Stephan Michael Sechi is a

game designer Game design is the art of applying design and aesthetics to create a game for entertainment or for educational, exercise, or experimental purposes. Increasingly, elements and principles of game design are also applied to other interactions, in ...

who has worked primarily on

role-playing game A role-playing game (sometimes spelled roleplaying game, RPG) is a game in which players assume the roles of player character, characters in a fictional Setting (narrative), setting. Players take responsibility for acting out these roles within ...

Career

In 1982, Stephan Michael Sechi, Steven Cordovano and Vernie Taylor each put in $600 and formed the company Bard Games to produce their own ''

Dungeons & Dragons ''Dungeons & Dragons'' (commonly abbreviated as ''D&D'' or ''DnD'') is a fantasy tabletop role-playing game (RPG) originally designed by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson. The game was first published in 1974 by TSR (company)#Tactical Studies Rules ...

'' supplements. Sechi and Cordovano's '' The Compleat Alchemist'' (1983) was the company's first product and presented a new character class: a magic-item maker. Sechi's '' The Compleat Adventurer'' (1983) offered a number of variant classes for thieves and fighters, while Sechi and Taylor's '' The Compleat Spell Caster'' (1983) presented many variant magic-user classes. Sechi oversaw Bard's next project, '' The Atlantis Trilogy'' for Bard Games, which took three years to complete but eventually the three books were published as '' The Arcanum'' (1984), '' The Lexicon'' (1985), and '' The Bestiary'' (1986). Due to personal and financial disagreements that arose in the wake of his completion of ''The Atlantis Trilogy'', Sechi sold his shares in Bard Games to Cordovano and left. Over the next three months he began work on another trilogy of supplements that would form the basis of a new RPG; Cordovano decided that he did not want to run Bard Games and sold it back to Sechi, who now had a publishing house to produce his new game which he called ''

Talislanta ''Talislanta'' is a fantasy role-playing game written by Stephen Michael Sechi and published by Bard Games in 1987. There have been six different English-language editions and several foreign language editions published. All English-language pr ...

'' (1987) . The success of ''Talislanta'' allowed Sechi to collect his ''Atlantis'' setting material into a new sourcebook, ''Atlantis: The Lost World'' (1988) and shortly afterward could publish a second edition of the ''Talislanta'' game in the ''Talislanta Handbook & Campaign Guide'' (1989). When a buyer from

Waldenbooks Waldenbooks, operated by the Walden Book Company, Inc., was an American shopping mall-based bookstore chain, from 1995 as a subsidiary of Borders Group. The chain also ran a video game and software chain under the name Waldensoftware, as well as a ...

placed a huge order on ''Atlantis: The Lost World'', Sechi was reluctant to fill it but eventually did; about a year later many of the books were returned, forcing Bard Games to refund about $20,000. Sechi repaid its debts to the book trade, paid off his partner, and then shut Bard Games down. Sechi retained control of Bard Games' properties, and licensed the rights to

Wizards of the Coast Wizards of the Coast LLC (often referred to as WotC or simply Wizards) is an American publisher of games, primarily based on fantasy and List of science fiction themes, science fiction themes, and formerly an operator of retail stores for ga ...

, Death's Edge Games,

Daedalus Entertainment Daedalus Entertainment was a Canadian game company that produced role-playing games and game supplements. History Daedalus Games began when Robin Laws approached Jose Garcia in 1993 with an idea for a Hong Kong Action Cinema RPG; Garcia liked the ...

, and Pharos Press. In 2005, Morrigan Press licensed ''Talislanta'' from Sechi and simultaneously bought the rights to two of the ''Atlantis'' books, ''The Lexicon'' and ''The Besitary''. In 2010, Sechi placed the entire corpus of ''Talislanta'' books under a

Creative Commons Creative Commons (CC) is an American non-profit organization and international network devoted to educational access and expanding the range of creative works available for others to build upon legally and to share. The organization has release ...

license.

References

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Sechi, Stephan Michael Living people Role-playing game designers Year of birth missing (living people)