Are all your fave SFF writers secretly playing RPGs at home?

Monte Lin is the managing editor of one of science fiction fantasy (SFF)’s most well-respected publications, Uncanny Magazine. In 2024, on the way to Seattle’s sci-fi and fantasy convention, Norwescon, Lin ran into a gaggle of employees of Pathfinder publisher, Paizo. They were shocked to find out where he was going—they had never heard of Norwescon, despite its running since 1978 in the same county as their head office. Also, ever since their house convention, PaizoCon, had gone online, they were actively looking for something to replace it on their event calendar. “It just seems perfect, right?” said Lin. “You've got a bunch of people who are hungry for a convention to be part of. And then this science fiction convention was just around the corner… It was like chocolate and peanut butter. How come they have never come together?”

Apart from his life in SFF, Lin is a writer and editor who freelances for a number of RPG publishers including Paizo. He’s got one foot in both spaces. RPGs and SFF have a deeply connected history. As Jon Peterson shows in his book, The Elusive Shift, the entire art of roleplaying was incubated in SFF fan circles. But what does that relationship look like today? Have the two industries stopped talking to each other? Where do they overlap? Do they struggle with the same things? Rascal News put on its deerstalker hat and went to find out.