know what Tekumel is, you'll get the point), and distribute RPG-related software.
• Pinnacle Entertainment produce Deadlands. Unfortunately, I find this faintly silly (polyhedral dice, playing cards, and poker chips? And a dumb fake-folksy writing style?), but I'm apparently atypical.
• I discovered Postmortem's page because I edited a book by its creators.
• RPG4Sales describe themselves as "a couple of gamers from the NE of England who sell mainly out of print RPGs, mainly in order to finance our own collections. We have a heavy bias towards D&D/AD&D as that is the game we play ourselves, though we are slowly expanding into other RPG genres..." In truth, I haven't even looked at their site myself yet, but there always seems to be a demand for second-hand RPG dealers.
• I've mentioned my personal interest in Steve Jackson Games elsewhere. They have an on-line news-and-gossip source, The Daily Illuminator, and an excellent e-zine, Pyramid.
• Visionary Entertainment.
• White Wolf were an industry phenomenon in their time.
• Wizards of the Coast are too big to ignore, what with their eating TSR and then being eaten by Hasbro. (Talking of TSR and Dragon Magazine, the enigmatically vanishing Yamara seems to have re-surfaced on the 'Web. Possibly.)
• XXXenophile is, or was, amongst other things, a Trading Card Game, but what the heck. I probably ought to point out that this topic should really have a certificate '12' or something. Whatever, I have a sneaking liking for it.
• For alternative lists of RPG companies, see Steve Jackson Games' site.

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