This month’s interview is with Liam Routt, who is the Manager – Games and Digital Media at Film Victoria. In the past Liam has been a programmer/producer/designer of computer games and a writer/editor/designer/publisher for a range of tabletop RPGs including working with Chaosium and running his own company Darcsyde Productions.
SRGA: Liam, tell us a bit about yourself and how you got started in roleplaying.
Liam: Well, that was a long time ago…
We moved to Australia when I was 9, and early in our time here we stumbled into a little game store and were drawn to a fantasy game called Dungeons & Dragons. We’d always played a large number of boardgames, but this was something a bit new, in that you seemed to create a specific character to play with, and there wasn’t much of a board.
The first time I rolled the dice I got all 6s! (18 strength!)
The first time our intrepid group of adventures opened a door in our first dungeon, we disturbed a lizardman. My character was stunned. It attacked and did maximum damage, and my character died. Welcome to roleplaying!
We had a lot of fun with that game, but were drawn in much further when we picked up a magazine that had an adventure for a game we’d never heard of, with ducks in it as a playable race. We used the sample characters to create some of our own, and eventually tracked down a copy of RuneQuest, which we played for years and years, through multiple versions.
A few years later (I believe, this is a long time ago), we found another game from the same publisher: Call of Cthulhu. That game changed everything for us. We still played RuneQuest a lot, but Call of Cthulhu was so different… We began writing material, teamed up with amazing locals, and eventually I visited Chaosium on my way to university. The rest is (sort of) history.
Read the rest of the interview here
