Nationality American Occupation Game designer | Name Philip Reed | |
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Philip J. Reed is a game designer who has worked primarily on role-playing games.
Career
Philip J. Reed has been working professionally in the roleplaying game industry since 1995, and in that time, he has worked for such companies as West End Games, Privateer Press, and Atlas Games. Reed was an employee of Steve Jackson Games when, in 2002, he began blogging at his own site philipjreed.com; the majority of his posts were either reviews or short articles supporting his favorite games. In September 2002, Reed created a little hobby business, first releasing Mime Smashing (2002) - a card game that had been intended for publication by Hobgoblynn Press before the deal fell through - then the PDF that his company would be built on: 101 Spellbooks (2002), a collection of fictional books for use with the d20 system. Reed sold his first PDFs from philipjreed.com and under the imprint Spider Bite Games. In 2003, Reed and artist Christopher Shy created Ronin Arts, a new company. 54°40' Orphyte sold the rights to Pacesetter Ltd's game Star Ace to Reed, but while he created a website in 2003 that promised a d20 version of the game, it disappeared within a year. In 2004, Reed left Steve Jackson Games to work on Ronin Arts full-time. In 2006, Reed was able to successfully sell an extended series of PDFs called ePublishing 101 which recounted how to make PDF production work. Michael Hammes and Reed wrote 4c System (2007), the retroclone to TSR's Marvel Super Heroes system. By 2007, the PDF market had cooled considerably as the d20 license ramped down and Reed decided to go back to work at Steve Jackson Games; in 2008 he became Chief Operating Officer of the company.