You walk into a tavern and sit at an open table. The barmaid walks over and asks if you’re here for the open invitation for an adventure. As you look around you notice that everyone in the tavern looks like they could be related…welcome to Gifford Gaming! We are a family that has room for everyone to come join in our adventures, and we’d like you to come along on ours.
Family means more to us than anything! We live in a small town in Utah called Mapleton. About 50 miles south of Salt Lake City between Provo and Spanish Fork. We love this place, it is heaven on earth. Beauty abounds and there isn’t any direction you can look that doesn’t take your breath away. The natural beauty of where we live feeds our love of fantasy stories. We live in the foothills of a mountain range that looks and feels like they were pulled straight from the pages of a Tolkien novel.
In fact, you’ll find out within minutes of meeting any of us, Tolkien is our muse in most things. We all adore the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings books. A common debate is if Andy Serkis or Rob Inglis did a better job narrating the audiobooks. Now, we’ve always been movie buffs and most of us can carry on entire conversations in just movie quotes. (If you allow quotes from The Simpsons and Arrested Development Jake could go the rest of his life without saying an original sentence.) The release of Peter Jackson’s movies really changed things for us. The art of storytelling became something very important to our family. There really isn’t a better storytelling device than table top games like D&D. They transform a solo art into a collaborative one. So playing them as a family comes as natural to us as the brewing of ale and smoking of pipe weed comes to a Hobbit.
This reminds me of a story…
One day we were playing Dungeons and Dragons. My brother’s rogue was messing with dad’s paladin by secretly tossing pebbles at him. During the skill check his dice went over the edge of the table for the fourth time that night. Dad, Ben, had enough of that and disappeared into the office for a few minutes and when he came back he had an 8” square piece of leather with buttons on the corners, creating a makeshift rolling tray for the table. He’d been into leatherwork as a hobby since he was a Boy Scout in the 70’s. It was a quick and dirty solution to a problem we had. It worked and we thought it was awesome. About a week later I took that first rolling tray with me to a game with some friends. Every one of them turned green with envy and demanded I bring more for them next time. They started showing their friends and suddenly we had orders coming in from all over. Next thing we knew we were at farmer’s markets and small conventions selling rolling trays, dice bags, and makeshift notebooks.
The real pivot point for Gifford Gaming was the development of our completely original design, the Campaign Scroll. We were trying to find a way to carry a set of dice and a mini around with us. The prototyping was long and intense. We failed at what felt like a thousand different ideas. The original idea transformed, dropped things, picked up others. Then it coalesced and we had a rolling tray that could, itself roll up into a travel case carrying dice, a notebook, a pen and a character sheet. People went bonkers for it and now we’ve got more than a dozen pieces on offer and we travel all over the country going to conventions and faires.
We live in heaven and work there too.
We found a way to combine some of the things that we love most and shared it with the world. The world responded by giving us something we couldn’t believe, YOU! When you boil it down, that is what Gifford Gaming is. It’s a perfect combination of family, storytelling, leather and sharing. It’s not lost on us how lucky we are to do this and we are eternally grateful to every one one of you that makes it possible for us to do this!
So, thank you all for joining our adventure. Grab a Campaign Scroll, roll for initiative, and let’s get this party started!
