Chad "magehammer" Ries has been a comics fan and a gamer for most of his life.  He read his first comic when he was five years old, and played his first tabletop game when he was twelve.  And he's never looked back.

"I just do it because kids want it, and it's nice for me to get back in that way."

Chad Ries has been a teacher for thirty-one years.  He's been a tabletop gamer and a comic book fan for even longer.  You wouldn't think those very different worlds would intersect very much, but you'd be wrong.

Chad isn't what you'd call a "closet" fan—rather, he wears his fandom on his sleeve, and is never opposed to striking up a conversation with someone about the things he loves.  That's how, roughly fifteen years ago, one of his students approached him about starting a gaming group at the school.  Chad took that idea to heart, and the Red Dragon Gaming Society was born.

Since the Society began, Chad has been running it without fail every school year.  Every other Wednesday after school, it's game time.  Even during the shutdowns of the early 2020s, the Society persevered—albeit virtually, via Google Meet.

The best part?  Chad does all of this—hosts the Society, teaches games, plays games with the students, brings in his own games from home for them to make use of—for no additional pay.  It's all for the love of gaming.

"Comic books are magic."

Of course, Comic Book Clique is a primarily comic book site, so how does that tie in here?  Well, Chad is a true fan.  He read his first comic when he was five years old, and he's still reading to this day.  He's not a "put it in the bag and look at it" collector, either.  He's a reader.  Floppies, trades, digital, it doesn't matter.  However he can get his "fix," he will.

If you asked him to pick his single favorite comic series over the years, he'd probably tell you it was the Legion of Super Heroes.  Through all their ups and downs, the various iterations, he's stuck with them and his love has never wavered.

Comics come into play in his classroom, too.  He's got a creative writing course, and one of his assignments was for the students to put together a page of a script for a comic book.

On other occasions, he'd assign a writing project to the class and he would write his own short stories as examples.  Some of these stories later ended up getting placed in a collection of fiction that he self-published.

Even beyond creative writing assignments, comics can be a powerful tool for learning.  He'll tell you that comic books introduced him to science, they introduced him to heroes.  Not bad things for a kid to be learning about.

"I designed the games I really, really wanted to play."

When he's not teaching, running the Game Society, or reading comics, Chad is playing tabletop roleplaying games.  In fact, over the last few years, he's started making his own.

When it comes to roleplaying games, there are games that have a ton of rules, and there are others that are much smaller in scope.  Chad prefers the latter, although he also loves rolling a ton of dice, and he couldn't find any games that truly spoke to him the way he wanted them to.

So, he started making his own.  At first, it was just for himself—he'd write the rules, then he'd record a video for his magehammer's Game Table YouTube channel to test them out and see what his viewers thought.  As his audience grew, people started asking him for the rules.  The games he was making ended up speaking to more than just his intended "audience of one."  So he made a more official-looking PDF and put it on itch.io as a "pay what you want" item.  It did very well, but people wanted print copies, so now he does print on demand on Amazon.

So far, Chad has published four games.  The first was a Dungeons & Dragons-style fantasy game.  Next was a pulp adventure game, then a science-fiction game.  Most recently he added a comic book superhero game to the catalog.

"One of the reasons I started my channel was because I didn't game enough."

We mentioned his YouTube channel, where he posts videos of him playing various games by himself.  He almost never appears on camera—it's just the dice, the miniatures, and his voice.  Chad says that one of the main reasons he started the channel was because he didn't feel like he was gaming enough—but he wasn't able to force himself to sit down and do it more.  By setting up a recording space and giving himself something resembling a schedule, it allowed him to push over the hump and actually do the gaming he wanted to.

It's not that he doesn't like playing with other people on the channel—he's had a few friends make appearances, including CBC's own Fantastic Frank Jarome—but the more people you have, the harder scheduling becomes.  When it's just him, he can head down to the studio and hit record whenever he feels like it.  And that makes all the difference in keeping him in a gaming state of mind.

"I don't care about belt pouches or tiny feet."

His superhero RPG, Defenders and Dangers, is his love letter to old-school comic book supers.  Other than the Legion, some of his other favorite comics are Invincible and Youngblood—two books that take the classic comic tropes without all the corporate trappings of a Marvel or DC book.  He is such an unapologetic fan of Youngblood and its unabashed superhero aesthetic that he can even forgive Rob Liefeld's artistic... eccentricities... more than many readers can.

He says the game took him two or three years to complete.  It took him that long to crack the code on how to handle various powers in his simple dice-pool system.  But crack it he did.  When asked, he said that it will handle anything from non-powered heroes to something just below Superman with no problem.  Once the power level scales above that or edges towards cosmic, the system might not hold together.  Or more accurately, you might not own enough dice for the size that the pool would grow to at those levels.

"Art sells the games.  I will stand and die on that hill."

There's a long and interesting story about Chad's path to self-publishing, but we'll just sum up a few points here.  If you check out any of his games, you'll see that the superhero Defenders and Dangers is the only one that actually contains artwork.  Can't have a comic book game without colorful superhero art, right?  To get the look he wanted, he actually bought a catalog of stock art from an artist on the website DriveThruRPG, and supplemented it with a couple of pieces from a friend.  The use of one main artist gives the book a very consistent look, and it just looks good.

He found that you can make a cover very easily with Canva, and page layout is a snap these days with all the toys available.  So all told, none of the production took very long once the game rules themselves were finalized.  Not bad for something that he describes as a "side hustle."

"I go where the stories are."

At the end of the day, Chad Ries might strike you as an odd choice to feature on Comic Book Clique.  But what are comics but a way for us to tell stories, and to share the things we love with others?  That's exactly what Chad is doing through his Game Society, through his teaching, through his channel, and yes, through his games.

We should all hope to be able to fold the things we love so thoroughly into our day-to-day lives half as well as he does.

If all of that doesn't make him a Local Hero, then we don't know what does.