Oaths and Fates

Interlude: Commitment

2011-12-20T21:18:00.000-08:00

There are great men in the world - I've met some of them - but caught like everyone else in the vast Titanic millwheels of our world-spanning culture they can do nothing alone. One person's intense, passionate commitment is necessary but not sufficient to change the world.

It took a community to keep Wizards of the Coast alive through the bleak winter of 1992-3. Friends, family, fans, and colleagues pooled their resources to keep this tiny venture going through the worst crisis it ever experienced. This crisis wasn't resolved with the creation of Magic: The Gathering. Late in 1993, many months after Magic had already become the phenomenal commercial success it's now seen as, Wizards itself and its staff and contractors were still suffering financially for reasons we'll discuss in the coming year. Friends, family, fans, and colleagues continued to keep Wizards alive, helping it cross the chasm from creating a great game to creating a sustainable company.

We'll explore how Wizards survived the lawsuit, how such a tiny, cash-strapped company managed to create and bankroll the hit of the decade, and what they hoped for at the time - why they did the things they did. We'll see some of the crude, xeroxed cards that predated the final, fantastic graphic design, explore the essential but ill-examined role of Cornish College of the Arts in Magic's success, and follow the Magic road show as the Wizards team toured small game shops and conventions introducing people to their little labor of love, building their fan base one person at a time. Along the way, we'll flash back to the earlier years and fill in some of the story that I skimmed so blithely past in my July posts, including the vital role of the Internet in Wizards's survival. We'll see pictures of items from Wizards's history never before shown, and we'll read contemporary accounts of small, quiet, little-known events that set in motion the big splashy results that made the papers. We'll peek inside an early staff meeting that would not end, in which Wizards began wrestling with the sometimes intractable problem of how to get a group of passionate people with different ideas to agree on a single decision. As Lisa Stevens said in that meeting, "But what if in the end you can't agree? Who gets to make the decision when the process falls apart?" We'll start working on the problem of bringing these people to life for you, so you better understand who did these things and why.

But what we'll come back to over and over is the role of commitment, how very much commitment it takes to do something like this, not just the intense commitment of one or two or a dozen people but also the vast, persistent commitment of an entire community to back their plays and hold them up when they would otherwise fall down. Peter used to laugh when people praised him for this thing "he was doing," because he knew how very many people it took to do it. The search for simple answers, sound bites, and sufficiently scanty column inches strips the truth from our understanding of the world, leaves us believing in caricatures instead of characters, truthiness instead of truth; let's rip those veils aside and see who the Wizards really were.

But before we continue this journey, let's be honest with one another.

This project is not my top priority. I have many commitments ahead of it - to principles, to people, and to the same professional quest that in the 1990s led me to repeatedly turn down Peter's offers to come join his so very happily lost boys and girls. I am committed to those higher priorities in my life, and I will put them ahead of this history project whenever I am forced to choose, but I will often not be forced to choose. Because I have no children, I have room in my life for more than the usual number of commitments. This is one of them. It will not get lost in the shuffle, though it may come and go like a recurring haunting.

I live a life of tides, and if you join me on this journey you will too. Sometimes I will post every day for weeks on end when the demands of higher priorities on my time ebb, sometimes silent months will pass by when they flow. But I will always be thinking about this project, talking to Wizards folks about what it was like back in the day, looking for the time to post, searching for the thread of the narrative.

This project matters to me for reasons that may be clear to you by the time you read the book at the end of this road. I'm committed to it, even during these quiet times. During the winters of this blog I'm putting down roots to prepare for the riotous blossoms of its springs.

Here it comes.

Wizards: Peter on the Cusp, Part Thirteen

2011-10-12T20:01:00.000-07:00

Whether they realize it or not, businesses plan in layers. When times get rough, when the pressure's on, we can give up our shallow plans readily enough, but we're reluctant to surrender more deeply laid plans. If things go badly enough for long enough, our layers of plans are stripped away from us.

Eventually we come to the bottom of our conscious planning and are left with what we think is our foundational desire for our company. That one we do not give up lightly. That one, if we surrender it, we do so with despair, ready to give everything up. But it's only the conscious foundation of our company; it's not our real deal breaker. This "last" plan contains too many optional components to which we are emotionally attached, so though we would never dream it at the time, when the "worst" comes to pass we discover to our surprise after a period of grieving that this too we can give up, because there was a deeper unconscious bottom line that can keep us going so long as we do not have to surrender it. It's only when we must give up what we thought was our bottom line that we discover our real bottom line, what we really care about.

This is the point of the ancient Greek admonition Gnothi Seauton - know thyself: that we think we know ourselves but we are wrong. It is not until we are fully tested under the right kind of pressure that we begin to discover how many of our attachments are inessential, that we begin to discover what our true bottom line is.

In December 1992, Peter did not want to move backward. After the long, hard struggle to put together a great team, create a steady stream of products, and approach break-even, he did not want to give that up again. He wanted to move only forward, but the lawsuit gave him no choice. He had to surrender and grieve.

But he found when his back was against the "wall" that it wasn't really a wall, that he could step further backward with his team and they could still survive and still keep working (albeit more slowly) on keeping Wizards of the Coast going. They did not know their future anymore, the lawsuit might eventually do them in for good, but at that moment they could keep going, could keep making plans and searching for ways to make things better.

They discovered that they did not have to surrender when they thought they would, that they could reposition themselves and keep trying, remaining open to opportunities.

A wise businessman once told me that the most important secret to succeeding in business is just to survive long enough, because opportunities cannot be precisely predicted. You may go through very long droughts that seem endlessly dire, but sooner or later opportunities do come along, and when they do they go to the company that found a way to keep going and to remain open to the unpredictable possibilities that lay ahead. The commitment to survive - avoiding despair, avoiding gambling with your future - is the key to survival.

During the 1992-1993 drought at Wizards of the Coast, everyone found other sources of income to keep them going while they slowly pushed the company forward through its difficulties.

Peter Adkison continued to work at Boeing full time, as he had since the beginning of Wizards.

Lisa Stevens edited Volo's Guide to the North (AD&D 2nd Edition, Forgotten Realms, TSR).

Beverly Marshall Saling edited Werewolf: Drums around the Fire (White Wolf) and White Wolf Magazine Issue 37 (White Wolf) and proofed a book for the University of Alaska, but she was largely able to focus on Wizards full time or near full time thanks to my job at the Department of Veterans Affairs.

Jesper Myrfors contributed art to Vampire The Masquerade Second Edition: Players Guide (White Wolf), Vampire: The Anarch Cookbook (White Wolf), Vampire: Chicago by Night (White Wolf), and Sentinels (Role Aids, Mayfair Games).

Jay Hays worked at a club.

Cathleen Adkison, Lisa and George Lowe, Ken McGlothlen, Rich Kaalaas, Dave Howell, Mike Cook, Jonathan Tweet, and the many other people who had not been working full time recently for Wizards continued to rely on their other jobs to pay the bills. These other jobs, these other gaming products, and friends and family kept Wizards alive through this dark time.

Peter's 1993 narrative about this (in which I make my own oblique appearance in his narrative):

But a couple of weeks ago for some reason things started picking up. I'm not sure why, but partly it's because we realized that we can actually move forward and continue publishing products with all of us working on a part-time basis. Probably because we've gotten pretty proficient at our respective tasks here. Jesper's living at home and said he could go without pay indefinitely, particularly since his involvement here at WotC has gotten him some free-lance contracts for other companies (an upcoming White Wolf book is being entirely illustrated by him, and I hear they liked it well enough that he's going to be doing another one). I'd been working full time here and at Boeing (I've averaged over eighty hours of work a week for the last two years) and didn't need WotC income, Jay said he could work part time for WotC and full time elsewhere and manage Design & Development from home through e-mail if he could take home one of the computers, Beverly said she could probably get by with her husband's full-time job if she could pick up some free-lance editing, and Lisa's working part-time freelancing too (she just edited a book for TSR, for more money than I'd been paying her for three months worth of work!).

Postscript: Looking at that list of editing and illustration side projects, once again you can see Lisa Stevens contributing crucially in the clutch to keep Wizards alive. Her experience, rolodex, relationships, and networking savvy continued to make the difference in the survival and development of Wizards.

Interlude: Work and Research

2011-08-17T07:19:00.000-07:00

Fear not. My series on the history of Wizards will resume in a couple weeks.

This coming weekend is the annual meeting of the board of directors of my nonprofit, so I've been focusing for the last several weeks on preparations for it and on associated support work.

During this time, however, I've also been continuing with my research, including interviews with Carol Monahan and John Miller and digging through Beverly's Daytimer archives for 1993 and 1994 to help pin down events and dates. After the board meeting I'll start scheduling a series of interviews with various Wizards founders and early alumni, so we'll have plenty of eyewitnesses to history helping to develop the story of how it all came about.

Who Will Speak for the Dead?

2011-07-25T22:41:00.000-07:00

Paul Randles, 1965-2003

When I began this project, I wanted to include the words, stories, pictures, and perspectives of the people of Wizards of the Coast themselves. That would help the reader break free of my perspective and observations, break free of my voice and diction to let the people speak for themselves. It will take some time to put together all the interviews and collect all the writings to make this possible, but it's part of why I jumped into my first series by writing around Peter's 1993 narrative; it gave me a way to start immediately practicing what I want to do in the book itself.

When I began this project, I also knew to do this I would have to give special consideration to the dead, to those who were just as alive, just as real, just as much a part of Wizards as those still living but whose mute lips no longer give voice to their memories, whose still fingers cannot write their stories, whose candles no longer light our way. The dead are so quiet now, it is easy to forget that they are there, that they have stories to tell, that their lives and perspectives still matter, despite the difficulties we now face in learning and sharing them. Of the many people whose tales I must become custodian to, must help shepherd into this community's shared story, I have known from the beginning that these are the people I must help the most, must not forget, must bring to life on the page so that in today's pretense of an eternal present at least in this one story we will remember our silent friends, their words, their deeds.

They deserve special consideration because that's the only way to compensate for their silence now, the only way to give them their fair share of our attention now that they cannot speak for themselves. The past is just as real as the present; what they did then is just as vital and complex and interesting as what we do now. They cared as much as we care, thought as much as we think, worked as hard as we work, loved as much as we love. The past in which they still live and breathe is the larger story of which our lives at this moment are just a tiny part, and their present is our future.

Judy Sorenson, 1954-2011

Because we all walk the same road they have traveled before us. We will all pass through that mortal veil they have stepped through.

Blind Homer wrote that we are ephemeroi, creatures of a season, very like the leaves on a tree. We are all born. We all live. We all die. We are one people, quick or dead. We are bound together not just by the ways we touch each other's lives but also by our shared story, our one human, mortal frame within which we work the art of our lives. We are defined not by the nobility of our births or the ease of our deaths, but by the good we do with the time we have, by the art and justice and love we create and share. That is our legacy to the future. That is how we show our gratitude and respect for the past. That is the debt the quick owe the dead.

When I began this project, I knew we would have to work together to speak for Papa Christmas, to write for Judy Sorenson, to remember the others who should not be forgotten.

That much I knew, but I never dreamed that Bobby would be among them. Now he has left us to join them, so we must speak and act for him, too, so that his art and justice and love live on, so the part he played in helping Wizards of the Coast become what it was and helping us become who we are is remembered.

Ars longa, vita brevis, Bobby. Your candle is dark now, your fingers still, your lips silent, but our candles will illuminate you, our fingers will write your stories, our lips will give voice to your memories. The good you would have done, now we will do. We will laugh for you now, dear friend.

Robert McSwain, Junior, 9 September 1955 - 22 July 2011, Rest in Peace

2011-07-24T10:21:00.000-07:00

Mr. Bob, rest in peace

I just found out this morning that our dear friend Bob McSwain, Jr. (known to many in Walla Walla and at Wizards of the Coast as Mr. Bob) died from cardiac arrest on Friday afternoon at 3:25 pm. It had been a difficult time for Bob recently. He contracted a flesh-eating disease in May and had to have a foot amputated on May 8th, and then his father passed away on June 22nd.

He is survived by his sister Peggy Stimach, his son Robert McSwain III and daughter Sandra Mejorado. Peggy is planning a memorial and will let us all know the details when she has them figured out. As soon as I know more about the memorial I'll post them, including where flowers or donations can be made.

I know many of you loved Mr. Bob and will share our grief at this sad news.

Wizards: Peter on the Cusp, Memorandum

2011-07-23T14:28:00.000-07:00

Peter Adkison, 29 March 2011

Most startups go through a period that feels like the turning of a vice. We start with excitement and hope and begin to carry out our plans, and fairly quickly we begin to run into the tasks we need to resolve to get where we want to go. We begin to run into obstacles we cannot solve and must instead go around; our goals begin to shift as we search for ways to continue in the general direction we had in mind. Along the way we pick up burdens we have to carry, worries, debts, and responsibilities; just when we get used to carrying the load, we are surprised and disappointed to discover we must carry yet more.

At some point, we find ourselves lost in our work, turned all about from changing directions so many times, and staggering under the load we have to carry. There comes a point when yet one more task or obstacle or burden becomes the proverbial straw that breaks the camel's back. We lose our composure and begin to wonder whether we're being punished somehow.

Those of you who have never tried to start a company may think I'm exaggerating, but go ask your friends who have. Every entrepreneur knows about the long, dark night of the soul. Every classic story structure runs through this arc, because it is the arc of all our stories, the arc of life. One way or another, anyone who decides to become an actor in their own lives, who strives to change the world or their lives in some way, knows this moment.

Here is what Peter wrote on Thursday, 3 December 1992 when he faced his moment. He feared his team's disappointment when he sent it, but he stepped up to the plate, described their situation, responsibilities, and options, and helped them to see that there was still hope left, were still ways forward for their little company if only they could keep the faith.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

MEMORANDUM

Wizards of the Coast, Incorporated

------------------------------------------------------------------------

   Date: December 3rd, 1992

   Memo: PDA145

   From: Peter D. Adkison

   To: Cathleen Adkison
   Tom Des Brisay
   Jay Hays
   John W. Jordan
   Lisa Lowe
   Jesper Myrfors
   Beverly Marshall Saling
   Lisa Stevens

   CC: Michael Cook
   Ken McGlothlen

   RE: The severity of our financial situation

The financial situation with Wizards of the Coast has continued to deteriorate over the last few weeks. The stock solicitation is proceeding too slowly and my hopes are declining with every passing rejection. I think the company has to face the fact that we may have failed to jump immediately to that top tier in the roleplaying industry that we were hoping for.

The purpose of this memo is not to announce a major scaling back at this time, but to warn you that this eventuality may be imminent. Two days ago we went through our end-of-the-month bills and payroll and it happened to coincide with a threat about overdue taxes. It was pointed out to me by our friends in the government that if I didn't pay some of our taxes I could go to jail. Needless to say, we paid some taxes and that contributed, along with consignment fees to Steve Sechi, a payment to our attorney, and some other things, to our not making payroll.

Furthermore, unless we receive a tremendous amount of money, I'm not going to make payroll until after I return from the Palladium lawsuit preliminary hearing on the 14th of this month. At that time our employees will be due two payroll checks and I can't guarantee we'll be able to make those.

When I return from that hearing we will have to make a serious decision on how we can proceed from there. If we do not win the summary judgement then we'll be looking at a very expensive court case. And before we can even continue with the case we'll have to settle up our current outstanding balance, which I believe is on the order of $8,000 or so. Worse, because this balance has been delinquent so long, we may even have to pay a retainer on top of that. The bottom line is that I've got to posture the company to where we can pay them a sizeable sum in a couple weeks, and since we currently have a negative banking account balance (I'm hoping that some of the overseas deposits which I have no way of knowing about are covering this) this means the company basically won't be writing any checks over the next couple weeks. I think I can scrape together $100 for Beverly, Jay, and Lisa Stevens, but that's it until after the court hearing.

If everything goes well we'll win the summary judgement and we'll get ten or fifteen grand in investments by the 15th. But if we get less than that, or if we don't win the court hearing, than I think the company will have to go to a major fallback position. This would probably consist of a scenario composed of some steps along the following lines:

No cash salaries. This would mean we'd probably lose most of our current staff. The only work we'd be able to pay cash for would be contract work, on a by-project basis, and only for services that we couldn't find someone to do for stock.

Most of our cash would go first to keeping a bare-bones office open.

We would probably concentrate on paying off debts that various of us have personally co-signed, like the Luc Schepens loan, the line of credit, etc. The purpose of this is to try and minimize the hurt to us personally should the company go bankrupt.

The toll-free number might have to go and subcontractors might have to pay for their own calls; perhaps this would go even further toward encouraging people to use e-mail.

I'd look for a way of running the company in some sort of family or communal setting. Perhaps move into an apartment and run the office out of there with off-site warehousing and maybe talk to Jesper about having a satellite production office based out of his studio. Obviously this is an option only to the extent of my wife's tolerance level, which is already stretched to the point where I'm hesitant to stretch it any further, so I'm not sure where this option would lead.

Just so you know what the options are, if this scaleback didn't do the trick the last-resort options might be some things along these lines:

Look into what some of the bankruptcy-protection options are, where the company keeps going and is simply organized and protected by the court.

Look into merging with another company.

Look into a cooperative venture with another company, where we'd basically turn into a development house. This way I could perhaps devote my energy to writing only and slowly write books and pay off WotC's debts that way.

If things go sour you can rest assured that I won't be doing any fingerpointing. As president and acting financial officer I will assume responsibility for the situation and it will be my duty to explain the situation to the shareholders.

Please put up with my temper people. I've never been this stressed out in my life. I apologize for being this way, but the pressure is like nothing I've ever imagined and I don't always cope as well as I should.

But we're not dead yet, so in the meantime let's put on the best face we can and continue to give this our best shot. Many many times great success stories come on the verge of what seemed like a great tragedy. Our opportunities are still there; a couple of good breaks and we could be in great shape in no time. So let's remember our responsibility to our shareholders and do our best - we can do no less.

