Before Creepy Doll Studios existed, I had already been playing tabletop role-playing games for most of my life.
I started in the early 1980s with the old Dungeons & Dragons boxed sets. Like a lot of people who grew up with RPGs back then, it didn’t take long before I started modifying things. Rules got tweaked. Systems got taken apart and rebuilt. Entire games got homebrewed just because we wanted to try something different.
By the time I graduated high school I had probably played twenty-five different RPG systems.
That might not sound unusual today, but I grew up in rural Michigan. Games weren’t easy to come by. There was no Amazon. No easy online ordering. The closest thing we had to mail order was the Sears or J.C. Penney catalog, and they carried maybe a few TSR products like Dungeons & Dragons or Gamma World.
If you wanted anything else, you had to drive a couple of hours to a hobby store and hope they carried something interesting.
Despite that, RPGs became a huge part of my life. Most of the people I spent time with were gamers, and through that hobby I met an incredible range of people. One of the things that has always impressed me about tabletop RPGs is how wide the player base actually is. It cuts across backgrounds, professions, and personalities in a way very few hobbies do.
But Creepy Doll Studios didn’t come out of that immediately.
For a long time I just played and homebrewed.
The Road to Publishing
Around 2013 I found myself between projects.
I had just stepped away from a strange stretch of my life where I had been involved in early professional online gaming and MMO communities. I ran a large guild that operated across several MMORPGs. We did beta testing for developers, organized events, and even ran charity projects through the guild.
After that chapter closed, I finished a stint running a private investigation firm.
And suddenly I had time.
At the same time, the tabletop RPG industry was changing. Platforms like DriveThruRPG had made it possible for independent designers to publish their own games. Print-on-demand services were becoming viable. People proving that small indie games could find an audience.
So I decided to try it.
Not with a giant production. Not with a big Kickstarter. Just with small, focused games.
One of the earliest decisions I made was simple:
I wanted the games to be accessible.
I knew tabletop RPGs weren’t a path to becoming a millionaire. If someone wants to make a million dollars in tabletop gaming, the fastest way is probably to start with five million.
For me the goal wasn’t money.
The goal was getting people to actually play the games.
That meant keeping prices low and production simple. I wrote the games, handled the layout, and built the books myself using Microsoft Word because that’s what I had. Fancy publishing software wasn’t necessary. Word worked, and that meant I could keep costs down.
The Birth of Creepy Doll Studios
The first game I released came out in August of 2013.
It was called Bath Salts.
Bath Salts wasn’t even a traditional role-playing game. It was a ROLL-playing game, built around dice mechanics and a very dark joke about the horrors of working in customer service.
While writing that game, the name Creepy Doll Studios came to me.
The idea was simple.
Sometimes you find an old doll in the back of an attic. It’s covered in dust and cobwebs. When it was made eighty years ago it probably looked normal. But today it just looks unsettling.
Most of the games I design come from that same place—the weird corners of the mind where strange ideas have been sitting for years.
That’s what Creepy Doll Studios represents.
Not necessarily horror games.
Just strange ideas that have been sitting in the attic long enough to get a little weird.
The Weekend That Created 1%er
Shortly after Bath Salts released, my friends were talking about a show that was going into its final season: Sons of Anarchy.
I had never seen an episode.
But I realized something.
If I could write a biker RPG quickly, that show might give the game a brief wave of attention.
So I gave myself a long weekend.
Thursday through Sunday.
I had some real-world familiarity with biker culture from the 1990s when I owned a tattoo shop and interacted with members of the Devil’s Disciples motorcycle club. That gave me enough understanding of the structure and brotherhood culture within outlaw motorcycle clubs to build something believable.
I brainstormed the game using Post-it notes on my refrigerator.
By Sunday afternoon the game was written, laid out, and available through print-on-demand.
That game became 1%er: The Outlaw Motorcycle Game.
To this day it’s still one of my best-selling titles.
Even more interesting, the core dice engine from that game was later used by designer Rich Rogers for his street-level superhero RPG Hits the Streets: Defend the Block.
That game went on to win a BAMFies award and later received an ENnie Judges’ Spotlight.
So while my original book was thrown together over a weekend, the system itself proved solid enough to power an award-winning RPG.
The Early Creepy Doll Games
After that first release period, several more games followed:
One Foot in the Grave
Elderly folks trapped in an adult foster care facility during a zombie outbreak.
Dude Run!
A role-playing game about paranormal investigation shows—the televised ghost-hunter style shows rather than traditional paranormal investigators.
Dead Teenager RPG
My take on slasher horror movies.
Dead Teenager RPG uses two decks of playing cards and intentionally removes player control over the killer. The characters don’t hunt the monster. They try to survive it.
And just like in slasher movies, the characters constantly make terrible decisions that get them killed.
The mechanics actually force that behavior, meaning players often find themselves fighting against their own characters’ bad instincts just to keep them alive.
Because that’s what slasher films are really about.
Not competent heroes defeating a villain.
But terrified people trying to survive something unstoppable.
Designing for Experience
This is the core philosophy behind Creepy Doll Studios.
I’m not interested in designing systems that can do everything.
I’m interested in designing systems that create a specific experience.
The mechanics should reinforce the genre.
They should push players toward the kinds of decisions and situations that define that type of story.
When it works properly, the game pulls players into the experience of the world instead of just giving them tools to simulate it.
If players walk away from the table feeling like they actually lived through that kind of story for a few hours, then the game did its job.
And Then Things Went Quiet
After that burst of releases between 2013 and 2014, life moved in other directions.
The last RPG material I wrote was in 2018 for Codex – Chrome 2, the zine published by The Gauntlet.
After that, Creepy Doll Studios went quiet.
Until now.
Because the attic is still full of strange ideas.
And it’s time to start pulling them back out again.