Adept Play is an informal online academy dedicated to understanding and enjoying the tabletop roleplaying hobby, specifically as unacknowledged folk art.

As a community, we organize games online and locally, post about our games, and, through discussing our experiences, learn and develop as players. As an academy, Adept Play offers online courses in the play, design, and history of the tabletop roleplaying hobby, as well as game design consulting.

Participation at this website and at the associated Discord server is free. Fees or prices apply for design consulting, online coursework, contracted teaching and workshops, game sales, and the Patreon.

About Ron Edwards

My life-time career was, if you can believe it, a biology professor, specializing in evolutionary theory. But I was also one of the advocates for independent publishing for role-playing, which grew into a design and ideas movement in the early 2000s. I co-founded the website The Forge in 1999-2000, which became a touchpoint for multiple events and influences throughout the hobby. I closed the Forge in 2012. It’s preserved as an archive here (2000-2008) and here (2008-2012).

As Adept Press, I published several influential games across a range of genres and subject matter, including Sorcerer, Trollbabe, and Spione: Story Now in Cold War Berlin. My recent work includes Circle of Hands and, for Hero Games, Champions Now.

I moved permanently from the United States to Sweden in the spring of 2017, and I live in Norrköping with my family.

Adept Play is only minimally a publishing company, because my central concern is the authenticity of play and its availability to anyone who might like it. I love any well-designed role-playing from any era or of any topic, such as this classic of the late 1970s, and even any not-so-well designed game which only needs some love at the table.