Peter D. Adkison
President, Wizards of the Coast, Inc.

Wizards: Peter on the Cusp, Part Twelve

2011-07-22T23:22:00.000-07:00

Steffan O'Sullivan, who saw trouble brewing

In June 1992, after Wizards had released The Primal Order and The Talislanta Guidebook, with more products underway and things looking hopeful, a long-brewing crisis came to a boil.

It was set in motion on 17 November 1991, when Peter posted on the Usenet group rec.games.frp at 4:18 a.m. looking for RPG systems experts. Four hours later, Steffan O'Sullivan warned him in his reply:

If this project involves publishing, you'd better get publishers' permissions, first . . .

A day later, Peter responded:

I will be following the procedures outlined for me by my intellectual properties attorney.

Experts from all over the Internet contacted Wizards and contributed their conversion notes to The Primal Order to create the first Capsystem product. TPO hit the stores five months later in April 1992, and two months later in June Kevin Siembieda launched the lawsuit that nearly destroyed the fledgling company. The long, difficult road to their very first product release led Wizards of the Coast directly into legal trouble.

The Wizards staff had wanted to create a stronger RPG community by developing ways for people using different RPG rule systems to play together. The Capsystem line of products was created with that in mind, as was the Envoy system (though that was never published nor even written down beyond the notes stage). The marriage of the d20 system and the Open Gaming License many years later was a return to that goal.

The lawsuit's claims to the contrary, what got Wizards into trouble was not actually the system-integration notes themselves. Under U.S. copyright law, only the text - not the ideas - are copyrightable, so expressing those ideas in your own words does not count as a violation of copyright. Had Mr. Siembieda patented Palladium's rules, then Wizards would have been in the wrong, but he did not. Wizards's intellectual-properties attorney was correct, and Wizards correctly followed the procedures he outlines.

The actual problem came in two parts, which the many very smart and creative but idealistic people out there should pay attention to if they want to learn from history.

Kevin Siembieda, Palladium founder

The first part is that under trademark law, a company that does not vigorously defend its trademark can be accused of abandoning it, at which point they lose their trademark and it's up for grabs. That is, the law itself drives companies into aggressive attacks upon anyone who infringes upon their trademarks. If you have heard the saying about the Disney company Don't mess with the mouse, this is why; if Disney did not defend their trademarks, they would be considered abandoned. Even if a company will lose a court case, it also benefits by demonstrating that it cares about its trademarks.

Now simply naming a company or referring to its trademarks is not a violation of trademark law - on the contrary, the whole point of trademarks is the hope that the public will refer to them frequently. Trademark violations occur when you misrepresent your own work as falling under that trademark, or vice versa if you use the trademark in such a way that it seems to belong to you rather than its proper owners. These kinds of dilutions of the brand are the kinds of damage trademark cases are built around. Since Wizards in no way tried to represent its work as part of Palladium, nor presented Palladium Books's trademarks as though they belonged to Wizards, it did not even come close to violating trademark.

Nevertheless, for the reasons described above (as well as other less noble motives that do not apply in this case), companies are often ready to launch trademark-violation lawsuits even when they are clearly in the wrong. We live in a severely suspicious and litigious culture, in which people try to resolve with court cases what past cultures resolved through etiquette. Because of trademark law, this unpleasant quality is multiplied in the case of companies who want to survive for long.

The lesson of the first part is this: just because you're in the right legally does not mean you will not be dragged into court. As children we sometimes learn to become so focused on what's "fair" or "right" that later as adults we can lose track of what's prudent. Just because you can do something does not mean you should, or that you will not be attacked for it.

The second part is that the guarantee of swift justice - that is, of efficient determination of whether someone is guilty or innocent - has long ago devolved into a labyrinthine system of laws and procedures so Byzantine that more than a few defendants have died before being exonerated in court. The American legal system has become so complex that it has itself become the punishment.

The punishment now precedes the determination of any crime. Merely to be dragged into an extended legal process is often all it takes to punish someone financially with large debts for the rest of their life or even bankruptcy. The threat of court is often enough to make innocent people subject themselves to punitive settlements in an effort to avoid it.

Those with the money to spend on lawsuits know how to use the court system to get what they want out of the innocent. Although this was not Mr. Siembieda's motivation (Palladium Books had more money than Wizards, but not enough to squander on harassment lawsuits), the consequences were the same - both Palladium and Wizards suffered.

Publisher of numerous RPGs, including Rifts

The lesson of the second part is this: you are one lawsuit away from having your life turned upside down. Do not be in a hurry to prove your innocence in a court of law. Unless you have good legal counsel and a wise judge and are lucky, you're gambling with your future. You will certainly pay a much higher price than you expect to in time, money, and stress just to return to the status quo - if you can; today's overburdened courts are fallible. You may be held guilty of something of which you are innocent. DNA evidence in recent years had turned up plenty of convicted "murderers" who we now know cannot possibly have commited the crimes for which they have been punished. Avoid the court system if you possibly can.

Wizards couldn't. They had relied upon doing the right thing, upon following the law and trusting that it would back what they did. This approach was central to the strategy of the Capsystem product line, which in turn was central to their strategy of carving out their niche in the RPG world by doing things differently than anyone else had done them, by finding ways to grow the pie rather than fighting over it. Concerned about his trademark and copyright, Kevin Simebieda could settle for nothing less than an admission of guilt, but an admission of guilt would set a precedent and open Wizards up to lawsuits from all the other companies they integrated with in TPO.

They couldn't back down, and as things stood they couldn't settle either, so during the second half of 1992 their pride and hope in their growing line of RPG products was increasingly undercut by mounting legal costs and dread about the future. Just as they seemed poised to become financially sustainable, they became financially pressured again. The train had left the tracks and seemed headed unstoppably toward a court battle that would economically destroy them.

Peter's 1993 narrative about this time:

But just after the Guidebook came out, on June 17th, 1992, we were dealt a devastating blow (although it took several months before the full impact really started to hit). We were jointly sued by Palladium Books and Kevin Siembieda for copyright and trademark infringement due to the TPO integration notes. The further and further we got into 1992 the more time and resources this started to consume, and a cloud started settling over our office that sapped our energy and caused us to start doubting the future of the company. This last November and December were low points, culminating with the fact that the case wasn't thrown out of court on the 14th of December as we'd hoped it would be at the summary judgement hearing we had that day. We had started a stock solicitation in November, but it was proceeding slowly, and on December 28th, during our Christmas holiday, I told our staff that the payroll checks I was writing would be their last, probably for several months.

Off Sick Today

2011-07-21T19:12:00.000-07:00

My stomach insists I take today off, so no post today, alas.

Wizards: Peter on the Cusp, Part Eleven

2011-07-20T22:52:00.000-07:00

Talislanta Geographica

What if?

Uncounted alternate histories have been written, launched from those two words.

Wizards of the Coast in 1992 begs us to play the What If? game. It was the year where the first generation's dream of forming a successful RPG company almost came true.

For about eight months in 1992, from April 1st when the boxes filled with The Primal Order arrived from the printers until December 28th when Wizards distributed their last paychecks for a while, it was an RPG company inching ever closer to success. Had other factors not intervened, Wizards would have been in the black before the end of the year.

The Scent of the Beast

Before April 1st, they were trying to be an RPG company, but until you release your first product you're not really there yet. After December 28th, they were too financially disrupted and in some ways reverted to their pre-April 1st condition (though wiser and more professional) of having difficulty keeping up a full production pace of publications, and they soon became too distracted by unexpected success to keep their focus on RPGs.

Anyone who decides to become an entrepreneur and start up a company is in for a lot of stress and unpleasant surprises on the way to success or failure. Companies start in the red and continue to bleed money rapidly long before they ever produce any income. Keeping up with the new business's urgent hunger for funds to keep it operating keeps the executive and often many of the staff distracted from being able to fully attend to the actual business of the company, because if you look away from the problem of raising funds for too long you're out of business before you realize what happened. During that period of distraction, most organizations make embarrassing mistakes because of the lack of executive oversight. If you've never tried to start a business you may be surprised that the statistic that 90% of new businesses fail in their first year of operations is so high, but if you have tried then the surprise is that the failure rate is so low. It's tough work.

Pawns, The Opening Move

From October 16th, 1989 until early 1992, Wizards began as many organizations do, holding down its pace of spending by relying heavily on part-time and volunteer labor. This is not a bad way to begin an organization, since it limits the pace at which you bleed money and gives you time to figure out how to get organized. An underappreciated factor here is that you're going to make a lot of mistakes, and it helps to do so when you don't have much money to lose doing it; mistakes become more and more expensive as an organization grows, which is partly why so many large organizations become so conservative and bureaucratic (which, yes, is also a mistake). Unfortunately, this strategy also holds back the pace at which you can produce, which in turn holds back the pace at which you can develop an income stream to offset your costs, which extends the time you will remain in the red. It's a difficult chicken-and-egg problem that is usually resolved only through loans and investment to pour in enough money to get the company on its feet (or more typically through bankruptcy).

The Archaen Codex

By early 1992, though, Wizards had increased its rate of production by shifting the balance of the core staff more and more toward full time.

Later, when we go back and cover the early history in detail, I'll get firmer dates for the 1992 releases (I'm sure some of these are wrong), but here are my guesses so far based on studying ads, the books themselves, and Internet sites:

April 1st: The Primal Order
May: The Talislanta Guidebook
June: Talislanta Geographica
August: The Scent of the Beast
September?: The Primal Order: Pawns, The Opening Move
October: The Archaen Codex
October: Tales of Talislanta
November: The Compleat Alchemist

Tales of Talislanta

When you factor in the back stock of Bard Games products they acquired as part of the Talislanta deal with Stephan Michael Sechi, that gave Wizards a respectable product catalog by the end of 1992. When you factor in the many RPG products they had planned and in production by the fall of 1992, 1993 looked to be an even better year. The Wizards team were not yet in TSR's league when it came to the experience of their production team, nor in sales figures, but by hook or by crook they were turning out well designed, well produced products and were getting better and more successful as they went.

Likewise, although the year began with their in-house organizational systems still being cobbled together - in January they were just beginning to shift from individual assignments to the concept of formal teams, and in March George Lowe was going back and entering their basic financial data from the previous year to try to get it all recorded in one place - by the end of the year their organization although simple was coherent and productive.

The Compleat Alchemist

So the game of What If? here is a bit of a cheat. Anyone with access to the before-and-afters can see that all else being equal Wizards of the Coast would have probably been successful for at least the next year, which would have been long enough to fully get their feet under them. If they kept up the standards they'd set for themselves and kept learning lessons and making organizational and process improvements, they would have been on a long shallow curve of slow growth that would probably have been much healthier for them as an organization in the long term than the crisis followed by explosive success and growth they were subjected to instead.

That would have been more in accord with their dream for their company than what actually happened next. Until their train went off the tracks, their dream seemed to be coming gradually true. As Peter wrote in 1993:

After the Guidebook, Geographica, Tales, Pawns, and the Codex seemed to just fly out the door. Once we had Jesper, we had an incredible team and we started to really get into synch.

Tuesday Intermission

2011-07-19T22:13:00.000-07:00

I hope you've enjoyed our history so far. It has been a blast researching and writing it, and there's a lot more to come.

The Wizards gang are starting to feed me stories and information. Last week Beverly and I had dinner with Peter and Dee, where we traded Wizards stories you'll eventually be hearing, including the wise janitor, the mystery employee, and the attack cat; on Facebook Ken has been walking me through the very early Wizards history from 1989 to 1990; last night I walked Green Lake with Beverly and Dave and tonight with Beverly and Jenny Scott Tynes, and they shared some of their stories and memories with us; Lisa Lowe is hoping to get together with some of us soon to discuss the pre-history of Wizards, going all the way back to Walla Walla, including the May 23rd, 1990 brainstorming session that helped kick things off; and so on. This is becoming the community storytelling I hoped it would become.

I'm building a master spreadsheet correlating events in Wizards's history with the people who were involved so I know who to ask for more information. People are beginning to dig through their own archives for material, and some of them have agreed to begin writing down what they remember about how they joined and why. We're making lists of stories that definitely need to be included, some funny, some sad. I think you're going to enjoy it; it's certainly going to be a lot of fun to write.

I'm taking tonight off to be sure I get a full night's sleep, but our history of Wizards of the Coast will continue tomorrow with the brighter side of 1992.

Meanwhile, as an apology for not posting tonight, here is a gratuitously cute photo of our cats Rashid and Surya from when they were still kittens back in August 2006.

Rashid sleeps on Surya, 8 August 2006

Wizards: Peter on the Cusp, Part Ten

2011-07-18T19:28:00.000-07:00

Jonathan Tweet, Mr. Creativity

For seven years as a child I studied Shorin Ryu Karate under my sensei Jerry Gould. Shorin Ryu is a very traditional style of karate, one of the original three styles developed in Okinawa. "Shorin" was more or less the Okinawan pronunciation of "Shaolin," of Kung Fu fame; the school was started by students who studied kung fu under Shaolin monks and then adapted it to the Okinawan culture's approach to fighting. The karate schools with the deepest roots tend to be the most hardline about discipline and struggle, the least softened for Western sensibilities. With that in mind, it may be less surprising to you than it was to me at the time that the very first kata the beginning Shorin Ryu student faces is the longest and most difficult, Seisan. The idea behind this is three-fold: to give the beginning student a long choreography in which to become immersed, the better to absorb the spirit of the art; to teach the student that the art is always hard work; and to weed out those ill-suited to the art.

Shorin Ryu is designed this way on purpose. Wizards of the Coast designed their own learning curve this way by accident.

The Primal Order is 231 pages (not counting front and back matter) at 8 1/2 by 11 inches of all new material, on a subject with less than the usual amount of precedent in the RPG industry to draw from, using a systematic approach hardly every tried. A hundred people are credited with contributing to its creation, including eight primary authors (Peter Adkison, Cathleen Adkison, Steve Conard, Dave Howell, Cliff "CJ" Jones, Kenneth W. McGlothlen, Beverly Marshall Saling, and W.R. Woodall). From conception to publication, it took two years to complete. This one really did take a village.

The Talislanta Guidebook is 327 pages (not counting front and back matter) at 8 1/2 by 11 inches. It is based on a prior edition and a complete initial manuscript, so in theory that should have more than compensated for the greater length. The difficulties Peter alludes to below were three-fold:

1) Although Stephan Michael Sechi was a published gaming professional and produced better first drafts than the original Wizards team could, they still were not up to Wizards's new standards and required a lot of editing and rewriting to make them sing. Although this was going to be easier than The Primal Order first draft, it might be on a par with getting from the third draft to the fourth, which was quite difficult.

2) Wizards had no idea that the text would require that much work, so they started out planning just a new chapter and some light editing, but then kept having to incrementally expand the scope of the project further and further. Peter had queried the online community about Talislanta and gotten feedback that although very creative and original it was complex enough to be difficult for beginners to know where to start. Jonathan Tweet was originally brought on because he did such a good job with the introductory module for Ars Magica that Wizards wanted him to solve this problem by having him do the same thing for Talislanta. The timelines for the project were built around just that, plus time for editing. Once Jonathan got into the manuscript, though, he realized the section on magic simply had to be rewritten. About the time Wizards began to accept that it had to shift the timelines to make time for that, Jonathan realized that really the entire text needed to be reworked to better present Mr. Sechi's ideas, so the timelines had to be changed again. The Wizards crew, who had been just about driven into post-traumatic stress disorder through this kind of repeated schedule shift with The Primal Order, began to experience flashbacks. In the end it only required one round of rewrites, not three, since Mr. Sechi's original manuscript was in better shape, but it did make the Wizards crew increasingly nervous for a while.

3) Mr. Sechi used language in very idiosyncratic ways and was very particular about what could or could not be changed, making editing and rewriting into a complex and time-consuming negotiation process. One example I remember is that he uses the word "mordant" as an adjective meaning "deathly" or "deadly," whereas the usual English definition is a noun that means a substance applied to cloth to make dyes stick to it so it doesn't fade when it's washed. Mr. Sechi had many such examples of idiosyncratic diction that needed to be preserved mixed in with genuine errors that needed to be changed, so editing required a continual back-and-forth dialog. In the end, though, Jonathan and Beverly found the right balance for the text, correcting mistakes and reorganizing confusing explanations while preserving Talislanta's unique feel and Mr. Sechi's distinctive use of language.

When Peter regrets not having done a better job with the Guidebook, he's compressing too much to be fully understood. What he means is this. If Wizards of the Coast had been inventing a world from scratch, this is not the world they would have invented, nor is it explained the way they would have explained it. However, this was not a case of original invention (Peter felt that with great RPG worlds like Talislanta out there, the community did not need another one from Wizards); it was a case of something even more intimate than an adaptation: a seamlessly authentic update. In working on Talislanta, Wizards could clean up the organization and language to a certain point, but beyond that any further changes would have been too invasive, would have crossed the line from helping Mr. Sechi's creation shine through to fundamentally altering it, which that was not their mission. Their job was to midwife Mr. Sechi's baby, which they did to the best of their ability.

Lisa Stevens was right. Talislanta did give Wizards a clear path into the future.

It was the beginning of a creative relationship with game designer Jonathan Tweet, who would go on to do many great things for Wizards of the Coast, including designing Everway and co-designing Dungeons and Dragons Third Edition.

It was also the beginning of an important partnership between Wizards of the Coast and Stephan Michael Sechi, in which Wizards helped Mr. Sechi raise the production values of his creation and Mr. Sechi gave Wizards the work they needed to survive and to improve their skills and professionalism, to build their reputation with the game industry as a company that cared deeply about doing high-quality work.

Having proven themselves on The Primal Order and The Talislanta Guidebook, two tough back-to-back projects, Wizards looked forward to calmer waters ahead.

