So, how'd you find this place?

[ScottM]

My own trip to the forge was two steps removed from a yahoo search on storytelling for Mage.  The first stop was lumpley's website , which had such cool games (particularly Otherkind and Before the Flood), that I read through almost everything on the site.

After the game descriptions, there was this blurb:

(Narrativism is a very cool philosophy of game design. The place to start is the Forge. I'm on there as lumpley, stop in and say hi.)

So I stopped by.  I didn't say hi for long while thereafter, but I made a good vulture (circling, circling).  And since I never really said it, "Hi Lumpley!"  Anyways, that's my twisted trail.

So, how'd you find the place?
Scott

[lumpley]

Hi!  Good to see you!

I did a google on "free rpgs" or something back in 2001, and damn, the quality of discussion around here was so high that I stuck around.

-Vincent
(I'm a force for good! I'm a force for good! Yay!)

[ethan_greer]

Actually, I have no idea how I got here.  Who are you people???

Seriously, though - I really don't remember.  Which seems odd to me; that's the sort of thing I normally would remember...

[GreatWolf]

I came over from GO when the Forge forum originally started.  Boy, it's been a while.....

Seth Ben-Ezra
Great Wolf

[szilard]

I think that I started reading the Art of Game Design over at RPG.net and someone there linked to the Forge...

Stuart

[Matt Wilson]

Clinton mentioned the Forge in a post on a local board in Seattle, if I remember right.

[Ron Edwards]

Hiya,

Well, in 1999, I had posted my System Does Matter and The Nuked Applecart articles at the Gaming Outpost, and I was selling Sorcerer as a PDF at the time. I'd become pretty snarky about the idea of creator ownership in role-playing games, for a variety of reasons, and some discussion got going about setting up a website devoted to that topic.

My friend Ed Healy, who had helped me a lot at that point, a fellow named Mike Mearls, and I decided to put that into action. Mike dropped out almost immediately due to various other goals and so Ed and I wrote up Hephaestus' Forge. At the time it didn't have a forum, just links to the Gaming Outpost, and a lot of reviews and articles by me. We wanted to feature games monthly with Actual Play accounts, which turned out to be harder than we thought (be easy now, but back then, no).

So I guess the way I "found" the Forge was to invent it.

Best,
Ron

[Clinton R. Nixon]

Oh, I don't think anyone really wants to know how I found the Forge.

In a nutshell, I was a naive young guy on the Gaming Outpost forums who really wanted to write RPGs. I thought Sorcerer was the bee's knees (although it'd be a few years before I really played it), and when the Sorcerer site and The Forge went down because of domain name issues, I used the only skill I had, networking knowledge, to help Ron keep them both.

So, the way I found the Forge was to accidentally end up running it.

[xiombarg]

Man, after Ron and Clinton, my story is lame.

Simple. I was a Gaming Outpost die-hard. Even after the several "reboots" of GO, and the switch to for-pay service, I stuck with GO and it fora.

But people on GO kept tlaking about the Forge. Went to it, bookmarked it, didn't do much.

But slowly, as GO continued in its death-throes, and shambled on in it's semi-undead state, I started going to the Forge more and more, because that's where the activity was... and is.

I got good feedback for Success here, thought-provoking (for me, at the time) stuff that challenged some of my preconceptions.

I never looked back... The rest is history... And other cliches. ;-D

[Jonathan Walton]

It actually took me several attempts to actually find the Forge.

I distinctly remember reading Emily Dresner-Thornber's "Crunchy Bits" articles over a year ago.  At the time, I was an In Nomine fanboy who was working on a game proposal for SJGames, but I never noticed the forums (which were, I have to say, buried among other less important stuff).

I finally got interested in indie rpgs several months ago, sick of the resurgance of D20 and the stupid, ultra-traditionalist thinking that came with it.  My first Forge post was Indy RPG Anthology?: "Death to D20", followed soon by one on designing specifically for a PBeM format.

Now, I'm here to stay.  The Forge is the best damn gamn design forum on the web, bar none.  The community's not bad either, I must say...

[Mike Holmes]

Me, too, GO transplant.

Mike

[Valamir]

Lets see how convoluted I can make this...

I discovered how much fun a good mailing list could be when Babylon 5 Wars from AoG was first released.  That experience (a positive one despite how crappy the game was) convinced me to sign up for the 7th Sea mailing list...which was my passion du jour at the time.

Then John Wick and AEG parted company, the supplements for the game got really screwy (and obnoxiously frequent) but before I dropped the list (or the list just died...don't remember which) someone mentioned Wick's latest and greates project...Orkworld.  

From his site I discovered his Game Design Journal, which was housed at some Gaming Outpost place I'd never heard of and couldn't care less about.  Then I made the mistake of poking around some of the GO Forums like Critical Hit.

Then I discovered some madman by the name of Ron Edwards spouting some GNS gibberish and shilling some silly PDF RPG.  What kind of crazyness was that...an electronic game book and an RPG with only 3 attributes...nonsense.  I still resent the man...I didn't ask to have my paradigms challenged.  I used to be quite happy killing orcs in the dungeon dammit...ok, well not really, but I digress.

Then GO imploded and I discovered that most of the quality discussions had moved over here, and Voila.

[Ron Edwards]

Ralph wrote,

I didn't ask to have my paradigms challenged

Heh, heh, heh.

They never do ...

Heh, heh (snork) ...

Best,
Ron

[Brian Leybourne]

It's all that damn Jake Norwoods fault ;-)

The Riddle of Steel led me - nose first - to the Forge a year ago, after the RPG.net forum about the game eventually gasped it's last breath. To be honest, I still do most of my posting in the TROS area, but enjoy reading through the general forums as well, and poke my nose in with an opinion or comment fairly frequently these days. I don't tend to post in the other game forums much, although Sorcerer and Little Fears are other great games and I keep my eyes on their forums too.

Brian.

[DaGreatJL]

Pretty simple, really. I was reading rpgnews.com when I saw a post that referenced fantasy heartbreakers, with a link to Ron's article. Intrigued, I read it. Then I read a number of the other articles. Then I read the forum. Then I started posting.

JL