Announcing “We Are All Monsters, Here”

Utah, UNITED STATES (7/30/2018)

Announcing We Are All Monsters, Here, a New Tabletop Roleplaying Game

“We have always been here, and we will be here long after you are gone.”

Gallant Knight Games and Jaym Gates are teaming up for a late 2019/early 2020 urban fantasy tabletop roleplaying game. The game will be funded via Kickstarter, with a planned launch period of 2nd Quarter 2019, and a fulfillment goal of early 2020.

Inspired by the rich wellspring of mythical urban fantasy (such as the works of Charles de Lint, Terri Windling, Patricia Briggs, and Guillermo del Toro), We Are All Monsters, Here puts the player in the role of a mythical being caught between safe invisibility, and saving the world at great personal risk. Themes include the shaping of personal heroism, chosen family, and the challenges and triumphs of finding your way in a changing world.

A new mechanical system is being developed for the game, engineered to draw on the traditions of oral storytelling and hidden identities, while maintaining an approachable and easy to learn focus.

The core writing team includes Crystal Frasier, Ann Lemay, Elsa Sjunneson-Henry, Tanya dePass, Kat Richardson, Elizabeth LaPensée, and Gina Ruiz, while Gates manages development.

“I’ve worked on some of the Tiny Setting projects from Gallant Knight Games, as well as collaborating with Alan during the fulfillment of the Genius Loci Kickstarter, and I am incredibly excited to be working with the company on this brand-new setting. I’ve wanted to do a Green Man sort of RPG for a long while, and to be doing it with such an amazing team of contributors is a dream come true.” – Jaym Gates

About the Team

Tanya DePass is the founder and Director of I Need Diverse Games, a non-profit organization based in Chicago, which is dedicated to better diversification of all aspects of gaming. I Need Diverse Games serves the community by supporting marginalized developers attend the Game Developer Conference by participating in the GDC Scholarship program, helps assist attendance at other industry events, and is seeking partnership with organizations and initiatives.

Tanya is a lifelong Chicagoan who loves everything about gaming, #INeedDiverseGames spawn point, and wants to make it better and more inclusive for everyone. She founded and was the EIC of Fresh Out of Tokens podcast where games culture was discussed and viewed through a lense of feminism, intersectionality and diversity. Now she’s a co-host on Spawn on Me Podcast. Along with all of that, she’s the Programming Coordinator for OrcaCon, the Diversity Liaison for GaymerX and often speaks on issues of diversity, feminism, race, intersectionality & other topics at multiple conventions throughout the year. Her writing about games and games critique appears in Uncanny Magazine, Polygon, Wiscon Chronicles, Vice Gaming, Paste Games, Mic, and other publications.

Crystal Frasier is a writer, game developer, and comic writer with twenty years’ experience, best known for her work on the Pathfinder line of roleplaying games and adventures and Green Ronin’s Mutants & Masterminds superhero roleplaying game. She strives to make games worlds where everyone can see themselves reflected. She is a survivor of both the Art Institute of Seattle and New College of Florida, and pulls heavy inspiration for her work from European, Central American, and African history as well as the works of L. Frank Baum and Lewis Caroll. In her free time, Crystal reads comics, walks her corgi, and obsessively rewatches old cartoons from the 80s and 90s.

Jaym Gates is an author, editor, and game developer with a background in publicity and public relations. After a stint as the Communications Director for the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, she has worked as a freelance editor and author for clients including Amazon Publishing, Atlas Games, Vigilance Press, Margaret Weiss Productions, Onyx Path Publishing, Posthuman Studios, Owlcat Studios, and many more. She is currently the Editorial Coordinator for Green Ronin Publishing and the Managing Editor for Nisaba Press, as well as serving as an acquiring editor for Falstaff Books.

As an anthology editor, her titles include Strategy Strikes Back: How Star Wars Explains Modern Military Strategy, War Stories, Upside Down, Strange California, and Genius Loci, as well as tie-in anthologies for Eclipse Phase, Vampire, and Exalted.

In her spare time, she reads, rides horses, gets strange bruises from martial arts, and consults for futurist groups. You can find out more about her at jaymgates.com, or on Twitter as @JaymGates.

Elizabeth LaPensée, Ph.D. is an award-winning designer, writer, artist, and researcher who creates and studies Indigenous-led media such as games and comics. She is Anishinaabe from Baawaating with relations at Bay Mills Indian Community, Métis named for Elizabeth Morris, and settler-Irish. She is an Assistant Professor of Media & Information and Writing, Rhetoric & American Cultures at Michigan State University.

