Interview with Jason Walters from Indie Press Revolution
I had the opportunity to chat with Jason from Indie Press Revolution about how IPR started and how he got involved, some of the games he’s helped bring into the world, and his recommendations for all-ages TTRPGs to try out! IPR has been a critical part in sustaining the indie TTRPG space and allowing creators to get their work in front of others, and I am excited to learn, and help others learn, about IPR. Thank you, Jason, for taking the time to share with us and the work you’re doing at IPR!
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Welcome Jason! Can you introduce yourself? What is your backstory?
My backstory begins in 1978 when my father bought me the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons boxed set. I was 8 years old at the time, and I was deeply interested in tabletop role-playing games. I wasn’t so successful at finding anyone to play them with until I was around 11 or 12 and found the game Champions.
I spent my teenage years playing a lot of RPGs and fell out of it as a late teenager. I moved to San Francisco and wasn’t involved in too many TTRPGs except I was still playing D&D once per week, just not like this.
Then, in ‘99, I decided that I would really like to play Champions again.
I met a bouncer at a night club who knew a guy who was running a campaign in the Lower Haight district of San Francisco. The bouncer and I went and became part of this group to play Champions and became known in Hero Games Publication as the Masonic Street Irregulars.
I had made a new group of friends, and we played for about a year, and during the entire time, Darren Watts, the eventual president of Hero Games and who was manager of Indie Press Revolution for a while, would complain about the state of Hero Games as a publishing company… every game… for a whole year.
After a year went by, another person at the table said, Darren, if you would stop complaining about this, I will put together a package and get buy in and we can not talk about this anymore. Then, this person turned to me and said, “You’re a business person, pony up.”
And I did! I did pony up a fairly small amount of money thinking it was pretty good compensation for having fun once per year.
Darren took this money and bought airplane tickets and flew around the country raising a couple hundred thousand dollars in investments from people with real money and went and bought Hero Games, which we launched very successfully. I was part of the playtest group, one of the partners, authored and coauthored, and so on.
And can you tell us a bit about how Indie Press Revolution (IPR) started?
While all of this was going on, on the other side of the country in Jersey, Brennan Taylor of Galileo Games and Fred Hicks of Evil Hat Productions were running into the problem that no distributor wanted to carry their games or the games of their friends. These were very early storytelling games and they decided that they needed to launch an alternative distributor that represented folks like them.
They put together the original Indie Press Revolution in 2003, and it was a couple years after we were doing our own thing with Heroes on the west coast.
They had convinced a handful of game stores to buy from them, and Indie Press Revolution started to run out of Brennan Taylor’s garage in New Jersey.
Around this time, both Hero Games and IPR started going to Origins Game Fair and Gen Con and met, mostly because Darren Watts and I would go over to the IPR booth and buy stuff. We were friendly and aware of each other, and for those who go to Gen Con, everyone has their favorite booth they go to. For me, IPR and Paul Czege’s Ashcan Front were a couple that I always went to at Gen Con.
A few years went by, and Brennan’s house began filling up with games, and his wife was not a fan of the house being taken over by role-playing game books. Also, the economic reality of any distributorship is that they are very labor intensive and have very low profit margins. They require a lot of attention and don’t produce enormous amounts of sticky money. A lot of money passes through other people, but it doesn’t stay.
While this was all happening simultaneously, Hero was rapidly growing and became the 4th or 5th biggest role-playing company in the states *for a while* because almost everyone is *for a while*… things peak and decline, and it’s hard to keep stable out of Wizards of the Coast and Paizo.
Heroes had sort of reached this apex point, and it was simultaneously to the partners that that was not going to last, it was just not going to be sustainable releasing 12 books per year. At the same time, it was probably becoming obvious to the IPR folks, Brennan and Fred, that they didn’t have the time to keep running IPR the way they were, and they were more interested in making RPG books.
These two things intersected, and I had also decided I was tired of running my own bike tester company that I’d started in my 20’s in San Francisco, so I moved to Nevada where I built some small warehouses to store equipment for an earthship that my wife and I wanted to build, and… the earthship never got built, but now the warehouses are full of RPG books for about 23 years.
Darren started negotiating to have our parent company buy out IPR so they could focus on publishing and get their home back, and, before I knew it, IPR had moved into my warehouse.
And that is how I got involved in ALL of this. Lots of ups and downs in the history of IPR. Brennan and Fred built an entire retailer that I’ve now been involved with for 15 or so years. They built the entire format for how IPR works, and we’ve added to and run with it, but they built it and brought everyone together. It’s not an effort by a single person.
Over the last 15-16 years, we’ve been able to build on that legacy, and have been able to help the indie game community on the commercial end as much as selling non-mainstream game books has a commercial end.