Pater's comments from 1993:

After the release of TPO things bogged for a month or two until we got The Talislanta Guidebook out the door--another huge tome that consumed massive amounts of internal resources to get done "right." I have to admit that I'm not sure we did as good a job as we could have, although it's heads above the earlier editions (don't mean to slam Bard Games, but with Jonathan Tweet's coauthoring and Beverly's editing, it really turned out very nice).

Wizards: Peter on the Cusp, Part Nine

2011-07-17T19:28:00.000-07:00

Cathleen Adkison, one of the three original principals

Writing poised between hope and despair in January 1993, Peter narrated his history of Wizards in fits and starts, pausing over the moments, people, and problems that resonated with his current circumstances, passing lightly over other periods, people, and issues that didn't come to mind when he thought about his hopes for Manaclash (soon to be Magic: The Gathering) or his fears about the Palladium lawsuit. Most of the missing details I'll explore when I finish covering his narrative, but I will take an intermission from the narrative for the next few posts to spotlight two topics that should not wait.

The second topic is Talislanta, which dominated Wizards's activities in 1992, but which Peter's 1993 narrative dispenses with in three sentences. We'll take a closer look at Talislanta next post.

The first topic is the other people who made it possible for Wizards to produce The Primal Order, the ones who he didn't have to bring in from the outside because they were already present. There are three in particular I want to pick out in this post for how central they were to helping support Wizards of the Coast between late 1991 and early 1992, the time frame when TPO was being finished.

Cathleen Couch, Beverly's childhood friend in Walla Walla since fifth grade, married Peter Adkison on Saturday, 11 August 1990. Peter and Cathy had been together for years before that, and their families and friends were present, including most of the early Wizards gang. Understandably, one of the topics of discussion was Peter's new company. Beverly, as one of Cathy's bridesmaids, and I shared a table with Peter and Cathy. This was when Peter first told Beverly that he was starting up a game company and told her who all was doing it with him. After a pause during which she thought to herself "But none of you can write!", Beverly diplomatically asked "Do you have anyone who knows anything about how publishing works?" In the conversation that followed, Peter learned that Beverly had studied publishing arts at Pacific Lutheran University under Megan Benton. It was this conversation at Peter and Cathy's wedding that set the stage for Peter later seeking out Beverly's help in reviewing the early Wizards manuscripts and eventually recruiting her as an employee.

This also might have been the first time I learned about Wizards. It probably didn't come up in our conversations before then, but you never know. Human memory is unreliable.

Michael Cook, quality-improvement guru

Cathy was there when Beverly and I learned about Wizards. She was also there when most of Peter and Ken's gaming group learned about Wizards, on that kickoff brainstorming session the night of Wednesday, 23 May 1990 three months earlier. Since she and Peter were living together long before then, she was also a part of Peter's life when he and Ken were putting together the initial ideas for Wizards of the Coast over the Internet. Although she was not part of Peter's gaming group in Walla Walla back in the early 1980s, she was just a few years later, and she and Peter would have discussed the emerging plans for Wizards soon after he and Ken began formulating them, which makes her pretty much the fifth person (after Darrell, Terry, Ken, and Peter) in on the dream of starting an RPG company called Wizards of the Coast. And when you look at her longevity with and contributions to Wizards over the years, it makes her one of the original three principals with Ken and Peter.

Mike Cook never starred in a lead role at Wizards (no media exposure, that is), but contributed much over the years in important supporting roles. Like Cathy, at Boeing he studied the work of William Edwards Deming and brought Continuous Quality Improvement, Plan-Do-Check-Act, meeting facilitation, and many other tools for focusing on and improving quality at Wizards of the Coast. Cathy and Mike worked hand-in-hand to keep Wizards focused on learning from their mistakes and always searching for ways to do better. This focus on high and improving quality made Wizards of the Coast attractive to top-notch game designers like Richard Garfield and Jonathan Tweet and to other game professionals like Lisa Stevens. What many organizations fail to realize is that the very best professionals feel stifled in organizations that focus on delivering the minimum quality for the maximum return and long for the chance to do their best work. Mike Cook helped turn Wizards into the kind of company that could give them that chance, and they noticed and responded. Without Mike and Cathy pushing this core focus of the company, many of the things that Wizards did right over the years could not have happened.

George S. Lowe, "Primal Caterer" (and friend)

George Lowe was another supporting actor at Wizards of the Coast who contributed more to the survival of early Wizards than most people realize. Like Jay Hays, he was a Jack of all trades who shifted roles frequently to fill in wherever the company was lacking - and when you're a small company, you're more holes than substance in most areas, like Swiss cheese. Among the areas George worked on in 1991 and 1992 were retroactively building a financial database to get their financial tracking under better control, and cooking for Dave and Beverly during their marathon editing session when they moved into Peter and Cathy's house. In these and many other ways, George helped hold the place together.

We'll spend more time with the early Wizards personnel in the writing to come, but I felt it would be inappropriate to move on to a new chapter in the history of Wizards of the Coast without bringing Cathy, Mike, and George back into the spotlight so they could begin to be recognized for their early crucial roles. When we finish with Peter's 1993 narrative, we'll go back to the beginning of our history to get to know each of the original actors better, including many so far unnamed in these posts.

Wizards: Peter on the Cusp, Part Eight

2011-07-16T23:16:00.000-07:00

Jay Hays, who deserves higher-resolution

Genius is one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration. -- Thomas Edison, spoken statement (c. 1903); published in Harper's Monthly (September 1932).

The same is true of running a company. It is a lot of hard work.

Running a game company is almost nothing like gaming. It helps a lot to know gaming - that 1% that applies may not be sufficient, but it is necessary - but other than that it's a completely different kind of activity. Most gamers have no idea how different it is and are drawn to do something they would hate or simply be unable to do if they tried. It defies common sense how different they are. Wizards found that out the hard way, which (other than reading accounts like this one) is just about the only way to find out.

The first generation at Wizards of the Coast largely consisted of Peter's gaming group at the time he and Ken decided to get serious about creating a gaming company. So long as Wizards remained a part-time activity, something people could keep up with during weekends and evenings, the original team remained active. A time came, though, when Wizards had to turn up the heat and push full-time to get their first product to market and make the deals that would lead to their later products.

This put an unbearable pressure upon the original group, since it began to require a full-time effort with inadequate or no compensation (since as yet there was no revenue). None of the first generation could afford to quit their day jobs under such conditions, so most of them had to either drop out entirely or remain on the sidelines, helping when they could and otherwise trying to keep tabs on progress. Most of those who dropped out returned later, when Wizards could afford to hire them after Magic succeeded so spectacularly, but this created a temporary generational turnover at Wizards of the Coast.

The second generation at Wizards of the Coast consisted of three categories of people: (1) the few from the first generation who could afford to work without compensation, plus (2) those new employees and contractors needed to get the work done, plus (3) those who were drawn in by the excitement of the work and volunteered when they could. By mid-1992, the first category mainly included Peter, with a few others we'll discuss in the series ahead who helped out when they had the time. The second included Lisa, Beverly, and Dave. Most of those in the third category were eventually hired as part of the third generation (post-Magic), but two, Jay Hays and Jesper Myrfors, were hired as part of the second generation because Wizards needed their help so badly.

Jesper Myrfors, in high resolution & high spirits

James "Jay" Hays, like me, was a part of the Walla Walla role-playing game community, someone who gamed with Peter for years, but who did not attend the May 23rd, 1990 meeting that launched Wizards of the Coast. Five and a half months later, though, he began spending time at the Wizards office (the basement of Peter and Cathy's house at 23815 43rd Avenue South in Kent, Washington) and found that Wizards really needed his help. From project management to design to logistics to facilities management, Jay became the Jack of all trades who knitted the company together.

Jesper (pronounced "YES pur") Myrfors joined in 1992 during Wizards's push to create and publish new material for Talislanta, after Jay, Lisa, Beverly, and Dave were brought on board. In addition to doing art and design and eventually running production, Jesper built up most of the relationships with the initial group of artists who worked with Wizards of the Coast, many of whom later became famous as the artists of Magic: The Gathering. He had recently graduated from Cornish College of the Arts, and he drew upon his contacts there to create a social network of artists he felt could handle Wizards of the Coast's increasing demand for art and graphic design. Jesper's out-of-the-box thinking and taste for mischief greatly influenced the emerging in-house culture at Wizards of the Coast.

As for Peter, as his staff grew and took on more responsibilities, he was increasingly freed up to focus on the company's financial survival and expansion, which usually took a lot of work but became a severe crisis starting in June 1992.

His 1993 narrative continues:

The last part of 1991 and early 1992 was also consumed by the millions of things that had to be done to get going. Getting UPC codes for our books, UPS drop/stamp, bulk mailing permits, distributor announcements and solicitations, learning how to use a fax machine, securing financing on a copier, getting a laser printer and a couple of Macs, etc., etc., etc--all the little things that had to come together. If we wouldn't have had Lisa who knew how to do all this already, we would really have been flailing.

Of course the biggest hurdle of all was money. Financing has always been the limiting factor for our company's growth; it's very difficult to find people who want to invest in gaming. Well actually, lots of people want to invest in gaming, but most of them are gamers who don't have any money. We were never able to raise our entire stock solicitation, but we were able to get enough of it to get going and we're still paying the consequences of not having been able to raise it all. The biggest day in that sequence was the securing of a $30,000 line of credit, which was enough to guarantee publication of TPO and the Guidebook. The day we secured that LOC is a day I think of as the turning point as to whether all this was really going to be worth it or not. Before that there was always the possibility that we'd have a good product, good people, and a good plan but couldn't move forward because of lack of capitalization. But at that point I knew we were guaranteed of at least being able to make our mark in the gaming industry, that no matter what happened, I'd be able to contribute something to the industry I love so much. No matter what happens now, even if the company goes under because of this Palladium lawsuit [next post --Ed.] and I end up paying back the loans for the next twenty years, I'll always feel that I came out ahead.

Concurrently to everything I've been describing, we had our share of internal problems. Almost everyone who was initially involved with the company ended up moving on, either because they found that they didn't have the time to do the work on top of their "day job," because they didn't have skills we needed, because of personality conflicts, loss of interest, or what have you. I'm happy to say that I'm still close with everyone I've ever worked with. But now, out of the most active players in WotC, I'm the only one who was there at the beginning. Those primary people are Lisa and Beverly, of course, and Jay Hays and Jesper Myrfors. Jay came on board the earliest, along about November of 1990. He immediately dived into things head long, with tremendous ambition, dedication, and energy. He told me that he'd be a corporate officer within six months and on the board of directors within a year--he succeeded in both goals. He's consistently been one of the most hard working and fanatical members of the team, and he has a stock percentage to show for it. Jesper is the most recent arrival. He is an artist who'd always been a fan of Talislanta, asked to do art, and then just started coming down to the office and started hanging out, looking for things to do, volunteering his time. Within a couple months he was running just about all of the production department and we figured we'd better put him on the payroll. He's been a tremendous part of the team ever since.

Wizards: Peter on the Cusp, Part Seven

2011-07-15T00:01:00.000-07:00

The Primal Order, Wizards's First Product

The Primal Order was a tough first pregnancy for Wizards of the Coast. Peter's gaming group came up with the original concept and first draft, but the system was so ambitious that it exceeded the writing skills of its authors. The text was too complex and confusing, which is why Beverly blasted it in her first review.

So Peter worked with Ken to improve his writing skills and they rewrote it to create the second draft. Then Allen Varney, Graeme Davis, Jonathan Tweet, Ken Rolston, and Nigel Findley reviewed it again with a mix of praise and criticism.

Then Dave Howell and Peter rewrote it to take their criticisms into account to create the third draft; they also added game-system integration notes from a host of contributors who were experts on different role-playing-game rule systems. Then Peter showed it to Beverly again who agreed it was now on the road to a publishable product but still needed a lot more work.

Then began a long, grueling cycle of editing and rewriting by Beverly and Dave to create the fourth and final draft. Or perhaps we should call it the hundredth draft, because their work passed back and forth across the text over and over and over again. One thing led to another in complex cycles of changes. The work proceeded in chain reactions like dominos falling, in which they would be rewriting one section, then notice one thing that was inconsistent with another. While correcting that, they would realize that they should have done it differently to make the next part easier to explain. So then they would go back and rewrite it, which made them realize they should also rewrite something else. The process of combing out the tangles and inconsistencies in this complex work seemed endless, but they persisted.

When Dave suspected the text was stabilizing, he began typesetting it in TEX, but he was wrong. It wasn't close to stabilizing, and now editing, rewriting, and retypesetting all began to overlap one another.

As the work went on and on, Peter came to realize that their deadlines were at risk. He then made a crucial decision most CEOs would not make; this was their flagship product, their calling card to the world, so it was more important to do it right than to do it on time. Instead of cutting his editors/rewriters/typesetters off, he trusted their judgment that it was not yet ready to go to press.

Still, in an effort to salvage their deadline, he asked them both to move into the spare bedroom in his and Cathleen's house until it was done. Beverly worked during the day and Dave at night so editing and rewriting and retypesetting proceeded twenty-four hours a day for another two and a half weeks!

During this time, the Wizards team took care of Beverly and Dave so they could stay focused on their work through long hours every day. Food would magically appear on the desk or table beside them while they worked. Toward the end they began to get punch-drunk and giddy, so Peter would sometimes take them out to Las Margaritas to help them unwind. Dave didn't drink, but Peter and Beverly did, and both reached that special happy state you can only reach when you are both sleep-deprived and drunk.

Dave Howell, who rewrote & typeset

The whole thing was one enormous blur for Dave and Beverly. Other people in the basement worked on other aspects of the project, people came and went, but it's all a vague impression to the two of them now.

The Primal Order got a lot better during that time. Most of the rat's nests, inconsistencies, and confusing language were cleared from it until in the end the elegance and power of the system shone through to the reader. They never worked that hard in their lives for that long, but it resulted in a sense of triumph at the end of the long slog.

When it was finally done, Peter said Okay, I guess you can call your peeps and tell them they can have you back. I drove over to pick up Beverly, and Peter took Dave, Beverly, and me out to Las Margaritas one last time to celebrate. Dave, who didn't have any drinks, had only his bone-deep exhaustion to contend with afterward as he drove off homeward, only mildly menacing the other motorists in his groggy state. Tired and tipsy, Beverly needed my help staggering to the car after dinner. When we got her home, she collapsed into a long, troubled sleep, only to awake with a severe case of bronchitis. It lasted through two different rounds of antibiotics for two weeks before finally trailing off. Afterward, she suffered from persistent breathing problems for so long that she began to wonder if she had contracted asthma, but as the weeks passed the symptoms slowly disappeared.

Here is a gauge that editors particularly will understand about the level of effort involved in cleaning up the text of The Primal Order. Beverly bought a brand-new editorial red pencil to begin editing The Primal Order. The text went through so much editing that the pencil was used all the way down until it was about an inch long, with no eraser and no unsharpened wood left, just a point and a metal eraser grip. She was determined to finish editing the book with a single red pencil, so in the end she had to resort to tricks to get it in and out of the sharpener. To this day she still has the tiny red pencil stub in her treasure box.

Peter's 1993 narrative about this time continues:

Well, that fall I got the critiques back from the writers I'd sent them to. These critiques helped a lot, since they included two important elements: (a) pages of constructive criticism on how to make it better, and (b) a statement saying that the product had tremendous potential and that they wished us the best of luck. The letter from Ken Rolston was especially encouraging, and led to us asking him to write the foreword for the book.

One of the major criticisms of the draft I'd sent out was that it was very dry and that it was too oriented toward AD&D. At that time I brought Dave Howell into the loop and started working on yet another redraft of the book, this time with the intent of "lightening it up" and removing all the AD&D flavor. Also, about this time I started studying other game systems to write integration notes and quickly came to the realization that I need a lot of help. That's when we started up the famous experts-l mailing list, where I called for gaming-system experts on the net to help us out. By December 1991, we finally had a complete honest-to-god professional-quality first draft of TPO. Time to go see Beverly again.

This time Beverly didn't throw up on it, but actually declared it as "having potential." The editing soon turned into redrafting/editing, and Beverly and Dave both actually moved into my house (much to the chagrin of Beverly's husband and housemates) and worked on TPO night and day. Dave was helping with the redraft and doing the typesetting too. I helped where I could, but they were able to work fulltime while I had to go to Boeing and run the company. The book was supposed to be released in January, but it didn't go to the printers until late February, and the shipment arrived at my house on April Fools Day, 1992, perhaps the greatest day in my life other than my wedding day. To hold that book in my hands and see thousands of copies in boxes after working on it for over a year and a half was just incredible.

Wizards: Peter on the Cusp, Part Six

2011-07-14T00:01:00.000-07:00

Mike Davis, matchmaker

In Readers Digest in 1957, Allen Saunders wrote Life is what happens to us while we are making other plans.

Saturday, 24 August 1991 found friends and family gathered together at 1714 18th Avenue in Seattle for Beverly and my wedding, where our carefully knit plans were unraveling.

Some close friends could not attend. Cathleen Adkison, Peter's wife, my friend from high school, and Beverly's friend since fifth grade, was sick at home. Jay Hayes and Bob McSwain Jr., my gaming friends since high school, could not break away from Dragonflight, the gaming convention inconveniently scheduled at the same time. Peter and Ken made it, barely, only to find themselves standing around waiting with the rest of us. We were locked out of the hall. The caretaker could not be found. Beverly and I had wanted to plan our wedding ourselves to demonstrate our adulthood and maturity to our parents, but instead we stood there embarrassed and helpless.

It all turned out well in the end. With a little help from our friends we found grace under pressure, were married on the steps, held the reception at Madison Park in perfect weather, served wedding cake on the back of a stone panther, and enjoyed the impromptu outdoor wedding we had always wanted but dared not plan in one of America's rainiest cities.

We learned that sometimes it is best when life does not go according to plan.

Peter's carefully knit plans were also unraveling.

Richard Garfield, mathematician

A week before our wedding, Peter discovered that Mike Davis was right about how incredible Richard Garfield's design was for his board game Robo Rally. Peter founded Wizards of the Coast to make role-playing games, but clearly he was going to have to find some way to publish this board game, too. He did not know how he could ever afford to do it, but he would have to find a way.

