Parenthesis Press
Parenthesis Press is an enterprise devoted to publishing games. What kind? Good ones, we hope. To be less glib, our works fall into the category most often termed “story games”: role-playing games focused on the production of a narrative. These games tend to be somewhat more avant garde than your average D&D session, but for some players, they are more engaging and rewarding. We hope you’ll agree.
Who is Parenthesis Press?
Neal Stidham
designer
Neal has been designing games since the age of nine, when he realized that he’d played every game in the house and was still bored. Since starting his own indie RPG imprint, though, boredom isn’t really a factor. Neal’s having a great time not just creating his own systems and settings, but getting them into the hands of people who are actually playing them.
A longtime player of RPGs, boardgames, and miniatures wargames, Neal’s diverse gaming background is important to his design perspective. His professional gaming experience includes a long history with the Privateer Press Press Gang, as an organizer of local and regional Warmachine events, and a position as a blogger, podcaster and reviewer with the gaming site Gamejournal.tv. He loves games that are complex and sophisticated without being crunchy for crunch’s sake. Neal’s design philosophy centers on games that require cooperation to tell a story that everyone enjoys, even when they contain an element of competition to liven the action.
Neal has a PhD in Literature from Indiana University of Pennsylvania, in the Pittsburgh area. He lives in a perfectly cromulent apartment outside Raleigh, NC. So far, no one has successfully managed to enumerate all of Neal’s hobbies, but if you really want to distract him, bring up cooking, chess or obscure Modernist poets.