Knights & Knaves Alehouse

TheRedPriest wrote:

francisca wrote:That's her digging D&D's grave.

D&D's not dead yet. I heard that it got cloned, took early retirement from the business and is allowing the clone to handle the active publishing end of things. I hear it's still a helluva an active gaming phenomenon, though, when you can find it.

Yup. D&D is like Rock'n'Roll. Can't kill it. To further the metaphor, it is like a rock band:

OD&D is the original garage band who circulated their albums on cassette from fan to fan.
AD&D 1e is when they got their record deal.
AD&D 2e is when the main songwriter left, they signed with a new label, and they were just going through the motions.
3.x is when the band reformed, with maybe one of the original members, trying on new clothing styles and other as-then-current schlock.
4e is the crappy techno-remix version.

Couldn't see the picture upthread and found a couple of interesting websites. The first one I don't think I've seen before, the second I think I have, the third was finally finding a picture...
MY EYES!! AHHH!


http://nerdvana.freedomblogging.com/200 ... tsr/13825/

http://www.highprogrammer.com/alan/rants/tsr.html

http://tomeoftreasures.com/tot_adnd/rog ... rraine.htm

My apologies if the sites are already well known by the folks here...

rredmond wrote: http://nerdvana.freedomblogging.com/200 ... tsr/13825/

Yikes! That was an eye opening claim! It seems that she has a capacity for laying claim to things that her family was not involved in.

So Lorraine is the Yoko to D&D's Beatles?

Matthew wrote: Yikes! That was an eye opening claim! It seems that she has a capacity for laying claim to things that her family was not involved in.

Nice right, if that sat w/o argument for long enough I'm betting she would have started to believe it true. Crazy claim.

Question for Zotster/Mike.

Do you have any stories about how the satirical "Castle Greyhawk" module came about?

Was it deliberately done as an insult to Gygax?

ggroy wrote:Question for Zotster/Mike.

Do you have any stories about how the satirical "Castle Greyhawk" module came about?

Was it deliberately done as an insult to Gygax?

You mean the one I worked on? If that's the one, no, it was just intended as a light-hearted romp. There was no insult meant.

I have a little non-Lorraine story that might amuse a few folks here.

Background: The design department was located upstairs in the huge building outside of Lake Geneva (I think it was on Silver Springs Road or something like that, the pic someone posted of Lorraine breaking ground [or maybe burying bodies] was at that location). We were at one end of the building and the graphics (layout, maps, etcs.) and typesetting folks were at the other end. In between was an empty cubeland that used to house lots of marketing and sales people, who were all let go before I got there. It was a little creepy walking through there sometimes.

My first few days there, I was walking from the design dept. over to graphics when this guy stepped out of an empty cube and started talking to me. He was kinda skinny, with disheveled hair and a scruffy beard and rumpled clothes. We had a nice chat about who I was and what I was doing for TSR, while I slowly edged my way back toward design.

After I got away, I went to Steve Winter, who was then my boss, and told him that there was a homeless person in the empty cubeland and he might even be living there. Steve asked me to describe him then laughed and told me I'd just met Brian Blume, one of TSR's owners. So that was how I first met Brian.

Zotster wrote: After I got away, I went to Steve Winter, who was then my boss, and told him that there was a homeless person in the empty cubeland and he might even be living there. Steve asked me to describe him then laughed and told me I'd just met Brian Blume, one of TSR's owners. So that was how I first met Brian.

That is by far the best post-Gary TSR story I've ever heard.

Zotster wrote:After I got away, I went to Steve Winter, who was then my boss, and told him that there was a homeless person in the empty cubeland and he might even be living there. Steve asked me to describe him then laughed and told me I'd just met Brian Blume, one of TSR's owners. So that was how I first met Brian.

ROFLOL! ROFLMAO!
That reminds me of a few companies I've worked for where "Smelly, Dishevled Homeless Dude" was actually the owner.

francisca wrote:That is by far the best post-Gary TSR story I've ever heard.

I can post more dumb little stories like that, if people are interested.

Zotster wrote:

francisca wrote:That is by far the best post-Gary TSR story I've ever heard.

I can post more dumb little stories like that, if people are interested.

SPILL IT!

Do share!

francisca wrote:

Zotster wrote:

francisca wrote:That is by far the best post-Gary TSR story I've ever heard.

I can post more dumb little stories like that, if people are interested.

SPILL IT!

Yeah!

Odhanan wrote:

Zotster wrote:

Odhanan wrote: That is really interesting. What is the book's title, who's the publisher, and what are the names listed on the cover, if you don't mind?

I have it here now. Its title is "The Adventures of Buck Rogers" and has lots of amusing little blurbs on the cover ("With over 150 pictures suitable for coloring," "The BIG BIG book," "New Stories New Pictures"). It has "Lt. Dick Calkins" written on the front cover....
Edit to add: I want to note that this is by no means a comic book. It's a 300+ page book that has a lot of full-page B&W illustrations but tons of txt too.

I'll be damned. So Lorraine Williams is a fucking liar from start to finish.

Well, on this case she was telling the truth. Dille was the big cheese in the National Newspaper Syndicate and he was the one who came up with the idea for the comic strip. He paired up an artist (Calkins) with a writer (Nowlan). Nowlan had originally written for Amazing Stories in (I think) the 1920s or 30s called "The Airlords of Han" This involved a future dystopian America that was a ruined wilderness ruled by Asians in flying ships where the 'rebel' Americans live is small, hidden settlements and are slowly rebuilding their technology to throw out the Asian rulers. Its sort of like "Terminator" but without time travel and substituting the Han for robots.

Dille arranged to have Nowlan rewrite his stories as a comic strip, changed the name of the main character to "Buck" and convinced Calkins that he wanted to draw "Buck Rogers in the 25th Century" rather than the caveman and dinosaur strip that Calkins was eager to draw. Later, the caucasians defeat the Han and sign a treaty and they start travelling to places like Mars, Venus, etc. One of their big villains were the "Tigermen of Mars" who apparently made it into the 80s TV show as well. The Tigermen were like Klingons in behavior. I have a huge collection of reprints of the old strips.

There were apparently different lines of products that were released through different companies and various labyrynthian do not compete clauses ... so Nowlan and Calkins could release a book of original non-comic strip material (i.e.: coloring books or illustrated story books) through another publisher, but if they wanted to release a comic strip, it had to be through Dille's organization.

I don't know how Calkins and Nowlan felt about the deal, but to say that Dille "created" Buck Rogers as a comic strip and brought it to the public is probably as accurate a description as any. Nowlan wrote the short stories that Dille told him to 'recycle' into the first few years of the comic strip and Dille convinced Calkins to draw men and women with air ships and distintigrator pistols instead of dinosaurs and cro-magnons. Dille then got the strip into every newspaper he could and the popularity of the character took off.