The day before our wedding Peter sat in a parking garage listening to Richard describe his initial ideas for what would become Magic: The Gathering. It blew him away. It was not a role-playing game - it was not even a board game - but clearly Wizards was going to have to make this, too. His plans fell apart in the best kind of way.

All three of us wandered through our wedding day in a bit of a daze, giddy and off-balance, wondering what shape our lives would take now. We all decided to let go of our plans and embrace the unknown. We all said "I do."

It changed our lives forever.

Peter's 1993 description of the events:

Also at about this time magical event #4 happened (although we didn't realize its import at the time). As a result of one of my posts on rec.games.design, I received a letter from a guy named Mike Davis about this game that a friend of his, Richard Garfield, had designed. The name of the game was Robo Rally, and to tell the truth it sounded kinda stupid from the description. I politely told him that we were a roleplaying company and were only mildly interested in "getting into board games some day." He was fortunately persistent and I eventually agreed to take a look at the game and meet them since they were both flying out to the west coast to see Richard's parents. Well, the game was simply brilliant, and I was immediately impressed by their intellect and imagination, which surpassed my own on both counts. We told them we'd like to publish it the following summer after we got on our feet (the projected release date for TPO had been pushed back to winter of 1991 by this time). To jump ahead in the story, we never have published this game because of the tremendous expense of putting it out, although we're working on perhaps doing it as a joint venture with another company that shall remain nameless at this time.

At this meeting I mentioned that there was going to be a convention (Dragonflight 1991) the following weekend [Friday-Sunday, 23–25 August 1991 --Ed.] and they should come up to Seattle to attend. Mike had to go back to Atlanta, but Richard said he'd come up. Then Richard, probably wanting to show off, asked me if I'd like him to design a game during the next week (!), and if so, to describe to him a game concept and he'd do it. Well, I had always thought it would be really cool to have a fantasy-oriented card game that was quick to play, easy to carry (playing cards only), fairly easy to learn, that could be marketed through the convention circuit. I had noticed that people spend a lot of time at conventions hanging out in lobbies, standing in lines, etc., and I think having a game like this could sell very well in that market. He said, "Okay."

Next week Richard came to Dragonflight and while we were in a vacant parking garage across from Seattle Center (Ken was with us and we had parked there so Ken could run in to some building and pick up something), Richard described to me a game that he'd come up with that fit those specs--and went way beyond. And this game was the single most awesome gaming idea I had heard of since 1978, when I heard of roleplaying. I started whooping and hollering and yelling, primarily because I knew at that moment that we had an idea that would add a whole new dimension to gaming, and if executed properly, would make us millions. This wasn't just a new game, it was a new gaming form. (Btw, if we can raise the capital, this game will be coming out this summer. Wish I could tell you more, but you know how it is...)

Wizards: Peter on the Cusp, Part Five

2011-07-13T00:01:00.000-07:00

Talislanta, an established RPG product line

To those who complain about the endless succession of splatbooks and modules from game companies, here is a lesson for you, one that Lisa Stevens taught Wizards of the Coast in the summer of 1991: individual RPG products, however excellent they may be, are of limited interest to store owners. For a variety of reasons, they want RPG product lines, with a steady succession of new products to sell that fall under an established brand (or at least they did in the early 1990s; I've been away from the marketplace for a while; maybe this has changed, but I doubt it).

Companies that fail to set and keep steady schedules for releasing new RPG products suffer in the marketplace. If they can win over retailers and distributors at all, their sales usually spike and then fall off, which is not a financial model that can sustain any but the smallest companies.

This is why Lisa advised Wizards to abandon their original plan for a random collection of interesting products and instead choose one - The Primal Order - that was best positioned to launch a series of TPO products, so that distributors and retailers would support the new company. This is also why she pushed Peter to pick up Talislanta, because it already had an established product line (including inventory) and fanbase, which would make it attractive to distributors and retailers, and because it would not be hard to extend that line with new products. Distributors and retailers would see the existing fanbase as lowering the risk of taking on Wizards's Talislanta products, and since they were already familiar with and accepted the Talislanta product line Wizards would not face the uphill battle of convincing them of its viability.

Lisa's reorientation of Wizards toward product lines was important to the survival of the fledgling company. This is the kind of understanding and strategy that separates the 90% of new companies that quickly fail from the few that survive. Many of the truths of the marketplace are counter-intuitive and cannot be arrived at in any way except by hard experience. Young entrepreneurs usually enter the marketplace full of wildly unrealistic expectations about how the marketplace "ought" to work, and they base their companies' futures on these misunderstandings. Knowing how things actually already work is essential to figuring out how to make your new company survive in its market ecosystem.

Stephan Michael Sechi, creator of Talislanta

As a result of Lisa and Peter's negotiations, Talislanta, the creation of the elusive Stephan Michael Sechi became important to the survival and future of Wizards of the Coast in the year ahead. Were it not for Talislanta, Magic: The Gathering would probably never have happened, because Wizards of the Coast might not have survived long enough to produce it. And, of course, without Magic, Wizards would never have done well enough to save TSR and Dungeons & Dragons. We'll trace these threads in more detail later.

When we retell histories in short news articles in the media after brief periods of research and interview, these kinds of real-world connections almost always get missed. The later success of Wizards of the Coast is presented as emerging inexorably and all at once, like some kind of Manifest Destiny, as though Magic: The Gathering just sprang out of the forehead of Richard or Peter. In truth, as both those gentlemen will tell you, it took a lot of people and a lot of conditions coming together to make it happen.

Sometimes, though, these things seem strictly fortuitous. If White Wolf had been a corporation rather than a partnership, if Lisa had been able to rise in the company, then she would not have needed to seek advancement elsewhere. Neither Mark Rein·Hagen and Stewart Weick nor anyone else could have predicted that by structuring their company as a partnership rather than a corporation they were helping to set in motion a chain of events that would lead to Wizards of the Coast emerging seemingly out of nowhere to dominate their industry.

Likewise, I'm sure that when Stephan Michael Sechi dreamed his fevered dreams that became the storied world of Talislanta he did not imagine that he was helping in many different ways to set Wizards of the Coast on its path to survival and expansion, not least by helping to lead Jonathan Tweet and Jesper Myrfors to Wizards, but he was. So it is with all of us; the consequences of our actions go far beyond what we ever imagine.

Peter's narrative from 1993 continues:

Enter magical moment #3. Lisa asked me how I'd like to have her as an employee. Why would she want to leave White Wolf, a rapidly growing company (they'd just put out Vampire) to join a company that didn't even have its first product out the door? Ownership (there were some other reasons too). WW is a partnership between Mark Rein·Hagen and Stewart Weick and she didn't see how her hard work would get her anything in the long run, whereas WotC [rhymes with ROTC --Ed.] is a corporation and we were willing to give her a sizable chunk of stock to come work with us. A long and involved negotiating session ensued, where Lisa was able to entice us even more by saying, "How would you like to start production with an entire product line, and $100,000 in inventory? Have you ever heard of Talislanta?"

The next couple of months were amazing. Lisa and Rich went to GenCon [Thursday-Sunday, 8–11 August 1991 --Ed.] and started strategically placed rumors about this hot new gaming company on the west coast that she was helping out. By then the rumors had started flying about how she'd left WW, and I think she was offered about three jobs at that convention (Lisa has an incredible reputation in the industry as being very good at sales and marketing). We entered negotiations with Stephan Michael Sechi to acquire the exclusive English-language publishing rights to everything Bard Games had ever done, and we started raising money in earnest so that we could move Lisa out here and get started.

I was very paranoid about TPO though. I was starting to realize that there was a lot at stake, and that deities were probably not going to be that hot of a topic, and that TPO had to be awesome. So, at GenCon I got Lisa to collect the names of some key authors in the gaming industry who'd be willing to critique the draft I had at the time. As a result of that I was able to send drafts to Allen Varney, Graeme Davis, Jonathan Tweet, and Ken Rolston, not to mention Nigel Findley who I'd met at a local con (Dragonflight in 1991 [Friday-Sunday, 23–25 August 1991 --Ed.]). TPO basically sat on the shelf that summer/early fall while I waited for feedback and tried to get over feeling burned out on the book.

Wizards: Peter on the Cusp, Part Four

2011-07-12T00:01:00.000-07:00

Lisa Stevens, game-company professional

Already by the Spring of 1990, to those familiar with his management style Peter had revealed one of the main ingredients of his later success. He welcomed the idea that others knew things he did not, that others possessed skills and expertise he did not, that he needed to identify the areas in which he was lacking and then find people competent to mentor him and lead those areas.

In Spring 1991 he followed Tom Dowd's advice from seven months before, which led to finding Lisa Stevens, the seasoned game-company pro who helped Wizards learn the RPG industry, sharpen its focus to a single opening product, and much more. Peter learned a tremendous amount from her about what game companies are like, and over the months and years ahead, she helped him transform Wizards into a more professionally structured and oriented company.

Likewise, he let Beverly guide him toward higher standards for the writing, which led him to focus on improving his own writing and to focus more on those of his friends who could produce more professional text, like Ken. That shift in focus, when it comes, can be a tough transition in new companies - when the executive realizes that he has to begin separating the original founders, many or most of whom are friends, into those who can do the work the company needs done and those who cannot or will not. It can lead to hurt feelings and can even break friendships. He chose well, here, though, because Ken helped Peter to become a better writer and Beverly helped ensure he was on the right track.

Rich Kaalaas, graphic designer & charisma man

As for Rich Kaalaas, his role was not to mentor Peter - after all, Peter was never going to learn to become a graphic designer - but Rich was great at his job and he was one of the special people a startup executive learns to cherish, one of those people who gets things done. Rich did graphic design for years at Wizards; he designed the original logo for Wizards of the Coast (the tower on the seashore). We'll spend more time exploring his story later, but for now it should be noted that one of his most important contributions to the history of Wizards of the Coast - bringing Lisa Stevens and Wizards together - is one of those "other duties as assigned." Companies that enforce division of labor with too much rigidity, who insist that people stick to their job description - and there are many organizations like that, especially large ones - never get the best out of their people. You never know when your graphic designer is going to change the course of history through his charisma rather than his art.

Then in March it came time to go to the GAMA trade show. We scraped together our pennies and came up with enough money for one person to go to part of the show. Instead of going myself, I sent a guy who was involved at that time, Rich Kaalaas. I sent Rich because he's very good looking, charismatic, and can socialize very well, where I'm short, a bit overweight, and quite shy around people I don't know. Rich went to the tradeshow and magical event #2 happened--he met Lisa Stevens who was at that time working for White Wolf. Well, Lisa was single, Rich was cute, and, well, suffice it to say that they spent a lot of time together at the con. Lisa gave Rich massive amounts of advice, and after Rich came back from GAMA Lisa continued to give us advice, both in the form of phone calls and eventually through the Internet since Ken McGlothlen, a networking god, was able to get her connected to our BBS with no long-distance charges.

So, after GAMA and lots of consulting with Lisa, we completely reorganized the company's focus. We shelved all three compendium projects (we may revive one or more of them as part of our upcoming Pandevelopment line some day), put TaoGM on indefinite standby (I'd really really love to see this published, if Ken ever finishes it--hint, hint, clue, clue Ken!), and focused our attention on The Primal Order, which Lisa thought was the only thing worthy of being an opening product line.

I also about this time made a decision to trust Beverly on the editing and try to match her standards for publishable writing. Even though I'd never written much, and had pretty much ignored creative writing in college, I stubbornly decided that I'd work on this thing with her and Ken (who writes amazingly well--I'd rather read his writing than any writing I've ever been exposed to) until I got it right. I spent much of April and May that year (1991) working on that every waking hour that I wasn't at Boeing. I spent three or four sessions a week at Ken's, often crashing on his floor, and by the end of May I had essentially passed a crash course in writing. I wasn't good, but I'd at least gotten to college level. And in these months we'd rewritten about half of the book.

In the meantime I was still communicating a lot with Lisa Stevens. The flame had died between her and Rich, but I'd gotten to be pretty close friends with her by this time. She came due for a vacation at White Wolf and decided it would be fun to come to Seattle and meet all the people she'd only talked to through the net. So, in June she came to visit, and we all got to meet in real life, and we had a ball.

Wizards: Peter on the Cusp, Part Three

2011-07-11T00:01:00.000-07:00

Tom Dowd, who directed Peter to GAMA 1990

The evening of Wednesday, 23 May 1990 was one of those pivotal moments in the history of Wizards of the Coast. It's when Peter took the concrete planning for Wizards of the Coast beyond himself and Ken, when he invited his immediate gaming circle to join him in launching Wizards of the Coast.

This first year was a time of naive, energetic optimism, in which a band of friends took on roles based on their enthusiasm and hope rather than on their abilities, experience, or follow-through. It was a time of biting off more than they could chew, a time to discover that their bandwidth and abilities fell short of their dreams, a time to discover that wanting to do something as an idea and wanting and being able to do the actual work involved are very different things. It was also a time to discover that to measure up, to become a great company that surpasses existing standards, one must first fall short of those standards and be shamed and angered, be stimulated to try harder, to do better, and not to accept mediocrity, especially one's own.

Beverly Marshall Saling, who advised Peter to do better

When Peter reacted to his disappointment and his friends' frustration by deciding to set high standards of quality for Wizards of the Coast, he laid the crucial foundation for their every later success. Many company founders are incapable of accepting their own inadequacy, of swallowing their pride and committing themselves to do better than they've ever done before, which may be why so many companies do not survive this difficult and little-discussed transition, but new organizations must go through this stage if they are to survive long enough to become successful. Later, I'll tell the tale in detail, but for now here's Peter's quick overview of the period, as he continued his narrative in 1993:

May 23rd, 1990, is a date that will forever stick out in my mind. I invited everyone in our gaming circle over to my small apartment and we sat around in a circle and brainstormed product ideas until about two o'clock in the morning. I still have that list in my files and there are enough ideas on that list to keep us in business for ten years. Out of that meeting was born our capsystem philosophy, although it was to be refined many times in the future.

In the months that followed we started putting together a corporate structure, assigning projects to project managers, and so forth. We started working on four books, and this list soon expanded to five, including The Primal Order, TaoGM, and three system-independent compendiums (one on bars, one on mages/magic items, and one on keeps/castles). Our goal was to have them to first-draft stage by the end of 1990. Meanwhile I set out to try and collect information about the gaming industry.

In August I went to a local gaming convention called Dragonflight, and at that convention was Tom Dowd from FASA. He chaired a panel called "Writing for the Gaming Industry" and it was mostly about submitting modules for FASA/Shadowrun. Still, it was fascinating to me, and I learned a lot about what was involved in writing and such. At the end of the panel I told him that I was starting a gaming company and he gave me that glazed-over look that I find myself trying not to give to the hundreds of people who tell me that. He told me the same thing I tell them--go to the Game Manufacturers Association (GAMA) trade show which is held every spring in Las Vegas. This is a wonderful show, and it's where you can learn everything about the industry; there are retailers, distributors, and most of the other gaming companies of note, and there are panels on how to package products, pricing, distributor relations, and so forth.

Meanwhile things were going slowly on the writing front. We started going through a phase where people learned that this was going to be real work. By the end of 1990 we had two products that we thought were at first draft stage, The Primal Order, and The Compendium of Mages and Magic. At about that time we started consulting with Beverly Marshall Saling, a professional editor who I was a friend of, but who hadn't been involved much to that point. I told her I had two books for her to edit if she'd be willing and she said she'd take a look at them. Similarly to Tom Dowd, Beverly had that glazed-over look in her eye that I try not to give to the dozens of unpublished authors who give me something they think is a "first draft."

Beverly was very polite, but she couldn't hide her amusement at our puny efforts. What we gave her "wasn't even close" to "publishable" in her estimation and during the first part of 1991 we had many internal squabbles along the lines of "What does she know?" and "Looks good to me" and "How much quality do we want, anyway?" We were getting closer and closer to our projected release date, July 1991, and things were getting tense--it was not a pretty time.

Wizards: Peter on the Cusp, Part Two

2011-07-10T00:01:00.000-07:00

Ken McGlothlen, 6 August 2007

Peter's early history of Wizards of the Coast, written 23 January 1993, continues, including the pivotal role of long-time friend Ken McGlothlen in the beginning:

Over the next few years we sorta used "Wizards of the Coast" as an informal name to attach to various amateur things we did. In fact, we actually published one amateur game back in 1981 called Castles & Conquest, which forms the basis for some of the thinking that's going into The Military Order, which is what I'm working on right now. Our byline was "What's D&D without C&C?" It was really really amateur, made Arduin and Judges Guild stuff look like Time Magazine, but I managed to sell enough of them to make my way at conventions and such. Eventually I quit doing it because I wasn't satisfied with the product and this wasn't something I took very seriously at the time.

Other uses for the Wizards of the Coast logo over the next few years included a campaign newsletter that I published for my Chaldea campaign, "sponsorship" of some convention events and tournaments, etc. It basically came to symbolize the gaming group I played with, which at one time included about fifty active players. From about 1982 through 1990, Chaldea was my life (when I wasn't going to college, and then working at Boeing as a systems analyst). Even when I was taking twenty credits of college classes I'd GM three or four times a week, and a lot of that was power gaming where the fundamental principles of The Primal Order were playtested and developed. Yes, we played and ran deities, even as PCs--I can admit that now. :-)

In the spring of 1990 I was starting to go through that phase where I'd paid off my college loans, I was getting married, and I'd worked at Boeing long enough to feel that my career was secured. At this time I started thinking about life, and the thought of being a computer programmer for the rest of my life was really starting to scare me (it was becoming really boring). I realized that gaming wasn't something that I was going to "grow out of," but I was starting to feel a need to justify it in light of the incredible amount of time I was spending on it. Fortunately my wife plays, but I guess that was inevitable since I refused to date women who wouldn't play--roleplaying games that is. :-)

So, one day in April of 1990 as I was talking back and forth with Ken McGlothlen (Terry and Darrell had left the scene by this time, although we're still friends and have occasional contact) on the Internet during my Boeing lunch hour, Wizards of the Coast came up. We started reminiscing about the "good old days" and then the idea popped into my head, "Why don't we do it?" So I typed it across the Internet to Ken, "Why don't we start a gaming company? Wizards of the Coast, only for real this time?"

