Interview with Nathan Rockwood, Creator of the GameMaster's Apprentice Cards

Solo RPGs can sometimes help people overcome the analysis paralysis of creating a story from nothing, by offering them a framework within which they can play and create. That kind of scaffolding is great for students, for gaming adults, and for professional designers, so I hope we see even more interesting work in the realm of solo gaming over the next decade or two!

A long interview with the creator of GameMaster's Apprentice cards. Continuing the solo gaming interviews.

Disclaimer. Rand Roll is an affiliate of Drive Thru RPG.

Chat with Nathan Rockwood of Larcenous Designs

Nathan Rockwood is the creator of GameMaster Apprentice (GMA) decks such as GMA: Science Fiction. There are decks for fantasy, cyberpunk, sea and more. Also the publisher of other titles, including ALONe Solo Game Engine (pay-what-you-want) and a tarot deck.

We have Nathan's gaming story, background of GameMaster's Apprentice, the Tarot Deck, advice on using GMA, ALONe Game System and Teaching Game Design, plus other bits.

What was your gaming story before GM's Apprentice?

When I was a kid, probably in 4th or 5th grade, I found my parents’ old D&D red and blue boxes sitting on a bookshelf. I got into playing it (mostly incorrectly) with my siblings and some friends, and by the end of middle school, we were writing our own systems and adventures.

In 9th grade, I found a D&D group who were much more familiar with the actual rules. We played about weekly, which was great, but our DM was a senior set to graduate that spring, so I stepped up to take on the role for my groups’ sophomore year.

Over the summer, I wrote and prepped and sweated over the details of what at the time seemed like an epic campaign, documenting locations, NPCs, quests, hooks, contingencies, and so on, all starting off with the player characters making a home base out of a specific tavern and the people there.

And then, in the first 20 minutes of the first session, the players burned down the tavern and killed everyone inside because they mistook the Thri-Kreen bartender for a monster.

Looking back, I realize I could’ve done several things differently–including pausing the action and telling them “Roll perception; you see the bug-person is polishing a glass and wearing an apron” – but at the time I was very new to DMing, and I was caught between wanting to let players do what they wanted, and not having the experience to guide without railroading.

So the lesson I took from this was: Never over-prepare. Have some ideas ready, but mostly, lean into whatever the players are interested in, and make it up as you go.

And that strategy worked, at least for us at the time. We played most weekdays for one or two hours after school, and sometimes almost six hours a day on weekends. We played during lunch; party members brought ideas to me while we were walking between classes; we would take over booths at the local cafe/diner to act out the serious business of dungeon traps and puzzles.

I credit that insane number of DMing hours with both my writing/game dev and my teaching careers. I honestly don’t think there’s better prep for managing a classroom of 30 than running games for groups of 5-10. I’m so grateful my players tolerated my shenanigans for so long!

After that year, we moved on from pure D&D to other systems and sometimes other GameMasters; we tried some homebrews of mine, we played some Earthdawn, Vampire, and I even the official Starcraft RPG that was published using the Alternity rules.

My senior year, school year 2003-2004, we tried out GURPS 3rd Edition, which we used to expand a Starcraft game beyond the limited scope of that unique branded box set. We played that for a while, but then discovered Firefly via the magic of VHS tapes a friend had recorded, and group interest shifted. I sent the PC’s Starcraft dropship through a dimensional rift, let them recreate their PCs into ones that fit the Firefly universe, and we just kept on flyin’, as they say.

This was unbelievably fortunate in the long run, since about a year later, as a college freshman in November 2004, I stumbled across a post on a fan-board for the upcoming movie Serenity that claimed to be recruiting playtesters for a an “RPG with a setting we can’t legally announce yet, but which the members of this board will think is shiny.”

Playtesting the Serenity RPG, for which I wrote plenty of fan-content, eventually led to me being hired to officially write the weapons & gear chapter in the core book. Writing game content quickly was my specialty, after all the improvisational GMing, so the fact that I only had two weeks to write that chapter – the first of which was my freshman year exam week – didn’t actually feel that daunting.

