The Amazing RPG Adventure Books of Richard Law

Richard Law has been running successful adventure RPG's in the Family Zone at the UK Games Expo for a number of years.

He introduced an exciting new look to the Children's Roleplaying area this year with the introduction of his RPG adventure books.

We were keen to know a little bit more about Richard and how he creates his books. Here is what he had to say.

I'm not sure how to put into writing my thought processes, the plan was to create a modular system, allowing for near infinite replayability, so i knew i wanted a set of single encounters that could be combined into different adventures, i looked back at all the different themes i had ran at Expo, and knew i wanted to remember what i had done before, so my first sets of encounters were themed one each after each past adventure i have run at Expo.

As for the book design, I've been looking for a wife friendly storage solution for my board games for a while, and a couple years back experimented with the idea of creating board game boxes that looked like Books to disguise my collection on our bookshelves. The logistics of actually doing that with the vast range of different size box requirements and an ever growing game collection meant I never actually went ahead with that idea, but when coming up with the plan for the new RPG system, my original game box prototypes came back to mind and it seemed a perfect fit.

I decided then if the overarching adventure theme was littary, the books themselves could become part of the game, so the book covers could fold out into the maps, and they would contain everything needed to run the adventure, the GM books where a logical extension of the theme, i have always used a box instead of a Gm screen for these games, as i don't want to create a separation between the GM and the kids, but need somewhere to hide some surprises (and keep the dice, miniatures and other gubbins needed from the gm side) and i jumped at the excuse to create large imposing wizard tomes to go on the table.

My favourite part of the whole system is the name of the fictional publishing company I used for the books, S&O, or Strange & Odder is what me and my brothers called my fathers company Grainge and Hodder when we were kids. This is the company that provided all the laser cutting and brass embellishments for these games, and for all the games I have run in previous years. My father sadly passed away at the end of last year, so the name is in memory of him.

Richard and his adventure books will return to UK Games Expo in 2024. We will bring you more news on this as we get closer to the show.