There was a long pause.

Ken knew me well enough to know I was serious, and that I also realized the implications of starting something like this. His response was, "Something like 90% of all businesses fail within the first two years, but if anyone could pull if off, you could." Ken is someone who very rarely gives complements, and that statement was something I emotionally fell back on many, many times over the next couple of years.

So, we spent the next couple weeks talking to each other over the Internet for a couple of hours every day. Some of those conversations are still logged somewhere. :-) We talked about every conceivable thing, like what we wanted to do, who we'd need, pricing, fund raising, etc. One thing that came out of that conversation was that we "wanted to do it right." That we were going to approach it as a business venture, spend ample time planning it out, raising money, print professional-quality products, and find professional editing, art, typesetting, printing, binding, etc.

Wizards: Peter on the Cusp, Part One

2011-07-09T07:04:00.000-07:00

The ancient Greeks noticed that because people are such excellent mimics, they often don't show you who they really are but rather who they think you want them to be or who they wish they were. Worse, because we're so good at losing ourselves in the roles we play, often the last person in the world you should ask to find out who someone really is is the person himself, because he is the most committed to the role and not the reality.

The Greeks believed the best way to find out who someone really is is to put him under such extreme levels of pressure that he has no energy left for pretense and has to fully engage with the problem with nothing left but his own authentic resources, the truest, strongest part of himself. Since it would be sadistic to conduct such experiments on real people, they conducted them upon artificial people, putting them under pressure to reveal their innermost character, and so the art of tragedy was born.

Sometimes, though, life decides to run that experiment anyway.

In some ways, Christmas 1992 was the most characteristic time in the history of Wizards of the Coast. Under extreme financial pressure from a harassment lawsuit, Peter was forced to write his last paycheck to his small staff for the foreseeable future. Everyone struggled to keep moving the company forward while simultaneously worrying about out how they could each pay their rent and other bills to survive through the crisis. Poised between hope and despair, the true nature of the relationships the team had forged came to the forefront.

It was while under this pressure in January 1993 that Peter was asked by James A Seymour on a mailing list:

Peter, could you please post a brief history of your company? I'm curious from both a casual standpoint, and from a game writer wanta be viewpoint.

Peter's response, which I will quote in its entirety over the next several posts on this blog, is where we will begin our exploration of the early days of Wizards of the Coast. I chose it in part because the story he tells is true, in part because it came before the distractions of Magic: The Gathering and Dungeons & Dragons changed the way we looked back at our origins, and in part because its hopeful, honest, and friendly tone even at a time of extreme pressure shows something important about the character of Peter Adkison:

Jeez, this could take hours--make that days! Asking a gaming company president, er, I mean janitor [We'll discuss the "janitor" another time --Ed.], for a brief history of his company is like asking a historian for a brief history of the world. :-)

Thanks for being interested; I'll try and be brief.

Along about 1979 or so a product came out called "The Overlord's City" or something like that from Judges Guild. [City-State of the Invincible Overlord --Ed.] A friend of mine named Terry Campbell saw that and was really excited about it--thought it was an incredible piece of work and was really inspired to make up his own city module. He suggested to myself and two other friends, Darrell Judd and Ken McGlothlen, that we start a gaming company. Darrell came up with the name, Wizards of the Coast, from the name of a mage guild that one of his characters belonged to in another guy's campaign. We sat around and discussed it but figured that there was no way we had the time, experience, or funding to pull something like this off. The discussion sorta ended with a "maybe someday after we have real jobs." Little did we know.

To be continued . . .

Wizards: To Rescue Dungeons & Dragons

2011-07-08T07:01:00.000-07:00

It was a dream of Peter Adkison's (and many of the Walla Walla D&D players) to some day work for TSR and contribute to the game we loved. Wasn't that every young but serious gamer's dream? The Walla Walla gamers were young and serious, but we thought we were just dreaming.

When Peter's dreams shifted to starting his own game company, his motivation was, as he once told me, that he had a filing cabinet full of great gaming material, and he had a circle of friends with filing cabinets of their own, so together there simply had to be some way to make a living doing what we loved. Taking our hobby professional just seemed like the right next step in growing up.

In the early poor-but-not-desperate days (before the teetering-on-the-edge-of-bankruptcy days to follow), when we fantasized about where we wanted Wizards of the Coast to go, what we wanted it to become, we started out with the short-term goal of breaking even - maybe even becoming barely profitable! - but when we really stretched our imagination we imagined doing work that would make our heroes at TSR proud. We wanted to be like them - maybe even as good as them someday.

In those days, when the office was the basement of Cathy and Peter's house, we were tiny and spending more than we brought in (which for a long time until we got our first product to market was nothing). The idea of actually becoming bigger than TSR and buying them was sheer fantasy back then - but even then we dreamed of it. Most D&D fans who go into the gaming business must have at least imagined it from time to time, but when you're wondering if you're ever going to finish your first book and whether anyone will like it, it's hard to take your own dreams seriously.

And yet.

We would say "Maybe someday we'll even become big enough to buy TSR," and we would laugh it off to show we weren't serious. But we were. We did take our dreams seriously. We were embarrassed and ashamed and afraid to admit even to ourselves that we were seriously dreaming that big about something we couldn't do when we were having trouble doing even the little things, but it didn't matter. We worked like crazy and kept on dreaming.

Meanwhile, hardly anyone liked the direction TSR's business owners were going with the company. Peter certainly did not. When Gary Gygax left TSR it was unthinkably shocking to those of us who grew up with D&D, but then things got worse. We were afraid the management would run it into the ground, which they then did. When TSR got itself stuck - unable to pay bills to get products printed that would have earned the money to pay those bills - many of us were frustrated and outraged. Peter wanted to rescue D&D and ensure it could never be imprisoned again.

Another time I'll tell the story of how the TSR purchase actually came about, but for now let's cut to the chase about why it happened.

This is the part in today's post where I must switch pronouns. Although I remained close to Wizards until shortly after the Hasbro purchase, about the time they shifted from the basement to their first office building I became a bit more outsider than insider, so Wizards must become a them rather than an us in my little narrative. You'll see this shift a lot over the posts ahead, I'm sure.

When Magic: The Gathering became such an unexpected hit, it made Wizards of the Coast successful enough to save D&D. Of course Peter bought TSR and rescued D&D - any D&D fan in a position to do so would have done so. There were plenty of tactical and strategic details that made it a good move for this company at this time to buy that company, but those are merely the things that allowed Peter to do what he wanted to do anyway, what most role-players want to do - to be the hero and do the right thing, to save the object of his affections from clear and present danger.

So there was half of Peter's dream for D&D accomplished, to rescue it. The other half - to make it immune to future danger - required figuring out a way to keep it rescued, and that took more thought and work. The Open Gaming License (OGL) was the direct result of that search.

The OGL was not designed to screw the gaming industry nor to lead to the domination of Wizards of the Coast and the d20 system. Wizards hoped it would be good for the company and that edition of the rules, but that's not why they did those things - that's only why as a business they were allowed to do those things. The core motivation predated even the existence of Wizards of the Coast, let alone d20 - the love of a gamer for his game and the desire to protect it forever.

And that's one of the reasons why I'll always think of the first (pre-Hasbro) Wizards of the Coast as a success, because it let us fulfill one of our most cherished dreams for our industry. If you ever bought Magic cards, you too helped save Dungeons and Dragons forever.

Hammers of the God, First Review

2011-07-07T07:45:00.000-07:00

Many people who buy modules don't play them anymore. They buy them, flip through them, but don't always read them; if they do, they're more likely to read partway and then lose interest. Less than half of consumers ever play with modules any more. The rest just sit on shelves, collecting dust, adding bulk to gaming collections.

Look around your gaming room. You know what I'm talking about. How many gaming supplies do you own that you've never seriously gamed with?

Those of us who do sometimes actually play with the modules we buy do so because once upon a time we had a great play experience with a module. For module consumers, the challenge is to set aside all the so-so experiences and recall what was so special about the very best of them, why they stick with us even years later.

Modules like James Raggi's Hammers of the God can help us remember why we fell in love with modules, why we wanted to interrupt our reading partway through not to put them on a shelf but to call our friends and schedule a time for them to play in it.

First, movement through the dungeon is original and interesting. This is not a high-circulation design with multiple alternative paths, like B1, In Search of the Unknown. Rather, it demonstrates that even a simple branching pattern can create great gameplay through a combination of fascinating settings and a series of original and tactically interesting choke-points. Structurally, it reminds me more of S2, White Plume Mountain, though with all the details different.

Second, also like White Plume Mountain, Hammers of the God has some interesting tricks, traps, and environmental challenges. As I read each of them I thought about how a party would puzzle through solutions that don't get them killed, and it seemed to me these challenges were just as interesting and difficult as those in the classic modules I love.

Third, the setup itself is a classic, or rather the classic - a treasure map covered in dwarven runes - and so is the setting . . . but I can't tell you why. In Raggi's words, all the players get to know is "Treasure map!" and "Dwarf related!"

The details are supposed to be a surprise, and they are, so I'm not going to spoil it. I can say this about it: we've all seen this kind of Dwarven setting before, but it was never done quite like this.

Dwarves are an odd choice, since Raggi prides himself on making interesting settings, and dwarves have long become painfully predictable. Everyone knows what dwarves are like, which makes them a tough subject to break out of the box with. I know four interesting takes on dwarves - the Norse Sagas, Tolkien, James Maliszewski's Dwimmermount dwarves, and this module. Like Moria, the setting of Hammers of the God is chock full of unexpected history, but without giving too much away I can say it also contains an important and fascinating form of art, and literature, and religion, and people. Only partway through the read I found myself genuinely interested in dwarves again, which was no mean feat. To take an ordinary ingredient and make it sing again is one of the defining characteristics of the best chefs.

Clearly I'm going to have to find the time to run some players through this James Raggi cuisine. When I do, I'll write a second review. Like all his modules, this one's not just for reading. It can only be fully savored at the table.

Memorable, lethal, and crying out for a party of characters to explore it: that's a classic module.

Holmes: A Palimpsest

2011-07-06T07:06:00.000-07:00

Part of the reason Holmes fans enjoy detailed analysis of his text is that there are inconsistencies in it that reflect his self-defined role as primarily an editor rather than an author. The text must be read as a palimpsest with at least four layers that derive from four different goals for his book.

His first goal for his book was to edit the original 1974 Dungeons & Dragons rules into a clearer, easier-to-learn format. Contrary to about half of what Gary Gygax later said on the subject (even great men are subject to lapses of memory), and contrary to what the final text says and what most readers have concluded, Dr. Holmes began this work before Mr. Gygax began assembling his own edits into the manuscripts that would eventually become Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. The blue book was not originally related to AD&D at all. Much of the text in Dr. Holmes's Dungeons & Dragons is word for word the text from Mr. Gygax and Mr. Arneson's Dungeons & Dragons text, as it was intended to be.

His second goal was to address the text to beginners, to create an introduction to the original Dungeons & Dragons that made it easier for new players and DMs to learn the game. He focused on just the lower levels of the game - though he still kept many higher-level monsters - and omitted complicated rules that could be considered add-ons to the core foundation of rules. Likewise he stripped down the advice to DMs, along with the wilderness and siege rules. In some cases, his excision of these supplementary rules is not complete, leaving the fingerprints of his editing in the final manuscript. Although later the project to create the blue book was described as always having been motivated by the second goal alone, there is reason to believe this second goal was arrived at later, that at first he planned a complete re-edit but after discussion with the folks at TSR decide to limit its scope to a beginner's guide.

His third goal - unstated, but evident in the text - was to reflect Gary Gygax's evolving vision for the game. We see this goal with his import of options like the Thief class from Mr. Gygax's Supplement 1: Greyhawk, with his adoption of the five-part alignment system from Mr. Gygax's article "The Meaning of Law and Chaos in Dungeons & Dragons and Their Relationships to Good and Evil" in the February 1976 issue of The Strategic Review magazine, and with borrowings from Mr. Gygax's draft Player's Handbook and Monster Manual manuscripts. These updates were sometimes worked smoothly into Dr. Holmes's emerging text, but they often introduced inconsistencies that betrayed their supplemental nature.

A fourth goal - not his but imposed upon the text by TSR during the production process - was to advertise the forthcoming Advanced Dungeons & Dragons game and to generally try to repurpose the text as an introduction to that game instead of to the original Dungeons & Dragons game. Although TSR and Mr. Gygax originally approved Dr. Holmes's goal of creating a re-edit of and introduction to original Dungeons & Dragons, the further Mr. Gygax proceeded with his Advanced Dungeons & Dragons project the less he liked the idea of having Dr. Holmes's project point new players and DMs toward what Mr. Gygax increasingly began to think of as the past. In 2005 Mr. Gygax wrote on the EN World forums that he was the one who inserted the AD&D material into Dr. Holmes's book. This layer of edits was rushed and created numerous inconsistencies in the final text.

Some will find these claims noncontroversial, but others will find them bold. In the series ahead I hope to examine each of the four layers in details.

Wizards of the Coast: A New Series

2011-07-05T19:03:00.000-07:00

I was close to the people who founded Wizards. We gamed together for years in Walla Walla long before Wizards was more than a vague idea. We attended each other's weddings, supported each other though breakups and tragedies, and generally understood each other's character and intentions.

I never worked for Wizards, but my wife did as did most of my friends - indeed, there was a time when I seemed the only one of my circle of friends who did not work there - and many times we talked together about why they did what they did and what they hoped to achieve. In the early days, in the basement of the house that Peter and Cathy mortgaged twice to try to keep their dream alive during the difficult years, I attended almost all of the weekly staff meetings, and I often hung out at the company - since after all most of my social circle was there. After the move to the first and second office buildings I was still there almost every day, however briefly, since I drove my wife to and from work and often came inside and hung out, and I attended many staff functions.

I was such a part of the company without being an employee that even during their later, more security-conscious years even employees who did not know me would let me into the building without pause. The newer employees saw me so often they just assumed I worked there, and the older employees all knew me too well to think of me as an outsider. The funniest example of that was when the head of security let me in the very week he personally enacted strict new guidelines to protect building security. It just didn't occur to anyone that I was an outsider, but I was. I was as inside as an outsider could have been.

Eventually we'll talk about why I never became an employee, but for now my point is not that I'm one of the cool kids because I'm friends with the cool kids - my own career where I've chosen to make my mark on the world has nothing to do with gaming. My point is that you're never going to get a more inside look at Wizards from an outsider than I can give you, because the only people more inside than me were actually inside.

That puts me in an interesting position to write a series like this. It's because of my background that I know from first-hand experience that most of the histories written about Wizards of the Coast miss a good deal of the story. It bugs me. If we don't understand what happened, if the true story is never told, how are we supposed to learn from it?

Peter and I once talked about how weird media coverage is. When we were younger, we just assumed that the media was more or less right most of the time, aside from occasional errors that had to be corrected in the next day's paper. We figured outrageous errors only happened because of conscious bias.

It was Wizards's experience with the media that taught us both how naive that view was, how wrong the media is most of the time about most things. In the entire time I was associated with Wizards, I never once read even a short article about Wizards that didn't get something really basic wrong, like claiming that Peter invented Magic, or that Richard founded Wizards. These were not writers with a vendetta against the company; they were just driven by the demands of their industry to hurry to press, with no time for quality control or fact checking. Peter and I concluded in that long-ago talk: If the media is this wrong about something we know, how wrong must they be about all the other subjects we don't know well enough to tell the difference?

Experience eventually teaches most of us the sad answer. Reporting is more or less always full of errors. It's organized, professional gossip. The most you can hope for is a moderately accurate and entertaining source. The only part of history we ever learn the truth about - and at best only in fragmentary form - is the history we ourselves lived through. Everything else is hearsay, exaggeration, and distortion. When I read articles and Internet speculations about Wizards's motivations for this or that action they took, I know I'm not reading the results of malice but of the logical consequences of getting our information from second-hand sources that cannot possibly offer us the truth.

The only real antidote for this is for each of us to offer, as soberly and carefully as we can, those pieces of history we can report from direct experience, with the understanding that although they are merely subjective perspectives they are at least honest ones. I have maybe three worthy stories in me, and this is one of them. Telling what I know of Wizards's origins is one of the contributions I can make toward trying to capture a little real history for those who missed directly experiencing it. I missed a lot, but I also saw a lot. We still know the rest of the players in this little drama, and their perspectives can help fill in the many gaps in what will follow.

Maybe together in this piecemeal way we can tell a little truth together. I hope you enjoy it.

Vornheim: The Complete City Kit, First Review

2011-06-15T20:35:00.000-07:00

Author and artist Zak Sabbath must be the love child of Bill Sienckiewicz, David Macauley, Paolo Soleri, Dr. Seuss, and Richard Scarry. All six of those artists create layouts so complex and unexpected, so far outside the box that after flipping to a new page of art or diagrams the reader's first reaction is often to stare at it wondering "What the Hell am I looking at?" (and where's Goldbug?) After which the light bulb comes on, we are enlightened, and our concept of the world expands.

The covers of Vornheim: The Complete City Kit are random generators. The inside of the dust jacket is an intricately drawn map of the city that looks like an etching. Palaces and cathedrals look like a bizarre, titanic cyborg hands. The wilderness map looks like a quilty patchwork of expressionistically drawn city blocks. A house map is keyed with illustrations of each room's contents. Page 18 has possibly my favorite small dungeon map ever, in simplified, stylized 3D, again with illustrations of the contents. Cross-sections, silhouettes, tables, a diagram for randomly generating NPC relationships capable of generating stories, a flowchart for searching a library, and simply impossible, gravity-defying, fantasy construction of towers, bridges, arches, and flying buttresses stacked into off-balance, phantasmagorically teetering architectural piles . . . and that's before we consider the pages and pages of surprising encounters and provocative tables.

