My name is Ewen Cluney. (“Ewen” is pronounced like “Aaron.”) In the world of tabletop gaming I’m best known as the translator of Maid: The Role-Playing Game and Golden Sky Stories, and I think some people may know me as the designer of Channel A, the anime pitch party game. I’ve hit a turning point in my creative pursuits. I’m getting things published, and a few people are even coming to me, asking me to create things for them. In the past I’ve started a lot of promising projects and ultimately left them unfinished, and I want to be better about realizing my creative ambitions. I want Patreon to be a tool to help me do that, and if you choose to support me I want you to keep me honest.

I enjoy all different sorts of stories and games, but my own works tend to have a certain bright, shiny aesthetic that I think makes my works stand out a bit in the world of tabletop games. I do sometimes make things with darker themes, but even then I tend towards a clean look. I’m a professional translator, and anime and other Japanese media have had a huge influence on me. Not everything I do is anime-inspired, but it informs more of my works than not. Aside from simply being something I like, anime is underrepresented in tabletop games, so that I find it very easy to come up with anime-inspired concepts that no one’s yet explored. Where there are many excellent games drawing on, say, the works of H.P. Lovecraft or J.R.R. Tolkien, anime and other Japanese media basically represent a wide-open undiscovered country for game designers.

What Kinds of Games?
In terms of the kinds of games I make, my core emphasis is of course tabletop role-playing games, but I also dabble in card games and interactive fiction. For RPGs my design influences are far-ranging, and my games can be mechanistic or freeform or anything in between depending on what grabs me and what works for the subject matter I want to pursue. My card games have so far been skewed towards party games, and I’m still in the process of feeling my way towards designing other kinds of board/card games. Interactive fiction is something I’m just getting into, and I want to explore the form through Twine and a few other avenues.

Right now I'm on a kick of designing small, mostly anime-inspired RPGs. My first game released through Patreon was Fullmetal President, and I'm currently working on about half a dozen others. Watch my blog and the Activity section of this page to see what's coming up.

How Often?
My aim is to put out a new game every 1-2 months. Real-life circumstances may result in me doing less than that, but I'm not planning to do more than 1 per month at most. If spending too much on patronage is a concern, remember that Patreon does let you put caps on your contributions.

What Am I Paying For?
Writing RPG material is “free” in the sense that I don’t have to pay for stuff like art supplies or computer hardware, but there are a few specific things the money would go towards. It varies quite a bit from one project to the next, but I do actually spend a fair amount of money on research at times. Raspberry Heaven was responsible for me having a pretty ridiculous collection of 4-panel manga for example, and for Faerie Skies I ended up re-watching Labyrinth for the first time in ages and buying half a dozen books on fairies. It’ll also let me commission artwork and layout, rather than just doing the best I can with stock art and MS Word. Moreover, it’ll help me make ends meet.