After years of work, we are so excited to release the Beta of Adventure Forge and see all the incredible things you will make with it. This is not the end of our journey, not by a long shot. We have so many more features and improvements that we can't wait to bring to the platform, and of course, we are dying to use it ourselves to create Universes and Adventures. It's a journey that we want to take with you: from this point on, it's a project that will be guided collaboratively with you based upon your feedback, your feature requests, and of course, your creations.

Before we talk more about where Adventure Forge is going, I think it might be useful to talk about where it came from. I have had the honor and pleasure of creating games of all sorts for over forty years. Starting with tabletop games and RPGs at FASA Incorporated in 1980, where I led the creation of the first Star Trek RPG, BattleTech, MechWarrior RPG, Shadowrun, Renegade Legion, and many more games that no one remembers anymore. Those years were some of the happiest of my life and I believe the reason that was true is because tabletop games, especially role-player games, are a collaborative creative process with the players. The designers kind of "set the table" by providing the mechanics and setting, but the game masters and players are the ones that "make the meal." Of course, there was no internet in those days, so the primary way that we engaged with players was at conventions. Going to cons was always a joy for me because I got to hear the amazing and heartfelt stories from the players themselves.

In 1987 I dove into virtual reality, years before it was called virtual reality. That resulted in The BattleTech Center, in which teams of four players, each in their own Mech cockpit, battled another team in a virtual environment. It was thrilling stuff, and began an almost 40-year career in video games and technology which included the MechWarrior series of video games, the MechCommander series, being the Creative Director of Microsoft Games for the launch of Xbox, leading the creation of the first transmedia ARG experiences with Steven Spielberg, helming the Shadowrun RPGs and BATTLETECH PC game, being a creative director at Walt Disney Imagineering R&D, and most recently extensive work in augmented reality.

It was always an interesting battle of compromises and situational creativity to bring to life on screen what we had in our heads and design documents. But I always felt that the real limitation was that only the development team's creativities were engaged with the development process. We couldn't tap into the unlimited creative energies of the players themselves.

That is what drove me to assemble an incredible team to create Adventure Forge. Our hope is that we can provide accessible tools that enable storytellers, artists, writers—and yes, game masters!—to create their own narratively rich video games. To empower them, you, to make games about people and places I've never encountered, and ideas that I would never have had. Games that reflect your lives, visions, and cultures. A platform that doesn't constrain you to one vision of what a narrative game or role-playing game is, but is as clean a sheet of paper as we could imagine, to enable you to create your own game mechanics and innovate the form of the genre.

Now, with that stirring speech out of the way: I need to ask for your patience. We are a small team with limited resources, trying to "bat way out of our league" with an incredibly ambitious project. We will be as communicative and responsive as we can! And we ask you, our creators and collaborators, to please be respectful of each other and of our hardworking team. You and us, we're all working towards the same goal of creating a great platform and a collaborative, supportive creative community.