My Life as a Company Bigwig

Note: these are my recollections as I remember them; my memory could be faulty. I also intend no malice, insult or libel against anyone mentioned; I hope none is taken.

Joel asked what it was like running a game company. With the thought on this 25th anniversary that a few others might find this entertaining, let me fire up some of those old synapses and tell you a tale...

First let me introduce the primary players in this saga:

Pete F. was the real creative soul behind the company. I met him when I was a First-year man at UVa through Anne Skinner, and I was introduced to Role Playing Games. It was like a drug! Pete was Fourth-year, and ran a Middle-earth campaign in the Second Age. When I joined the company, it was the second year of the 'Crown Quest' in which we had to destroy the Iron Crown of Morgoth (this was pre-Silmarillion, so we didn't know that it had been re-made into manacles). Even then Pete was modifying D&D, and we were using the computer-generated pre-Arms Law weapons tables.

Coleman C.: Coleman I think was already working on his doctorate in Computer Science back then. He was in the game, always the sneakiest of players.

Bruce N.: My year, he was another friend of Anne's, and joined the campaign a bit later.

Rick B.: He was never really into RPGs; more of a war gamer (which all the other guys were into, though I never was), Rick helped found the company with some much-needed capital.

Me: Callow youth.

I played all through school, while Pete continued to develop the system with help from others. When we started, he was (I think) fresh out of Law School at William & Mary. We rented a space in a little brick building in downtown Charlottesville, and I think Rick was the only full-time employee at first. I was working at the UVa Library for two years after I graduated, working for ICE at night. One very unusual (even unique I think) thing about our RPG company was that we were essentially run by committee: all five of us were on the Board of Directors, and we all took a very active part in company decisions.

Our first two products were Arms Law and Iron Wind, both 'typeset' on an IBM Correcting Selectric. We took way too many to our first GenCon, but a distributor snapped a lot of them up, and we were off.

Some random snippets:

Many of the original spells of Spell Law were invented by Pete one at a time, or at most in proto-lists. All were lovingly written in this elaborate script on parchment sheets. Some of them were real doozies.

Mentalism was invented by Olivia Johnston (later Olivia Fenlon) and me over beers at Pavilion XI, the student bar at UVa. We based the idea on the telepathic abilities of the High Elves and Wizards in the Lord of the Rings.

Pete once played a Mystic in a game run by Coleman before Mystics had any spells. He basically spent the entire game acting strangely.

There was no air conditioning in our first office, and the summers in Charlottesville can be sweltering. I remember sweating over that Selectric, typing spell lists.

Space Master started out as "Tech Law" an unsolicited proposal for a rules supplement sent in by a Canadian named Kevin B. There's a whole story behind that as well.

Our first computer was something called a 'Basis' that was the huge metal thing that ran on two 5.25" floppy disks. Our next generation of computers were Kaypros, metal boxy things that were supposedly portable. They ran on two 5.25" floppy disks as well using the CP/M operating system. We had one Kaypro with a -- get this -- 10 megabyte hard drive. Then in 1984 or five, we got our first... Mac. We were amazed. We could typeset stuff ourselves! No more stupid codes!

I was an incredibly prolific writer back then. I wrote a ton of Space Master stuff. Oh, here's a little secret for you few game people out there. For some reason, at some point when I was Art Director and Production Manager, Deane the Sales manager didn't like the idea of me writing ICE material on the side, even for free. By this point we had a board of seven people and she was on it. So to go behind her back I invented a nom de plume. I wrote several Space Master modules under the name Alexander Brooke Lindsay III. I think I told Kevin B. at one point but no one else. I think several people suspected, but no one said anything.

Related to the above, when the first Shadow World novel came to us, I suspected that the author (Roxanne Longstreet) was a nom de plume of a local writer named Brenda, but Pete has always assured me that she was a real person, and the last time I brought it up, he even -- with his trademark sly grin -- said that some people thought that the book had actually been written by me.

Back to Shadow World, this was my biggest project by far, going far beyond our original plans for the World of Loremaster envisioned when we published Iron Wind, Vog Mur (this was originally a module submission to TSR written by Pete and Kurt Fischer) and Cloudlords of Tanara.

More to come.