Profile: Indie tabletop game company, Creative Mountain Games

Creative Mountain Games is a hidden gem of tabletop gaming resources.

The site and company is run by a friend I made through Northeastern Illinois University while working at its student newspaper the Independent. Mark Clover, the head of Creative Mountain Games, is a gamer at heart. His love of tabletop games is part of the reason he started up the indie publishing company with the philosophy, “We do the work, so you can play!”

The company currently has 17 products at EN World PDF Store and RPGNow with more in development. Products that are developed are one-shot scenarios and full-length campaigns. The formats and rules are adaptable to any Dungeons and Dragons editions, working with the experience from a current campaign that Clover is running, it is advised to stick to the most recent editions.

Various people from the EN World community have put their work in several cooperative dungeon games that are available for download at the Creative Mountain webpage including multi-session games Terror & Blasphemy, Halls of Anarchy, Crypt of Damnation and Tomb of Chaos. There is also fiction to help inspire you when your building a campaign of your own.

The company’s most recent product, a revised version of Small Keep is available for purchase at the EN World PDF Store. For those of you who live in the Chicago area, the Games Plus store in Mount Prospect also has a couple of copies available as well. The websites also have some freebies that are useful in at least learning about stories to base your own campaigns or one-shots off of and free materials for generating characters for some formats.

Even though there are freebies, the products that actually have a cost are more affordable than the mainstream RPG information with prices that range from $1.99-24.93. These products include the downloads from the Creative Mountain webpage but also include past products, low-level adventures, source books and dice games (for in-game gambling).

All in all if you’re interested in getting into tabletop gaming and have friends who are interested as well, this company is perfect for your gaming needs. In June 2008 (an exact date has not been released), Creative Mountain is coming out with a new game titled MF Wars – Medieval Fantasy Wargame and Roleplaying System.

Look for coverage of the release of MF Wars and an interview with publisher Mark Clover in June 2008.

Site [Creative Mountain Games]