As I wrote in my reprint of “Role-Playing Games: A Primer”, in late 2007 Knucklebones magazines commissioned two articles for their May 2008 magazine that they never published due to closing up shop. Which is fine, it happens; I’ve had much larger commissions end up in limbo due to a company floundering. What was less cool was that they convinced me not to seek alternate publication for those articles for a year and a half, by which time they were so stale that they were no longer a priority for me.

For me this was especially heartbreaking for this article, on Atlas Game, because it represented not just an article, but an article about a company I liked, where they’d made the effort to support me in its writing, and where its publication could have given them some nice attention.

Well, I’m not sure how relevant it is any more, but here’s what Atlas Games looked like at the end of 2007. If the focus of this article is a little wonky, that’s because some boxed text has been incorporated (more or less) into the main flow. Since writing this original article I’ve also written a roleplaying-focused history of Atlas, which appears in Designers & Dragons: The ’90s (2014). —SA, 7/1/18

Atlas Games: Mapping Out 18 Years in the Industry

In the late 1980s John Nephew of Northfield, Minnesota bought a photocopy machine. It was for Lion Rampant — a small roleplaying company that Nephew was then working for. As is typical for tiny publishers of its sort, Lion Rampant couldn’t afford the equipment itself, so Nephew stepped up. Continue reading →