Samuel John Ross Jr. (born July 15, 1971), known as S. John Ross, is a game designer and owner of Cumberland Games & Diversions. He wrote the early
Indie role-playing game
An indie role-playing game is a role-playing game published outside traditional, "mainstream" means. Varying definitions require that commercial, design, or conceptual elements of the game stay under the control of the creator, or that the gam ...
Ross began writing professionally in 1990 writing role-playing material for
Avalon Hill
Avalon Hill Games Inc. is a game company that publishes wargames and strategic board games. It has also published miniature wargaming rules, role-playing games and sports simulations. It is a subsidiary of Hasbro, and operates under the company ...
,
Flying Buffalo
Flying Buffalo Inc. (FBI) is a game company with a line of role playing games, card games, and other gaming materials. The company's founder, Rick Loomis, began game publishing with '' Nuclear Destruction'', a play-by-mail game which started the ...
,
Guardians of Order
Guardians of Order was a Canadian company founded in 1996 by Mark C. MacKinnon in Guelph, Ontario. The company's business output consisted of role-playing games (RPGs). Their first game is the anime inspired ''Big Eyes, Small Mouth''. In 2006 Gua ...
,
Last Unicorn Games
Last Unicorn Games (LUG) was a game publisher owned by Christian Moore that was eventually purchased by Wizards of the Coast.
Last Unicorn developed the collectible card games ''Dune'' (1997) and '' Heresy: Kingdom Come'' (1995) as well as the 19 ...
West End Games
West End Games (WEG) was a company that made board, role-playing, and war games. It was founded by Daniel Scott Palter in 1974 in New York City, but later moved to Honesdale, Pennsylvania. Its product lines included ''Star Wars'', ''Paranoia'', ...
,
White Wolf
A white wolf or Arctic wolf is a mammal of the ''Canidae'' family and a subspecies of the gray wolf.
It may also refer to:
Organizations
* White Wolf (band), a Canadian heavy metal band
* White Wolf (band), white power oi band from the USA
* Whi ...
, and
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 science fiction themes, and formerly an operator of retail stores for games. It is currently a subsidia ...
in addition to his own company, Cumberland Games & Diversions.
Ross designed '' Uresia: Grave of Heaven'' (2003) as an original setting published for the '' Big Eyes, Small Mouth'' role-playing game; it was similar to the style of ''Swords & Sorcery'' anime. Ross created '' Risus: The Anything RPG'' and ''Sparks'' paper miniatures. He also created the retro-science fiction-fantasy role-playing game ''Encounter Critical'', and maintains the All-Systems Library.
His fonts have appeared on television, books and billboards. They have been used by
Anheuser-Busch
Anheuser-Busch Companies, LLC is an American brewing company headquartered in St. Louis, Missouri. Since 2008, it has been wholly owned by Anheuser-Busch InBev SA/NV ( AB InBev), now the world's largest brewing company, which owns multiple ...
,
Atheist Bus Campaign
The Atheist Bus Campaign was an advertising campaign in 2008 and 2009 that aimed to place "peaceful and upbeat" messages about atheism on transport media in Britain, in response to evangelical Christian advertising.
It was created by comedy w ...
,
Comedy Central
Comedy Central is an American basic cable channel owned by Paramount Global through its network division's MTV Entertainment Group unit, based in Manhattan. The channel is geared towards young adults aged 18–34 and carries comedy programmin ...
Penguin Books
Penguin Books is a British publishing house. It was co-founded in 1935 by Allen Lane with his brothers Richard and John, as a line of the publishers The Bodley Head, only becoming a separate company the following year.Ariane Sherine.
In Discordianism, he wrote ''Novus Ordo Discordia, the Gospel of St. Pesher the Gardener,'' which was included in ''Apocrypha Discordia'', and the "foreplay" or foreword for ''Ek-sen-trik-kuh Discordia: The Tales of Shamlicht''., both under the name Patriarch
Wilhelm Leonardo Pesher-Principle.
He was nominated for an
Origins Award
The Origins Awards are American awards for outstanding work in the game industry. They are presented by the Academy of Adventure Gaming Arts and Design at the Origins Game Fair on an annual basis for the previous year, so (for example) the 1979 a ...
for a short stint as editor of ''Pyramid'' magazine, and was named to the Order of the Pineapple along with author Adam Gorightly in 2013. ''Risus 1.5'' was named Best Free RPG at
RPGnet
RPGnet is a role-playing game website. It includes sections on wargames, tabletop games and video games, as well as columns on gaming topics.
RPGnet was founded in 1996 by Emma and Sandy Antunes, Shawn Althouse ( etrigan) and Brian David Phillip ...
in 2001 and he contributed to ''
Pulp Hero
Pulp magazines (also referred to as "the pulps") were inexpensive fiction magazines that were published from 1896 to the late 1950s. The term "pulp" derives from the cheap wood pulp paper on which the magazines were printed. In contrast, magazine ...
'' which received a Silver
ENnie
The ENNIE Awards (previously stylized as ENnie Awards) are awards for role-playing game (RPG) products (including game-related accessories, publications, and art) and their creators. The awards were created in 2001 by Russ Morrissey of EN World ...
for Best Writing in 2006.
Ross has been a named guest at several conventions including Technicon in 1995, 1997, and 1998; A-Kon in 2004 and 2009; and Starland Gamefest in 2013. Ross was a special guest at GameFest held in May 2014.
Personal life
S. John Ross was born as Samuel John Ross Jr., in Cumberland, Maryland on July 15, 1971. He is the son of Sam and Donna Ross. While he lived in various parts of the United States and in Japan, as of early 2014 he lived in Denver, Colorado, with his wife Sandra Ross.
Works
S. John Ross wrote these works:
*'' GURPS Russia'' and ''GURPS Warehouse 23'' for Steve Jackson Games (also, co-authored '' GURPS Grimoire'' and '' GURPS Black Ops'')
*''Among the Clans: The Andorians'' and the '' Star Trek Narrator's Toolkit'' for Last Unicorn Games
*'' Uresia: Grave of Heaven'' for Guardians of Order
*'' Encounter Critical'', originally published as hoax purportedly designed in the 70s.
*'' Risus: The Anything RPG'' and ''Points in Space'' for Cumberland Games & Diversions
*The '' Pokethulhu Adventure Game'' for Squishy Brain Games
*''Treasures of a Slaver's Kingdom'' which won the
XYZZY Award The XYZZY Awards are the annual awards given to works of interactive fiction, serving a similar role to the Academy Awards for film. The awards were inaugurated in 1997 by Eileen Mullin, the editor of ''XYZZYnews''. Any game released during the yea ...
2007 for the best NPCTreasures of a Slaver's Kingdom on ifdb.tads.org “The Big List of RPG Plots”
He was editor and developer of ''The Silicon Valley Tarot'', and the 2nd Edition of '' Murphy's Rules''.
Ross is the owner and creator of Cumberland Games and Diversions, a web-based electronic publishing company specializing in game-related documents and
TrueType
TrueType is an outline font standard developed by Apple in the late 1980s as a competitor to Adobe's Type 1 fonts used in PostScript. It has become the most common format for fonts on the classic Mac OS, macOS, and Microsoft Windows operating ...