Our Team
Lex Carra
Like many in this space, I started out in D&D, back in the late 3.5 era. A kid I went to high school with invited me to his table, and within maybe 8-10 months I had enough of a grasp of the game (and a healthy dose of foolhardy hubris) to tell a small group of friends that I could figure out how to DM for them. Later on in my gaming career I dabbled with running one-shots and short games in some other systems as well, and eventually made the switch to D&D 5E. Other than one multi-year break after my main table grew apart, I’ve been running games pretty much constantly for about 17 years now.
Thing was, right back at the beginning of my gamemastering journey I wanted to run games in the same setting as my novels, which meant I had to jump immediately into the deep end with homebrewing. I also didn’t really touch modules and pre-written campaigns until later, which meant I was doing a lot of my own story crafting and level design. Both of those fed naturally into my friendship with Alan, and while we’d always worked well creatively together, maybe a decade ago we started discussing game design ideas with some actual intention to make things.
Smash cut to 2021, when I realized that I was really dissatisfied with a particular indie dungeon fantasy game that just was not doing the things I really wanted and expected it to do. After one impassioned tirade to Alan we started coming up with ideas of how to fix it, and that’s when the project that became TLRA was born.
Alan Tyson
I became a player and designer of RPGs in a dark, musty basement during the summer of 2002. My friends and I had just learned to play D&D 3rd Edition, and we decided one night, before our game, we'd go see Blade II. Naturally, we came out of the theater buzzing about vampires and silver swords and bloody fights in underground nightclubs, and one of us mentioned how cool it'd be to be able to play something like that. We got back to that basement, I grabbed a notebook and a pen, and over the next hour, I made my first role-playing game. It certainly played like a thirteen-year-old had spent an hour on it, but it worked, and I was hooked.
I met Lex in college, and found in them a kindred spirit; meaning (among other things) someone else who had strong opinions about combat initiative systems and "morality simulators." We worked on about a dozen RPG and board game projects, but when we hit upon the idea for The Long Road Ahead, we knew we had something special on our hands. We wanted to make a game that felt like our favorite epic quest stories, and perhaps one that would speak to the role-playing community's growing love for character-focused, emotionally-enriching stories.