Steve Kenson: Professional Geek

Hi and welcome to my home page! I'm Steve Kenson, a writer and designer of fantasy role-playing games (RPGs) and related fiction, which means I'm basically a professional gaming geek. I live in Merrimack, New Hampshire, with my partner, Christopher Penczak (who is a professional geek of a different sort).

I worked freelance in the RPG industry starting in 1995. In early 2004, I began working full-time as line developer for Mutants & Masterminds, a superhero game I designed. I still do some freelance work (and feel free to contact me about it!), but my development job takes up most of my time. Talon Studio is my official "business identity." The name comes from my first Shadowrun character, about whom I have written three novels. (See? I told you I was a geek!)

On this page, you can find information on my work (past and present) and a lot of gaming-related material and articles. I've organized the material here by category, with links to the various publisher and game company home-pages, where available and applicable. There's also information about some of the different games I have run in the past (when I felt ambitious enough to create pages for them) and some info about me personally. I also maintain a LiveJournal where I post personal information, but it's friends-only, for the most part.

Unless stated otherwise, all material on this site is © 1998 or later by Stephen Kenson and Talon Studio, except for game-specific logos, game systems, and images, which are the copyright of their respective holders.

Green Ronin Publishing

I work for Green Ronin, a game publisher based in Seattle. I'm the line developer for the Mutants & Masterminds Superhero RPG and True20 Adventure Roleplaying, both written by me and based on the popular d20 System rules.

Mutants & Masterminds has earned several ENWorld Awards (including Best Game, Best d20 Game, and the Peer Award), Pen & Paper Fan Awards (Best RPG, Best Cover Art, Best Interior Art, and Best Graphic Design), and Origins Award nominations (Best RPG, Best Graphic Presentation, and Game of the Year). It's currently in its second edition.

True20 Adventure Roleplaying is one of the top-selling products on RPGNow. It's based on Green Ronin's Blue Rose RPG, from a system I designed, but revised and expanded to work for most adventure genres with human-level protagonists. After some success as an electronic publication, it was released as a hardcover book and has several support products planned.

roleplaying games

Since 1995, I have written or contributed to dozens of RPG products. If you're interested in a complete list of my published credits, click on the link above.

novels

I have nine published novels, seven set in the Shadowrun universe, one in the BattleTech universe, and one in the Crimson Skies universe. You can get details on my novels and sample chapters by clicking on the link above.

articles

I have written articles for game magazines like Dragon, InQuest, Polyhedron, Pyramid, Shadis, Star Wars Adventure Journal, Adventures Unlimited, Shadowland and Earthdawn Journal. I wrote the Profiles column in Dragon Magazine from January of 1999 to June of 2000. Click here for a complete bibliography of my published articles. I've also posted a number of my articles online (click the link above).

fun & games

Of course, RPGs aren't just work for me. They're also my hobby, and I play with a group that has some members who go back with me all the way to high school (yeah, that's way back). Check out the link above to see pages devoted to some of our various games.

contacting me

If you check out the page, feel free to e-mail me and let me know what you think. I'm open to suggestions about content and other things people might like to see posted here (although if my track record is any indication, it'll take me a while to get around to it). Thanks for stopping by!