Peter Freeby looks every inch a Brooklynite – from the New Yorker tote bag slung over his shoulder to his mustard yellow sweater and complementary plaid yellow scarf.

Herbert Von King Park, located in the middle of Brooklyn’s “Bed-Stuy” neighborhood, is his office of choice when the weather permits. “It’s good lighting,” he says as he pulls out his laptop for a video call.

Freeby is a digital designer, self-described “freelance COO” and his latest passion project will turn into a full-time gig in January 2023 – a startup mobile app for tabletop roleplaying games (RPGs) called Tabletop Town.

Tabletop Town is “an app to play Dungeons and Dragons and eventually other tabletop role-playing games on your phone,” Freeby explains, “asynchronously and mobile-first.”

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, game players all over the world moved online to continue their fantastical quests. The pen and paper of tabletop RPGs were switched out for messaging apps like WhatsApp and Discord. The gaming community is active in the process of adapting to this new medium of play.

A tabletop role-playing game is a social activity where a group of players create their own “characters” to play their chosen game. The players then progress as their characters through a real-time, turn-based quest or adventure story.

Tabletop RPGs are incredibly popular in the gaming world, with over 50 million adventurers playing the original RPG Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) since its inception in 1974.

As evidenced by the name, tabletop RPGs are usually designed to play on a table. However, in an increasingly digital world, many “tabletop” games are moving online. Websites like Roll 20 and D&D Beyond have already broken the market for digital tabletop gaming platforms. The developers of Tabletop Town, Freeby included, are looking to break into a new demographic with their app launch – mobile players.

Even Freeby’s own adventures resemble the ones he hopes Tabletop Town will be able to tell. Though it would be easy to mistake Freeby for a New York native, he originally hails from the opposite coast.

“I grew up in Grover Beach, California,” he said, “and I always wanted to move to a big city because I desperately felt the need to move to a place where people aren't like me – or at least people didn't look like me.”

Freeby initially started his journey at The King’s College as a Politics, Philosophy and Economics (PPE) student. Before graduating in 2015, however, he ended up changing over to the school’s Media, Culture and the Arts major.

“I wanted to be president of the United States,” he says with a chuckle. “So [PPE] was my first major. Within six months, I had an iPad and I was reading the dredges of political discourse in The Hill app and the Politico app. I just got so disenchanted with the whole idea that anything could be done in an interesting way in politics.”

After moving to New York City, Freeby began to see “all kinds of problems with Republicanism in general... Part of that was through dating queer people and figuring out that I was bisexual. Part of it was knowing literally anyone that wasn't just a cis white person. That wasn't very common in my upbringing.”

With the advantage of hindsight, Freeby now believes that the best part of his education at King’s was the opportunity it gave him to embark on his own journey into adulthood in New York City.

“I think the real reason why I went to King’s, looking back on that time in my life, was because I needed to go to a big city,” Freeby says. “I love cities. I've always been a city boy, even when I was living in a weird small town.”

While Freeby was a college student, he started pursuing different job opportunities in freelance digital design. This caught the attention of Paul Glader, Professor of Journalism, Media and Entrepreneurship and director for the McCandlish Phillips Journalism Institute (MPJI) at King’s. “After Peter graduated, I hired him for design projects with MPJI,” Glader says.

Freeby served as the Program Associate for MPJI from 2017 to 2019, designing the current logo and building the website. MPJI launched the Journalism, Culture and Society major in the fall of 2017, and Freeby played a foundational role in designing the logo, website and other digital systems for The Empire State Tribune.

Freeby then worked for Glader on various startups including Religion Unplugged, The Media Project and VettNews. “I was doing the digital construction,” he said, “building infrastructure and doing a lot of design, advertising and marketing for different companies and startups.”

“Peter’s a really good example of a different kind of King’s student who goes outside of the curriculum, networks in the city [and] develops skills on their own as they work with and for institutions,” Glader says. “That’s really cool, and I’ve liked working with Peter over the years.”

After working with Glader full-time for several years, Freeby struck out on his own as a freelance digital designer with clients such as the Artist Estate Studio.

“I spent my 20s essentially making as little money as I could find for as much responsibility and breadth of experience as I could get,” Freeby explains. “I had this real sense of like, ‘I have to do something important,’ and I got so exhausted. You don't have to do something important for something to be meaningful. You can make stuff that's as simple as a D&D app. That's solving a real problem that people have with how easy it is to play D&D.”

The traditional way of playing tabletop RPGs involves many solid chunks of time that few people have in their regular schedules. Weekly playing sessions, or “campaigns,” can often run for four to six hours each time and continue for months on end. This barrier to entry is the problem that Freeby and his team are setting out to solve.

“What we're trying to do is make it so that you can play asynchronously on your phone,” Freeby said. “I could drop in for five minutes when I'm on my lunch break. People can play parts of the game when they’re done with their shift, or whatever else it is that they’re doing living their lives. Working class people don't often have a Dungeons and Dragons amount of time to be able to spend on their hobbies.”

Freeby has been playing various tabletop RPGs since he was young. “My first tabletop role playing game was the Star Wars roleplaying game,” Freeby recalls fondly. “I also played Warhammer and [other] stuff a little bit growing up, but those didn't quite stick as much.”

Freeby properly discovered the tabletop roleplaying community of D&D after graduating college. In order to try and “reconnect with my friends in California, we would play remote. Some of it was over Covid, but we did a little bit of that before then too.”

With most of Freeby’s gaming friends living across the country, sitting down around a table to play D&D isn’t very feasible. “I came up with the idea a while ago,” he says, “and then me and my best friend were working on it… we put together a team and now we even have a marketing department.”

Freeby and his team are still building the nuts and bolts of the app, but it is well on its way to a May 2023 public launch. “We're in the alpha stage right now,” he explains. “I have it installed on my phone, and the rest of our team does as well… We've gone through about six cycles of bug fixes and stuff like that. We've got probably 70% of the app done at this point.”

Tabletop Town’s team recently completed a three-month startup course with Batchery, a “seed investment startup incubator” that connects startups with potential investors through various mentorship programs and networking opportunities.

Freeby and his team are taking a definite risk in launching a startup business. Nine out of ten startups fail on average, according to Fortune Magazine. Freeby, however, is not so easily dissuaded. Armed with the experience of working for several successful startups, he expressed confidence in finding investors to support the project.

“When you talk to an investor, so much of the time they're like, ‘How are you going to save the world?’” Freeby says. “That's how founders [usually] pitch stuff. If you instead talk to them and be like, ‘Look, this is a stable business model that makes sense. It's been proven by a bunch of other products… we're just doing it in one particular way that no one else is doing it. And we think we have a strategic advantage for X, Y and Z reasons.’ Then investors are like, ‘Oh, I don't have to get stressed out about it. It can just be fun.’ People love that. I know it's been a huge weight off my shoulders to be able to work on startup stuff while also not getting stressed out about it.”

As the RPG community continues to transition into digital spaces, Freeby is anticipating what individuals are looking for in their efforts to play their favorite games online.

“The way the internet community functions right now is in a massive state of flux,” Freeby said. “There’s the potential death of major social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook. A lot of these platforms have been explicitly antagonistic toward their users… Having smaller pools of community might be the way to go, and that’s what Tabletop Town is trying to tap into.”

With latte and laptop in hand, Freeby is stepping into the uncertain territory of startups with the goal of bringing fellow gamers together on a mobile platform to play anywhere, anytime.
Melinda Huspen is the Managing Editor of the Empire State Tribune. She is a junior at The King’s College studying Journalism, Culture and Society.

King’s Alum Peter Freeby Sets Sights on New Mobile RPG App