And all in a small, dense, sixty-four page hard-cover book.

Zak, James, Darren, Mandy, Maria, and the playtesters have crafted a great sandbox and improv-generation aid for DMs who want to run city adventures - and for the many DMs who don't want to yet but will if they immerse themselves in the spirit of this book.

Vornheim colors far outside the lines of recent mainstream gaming, which uses crisp art and text to lead the DM and players by the nose through scripted rules and adventures. Instead, Vornheim is Byzantine, brilliant, and exhilarating, a return to the original do-it-yourself, hobbyist tradition of stimulating the DM's imagination until he or she bubbles over with ideas and an urge to run games that express them, games that in turn excite and stimulate the players to take the game in unexpected directions, fresher than any pre-planned script can be. Vornheim is a big gift to gaming in a little package.

Vornheim is a valuable addition to the small but growing group of recent gaming releases that proves the reality and worth of the old school renaissance. Surely gaming awards are coming its way over the course of the next year. Congratulations to Zak, James, and the rest of the team. Well done!

Holmes Roots

2011-06-12T12:06:00.000-07:00

David C. Sutherland III's dungeon from the blue book.

Since July last year I've been working with a couple people on a little project that requires us to comb carefully through the text of Doctor John Eric Holmes's Dungeons and Dragons blue book from 1977, a work that launched many of us into our D&D hobby and still excites our imagination.

In the process, we're discovering where various rules and concepts in the Holmes blue book come from - which ideas go back to Chainmail or to the original Dungeons and Dragons set, and which were innovations by the good doctor himself. For those of us interested in the details of our game, how it came to exist, and how it was originally played by the first-generation gamers, I'm going to be posting a series that traces these individual game mechanics and concepts.

For the rest of you, alas, this will not be your cup of tea, but boy howdy is it mine.

I hope that late this year, about the time this series concludes, I'll have something more interesting to say about the underlying project that's motivating this exploration, but for now let's just treat that as one of the many mysteries to be found deep in the dungeon toward the end of our journey. For now, let's focus on the journey itself, on the analysis of the blue book.

Essential Grognards: Philotomy Jurament

2011-06-12T11:14:00.000-07:00

Philotomy's OD&D Musings

For many D&D grognards, Philotomy Jurament's website Philotomy's OD&D Musings remains a philosophical and conceptual reference that helps to define the way we think about old-school-renaissance role playing. He writes clearly and concisely about how and why he was drawn back from the more recent versions of D&D to the older ones, and more importantly about what the specific gaming experience is that these older versions capture for him. Many of us do not much write about these topics mainly because he has already captured the way we feel about it.

Contrary to the way I just described it (that is, contrary to the net effect it has upon us) his website is structured like a toolkit rather than a philosophical narrative. His site is not a blog but a simple, static website with a four-item menu across the top and a index of just thirty-six main posts. It has not been updated during the several years I've been returning to it, but remains a potent force in the community perhaps because of rather than despite its stasis.

It is not the production of new entries but the thinking within the existing ones that keeps his site fresh. Although he writes with authority about the rules, he eschews false objectivity in favor of a personal approach, always writing about gaming nondogmatically, always in terms of how he and his players like to game and what he has discovered in the rules. For those of us immersed in the details of the game over the decades, the results are insightful.

I will now fail my test of originality by agreeing with most of his fans that my favorite post is his antidote to Gygaxian naturalism, The Dungeon as Mythic Underworld, a short, evocative essay that helped me break through the straightjacket that was suffocating the life out of my games.

FrDave's Series on Holmes and Cook

2011-06-12T10:39:00.000-07:00

Over at the blog Blood of Prokopius, FrDave has since April been running a series of posts that explore, compare, and contrast the Holmes and Cook editions of Dungeons & Dragons. He often discovers subtleties of the rules or setting missed by other writers and uses his explorations to propose explanations, extensions, and alternatives. His post from Thursday compares how Holmes and Cook describe dragons.

FrDave's been pondering role-playing games in his posts since December 2008 and has run several series of posts during that time, including Planar Cosmology of D&D, posts from his Lost Colonies campaign, World Building, OD&D Magic Champions Style, Thoughts on Sci-Fi RPGs, Meditations on various RPG topics, Druids as Monsters, and Saintly Saturdays. Of these, Saintly Saturdays is the most unusual, a series about saints celebrated by the Orthodox Christian church and related RPG topics. Yesterday's post was about the origin of the hymn Axion Estin, and about revitalizing the cleric class by emphasizing faith as a key component of the class.

Stonehell Skye Begins

2010-06-27T23:59:00.000-07:00

Today I started Stonehell Skye, the fourth adventure arc in my Englandia campaign, more or less by accident.

For the last two years I've been reading the blog and bulletin-board writings and maps of Philotomy Jurament, Sean "The Stonegiant" Stone, Gabor "Melan" Lux, "Evreaux", "Wheggi", Trent Foster, Allan "Grodog" Grohe, Stefan Poag, Joseph "Greyhawk Grognard" Bloch, "Mbassoc2003", Jeff "Jeff's Game Blog" Rients, James "Grognardia" Maliszewski, Michael "The Society of Torch, Pole, and Rope" Curtis, Michael "Chgowiz" Shorten, David "Sham" Bowman, "A Paladin in Citadel", James Edward "Lamentations of the Flame Princess" Raggi IV, Zak "Playing D&D with Porn Stars" and "I Hit It With My Axe" Sabbath, and many others.

It's been a heady mix of megadungeon theory, old-school theory, and just plain fun I've been soaking my tired gamer brain in, and it's reminded me in just about the best possible way how much fun it used to be to kick it old school.

Our plan for today had been just to run practice combats to get more familiar with the 3.5 rules, but as I was preparing I realized I no longer wanted to put off that old-school fun entirely. Instead, this morning I unexpectedly decided five things.

First, I didn't want to practice combat artifically, in arenas or generic settings. It would be just as easy and a lot more fun to practice combat in actual play, to learn by doing. The connective tissue of the game would make the combat mean something.

Second, if we were really going to play, I wanted to run a megadungeon. I came this close to starting my own then and there after rererereading the Dragonsfoot megadungeon threads, but I was dissuaded by that same reread. One of the commentators pointed out how personal a true megadungeon needs to be to sustain it over time. My old megadungeon from Walla Walla, Seven Levels, is no longer where my heart's at - it's not personal to who I am now - so I couldn't resurrect that, and I'm still exploring which parts of a megadungeon speak to me the most, so I'm not ready to create my own again from scratch. I knew then that I was going to run someone else's megadungeon, running it pretty straight at first and gradually making it more personal over time, and that this would be the setting for our "combat practice" today.

Third, I knew I wanted to run a mythic underworld dungeon. Philotomy's conception speaks most deeply to me. In pre-articulated form it's what long ago excited me about Dungeons & Dragons, the kind of underworld that haunted my happy childhood dreams, yet it's the form I never ran. Early on I was distracted by Gygaxian naturalism, and although that served my Dagorëa campaign well for many years, it's also ultimately what sucked the vitality out of my dungeons, why I abandoned them in the 1990s. I just know the mythic underworld is what I'm craving, so whoever's megadungeon I adapted was going to get a serious dose of mythos from the get-go.

Fourth, although my players are committed to D&D 3.5 for their characters and skills and combat, I've grown equally committed to Holmes and original D&D's approaches to experience, time, resource consumption, monster and treasure distribution, wandering-monster frequency, challenging the players rather than their characters, and above all on the focus of the game being about exploration and resource management rather than straight-up combat. I decided we'd run this as a fusion game - as Wizards-style characters in a TSR-style game - and see what happened. My goal here is not perfection, just an experiment, a light-hearted investigation into the mad science of fun.

Fifth, after catching up on the last two years of Order of the Stick on Friday night and watching the most recent eight episodes of I Hit It With My Axe Saturday and Sunday morning, I've decided one of the worst mistakes I made in gaming over the last twenty years was in approaching it entirely too seriously, in trying too hard to get it "right." Above all, it was watching Mandy, Connie, Satine, KK, Frankie, and Justine bubble over with excitement at the creative silliness of Zak's attack goblins riding in inflatable-pig balloons that gave me my epiphany this morning. I decided to kick the quest for awesome epic quality out the door for a while and replace it with sheer, ridiculous fun. My job gives me all the seriousness I need. What's missing is real play of the childlike variety.

I had to have something ready by 1:00, so I knew I'd have to pick something I'd already studied.

I thought about cobbling it together from existing classic modules, but my third ongoing Englandia story arc, Skye, is already exploring classic modules. Besides, for this fourth arc's setting I wanted something more organic in its entirety, not just a pile of unrelated dungeons one atop the next. The difficulty levels of the ideal megadungeon should flow smoothly enough that a party of beginners should be able to begin adventuring at the top and develop their entire careers within its boundaries, exploring downward as their own experience levels climb upward (not that things ever proceed so smoothly in practice). Making that possible requires a certain minimal design coherency lacking from any random assemblage of dungeons.

After reviewing many of the incredible maps in the megadungeon threads I also realized I needed something that was already keyed to make me relax enough about running this. That ruled out some truly beautiful work - I was sorry not to be able to run Gabor Lux's gorgeous and organic Khosura maps, for example - but I had no choice. I needed enough of the work already done so I could focus my energy for now on running an existing weave and embroidering it as I went rather than exhausting myself creating the entire weave myself out of nothing more than maps.

I reviewed Joseph Bloch's impressive Castle of the Mad Archmage, but ideally it should follow Gary Gygax’s Castle Zagyg: The Upper Works, which I don't yet have and didn't have time to get before game time, so I decided to save exploration of this excellent adaptation of one of our hobby's founding megadungeons for a future adventure arc. Besides, I want to be more on my game before I tackle a work of such historic importance and confident whimsy.

I spent a good long while looking again at Stefan Poag's marvellous The Mines of Khunmar, but in the end I needed something more fully keyed. That will be remedied when Stefan gets his module fully transcribed, updated, and published soon. I'll be better off running Khunmar then, but it wouldn't serve me today.

For now, I settled on Michael Curtis's excellent megadungeon Stonehell Dungeon: Down Night-Haunted Halls, which he developed in part as an experiment to prove that a megadungeon can be captured sufficiently in a publication, a subject of much speculation over the last couple years in the old-school renaissance community. Stonehell is both packed with inventiveness and also structured with great economy and discipline.

The format for the maps and keys for each level are derived from Michael Shorten and David Bowman's highly influential one-page dungeon format. The constraints of that format helped guide Michael Curtis toward complete but extremely terse text explanations for each level reminiscent of such Judges Guild classics as Tegel Manor and City State of the Invincible Overlord. The result is very interesting. The endless expansiveness of the megadungeon concept is expressed in just about the tightest possible format, which I've elsewhere described as the gaming equivalent of an epic written as a series of haikus.

So now Stonehell Skye, Michael Curtis's Stonehell reset on the Isle of Skye in Scotland in the year 991 AD or thereabouts, will be my 3.5-OSR-fusion-megadungeon playground, a more light-hearted complement to The Hebrides, my ongoing 3.5-dungeon adventure arc, and The Severn River, my long-running but currently hibernating non-dungeon adventure arc.

My thanks to more or less the entire OSR D&D community for your indispensible help in getting me restarted.

Englandia History: Romans versus Druids

2010-04-10T21:30:00.000-07:00

The Emperor Claudius's imperial designs on the British Isles turn out somewhat differently in Englandia.

Here's the first of three major changes to British history in Englandia:

The province of Britannia was incredibly important to the Roman empire. The Roman occupation changed Britain forever, but Rome never fully conquered the British, just enough to break the back of druidic power forever. Indeed, there is much reason to conclude that was the primary motivation behind the conquest of Britain was to stop the British from supporting the Celtic resistance on the continent, that destroying the British stronghold on Anglesey drove the shape of the conquest.

The problem is, breaking the druidic line in 60 CE destroyed some marvelous cultural complexity that I would rather have had to enrich my campaign in 1000. To recover it, I would have to find a tipping point in the Roman conquest that would have allowed the druids to survive until Emperor Honorius in 410 declined to defend Britannia (Rome was busy getting sacked by the Visigoths), effectively letting the province go its own way. Fortunately, finding what I needed was easy, inevitable, because all of Britannia already was a tipping point for the Roman empire.

The Romans never even tried to conquer Ireland, and they tried but failed to conquer Scotland, after wasting enormous expense and manpower: abandoning the Antonine Wall after 160 and losing 50,000 Roman soldiers to successful Scottish guerilla tactics during the rein of Septimus Severus.

The evidence is clear: the Romans wanted to complete the conquest, they needed to—failure to do so cost them dearly in military expenditures—but they couldn't simultaneously hang onto the rest of the empire and also finish the conquest of Britain. Rome was at its limit in Britain. Shifting that limit backward to prevent the destruction of Anglesey would not have taken much of a change.

The question for Englandia is whether the shift in the supernatural world—in supernature—would have been enough to bring that about.

On the con side of the argument, a real supernature along the lines planned for Englandia would have been great for Rome. A martial culture that revered Mars, God of War, would have found that a real Mars would have loved them, too, and his favors would have made Rome even more devastating in battle—and that's just one important god out of a vast pantheon who would have taken care of the Romans. For all the parts of life that fall between the domains of those great gods, imagine lares, penates, and genii filling up Rome with intelligence and concern, helping out in myriad little ways to keep every Roman on the path to success and out of trouble. Then, too, augurs and auspices, signs and portents, diviners and oracles, which the Romans so cherished and believed in, would have helped Rome immensely if they had been real, if they actually could foretell the consequences of their plans; imagine how many disasters they could have avoided.

Englandia's supernature would make the Roman empire and every individual Roman citizen staggeringly more formidable.

Unfortunately for Rome, there is also a pro side of the argument. In a nutshell, Rome is outnumbered; Rome is one culture trying to conquer dozens of others, and every one of those cultures also benefits from Englandia's supernature. It's one supernature against dozens of others. The further a supernatural Rome expands the more supernatural enemies it makes, just like in real history and with the same consequences, more or less.

Not exactly like real history, though. Some things would change. The intensity of the struggles would increase and acquire their new, supernatural dimensions. This would shift the texture of conquest and resistance—some cultures that had resisted Rome well would do less well against a supernatural Rome, and conversely some that fared badly would stop Rome in its tracks because of this new dimension to their struggles. Based on design principle two from last post, the crucial variable would be which cultures had the poorest supernatural traditions and which the richest.

Which brings us to the British Isles.

The British mythology was as rich as the Roman. The land would be crawling with monsters of every variety. Every Celtic subculture in the British Isles had its greater gods and goddesses, and the lesser deities would be in every well, grove, and spring, in every venerated place in Britain—and almost every place in Britain was venerated.

As for magic use, this is one place the British would have an edge. Mediterranean conceptions of magic involved mostly nonmagical, heroic mortals interacting with supernatural forces and beings, but the British conception of magic was very different. The British supernatural extended into the lives of mortals. Sure, only a few would be mighty druids and witches, but even the many had their formidable gesas, talents, and second sights. Anyone familiar with Celtic mythology knows a gesa can make even a "normal" person profoundly mighty (at least until the downside kicks in and destroys his life, but hey, that's the Celts for you), but it's the second sight and related forms of divination that make all the difference.

Many Celtic magics resulted in the ability to foresee the future. Yes, many Roman ones did, too, but this is one ability where being evenly matched favors the otherwise-conquered. The problem for the Romans is simple: as important as their military might was to their imperial conquests, their political savvy was crucially important to their conquests.

Rome, like empires before and after, relied heavily on Divide and Conquer, a strategy that in turn relies upon finding feuding groups and lying to one of them that if they side with you then only their enemies will get conquered. In this way, a people who could have defeated you if united instead split up into small enough groups to beat. Rome used this strategy over and over and conspicuously used it to prevent the warring British tribes from uniting against them and kicking them out of the British Isles.

Divination, real divination, destroys this strategy utterly, because the parties being encouraged to feud with one another can check their divinations to discover that those feuds will result in their conquest, whereas uniting against Rome will result in their being able to kick the Romans out of their homeland. The Britons were mighty warriors and highly effective against the Romans (witness the Lost Legion, among many other examples).

If the Romans couldn't convince the Britons to break into small enough groups, the Romans wouldn't have made as much progress in their conquest of Britain.

So how far would the Romans have got under these conditions? They were still mighty and would have been mightier still, but so would the Britons have been, and their powers of divination would have let them unite against Rome. I'm opting for a conservative interpretation of the results. The Romans would still have pushed into Britain and held territory for an extended amount of time, but they could not have spread so far so permanently. They would have held the lowlands, but could never have permanently conquered any of the highlands or outlying areas.

For example, just as the Romans actually had to abandon the Antonine Wall and fall back to Hadrian's Wall, so under these supernatural conditions they would never have made it as far as building the Antonine Wall, and would have been unable to hold Hadrian's Wall either, falling back further into the Scottish lowlands where they would have built the walls and fortresses they could have held, closer to the center of their power in the southeast.

More importantly, they would not have made so much progress toward the centers of British magical power, where the most mighty magics would have been brought to bear against them. Thus, the more the Romans neared Anglesey (Ynys Mon), center of druidic power in Britain, the more they would have bogged down and failed. Just as the Romans in our world failed to hold Scotland and had to fall back to line of fortifications, so in this fantasy world they would have failed to conquer Wales and would have done likewise. Where Offa many centuries later would have built his dike to hold back Welsh raiders at the Severn River, the Romans will instead build Nero's Wall to hold back the terrifying ancient Welsh.

First change accomplished:

In Englandia, the Romans never defeated the druids.