Have you made any games of your own?
Personally, I’m more of a publisher and a distributor, but I’ve written and contributed to many books for Hero Games, including Lucha Libre Hero, which got nominated for an ENnie award. There was Worlds of Empire… a lot for Heroes.
In recent years, I designed and published a Descendant from the Queen game about the meaning of life called Symposium where you roleplay at the “symposium”, a philosophical dinner party. I’m also about to publish a storytelling game called Argumentation where you simulate a group of history instructors at a liberal arts college arguing about how history functions. Again, it has sort of a Descendant from the queen-like mechanic, and it’s designed to get people thinking about how history does function.
In publishing, there was At the Hands of an Angry God, which was nominated for an Indie Award for best rules.
At the moment, I’m thinking about doing another card game where you play early church fathers arguing about what books go into the bible and you could get something like St. Nicholas punching Marcion. I’m not sure yet; it’s still in the speculative phase. But I am very fond of the tarot sized For the Queen style game where you use information provided from the cards.
I’ve done a lot of editing, copy editing and developmental editing.
Here at IPR, a lot of us are game developers, so we playtest each other’s games during a weekly game night.
There are a ton of TTRPGs at IPR; do you have any recommendations for ones that would be good for an all-ages crowd?
I’ve mentioned For the Queen before, and it’s a game where you are companions of the queen, and she’s taken you on as an embassy with her because she knows you love her. You choose from some beautiful artwork to determine what your queen looks like, and then there’s a series of prompts to define who your character is and their relationship to the queen and to each other. By the time the game is over, you’ve fully fleshed out who the character is and all their history. It’s a beautiful minimalist game.
I also love Avery Alter’s The Quiet Year. It exists in this storytelling space of something like a zombie apocalypse and there’s a time when the zombies recede and you get to build some form of community. It’s not really about zombies, but it’s about map building and community building with a deck that walks you through seasons and periods of scarcity that you must deal with.
I actually picked up a copy of The Quiet Year from the IPR booth at GenCon because so many folks have recommended it for trying with kids. (and here’s my review!)
Yeah! Like, it’s more of a storytelling exercise.
On that front, a lot of storytelling tools like World Ending Game…
It’s a series of storytelling microgames that are good for wrapping up your longer campaigns. If you’re a Lord of the Rings fan, it’s kind of like, what happened to all the Hobbits after…? It gives you system agnostic storytelling tools.
Oh, I so want to get up and look through and find more in the IPR office.
I think Rowan, Rook, and Decard’s work with Spire and Heart is all very great. I’m looking forward to Hollows.
Beak, Feather, & Bone! That’s another gamified setting creation tool. You create an entire city as a group and have highlighters to color in the map. EAch building needs a characteristic that’s either “beak”, “feather”, or “bone”. It’s another unique narrative tool that’s been gamified.
Goblin Errands is another one. I don’t know if the author intended for it to be about hierarchy and everything, but it is also very funny and chaotic. You’re being sent into the city to run errands for the goblin boss and the humans chase you around.
And I’ll round it out with Stewpot. It created complex emotions in me. The basic idea is to sort of demill your murderhobos. You’re these high level fantasy adventurers who have to translate their killing abilities into boushie socially useful stuff so they can move to a small town and run a restaurant. Your assassin learns to be a sous chef, and things like that. Your fireball wizard learns construction site magic. Through a bunch of small narrative vignettes, you act out your character becoming a middle class business owner. You’re trying to figure out how to organize a menu or be useful to the cobbler down the street. It’s a very unique game. I’ve played both the first edition and the one that Evil Hat’s just released.
Is there anything we’ve missed talking about that you want to speak on? Or do you have any shoutouts?
Oh yeah! I want to give a shoutout to Heart of the Deernicorn’s Fall of Magic. Even though we don’t stock it anymore, it’s an editing masterpiece in minimalist visually prompted fantasy gaming. It’s a scroll-based RPG where you move tokens across the scroll and answer storytelling prompts at each location. If you like collaborative narration, it brings so much out of you with minimal rules.
I’d like to generally shout out to our various associates. At a lot of conventions where you see the IPR banner, they’re retailers and game publishers that work with us to help get to other locations. Our warehouse staff can really only do 2-3 conventions per year ourselves, so shoutouts to Imagining Games, 9th Level Games, Pandemonium Books, Happen Upon, Mythic Geekdom, and many others. Greatly appreciated, they’ve done an awful lot of work to get storytelling games to get them out in front of people at so many conventions that we wouldn’t be able to just ourselves.
Thank you for taking the time for the interview, and for all of the amazing game recommendations! IPR does so much for the indie TTRPG community, and I am very grateful that you are doing what you do.
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