Ian Marsh

Ian Marsh (born 2 October 1960 in Canterbury, Kent, England) is a British writer, magazine editor, and entrepreneur.

Early life

Ian Marsh grew up in Ramsgate. When he was a child, he fell ill with mumps and was confined to bed; because of this, his father bought him a Westland Lysander model kit by Airfix. The relatively popular fanzine also included reviews, articles about computer games, and a regular column about Diplomacy. Marsh continued to publish DragonLords after he entered university in 1978, and it was well-regarded, even garnering a positive review from Dungeons & Dragons co-creator Gary Gygax in distant Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, who wrote "DragonLords is a well done amateur effort which seems bent on improving itself and the hobby." Paul Mason considered Marsh's experience with DragonLords "a stepping stone to professional involvement in publishing".

Editor After graduating from University of Surrey with an honours degree in Materials Technology (metallurgy) in 1983,

Writer and editor In 1986, Marsh joined the staff of the new (but short-lived) Adventurer magazine, writing a column of games industry news and gossip titled "The Town Crier" that first appeared in Issue 3 (August-September 1986). Marsh's final column appeared in Issue 9 (April 1987), shortly before the magazine's demise.

In 1989, Marsh realized that the Doctor Who game license owned by FASA had expired, and he approached Peter Darvill-Evans at Virgin Books about creating a new Doctor Who role-playing game. The two men produced the role-playing game Time Lord, published as a paperback in 1991. By 1996, after the book had fallen out of print, Marsh regained the rights to Time Lord and made it available as a free download on the internet. When Strategy Plus combined with an American magazine to become Computer Games Strategy Plus, Marsh joined the magazine's UK staff as production editor in late 1991. Marsh scaled back the painting business and Fighting 15s became a UK mail order firm and distribution agent for several miniatures companies including Eureka Miniatures (Australia), Oddzial Osmy (Poland), AB Figures (UK) and Black Hat Miniatures (UK).

Marsh formed a publishing wing of the company called Oozlum Games, and used it to market several properties including: Huzzah!, a set of Napolenic rules written by Marsh; Martian Empires by Mike Lewis, a wargame in the Victorian science fiction style of H. G. Wells that uses the Martian Empires miniatures.