Englandia: Two Design Principles

2010-03-21T22:34:00.000-07:00

The more I studied history, the more trouble I had with the supernatural, with magic, monsters, and the divine. Although a great source of gaming fun and a powerful tool in the DM's arsenal for expanding the game's horizons, it's hard to avoid the conclusion that almost any magic item or spell from Dungeons & Dragons could have changed the course of history at some time in some place. If the world were a Gygaxian cornucopia of magic items and crawling with monsters, history would not even remotely have unfolded the way it actually did. Likewise, the divine.

No, to run a historically-based campaign, balancing verisimilitude and fantasy correctly would have to become a central goal. This led to my first design principle:

In Englandia, the supernatural is real but rare.

In 1997 when I was designing Englandia, I had been gaming for twenty years, so I knew this principle was going to be a problem for me. I was spoiled by the supernatural glut of my previous campaigns, in which magic was always at hand to spice up an adventure. As I've written before in this blog, I used it too readily, especially in Dagorëa, leaning on it as upon a crutch, and it delayed my ability to create convincing non-player characters by a decade during which I tried to compensate with the wild imagination of my monsters and magicks. I'd come a long way since then, but still, cutting the supernatural back enough in my games to keep the setting remotely related to real history was going to be a real challenge.

The solution lay in the adoption of a second, balancing design principle. As rare as the supernatural had to be to protect the historical integrity of the setting, it would have to be just that much more interesting than it was usually handled, to get every bit as much gaming juice out of it. That is, I would reduce its power to change history, but increase its originality and memorability.

For example, if I eliminated dwarves, elves, gnomes, hobbits, and half-orcs as choices for player-character races, I could compnsate by making human beings that much more interesting. After all, any DM worthy of the name ought to be able to create endlessly interesting player races out of the diversity of humanity: God-fearing Roman Catholic Saxons, enbattled pagan Mercians, heathen Scottish tribesmen, shamanic and tattooed Picts, headhunting Irishmen on chariots, fatalistic Northmen in long ships, sullen and xenophobic fenfolk, devout and cosmopolitan Moors, and so many more.

So that's how I would pump up my diminished supernatural, too, how the second design principle would work:

In Englandia, the supernatural varies culturally; it works the way each culture believed it did, most strongly in that culture's homeland.

So, for example, though there would be very few magic-users in Englandia, they would be extraordinarily different from one another, maybe between one and three wizards per culture to represent the range of magic in that culture. Likewise the monsters: from selkies on the Scottish coasts, to waterhorses and loch monsters in Scotland proper, to redcaps on the Scottish borders, on down to pagan Mercia where night stalkers haunted the land, to Christian Wessex with its demons and hags, and beyond.

Common throughout the British Isles was the belief that such things were disruptions, intrusions from the land of the dead, the otherworld, the faerie lands, and so I could set aside D&D's armies of undifferentiated humanoids and replace them with highly individualized beasties crossing over from beyond, each one carrying more meaning than just itself because it also represented a breakdown in the natural order of things, some unique kind of corruption that also had to be addressed.

Beverly and I already knew this was going to be fun. Even just the choice of setting combined with these two design principles was enough to solve many of the problems I'd had with my previous campaign worlds. The more we talked about these ideas, the more I could feel my creative juices flowing again. What a relief!

Still, we couldn't help feel some regrets. The price of finding a historical backwater and all the freedom that entailed was giving up some diversity, a cost we felt more keenly the more we designed a supernatural that flourished and unfolded ever more beautifully the more cultural diversity it had to work with. What we wouldn't give to be able to use fabled Baghdad, crossroads of the old world, as our setting, but its history was just too well documented and too foundational for the course of world history.

The solution, though, lay in those two design principles. The world so made not only thrived on diversity, it increased it, creating a feedback loop. The supernatural is inherently destabilizing to history, and so could increase its diversity, but also, as shaped by the second principle it could stabilize history by surprising would-be conquerors far from home.

Beverly and I studied British history in detail as we never had before to find the delicate turning points, the places where the application of these two design principles would surely have changed the course of history, searching for the fewest number of changes we could make—to keep history close to its actual course—that would both follow inevitably from those design principles and also increase the cultural diversity of the British isles in the year 1000.

Between April and September of 1997 we settled on just three changes to British history that would help to illustrate those principles and shape the character of Englandia.

Lawful Good, Part One

2010-02-14T23:43:00.000-08:00

On February 28, 2009 on Facebook, a few months after I joined, I took the D&D Alignment Test. The results showed me as Lawful Good.

For what that's worth.

These tests never quite offer the right choices. I consistently come out lawful good on alignment tests, but it's not quite accurate.

I'm a big believer in principles, virtues, standards, conventions, and manners, but I also believe the law is often used to enforce injustice, or worse (yes, I think it's worse), that legal systems tend to treat justice or any other higher principle than the law as imaginary. In such cases, the law become a force for nihilism, for the void, for the death of meaning, in short, becomes a tyranny of process over result that destroys any possibility of justice. People at least can understand that overt injustice must be opposed, but nihilistic, inhuman processes tend to confuse people into inaction because there is no clear "bad guy." The corollary to Pogo's "We have met the enemy and he is us" is that it is in such situations, when our own activities inadvertently result in meaningless and justice-blind systems, that we are at our most helpless to fix things.

Thus, lawful, yes, but not in the sense of human law except to the extent that human laws comply with higher laws and principles. When human laws conflict with justice and other deeper principles, I will oppose such laws to the extent available to me because I care too much about the deep principles that should underlie the legal system to let the legal system itself subvert them.

Unfortunately, legal systems tend to make themselves immune to improvement by bloating up themselves and their processes beyond the reach of any individual human beings or even beyond any meaningful organized control by democratic majorities, devolving into self-sustaining amoral systems of processes, a machinery of behavior that is the enemy of individual responsibility and authority.

I am a different kind of lawful than that.

Likewise, good, about which our culture has far less of a clear idea than about lawful, but that's a discussion for another day.

Two more things.

First, the idea of a nation of "laws not men" leads directly to a nihilistic legal system divorced from justice. We need a nation of principles, around which people and laws organize themselves. The law must clearly be subservient to principles and must be edited and adjusted all the time to conform more closely with those principles.

For the law to be a human tool for justice, there must also be few enough laws that dedicated people can actually learn them all. The current situation in which even legal specialists cannot fully know all the laws in their chosen area of expertise is risible, insane, and the legal principle that ignorance of the law is not a defense is actually an evil, a form of cruel and unusual punishment when coupled with a system of laws too vast for the majority of people to be anything but ignorant about most of them. That is, this legal "principle" renders all human beings defenseless against its own inevitable consequences.

Second, what do we do in the meantime? Well, as flawed as the legal system is, it is currently the only tool we have with which to try to bring about some measure of human justice - since there is no formal place in our society for principles, the only sources of true justice - so we do our best to learn about and follow just laws and to learn about and work around the unjust ones.

And we certainly don't flout the law in a vain effort to "prove" how free we are. We save our battles with the legal system for the ones we cannot avoid, where the damage to justice inflicted by the law is so high that it takes precedence over all the other things we could or should be doing with our lives and requires us to sacrifice some part of our lives to this quixotic struggle to eke justice out of a system that cannot conceive of justice yet wraps itself in that very mantle.

That is, we should be law-abiding citizens except when justice demands otherwise.

That is the kind of lawful I am.

One last thing.

Some people's alignments are accidental, just a description of whatever they happen to do, but my alignment is deliberate and very, very important to me. I am passionate about moral, philosophical, and organizational issues. I work hard to understand what the right thing is to do and to try to do it, and I try to sleepwalk through life as little as possible. I fall short plenty in both understanding and execution, as a fallible mortal who overextends himself, but the lifelong struggle to become a good and wise person is almost always on my mind and in my heart.

The Road to Englandia

2010-02-06T22:24:00.000-08:00

Englandia, my fourth and ongoing D&D campaign world, is my current recipe for a fun campaign setting to run.

My ravenous studies in science, history, sociology, and anthropology satisfied my drive to learn but left me unable to enjoy either the random fantasies of my first childhood campaign world or the arbitrarily organized and highly derivative fantasies of Dagorëa, my second campaign world. Both originality and intense verisimilitude have become necessary ingredients in my fantasy play.

However, six years of developing and running Nia Revo, my extremely detailed and original third campaign world, was enough to teach me that inventing a reality from scratch is more work than fun. After three years of running games there, from 1989 to 1992, the increasing intensity of my work life reduced my free time and energy too much to support both running games and the necessary investment in inventing their reality, so I gave up active gaming and spent the last three years of Nia Revo building a notebook detailing its physics, languages, writing systems, history, etc. That turned into an expectations trap, in which the more time and energy I put into the development of the game without actually playing, the more impossible it became to justify all that investment. By 1995 I was burned out and had forgotten how to have fun.

It was clear we had to try something else.

Fortunately, that was the summer Mike Ryan interviewed with Beverly to work for Wizards of the Coast as an editor for the game Magic: The Gathering. Mike liked to DM, so for two years I played and did not DM. Those two years rekindled my love of the game and gave my DMing muscles some time off. Playing in Mike's game taught me that I can't DM unless I play, that the fun of play helps me enjoy life and makes me more playful, and that the tensions and irritations of play stimulate my creativity.

I thought back over my life and realized that D&D was the fountain of my creativity. I learned to draw better for D&D. I learned to write better for D&D. I learned cartography, linguistics, calendars, architecture, geography, storytelling, psychology, and dozens of other things to improve my D&D games. And it worked. My adult games were so much more interesting to me and my players than those of my childhood.

So.

After Mike's game ended in 1996, Beverly and I talked about the rundown of Nia Revo and the lesson I learned from playing with Mike, that I needed to play and DM—that I needed to play to be able to DM—and that I was a better and happier person for doing both.

We talked about the tension between my need for verisimilitude and my need to have the work of DMing be manageable, to fit within our crazy work lives. The limited free time in our schedules meant I had to give up on achieving fantasy realism by inventing it.

Instead, we decided to borrow it.

From history.

Because ultimately, no matter how good I am at simulating history and geography, the results will never be as realistic as reality itself. In hindsight it's obvious, but it took me about twenty years of gaming to relent and admit it to myself.

So over dinner one night in April of 1997, Beverly and I talked through the range of options for when and where to set a new historical campaign. We needed an era that had a lot of interesting cultural diversity, intensity, and turmoil, a time that had a lot of historical material to work with, but a place that didn't, a place where the historical record was sparse enough that we could embroider without unraveling it.

As students of history, we knew that during the Dark Ages the Arab world was the dazzling place to be—and China, the Americas, and many other places were also historically rich and marvelous—but that Europe was a poorly documented cultural backwater, some places more than others. Case in point, from the time the Romans left until the Conqueror's scribes compiled the Domesday Book lie six hundred years only sketchily documented by some chronicles, law codes, deeds, legal documentation, and so on—a lovely but tattered weave on which to embroider our little revels.

And so it was we settled on Saxons and Celts and Picts, Vikings and Magyars and Moors, a series of adventures set on the British Isles starting January 1st, 1000. I named it Englandia in honor of Alfred the Great's lifework and in echo of Jean Sibelius's masterful anthem.

. . .

I never realized it before researching this blog, but Englandia may well never have come about were it not for Mike's fun and fascinating 1995–6 D&D game with us, which rekindled my love of the game. He's like Englandia's godfather, and he was one of its first players. Thanks, man.

Postponing the Story to Resume the Blog

2009-12-30T21:06:00.000-08:00

Evidently I don't want to write about Nia Revo right now, since the prospect brought me to an abrupt halt. So, let's finish the story of how we got here later, and for now, let's skip ahead to the present.

Tables! Tables! Tables! And Snails!

2009-12-13T12:24:00.000-08:00

My favorite posting so far by Sam Kisko on his blog Valley of Blue Snails is this marvelous post called "You spy your long time love laying eggs in the wilderness one evening." It contains a truly baroque suite of tables called the Traumatic Adolescent Background Generator, which is one of the wonderfully weirder things I've read in a while. Although most of these are more fun to read than to have inflicted on your character, I suspect, a few of these are very close to events from my campaign:

19 – You awake most mornings with smallish fey creatures cuddled against you. They leave tiny offerings of flowers, sweet food, and perfumes.

14 – While near a waterfall you think you saw a pair of feline eyes behind it. Exploring behind the waterfall you see a crevice that sinks into the depths. You also find a huge discarded cat-claw larger than you are.

1 – A fey creature leaves a child at your door step. (if taken) The child grows to adulthood in 1d4 years, looking exactly like you.

Overall, these tables start out hilariously depressing and mean-spirited - I particularly like the Comeliness table in which no matter how beautiful or ugly you are it still works out badly for you - but gradually grow increasingly weird and charming. Here's one of my favorites from near the end:

18 – A small duck billed Hadrosaurid will periodically approach you when it thinks you are asleep and clean any parasites from your skin and hair. This is strangely soothing and does not wake you.

I'm not sure why this makes me so happy.

My second favorite posting of his is "A fire-breathing were-mammoth destroys half the village while calling your name." This is his earlier table suite, the Traumatic Childhood Background PC Generator, which is slightly less weird but still highly entertaining. The first few tables are generic enough, but once it gets into the events tables the weirdness begins. Some of these sound like things I've done to my players, like:

13 – The PC finds a large tar pit and strange fey creatures appear to live within. They have invited the PC into the pit to see their home but the PC has yet to accept.

14 – A traveling Elf maid gives the PC an orchid plant. The orchid never changes and is perpetually pointing towards one direction, even if turned or moved. If the Orchid is followed like a compass, it leads to a strange and wondrous place leagues away.

15 – The PC finds a lone boulder marbled with lapis. Before the PC can take any, a deer-spirit emerges and begs the PC to leave it. (if heeded) A yellow deer can be seen in the distance when the PC is in the wilds. (if ignored) Gain 1500gp in lapis.

Others - I'm sure my players are thankful - I never have and never will. After reading through these bizarre entries, we can all appreciate this one:

1 – Perfectly normal childhood. The PC's peers mock the child for his normalcy.

Because if these are the things that usually happen, normalcy would be tres outré.

My Second Campaign Setting: Get Real

2009-12-04T02:48:00.000-08:00

Early into my senior year at Walla Walla High School, in September or early October 1983, Cathy Couch decided I would make a nice addition to the group of friends she was creating, so she sought me out and recruited me.

Her timing was excellent. Several of my SAD&D gaming friends were in the year ahead of me and had just graduated and left Walla Walla, so my gaming group was suddenly smaller. Cathy reconnected me with Linda Yaw (who I had met in Spanish class in tenth grade but never gamed with before), introduced me to Ron Richardson, Chris Wilke, Wayne Burley, Mike Gilbreath, Mark Mulkerin, Cecily Fuhr, Angela Marks, and others, and brought me together with my future wife Beverly Marshall. (On October 17th Beverly and I began dating. We've been together twenty-six years.)

Cathy's group was independent of the SAD&D gaming community (at least until Cathy and Peter became an item a year or two later), so the group she brought me into played at far more normal power levels and more vanilla rules. More importantly, she emphasized character role-playing, and stories often turned on the basis of character interactions rather than monsters slain or treasure found. Certainly there was plenty of standard-fare adventuring, but the additional element of human drama forced me to develop as a player and as a DM.

The cosmic powers in Dagorëa thus became a background tapestry, and the new stories began to emphasize low-power PCs at the beginning of their careers facing unusual situations.

During my SAD&D years part of my campaign stock-in-trade had become a combination of cosmic struggles and immersive sensory detail, describing scenes in enough detail that players could visualize their characters' experiences and thus get more emotionally involved in the events themselves. With the epic scale removed to the background in my post-SAD&D years, the immersion, the detail, the verisimilitude became my DMing obsession.

I got better and better at bringing a scene to life, sometimes to the benefit of the game, sometimes to its detriment as a distraction or an imprudent end in itself.

At its best, this focus on setting produced amazing adventure sequences like the time Ron's character Arhíriel had to escape an enraged dragon by leaping from its nest atop an icy mile-high spire and then sky-diving without a parachute through the winter air and arranging to survive by landing just right in a deep alpine lake. It took all Ron's ingenuity as a player to work out how to survive this astonishing sequence of events, but in the end, with dislocated shoulders, cut feet, broken bones, a broken nose, black eyes, frostbite, and nearly drowned, Arhíriel could nevertheless look up afterward from her shelter beneath the snow-blanketed boughs of a fir tree, up the impossibly high and sheer spire of rock, to see the dragon circling far, far above. Afterward, Ron and I both chortled with glee at how cool that session was. I can still see it clearly in my mind to this day.

At its worst, a new character we'd spent an hour putting together would fall into a river during a rainstorm and lose all her possessions fifteen minutes into the game - all lovingly described in vivid detail but not actually any fun to play. Sorry, Beverly; my bad.

The other tool of immersion I learned by playing with Cathy's group was more of an unalloyed good: how to develop and run compelling non-player characters. It had always been a weakness of mine, but playing in campaigns that emphasized character interaction - plus actually socializing myself with this new group of friends - finally taught me by example what makes conversations and other social interactions fun. I practiced turning these lessons into good gaming material the usual way - by practicing over and over, making and running lots of bad NPCs until I'd made enough to learn from so I could finally began making less cliche, more interesting people.

By the middle of 1984 I'd worked out the art of making NPCs so engaging that I could hook the players into adventures just through social interaction alone. I knew I'd arrived when Ron and Beverly grieved over the tragic death of the NPC Bulano, a ranger who had been Arhíriel's mentor and Tinaelin's friend. Beverly actually wrote him an elegy. Likewise, although it was inconvenient, I recognized that when Tinaelin ended her association with Arhíriel because Ron's character blasphemed against Tinaelin's goddess, it meant my campaign finally had such compelling social interactions that the characters were more interesting than the monsters and adventures, a degree of social realism completely impossible for me to achieve only a few years before.