That first job led to several more, each with a higher word and chapter count, throughout my college and early graduate/teacher years. In the long run, gaming set me up to be ready for both teaching and professional writing, and let me rack up the credibility to run my first Kickstarter and launch my business, Larcenous Designs.

How did GameMaster's Apprentice (GMA) come about?

(You can find GameMaster Apprntice Cards on DriveThruRPG

Since I continued to GameMaster with little or no prep during my time as a college student/GM/freelance writer, I became very familiar with the struggle of coming up with fitting details on the fly if I wasn’t at least a LITTLE prepped ahead of time. However, I also didn’t want to try and write out big charts, or have to handle flipping around multiple hardback books looking for tables to roll on.

This was before most of us had smartphones, including myself, so the simplest solution was to use MS Word to format a sheet of paper into nine playing-card-sized boxes, type a bunch of names and loot ideas into them, and then abuse student printing privileges and use transparent MtG (Magic: the Gathering) card sleeves to hold them back-to-back, making my first proto-GMA cards.

At first, it was pretty much just names and some gear, but over time, I added more and more content. By 2006, I was also incorporating some solo RPG-style oracle tools in order to use the cards to help me beta-test the content I was writing as a freelancer. You can see that first early draft, along with other versions, in the image from my first Kickstarter, below.

A few years later, I was a newbie teacher living with my spouse and gaming with some friends. When they saw the cards I was using and told me I should try and sell them, I was skeptical but willing to consider it. They hooked me up with a friend who was a graphic designer, the same Max Johnson who continues to be my long-time collaborator on the cards, and in 2014, we Kickstarted the GameMaster’s Apprentice to surprising success.

What are your own experiences with solo rpgs?

I hadn’t really known about them, except as Lone Wolf-style gamebooks, until I was already working on what would become the GMA decks. I was trying to write my own rules for a GM-replacement engine and a friend pointed me in the direction of things that already existed.

Once I realized that solo RPGs were actually a genre/category that existed, that helped me think about the scaffold I had been creating myself, which turned into the earliest versions of what I now call ALONe: A Solo Roleplaying Engine. I used that, plus the early GMA decks, to test out a wide range of RPG rule sets I wrote between 2006 and 2013; I thought I was trying and failing to make my own RPG, but it turns out I was really refining the GameMaster’s Apprentice, over and over again.

Since then, I’ve gotten into a wide range of solo RPGs; while I tend to use ALONe or simply a GMA deck itself for actual roleplaying experiences, I also enjoy things like The Wretched and Chiron’s Doom, which inspired my DTRPG Game Jam entry, And the Bodies were Found the Next Morning.

What makes the Portal Tarot: The Apprentice Deck different to other tarot decks and good for gamers?

The Portal Tarot: The Apprentice is something I wrote to be exactly what I needed myself: A Tarot deck I wouldn’t have to memorize or spend too much time thinking about in order to deploy it as an RPG oracle and idea generator.

The text-only cards in the Apprentice version (which is what I originally Kickstarted, though I did later go on to publish the Master version with full art) are written to be recognizable to someone familiar with other Tarot decks, but to really be aimed at GMs who might not have the background to just pick up a pack of Tarot and use a spread in their game. I personally hate being slowed down by the need to look up information in text and booklets.

So that combination (having the text right on the cards, and having the text be tuned for meanings most likely to be useful in a game) makes the Portal Tarot: The Apprentice a little different from most other decks. Not necessarily better, but more tailor-made for a specific use.

What have been the challenges and highlights of creating GMA for different genres?

That’s a fun question!

So, when making the original GMA cards, which I dubbed the “Base Deck” before realizing that makes it sound like you need the Base Deck to use the others, I tried to tune every card to have content that would fit the broad categories of “Fantasy/Medieval,” “Modern,” and “Futuristic.” That seemed like plenty of effort for a project no one else would ever see–and later, when planning the Kickstarter, it seemed like the most reasonable way to make a product that would have an audience, since it was already so niche that making it with a single genre in mind felt like it would never find enough people to want it.

And then I made the “mistake” of setting myself a dozen stretch goals close enough to hit, adding multiple-times the original content to the project, and it turned out I had been wrong–many people wanted them!

