Hi! My name is Ben Lehman. I write tabletop role-playing games and sometimes other sorts of games. This is the webpage for my company, These are our Games. You can find detailed information on each game using the links on the right, or news in the posts below.

Despite the name, it’s just me running the show.

About the games:
Polaris: Chivalric Tragedy at Utmost North is a tragic fantasy game. The players play the Knights of the Order of the Stars, an ancient order sworn to save civilization from its own Mistake, and the demons that they have brought into the world. It’s famous for its system of key phrases, which resolve conflict via prices, rather than die rolls, and for its use of the Cosmos which divides responsibilities for the game between four players, rather than a single game master. Polaris won the Indie RPG Award for 2005.

Bliss Stage is a young adult post-apocalyptic romantic fantasy. In it, a small band of surviving teenagers fight a group of mysterious dream-like aliens with robots made of mechanized love. It’s a giant robot combat game which focuses on the personal cost of conflict, and hope for the future, rather than exact figures and heat sinks. It’s famous for it’s system of relationship handling, and the anchor-pilot system which combines mission-based scenarios with in-character role-playing.

The Drifter’s Escape is an anthology of short fiction, written by my brother Jake Lehman, and a role-playing game, written by me. Both the stories and the game have uniquely American themes: Isolation, independence, the discontinuity of our history, and our need to forge our own morality in the face of a vast moral vacuum. It is not famous for anything, yet, because it hasn’t been released, but it is — as far as I know — the first ever anthology of prose fiction and a role-playing game. At least, the first one which does not have the stories as simply play reports of the game.

There are also some miscellaneous games.

About me:
I am a 28 year old guy from rural northern California. I’m been playing and designing role-playing games for most of my life. I’m currently a graduate student in China Studies at the University of Washington. I alternate living on the west coast of the US and China. My games come out of the Forge tradition of game design: they have rules which are fun to play, which I expect you to follow, and which are complete and give full instructions on how to play the game.

About These are our Games:
These are Our Games isn’t quite enough to make me a living, but it is run as a serious business and at a profit. The internet and print-on-demand technologies have democratized the publishing world in a leap unheard of since the printing press, allowing creators to communicate and publish directly to their audiences, without much in the way of overhead costs or barriers to entry. This is both a good and a bad thing (I have feet in both the new and old publishing worlds) but I think that the social influence is overwhelmingly good. My own publishing is my way of contributing to this new society.

Along these lines, I strongly support any and all new independent publishing endeavors, particularly those that are profitable to their artists. I’m happy to give advice and consultation to anyone interested in starting their own endeavor on the scale of These are our Games: just contact me at taogames@gmail.com . My experience is mostly with selling eBooks and physically bound role-playing games, but I’m happy to talk to anyone about their projects, future plans, business goals, etc.

Further, although I do not personally use any open licensing, I encourage responsible re-use of my material in both the free and for-profit spheres. If you want to or have already produced a derivative work, please contact me for a personalized license. Thou art but a Warrior is the first product of this sort, but it will not be the last and I’d be glad to count your work amongst it.