If it sounds like I'm bragging or describing a triumphant march of progress, then I'm telling this all wrong. It's embarrassing to reflect upon and describe just how socially backward I was for so long, or how grandly shallow my adventures were. For a long time my adventures had to be cosmic and wildly original because I was incapable of engaging my players with anything less overtly interesting than that, like a bad novelist who can't create drama without putting women and children in danger or whose villains are always threatening the existence of all life in the universe in order to try to keep the audience's attention. I was such a slow learner. But I have to describe these things to characterize Dagorëa, because above all it was my most important setting for learning how to DM well.

By 1986 I'd worked out most of the fundamentals. I wasn't yet a great DM, but after years of practice and study I'd finally reached the point in my gaming career where I was often a good DM. Intermixed with the occasional dud, I ran a lot of entertaining adventures.

Unfortunately for Dagorëa, success bred failure. I outgrew it. My passion for realism grew into a demand that my first true campaign setting, created so early in my life in such epic, erratic, implausible gestures, could never meet. Over the next few years I DMed adventures set there less and less often until in 1989 I bid farewell to Atlantis, Dagorëa, all its history, and all its dynasties of characters for a new, wild, fantastic, original setting I would create from scratch: geography, biology, languages, writing systems, and all.

At the same time, I decided my RPG rules weren't realistic enough either, so I also bid farewell to D&D, AD&D, and SAD&D in favor of the hot new thing in RPG rule systems, Steve Jackson's Generic Universal Role Playing System, better known as GURPS.

I thought these changes were unique to me, that I was making a personal decision to introduce more realism in my game based on my individual development as a DM and a player, but I was unconsciously part of a mass migration. In the late eighties, at the same time many new DMs were coming to AD&D for the first time, many experienced DMs were leaving it for skill-based systems, which we all thought were more advanced and realistic. As the crowd roared in Monty Python's Life of Brian, "We're all individuals!" Or as Oscar Wilde said, "Most people are other people."

So, in 1989, for the sake of realism, I created my third campaign setting, Nia Revo.

My Second Campaign Setting: SAD&D

2009-12-02T02:11:00.000-08:00

The summer of 1981, much to my surprise, my brother Rob and I moved abruptly from Seattle (me) and New York (him) to Walla Walla to live with our mom. This move was very good for Rob, who'd already been uprooted from Seattle the year before to move with our dad to New York, a move that disrupted his life and traumatized him. Moving to Walla Walla was a great relief for him. For me at the time it was a more ambivalent and problematic change. Although there were many good things about the move, like living with mom, Rob, our younger brother Tom, and a great many pets, it cut me off from my step-mother, my friends, my gaming group, my girlfriend, my karate dojo and sensei, and the city and surrounding wilderness I'd grown up in and around all my life.

Although many good things about my family and about Walla Walla eased our transition, D&D itself especially helped. Rob and I played regularly, so we gradually found the other Walla Walla players. First, at Walla Walla High School, I found John Boen, Frank Beeson, Wade Hilmo, Todd Lincoln, Lea Rush, Danny Barer, and others. John and Frank helped me find the larger and more serious Walla Walla gaming community, people like J.J. Hays, Bob McSwain, Jr., Roger Rojo, Peter Adkison, C.J. Jones, Russ Woodall, Chris Van Hooser, and many many more. These gamers and I would later form the Northwest Dungeon Masters' Association, a precursor to Wizards of the Coast.

Somehow, partly because of the three colleges in such a small town and partly for reasons I still don't quite understand to this day, Walla Walla's gaming community became intensely creative and eclectic. They coined the term Super Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (SAD&D) for their approach to the game, which sounds like hubris, but after pondering it for years I have to conclude they named their style well.

Why?

First, just like AD&D added a baroque level of complexity to original D&D, so SAD&D upped that quality dramatically. Specifically, SAD&D rejected TSR's growing interest in standardization and official rules, returning to original D&D's hobbyist, do-it-yourself mentality, but it embraced and extended AD&D's taste for more complex rule systems and options.

SAD&D was a "system" (more of a human system than a rules system, a gaming culture) of catholic tastes, absorbing every supplement, every rule system, every scrap of interest from everything anywhere in the role-playing game (RPG) world, no matter how obscure, and every original idea from every fantasy or horror book published. This was not pragmatic eclecticism; it was a ravenous eclecticism for its own sake, systematized universal plagiarism to create a very messy and tumultuous but also very fun creative ferment. This gaming community had an insatiable appetite for RPG novelty and for synthesizing anything and everything into highly idiosyncratic and intricate campaign settings and rule systems.

The little town of Walla Walla added an early but measurable statistical bump to the bottom line of every RPG company in the world. These gamers built up remarkable collections of published material, and those too poor to buy were supported with Xerox copies from those who did until they could afford to buy their own. In turn, they then produced and passed around new reference sheets and cards that pulled together the ideas into new forms for their games. This feeding frenzy and drive for synthesis and integration was one of the more important qualities that led these people in particular to later form such a successful RPG company as Wizards of the Coast.

Second, in the same way AD&D represents a jump in power levels over basic D&D, SAD&D was another jump in power. Killer dungeons & megadungeons were all the rage. Everyone built and ran them, and we played almost every day, so everyone's characters - those who survived - rapidly shot upward in power. As characters grew more powerful, the power levels of the adventures were ratcheted upward in sudden and dramatic quantum jumps. Characters played heroes, superheroes, demigods, lesser gods, then greater gods. Adventures moved beyond dungeons to battles and wars, to apocalyptic struggles, and - this is where it really moved into SAD&D territory - into the realms of science fiction, interdimensional warfare, multiverses, alternate systems of science and magic, and ultimately mythological and cosmological revolutions.

It's not that other gamers in other cities and towns around the world didn't do these things, too - after all, planes and planar adventures are described in the Dungeon Masters Guide - but rather that the Walla Walla gamers self-identified as doing it enough to coin a term for it and for their happy power-gaming community. They regularly played the whole range of powers from untrained commoners to pantheons of deities and kept having to stretch their adventures, their rules, and their settings to accommodate that range.

Third, under these two pressures, the Walla Walla DMs worked hard to differentiate their campaigns dramatically from one another, right down to the rules of magic, science, and fundamental reality. In theory this should have made movement between these campaigns more difficult. For example, how does a wizard who casts spells using a spell-points system work in a campaign setting in which magic does not work that way? Instead, the Walla Walla DMs compensated by cooperating with one another, by being flexible about temporarily accepting unusual characters into their settings to encourage high-level character travel between their multiverses. With players free to take their characters wherever they wanted, SAD&D became a medium for the Walla Walla DMs to each come up with something original and interesting to offer those players, to draw them to adventures in their setting. The DMs competed to offer the most original and interesting adventures and settings.

During the four years I lived in Walla Walla I was increasingly drawn into that SAD&D culture. Although Dagorëa was already coming into its own as a campaign setting when I lived in Seattle, it really blossomed in reaction to all these gamers and their play style. I was lonely, so I wanted to impress them enough that they'd accept me into their community. They were a smart and experienced bunch with wildly varying educational backgrounds, so to find something original to contribute I leaned hard on my lifelong immersion in science to create situations, treasures, powers, and challenges they'd never seen before.

My strength in this creative competition among DMs was my ability to think orthogonally, to come up with challenges that legitimately circumvented their powers and defenses by expanding their understanding of reality, revealing new avenues of attack, defense, and exploration. I used time travel, alternate dimensions, new laws of physics, advanced chemistry, new phases of matter, principles of biology, and really anything I could think of from my understanding of science, architecture, and mythology to create new gaming opportunities. I translated Lovecraft's cosmic approach to horror into a cosmic approach to fantasy to keep up with my players, to surprise and delight them.

My weaknesses as a world builder and adventure designer were equally distinctive. As a lifelong outsider, I understood human psychology poorly; other people just didn't make sense to me. As a result, my magic and monsters were always more interesting and compelling than the non-player characters (NPCs) I designed to interact with the players. Likewise, and closely related, sociology, politics, and dynastic struggles remained areas I couldn't adequately develop. My NPCs tended to be loners, outcasts, individualists, interesting singly or in small groups but unable to cohere into compelling clans or societies. Oh, Dagorëa certainly had cities and nations, but they were abstract, institutional, lacking that exciting tension between the one, the few, and the many that makes fictional societies interesting. So, as players, we looked to other Walla Walla DMs and their more political campaign settings for those kinds of delights.

This wasn't a competition I could win. No one could. It wasn't that kind of competition. The drive of the Walla Walla SAD&D culture wasn't toward one victorious campaign but toward a community of highly original campaign settings. Over a couple years, Dagorëa developed into one of maybe six foundational campaign settings in Walla Walla, not the best, but one of the most unusual.

Those were heady times for me as a DM, but by October 1983 I was leaving behind the SAD&D style of play in Dagorëa, because something unprecedented happened to me and to my campaign setting.

I met my future wife.

My Second Campaign Setting: Mainore, Atlantis, Dagorëa

2009-12-01T00:50:00.000-08:00

From age five (January 1972) to age eight (1975), my subscription to Time-Life Books's series The Emergence of Man brought each of the twenty volumes to me, one at a time, from Life Before Man to The Persians (and many blessings upon my father for realizing that even at that young age I would love and devour these books intended for adults). As a very young child, I was most interested in the early volumes, dinosaurs and Neanderthals being more to my taste than early civilizations, but later, in 1979, in eighth grade, when I was searching for a model for a glorious palace to be my characters' home base, it was the later volumes on Greece, Rome, and ultimately Persia I searched for inspiration.

In the end, I modeled our home base of Mainore on the floor plan of a royal Persian palace from The Persians. For some reason, the players were a bit aggressive with one another, seeking out and attacking one another's home bases (not an activity I participated in, except as a defender against it), so Mainore had to be more than a palace. It had to be fortified as well, a castle. True to the original D&D end game, my characters recruited armies of followers and made use of magical items and spells to defend Mainore from the henchmen of the other players. Evidently my several generations of maps of the palace of Mainore are long-since lost, though I could easily and may yet recreate the first draft, which was a near-copy of the Persian original.

Although at first that was sufficient defense, during the escalating inter-player struggles of late eighth grade it wasn't long before I needed to find a far more obscure, far more difficult-to-find or -reach location for the palace. Using one of my characters' powerful magics, my characters traveled back in time to long before the sinking of Atlantis and rebuilt their palace-castle there and then (in the ten mile by ten mile area granted them by the deal described in the previous post) where the other players' more conventional characters could not possibly reach us.

The Atlantis my characters lived in was based on Athanasius Kircher's 1669 map from his work Mundus Subterraneus, as reproduced in Charles Berlitz's 1969 book The Mystery of Atlantis. I inverted it to place north at the top of the map and added details based on descriptions of Atlantis by Plato and others. For names of the seven kingdoms and geographical features I coined names from the Sindarin and Quenya languages invented by Tolkien as documented in the appendices to The Return of the King.

Since my brother Rob's characters also needed safe haven and land to develop a home base of their own, I developed an island archipelago to the south of Atlantis inspired by the maps in Ursula Le Guin's A Wizard of Earthsea.

By ninth grade, the D&D players of south Seattle outgrew their pointless internecine competition and matured into DMs, and their home bases were increasingly converted and developed into campaign settings for other players to enjoy. As relations improved, I too converted Atlantis from a hidden home base to a campaign setting, first sinking it to the bottom of the ocean, then relocating it on the moon, then transplanting it by 1981 (tenth grade, after moving from Seattle to Walla Walla) onto a planet of its own, then finally to an artificial planet in the shape of a great wheel that spun through space on an alternate plane of existence (a fairly original idea arrived at quite pragmatically after a year of struggling with the problem of accurately transposing a spherical map onto a flat piece of paper).

From its peculiar origins in 1979 until my abandonment of it and of D&D for many years starting in 1989, Dagorëa, as the wheelworld and my campaign was named, was my first serious campaign setting. It developed into one of maybe a half dozen core campaigns of the Walla Walla Super Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (SAD&D) gaming community, and it single-handedly changed my life.

My Second Campaign Setting: Home Base

2009-11-30T16:57:00.000-08:00

In the late 1970s I was a fan of the TV show In Search Of (yay Leonard Nimoy!), and on May 22, 1977 it ran the episode In Search of Atlantis, which blew me away at the time. I was so excited about the idea of Atlantis that with my allowance I bought off the rack in a grocery store a paperback by Charles Berlitz called The Mystery of Atlantis, which I devoured in a credulous frenzy. By eighth grade (1979-80), when the in thing for D&D players at South Shore to do was to make up a home base for our characters between adventures, there was no question where I was going to choose.

Sometimes the line between player and DM got a bit blurred in those early teen years, and illogical wish-fulfillment frequently drove our actions. In hindsight, it isn't clear what else could have. After all, since none of us had a developed campaign setting, our characters more or less didn't exist between dungeon adventures. Those of us dissatisfied with that state of affairs found the idea of creating home bases for our characters the more obvious next step rather than creating entire campaign settings for everyone else's characters. It seemed the most direct solution.

I don't know how everyone else at South Shore went about this, but in an effort to be fair I DMed my own player characters (PCs) as though they were someone else's characters through the process of discovering Atlantis, fighting dinosaurs on behalf of the ruling council (hey, what teenage nerd-boy doesn't dream of either owning or fighting dinosaurs?), and negotiating the purchase of land on which to build my characters' home base. The deal struck was this: my player characters defended the existing Atlantean kingdoms from the nasty monsters, and in return we got to take some vacant land to create the seventh kingdom. Armed with a magical Lyre of Building won in more normal D&D adventures, we worked week by week between dungeon crawls to construct that perfect home base at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean.

This isn't quite as weird as it seems for that era, given the precedent of solo-gaming established in the back of the Dungeon Masters' Guide and given the absence of any better options for between-adventures existence, but certainly by today's standards when campaign settings are a dime a dozen it'd be completely unacceptable. I suspect some of my peers were building their home bases in even less acceptable ways, by inventing everything from whole cloth by fiat and giving it to themselves (we used to say "His DM is the #2 pencil!").

As it happens, though, the illegitimacy of our campaign settings' origins quickly became moot as those characters were gradually retired and we began to realize what else our home bases could be used for.

My First D&D Campaign Setting

2009-11-29T23:19:00.000-08:00

My first campaign setting was that amorphous "gaming land" most gamers begin with, a world of detailed dungeons and vaguely medieval towns in which to recuperate. It developed like this.

At first all our focus was on home-drawn dungeons, and we always started each adventure descending the staircase into the darkness.

Within the first six months of gaming, about the time we began rotating TSR's early dungeon modules into our mix, we also began starting adventures outside the dungeon, at first in the immediate wilderness environs, and later in the proverbial tavern.

Gradually, within the first year and a half, this expanded to include stores and other features of the villages containing the tavern, partly prompted by the nondungeon settings in The Keep on the Borderlands and The Village of Hommlet and by such marvelous Judges Guild settings as Tegel Manor, Wilderlands of High Fantasy, and City State of the Invincible Overlord (the release of World of Greyhawk was still a year and a half off at that point). The Wilderlands made a certain amount of wacky, wonderful sense, but unfortunately we only rarely used them as our settings (only when playing a Judges Guild module) because, honestly, we didn't fully understand what settings were for at this point.

No, the "settings" we made up made a whole lot less sense and tended to lack any permanence between dungeon adventures, except the proverbial tavern which was always much the same no matter which village we put it in.

It didn't take more than a couple years before all the gamers at South Shore were shifting their energies from dungeon design to continent building. Their original impulse was to create homebases for their characters between dungeons using the rather excessive treasure and power they'd stockpiled from their early and ill-conceived Monty Haul adventures, but it didn't take long before they began recycling and expanding their home-base designs into venues for running other people's characters through adventures. Sheeple that I was in middle school, I did the same, and so my second D&D campaign setting was born.

In the Beginning

2009-11-29T20:26:00.000-08:00

At South Shore Middle School in Seattle, when I entered sixth grade in the fall of 1977, I found a new craze sweeping the school. Students were drawing maps of imaginary places with pencil and paper and then pretending to explore those imaginary places. At the time I didn't realize they were playing a game with published rules. I just thought the maps and imaginary explorations were wonderful all by themselves.

I wanted to play, but at the time I was so uncool that even the uncool kids who played didn't want much to do with me, though they did tell me it was published under the name Dungeons & Dragons (D&D). My brother Rob and I were electrified to that level of frantic obsession that only children are capable of, so to regain some peace and quiet our stepmother, Jean, drove us down to Heritage Bookstore in Renton. We discovered that the white boxed-set of D&D being played by all the other kids was sold out, but a new colored boxed-set edited by J. Eric Holmes had just come out, so that's what Jean bought us (many blessings upon her).

Since that time, D&D's been a major part of our lives. D&D helped me learn many things and helped me socialize to the point that I eventually even became intermittently cool. I played all the time as a teenager and met most of my childhood friends through D&D, including my future wife. Wizards of the Coast was started by our Walla Walla gaming friends, and my wife was Wizards's second employee. She still works in the gaming industry and we still play (once a week when we're lucky).

I've been blogging since 2004 but not until now about gaming. I've started this blog in part to explore my D&D campaign world Englandia publicly, where other people can discuss it and debate it and take ideas from it for their own campaigns, and in part to discuss gaming theory - because I've arrived at a cross-roads. Although I've been playing for thirty-two years, in recent years I've found my creativity flagging and my joy in running games bogging down in rules and planning.

I've also arrived at a realization. Reading the D&D old-school-renaissance (OSR) blogs over the last year has helped me to understand that these problems aren't specific to me, much to my surprise, but are instead a not uncommon reaction to modern D&D rulesets. The more I study the OSR observations and theories, the more I think the decline in my capacities as a Dungeon Master (DM) is related in part to the very problems the OSR movement has been criticizing. Maybe not, but maybe, and if it is true, then maybe the OSR prescription for this ailment is also right.

Maybe by simplifying my gaming rules, by changing the focus from the characters to the players, by shifting from static scripting to dynamic scripting, and by making a homemade megadungeon environment one of the pillars of my campaign, this will dramatically ease the burden of DMing and return gaming to the creative recreation it used to be for me.

Let's find out.