So one of the biggest challenges, really, has been calibrating my expectations properly. I didn’t have any market research or audience at all when I started, so I wasn’t sure what I should be looking to change and update as we added more genres. That is why a few decks had weird unique features, like the Demon Hunters and the Fantasy deck, that don’t match the rest of the original GMA line. I was just spitballing things with my gaming group, and the graphic designer Max would tag in on what was feasible to do good art for.

Highlights have been many, though! It’s a lot of fun to narrow my target down to one genre at a time, since then I can include more off-the-beaten-track ideas in the Sensory Snippets, Belongings, Situation, and Traits sections. I still think the Base Deck can do pretty much anything, but I can’t argue with how much fun it is to make and use something like the Cyberpunk deck.

What advice would you give people using GM's Apprentice for solo or group RPGs?

Don’t be afraid to use them wrong. Even though I have lots of ideas about how you MIGHT use the cards, whether on their own or with ALONe as a full game, they were truly created to be a quick way to reference multiple small things, not to be a big monolithic tool you have to fully engage with.

Whether that means ignoring all the character traits and just looking at the Smell to tell you something about an NPC, or using the Random Event Generator to spit out a PC’s tragic backstory instead of an encounter, or even just redrawing because you didn’t like the answer on the first card, there’s millions of different ways to use the GameMaster’s Apprentice decks, and they’re all equally valid.

You can even use them as a GM engine in a group setting, as long as everyone feels comfortable sharing responsibility for interpreting the cards! While I originally envisioned a traditional GM/players dynamic, where the GM used the cards to prompt new ideas, I’ve had some amazing reports from players who decided to use the GMA for their group’s GM, letting them all play together for the first time!

ALONe 1E has been completed after perservering for ten years. What can you tell us about it?

ALONe 1E has indeed been a decade-long project, and I’m really happy to have put a bit of a bow on it and declared it finished. That said, it’s always been an odd one out in my products.

Rather than having been a thing I set out to make, ALONe is a demonstration of how I used the cards for playtesting other systems, which was a thing always in flux. As a result, unlike my decks of cards or few other projects, it never got to have my full attention for very long, which is certainly part of why it took 10 years to finish!

While I’m very happy with ALONe’s final form as a set of guidelines for narrative solo gaming, I think one of the strongest pitches for it is that it was a living document that was constantly refined and updated with what I learned over a decade of work in the industry. It pairs with the GMA decks, but can also be read as just a set of ideas for telling stories.

I will also say, it helped me have perspective on learning to put down projects. Nothing will ever be perfect, which is why so many of the older games in the industry (and, in fact, ALONe! I can’t believe I didn’t catch this) still have “See Page XX” references that editors missed. But despite those errors, these games are still fun.

What are your next big projects that you can talk about?

Well, first up, and almost complete, is the GameMaster’s Apprentice 2e: Base Deck, and then the GMA2e: Post-Apocalypse deck.

I have some other ideas for GMA genres we might create or update to 2e after that, but those two are pretty much on lock. I had been hoping to have them done over this past summer, but delays pushed me into the school year, and then all bets are off until next summer; so, they might make an appearance sooner, but I’m going to hedge my bets.

After 2e Base and Post Apoc, while more GMA products are a high probability, I also have a few other thoughts. Interactive fiction of all kinds intrigues me, and I’m also considering GM-support products other than the GMA decks.

I am terrible at social media, but I do have a few accounts that people can use to follow me or keep up with releases. I’m mostly available via direct email at LarcenousDesigns@gmail.com, the contact form on my website www.LarcenousDesigns.com, or my BlueSky and Discord (interested folks can hit me up via email for a Discord invite). I technically have a Facebook page for the company, but I don’t interact there much.

Is there anything else you would like to talk about?

In addition to marking 20 years as a published writer/designer in 2025, I am proud to be in my 15th year as a teacher of Game Design.

I love to talk about what a high school game design track can offer kids–especially when they feel like ‘normal’ high school isn’t for them–but since that can be its own entire conversation,

I’ll just say that I think it’s important to remember that creating things (art, writing, games, music, whatever) is good, worthwhile, and important, whether you are creating them to share with others or just for yourself.