#81: Game Designer Jobe Bittman

Listen to the interview by clicking the arrow on the audio player below.

When I ask people what they do, I often get complicated answers: tales of time-consuming passions pursued in the wee hours of the night after long days spent earning a living doing something completely different.

In Jobe Bittman‘s case, he moonlights as a game designer, creating the storylines not for video games but for tabletop games. Think ‘Dungeons and Dragons’—but then stop thinking that because it’s trademarked, and Bittman actually writes for other games. He also contributes to Spellburn, a podcast about Dungeon Crawl Classics, one of the series for which he writes.

About Jobe Bittman: When asked for a bio, this arrived: “Jobe Bittman is a beaten and half-starved scribe-slave pressed into service by a sadistic demon prince. By day, he breaks all the internet. By night, he toils at freelance writing assignments and transcribes game designs at the behest of his dark master. His work has appeared in publications by Wizards of the Coast, Kobold Press, and Goodman Games. Please send meat.” So there you go.

#80: Jane Hodges, Leap Taker

Listen to the interview by clicking the arrow on the audio player below.

After the deaths of both her father and her uncle in a single year, writer Jane Hodges remembers being hit with “a pile of grief, followed by a pile of cash.” The money wasn’t enough to sustain her indefinitely, but it was enough to fund a radical change. In this interview, Hodges explains why the change she chose involved the purchase of a 12,000-square-foot elementary school near Mount Rainier.

About Jane Hodges: Jane Hodges is a longtime business/real estate journalist who has written for dozens of national and regional newspapers and magazines, a book author (Rent vs. Own, Chronicle Books 2012) and a creative writer transitioning into nonprofit work to marry those interests. A graduate of Dartmouth (BA) and Sarah Lawrence (MFA), she has since 2013 served on the board for Lit Crawl Seattle, is currently enrolled in the University of Washington nonprofit management certificate program, and has attended the Alliance of Artists Communities’ Emerging Program Institute.