Episode Details

In this week's episode, we chat with Chris Pramas of Green Ronin Publishing! We hear about adapting a series of novels as a TTRPG, implementing spaceship combat without writing a physics textbook, and the importance of considering what a fantasy city would smell like. Our conversation goes deep into the lifecycle of a tabletop game, the economics of the publishing industry, and the complications of crowdfunding. Spoilers abound for The Expanse and Broken Earth novel series. Thanks to Reilly for editing out the part where Jake tried to say "Fifth Season" but accidentally said "Fifth Element".

Chris Pramas is the founder and co-owner of Green Ronin Publishing. They're the publisher behind Mutants and Masterminds and Fantasy Age as well as some very in-depth adaptations. We talk about the adaptations for The Fifth Season as well as The Expanse in quite a bit of detail, but their original content like Lost Island of the Pirate Queen is also extremely fun and flavourful. This year has been their 25th anniversary, so they've been doing some cool monthly specials. Also, the bankruptcy of their physical books distributor has had them in a bit of a bind over the past few months, so possibly consider helping them out?

Green Ronin Publishing also has some community sites for people interested in building their own game supplements:

• AGE Creators Alliance is for Adventure Game Engine supplements.
• Chronicle System Guild is for Sword Chronicle supplements, which is the genericized version of the A Song of Ice and Fire system.
• Atomic Think Tank is a forum for Green Ronin TTRPGs more broadly.

Chris has some great recommendations for nonfiction history:

• SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome by Mary Beard
• The Bright Ages: A New History of Medieval Europe by Matthew Gabriele and David M Perry
• Return of a King: The Battle for Afghanistan, 1839-42 by William Dalrymple
• William Dalrymple and Anita Anand's podcast Empire

Finally, while we were putting these show notes together, we found the program for GenCon 2000, and it's an excellent examples of turn-of-the-century TTRPG graphic design. Head on over to our website to check it out.

If you've enjoyed this interview, maybe go check out the first time we met Chris way back at OrcaCon 2025!

For more conversations about publishing TTRPGs, go listen to our interview with David about self-publishing TTRPGs, our interview with Simon about minis (where we talk a lot about indie TTRPG publishing in the 90s), and

Listen Now