Emily Care Boss is an indie roleplaying game designer, theorist and publisher. She was a foundational member of The Forge, an early leader in the indie role-playing game movement and is considered the creator of the American Freeform genre of roleplaying games, which combine indie RPG principles and mechanics with Nordic freeform and American chamber live action role-playing techniques. Her game, Under My Skin was winner of the Audience Choice Award at Fastaval 2009. She has been referred to as the "Dean" of the North American school of structured freeform game design.
Career
Emily Care Boss got into role playing games during college in the 1990s, playing Ars Magica with a shared world created by friends. She credits talking with people at the Forge Forums during the early 2000s with helping her get into design and self-publishing. Her first game Breaking the Ice was published in 2005. In 2009 and 2010 she published two volumes of RPG Zine, which stood for "Role Playing Girl". Boss and fellow Forge theorist Vincent Baker are co-credited with formulating the Lumpley Principle, which states, "System is defined as the means by which the group agrees to imagined events during play." Further development of the Lumpley Principle describes player contributions as being assigned credibility by the other players in the game. She authored Dream Bear, a game about exploring dreams and symbolism. She also coined the concept of "bleed" at Ropecon 2007 and defined it as the emotional transfer between player and character, in either direction, during a role-playing game. In addition to her design work, Boss is the founding owner of Black & Green Games, which is best known its romance-themed indie games, Breaking the Ice, Shooting the Moon, and Under My Skin. The three have been collected into one volume as the Romance Trilogy in 2016, which was nominated for the Diana Jones Award for Excellence in Gaming in 2017. Many of her games have been noted as being adept at handling narratives of romance and sex, and Boss has been outspoken about the handling of love and sex in the design of RPGs and LARPs. Boss was a contributor to the role playing journals Push, Playground Worlds, the Knutepunkt publication States of Play, and the companion publications for WyrdCon in 2012 and 2013. She organized the JiffyCon series of indie roleplaying game mini-conventions in Massachusetts. Her game Last Chance Noir is a LARP game inspired by the Intercon LARP convention she attends every year. From 2005-2009 she co-wrote an RPG theory and design blog Fair Game, with fellow designer Meguey Baker. She was a contributor on a panel that wrote The Wyrd Con Companion Book 2012. She was on the programming team for the Living Games Conference in 2014, helped in 2016, and chaired the conference in 2018. She assisted with judging in the second "Golden Cobra Challenge" for LARPing in 2015. Her game Bubblegumshoe, a Gumshoe System Teen Noir setting, written with Ken Hite and Lisa J. Steele, won the 2017 Gold ENnie Award for Best Family Game.