Most recently, she designed and created art for Thunderbird Strike (2017), a lightning-searing side-scroller game which won Best Digital Media at imagineNATIVE Film + Media Arts Festival. She also designed and created art for Honour Water (2016), an Anishinaabe singing game for healing the water. Her work also includes analog games, such as The Gift of Food (2014), a board game about Northwest Native traditional foods.

She is a 2018 Guggenheim Fellow. Her ongoing contributions have been recognized with the Serious Games Community Leadership Award (2017). She was a Research Assistant for Aboriginal Territories in Cyberspace and continues to collaborate as a Research Affiliate in the Initiative for Indigenous Futures. Her dissertation in Interactive Arts and Technology from Simon Fraser University in British Columbia shares experiences from the Indigenous social impact game Survivance (2011). She was a Postdoctoral Associate for the University of Minnesota’s Research for Indigenous Community Health Center where she continued community-led work.

She runs hands-on workshops in an effort to build capacity for Indigenous-led game development. She created curriculum for the award-winning Skins Workshops developed by Aboriginal Territories in Cyberspace and the Initiative for Indigenous Futures. For over ten years, she has offered workshops to partners including the United Indian Students in Higher Education Youth Day in Portland, Oregon; Aboriginal Youth Science Exchange Camp in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario; Urban Native Youth Association in Vancouver, British Columbia; Native Girls Code for Gen7 in Seattle, Washington; Electa Quinney Institute for American Indian Education in Milwaukee, Wisconsin; Salish Kootenai College in Polson, Montana; and the Indigenous Youth Empowerment Program in Lansing, Michigan.

Born in Montreal, Quebec, Ann Lemay was raised on Star Trek and Star Wars. She has been reading, watching, breathing, and living all things science fiction and fantasy for as long as she can remember. After joining Ubisoft Montreal as a community manager in 1997, Ann subsequently worked in the game industry as a game designer, narrative designer, and writer on a wide range of projects. In 2010 she moved to BioWare Montreal, where she wrote for Mass Effect 3, Mass Effect 3: Omega, Mass Effect: Andromeda, and contributed to Dragon Age: Inquisition. After taking a short pause from games (mostly to sleep), she was lured back to Ubisoft to work on Discovery Tour by Assassin’s Creed®: Ancient Egypt, Assassin’s Creed Origins and an as yet announced title.

Currently, Ann is looking forward to taking on a new role as Narrative Director, at an as yet unrevealed company, with a pretty cool team. A determined advocate for diversity in games, she works to mentor and support like-minded voices in the industry.

The Game Narrative Toolbox, a book Ann co-authored with Jennifer Branders Hepler, Toiya Kristen Finley and Tobias Heussner was published by Focal Press in June, 2015. It is available on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Narrative-Toolbox-Focal-Design-Workshops/dp/1138787086

Bestselling author of the Greywalker novels, Kat Richardson currently lives in Western Washington, writing and editing Science Fiction, Crime, Mystery, and Fantasy. She is a former journalist and editor, with a wide range of non-fiction publications on topics from technology, software, and security, to history, health, and precious metals. A lifelong fan of crime and mystery fiction, and noir films, she is also the author of the Science Fiction Police Procedural BLOOD ORBIT under the pseudonym K. R. Richardson. She’s taught writing workshops for Clarion West, Cascade Writers, PNWA, Mystery Writers of America, ArmadilloCon, and Foolscap, and when not writing or researching, she may be found loafing about with her dogs, shooting, or dabbling with paper automata.

Gina Ruiz is a Chicana author living in Los Angeles. Gina was a PEN Emerging Voices Fellowship finalist in 2014. At the moment, she is knee-deep in researching the Mexican Revolution, as well as the Knights Templars. Gina also writes essays, articles about food, recipes, book reviews, and urban fiction.

One of her speculative short stories, “Chanclas & Aliens” is included in the anthology Ban This!,  while “Lorca Green,” is in the anthology, Lowriting.  Gina has a few more short stories about characters related to those in “Chanclas” and “Lorca” on this site in the Stories section, while others are upcoming.

Gina is a member of Linkedin Journalists and Las Comadres Para Las Americas.  You can find her on Facebook,  Twitter, and LinkedIn.  An avid reader and aspiring Medievalist, she inventories her books and documents her reading on LibraryThing and Goodreads. Occasionally, she blogs on the writing process.

Elsa Sjunneson–Henry is a gimlet made from feminism and snark. She is a deafblind speculative fiction writer, editor, and disability activist. She’s the Managing Editor of  the Hugo Finalist Magazine Fireside. Her game work has appeared in her own game, Dead Scare, as well as Blue Rose, Wraith 20th Anniversary Edition, Threadbare, Dracula Dossier and others. She writes from a dragon lair in New Jersey. You can find her @snarkbat on Twitter.