Edwards is also co-founder of The Forge, an online community to support indie RPG design and publication.

[1] While Edwards was a graduate student and biology instructor at the University of Florida in 1996, working on his PhD and writing a dissertation about evolutionary theory, he began to design an RPG he called Sorcerer.

[2]: 403  He continued to playtest Sorcerer and produced a fully rewritten version of the game that he began selling in PDF form after acquiring the sorcerer-rpg.com domain.

As Edwards monitored the Usenet discussions, he realized that different players brought dramatically different priorities to the table — what he called Gamism, Narrativism, and Simulationism.

In an online article in 1999, Edwards started to posit what would become his "GNS Theory" of how those three elements were related to techniques used during role-playing.

[1] With Ed Healy, Edwards created the website Hephaestus's Forge in December 1999, as a creator-owned-game publisher site.

In 2015, Edwards created Circle of Hands, a gritty low-magic RPG set in the Iron Age.

The award citation reads in part "First self-published online as a for-sale PDF, Sorcerer — together with its creator and publisher Ron Edwards — represent the potential of the independent innovator in today’s RPG industry [...] His successful nurturing of an online forum dedicated to creator-controlled games have leveraged a mere brilliant game design into the seed crystal of something with the potential to greatly improve adventure gaming.