Wizards: Peter on the Cusp, Part Nine

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.