Pete Tamlyn

Pete Tamlyn, a freelance game designer is known within Fighting Fantasy circles for his contribution to the development of Advanced Fighting Fantasy as an author.

Biography

Career

The success of Fighting Fantasy gamebooks combined with the fact that its creators were also the founders of the Games Workshop almost inevitably led to the concept of developing the very basic rules presented in the gamebooks into a more rounded role-playing game system. Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone, the creators of Fighting Fantasy and Games Workshop founders asked Marc Gascoigne to pull together in an editorial capacity a source book of enemies faced within the Fighting Fantasy universe. This became Out of the Pit, published in 1985. Soon after came Titan - The Fighting Fantasy World, a guide to the Fighting Fantasy planet Titan also edited by Gascoigne. These two source books, not originally called "Advanced Fighting Fantasy", became retrospectively wrapped up in the AFF series as books 1 and 2 when Dungeoneer was published as the third volume (although the first to be styled AFF.) This was where Pete Tamlyn's involvement became prominent because he co-wrote Dungeoneer with Gascoigne.

Tamlyn was already a firmly established figure in the role playing world as both an author and freelance game designer. His main contributions, or rather those with the widest audience, are undoubtedly those he wrote for White Dwarf. In 1986 he won "Punslinger of the Year"" with his article "Origin of the PCs".

He also wrote for other publications including Crash magazine where he concentrated on the relationship between RPGs and computer games, when the latter were in their infancy.. In this article he examined some of the similarities and differences between computer games, adventure gamebooks and true role-playing games.

Pete Tamlyn also set the RPG industry a challenge to produce a game with many ways of producing a character, from a full-fledged design system to a method which would allow fairly detailed characters to be generated with a few quick rolls of the dice—either to allow play to commence quickly, or to allow the referee to produce NPCs.

Bibliography

Fighting Fantasy

Advanced Fighting Fantasy

Writer

• Dungeoneer (Puffin, 1989) (with Marc Gascoigne)
• Blacksand! (Puffin, 1990) (with Marc Gascoigne)
• Allansia (Puffin, 1994) (with Marc Gascoigne)

Outside of Fighting Fantasy

Writer

• Green & Pleasant Land (Games Workshop, 1987, Call of Cthulhu sourcebook)
• White Dwarf Articles, including:
  • Generic
    • How to Save the Universe, Theory : Generic 1 White Dwarf #75
    • Origin of the PCs,GM Advice : Generic 1 White Dwarf #72
    • Roleplaying for Everyone, Theory : Generic 1 White Dwarf #80
  • Golden Heroes
    • Caped Crusaders, GM Advice : Golden Heroes 2 White Dwarf #76
    • The Pilcomayo Project, Adventure : Golden Heroes 2 White Dwarf #78
    • Rationale Behavior, Theory : Golden Heroes 2 White Dwarf #69
  • Judge Dredd
    • The Crazy File, Adventure : Judge Dredd 1 White Dwarf #77
  • Paranoia
    • Happiness is Laser Shaped Adventure : Paranoia 2 White Dwarf #87