We talk a lot at Wayfinder about the program building confidence in young people, but sometimes young people come to us already full of it, and we get to reinforce it, letting them know that no matter what the world might say, they should keep shining! Roy is a great example of this. When he first attended camp it was with a crew from California who flew in. It was clear that these teens had already built an amazing support system with one another, having all pitched in to pay for Roy’s flight. They were all already hooked because they had attended Westfinder, an informal Larping offshoot that another camper in CA started. So it is no wonder that he became an apprentice the next year, and staff the year after. Roy was a core staff member for 5 years, and occasionally worked here and there after that. Roy is a prolific Adventure Game writer who has proved able to take the Game experiences he had and give them back in new stories to campers.
One of the first times Roy deeply experienced the magic of Adventure Games was during his second year at camp (which was also his second camp). One of the ways magic happens for us is when all the elements of improv, play and planning coalesce in the Adventure Game where everything seems to go your way. “I had one of those games where you feel like the main character even though l was just a PC (player character). Everything went weirdly right. It was the Goblin Market the first time it ran. I ended up forming a pact with the devil to get out of being bounty hunted. The pact depended on me losing this tournament but I won and then ended up marrying the Queen of the fairies who saved me.” Though stories from Adventure Games can sound a bit like listening to your friends dreams, remember, when it happens right, it all feels completely real! You get to have these insane and life changing experiences. “The magic of camp was firing on all the cylinders for that game.” And even more amazing is when most of the campers all come away feeling like the main characters in their own stories.
This feeling led Roy to start writing Games, feeling inspired by a horror game he also played that summer. “I had such a visceral and exciting experience in “Perfectly Normal Game”. There’s the section right before everything gets really real in that game. We were all moving in this long line of summer camp kids and my friend’s character, who had twisted their ankle, was on my shoulders. We were going back to the main space, we were kind of freaked out, someone had showed up covered in blood, but we didn’t know anything was really happening yet. Then the human hunter factions start running us down the line and killing people. It’s dark and very chaotic and everyone’s screaming. I remember one of them running up behind us and on instinct I pushed my friend forward, to get to safety, it wasn’t a conscious decision of “you go ahead.” It was simply reflex and then I got immediately killed.” Though moments like these sound very scary, it is also where the magic happens, since all the attackers are just our friends helping us push the limits of pretend. “I learned how I would behave in that moment under total instinct. Because I wasn’t thinking ”my friend is now going to pretend to kill me with a foam machete.” I was thinking “this person is going to kill me now.” Horror games teach you about yourself and your reactions to danger.” Roy wrote “The Wild Hunt” the following year, another one of the best horror style games Wayfinder has run. “It’ s incredibly empowering as a 17 year old to see a creative project through to fulfillment like you do with Adventure Games. Also having a whole group of very talented, creative, awesome people working together and spending an enormous amount of blood, sweat, tears and time to make the thing that you came up with; it’s really amazing.”
While working as staff at Wayfinder, Roy received his Bachelors in creative writing and then his Masters, though he did try out some odd jobs in between. “I moved to LA to work for a game journalism website and that fell apart. Then I got a job for Nexon, a mobile game publisher.” All the while continuing to write on his own time, applying to tons of other jobs and grad school. One of the positions he applied to was at Wizards of the Coast (WotC). Not hearing back from anyone, he took the grad school opportunity, and graduated in May 2020 (during lockdown). When WotC finally did get back to him, they wanted to interview him, but he had already moved across the county for school, so he simply said “I hope you keep me in mind for the future.” And they did! He is currently a designer on the Magic: The Gathering World-building team. “Obviously Wayfinder encourages a very robust imagination and a creative life, which I use all the time. I think that writing an Adventure Game is very hard and requires you to use things other than a strictly creative muscle to plan out and map all the things that will be happening, and what the player’s motivation is to go to the next place. That sort of process is very comparable to the process of writing fiction.”
Beside working for Wizards, Roy still loves to go to small gaming shops and play Magic. He lives in Philly with his long-term partner, who he met at Wayfinder. He has also recently signed with a literary agency, so we should be seeing something from that before too long. Interestingly, another favorite hobby is “painting miniatures; it brings me great joy. It’s wonderful as a word person to pick up an art hobby that has nothing to do with words.” We’re looking forward to reading more of your words as they come out and are so glad you’ve kept magic and play in your life.
Written by Trine Boode-Petersen April 2025, from an interview in June 2024