A Talk With John D. Rateliff

A 30th Anniversary Interview

I don't actually remember first meeting John D. Rateliff. He'd already been at TSR for quite a while before I got there, and I remember hearing people refer to "Dr. John," and not knowing what they were talking about (John will explain). In early conversations with him, I remember feeling a bit intimidated by his knowledge of, well, a good many things. John's very well read, very literate, and a very knowledgeable guy. He's got a good eye for detail and minutiae -- all of which makes him a great editor. He and I worked together on both the Dungeon Master's Guide and d20 Call of Cthulhu. John worked on all different kinds of products in his time at TSR and Wizards. If you flip through your various D&D books, you'll find his name all over the place.

John's probably best known among his friends as being an expert on all things Tolkien. A bona fide Tolkien scholar, in fact, John attends Tolkien conferences, has started organizations, and is even writing a book -- but I'll let him tell you about that, too.

Probably more than anything else, John and I became friends because of our shared affection for Call of Cthulhu and related esoterica, both real and fictional. We've played a lot of Call of Cthulhu together, as well as D&D. He's a great guy, and fascinating to talk to. You'll see that for yourself as we hear what he has to say in a few questions commemorating the anniversary of Dungeons & Dragons.

Monte Cook: How did you come to start playing D&D?

John D. Rateliff: I started my second semester in grad school up at Fayetteville [University of Arkansas], twenty-five years ago this month. My mother, who knew of my interest in Tolkien -- which at that time was rapidly expanding into an interest in fantasy in general -- saw a news report about the game and thought it'd be something I'd be interested in, so she told me about it one time when I called home. I asked around and found out there were games every Friday evening down at the local hobby shop on Dickson Street (the student strip), went down to look, and wound up getting invited to play.

I still maintain that my first DM is the worst I've ever come across in all these years of gaming -- we just wandered down the open road having random encounters, with him killing any character who reached 4th level so he wouldn't have to expand his encounter charts -- but I was hooked. I got photocopies of the homebrew "Cal-Tech" rules the group used, bought the PH, then DMG, then MM, and brand-new Deities & Demigods (with Cthulhu, of course), and read straight through them. I created some rules for solo gaming and that, along with Paul Jaquays' Dark Tower adventure from Judges' Guild, some dungeon geomorphs, and of course some dice, was enough to see me through the next year or two.

By that time I was up at Marquette University [in Milwaukee, Wisconsin] working on my doctorate, where I fell in with some fellow grad students in the English department who were gamers and we started up a campaign. It didn't last long, but I started up a new one the next semester that turned into a campaign, mainly recruited from several "generations" of grad students. That one lasted for roughly the next ten years before it finally wound down.

Even now, fourteen years after it went from being a hobby to also being my job, I still play every week.

Monte: So you moved in academic circles and did some teaching before TSR. How did you get into game editing?

John: After years in grad school working on first the Masters and then the Ph.D., I drifted from academia into editing, starting out at a children's book publisher as a fact-checker and graduating into editing and occasionally writing or rewriting. That job ended when the publisher overextended and they began laying off people, rather like those folks tossed off the sled to the wolves in that famous Russian painting; still, it was a good experience overall and I learned a lot about editing and publishing there. Not long afterwards I heard from my friend Jim Lowder, an editor in TSR's book department, that they were looking for an editor in the games department in Lake Geneva to work on D&D. Jim had been a friend from Marquette days who shared my interest in Tolkien, fantasy, and medieval literature (we also share a somewhat sardonic outlook). This was actually not the first job I'd applied for at TSR; I'd been in touch with Jean Rabe and Skip Williams of the RPGA for several years, running (and on rare occasions writing) tournaments at GenCon and Winter Fantasy, and I'd interviewed for a part-time post with the RPGA a few months earlier. Since I didn't have a car and lived an hour's drive away, nothing came of this, but either they put in a good word for me or Jim Ward was tickled by the fact that I had a degree in fantasy, because I got the editor's job. I was hired in October 1991, at the same time as Rich Baker (designer) and Thomas Reid (editor), who started the week after I did, and Wolf Baur (magazines), who started the week after that, so we were "new fish" together.

Monte: What were your impressions of TSR, both as a new hire and as you got to know your way around?

John: In many ways it was a dream job, though there was always an element of surrealism about it, and the hours were grueling. The work was straightforward though never simple; in my years as a T.A. I'd had to grade hundreds of student papers and point out how they could be improved so the student could do better next time; all I had to do now was read what I was given and make the improvements myself. At the same time, I always tried to resist the temptation to rewrite everything the way I'd have done it myself, something one of our editors was notorious for (so much so that they quickly promoted him to designer) -- the ideal as I saw it was to make the writer sound more like himself or herself. We never had enough time, so with very few exceptions we all put in long, long hours -- staying late, taking work home, working through the weekends and the like were normal occurrences. This was all the more remarkable because no one made us do it; the senior management actually prided themselves on the fact that they never played or even read any of our games. It was purely a sense of our devotion to the game that we always wanted to put out the best possible adventures, sourcebooks, and the like.

Looking back, I think it's remarkable that so much first-class material got smuggled out: I think TSR's releases during that period (1991-1996) include a good percentage of the best roleplaying material ever published. This is all the more remarkable because it was done despite, not because of, the corporate structure at the time and because it went almost entirely unnoticed by the industry as a whole, which was agog looking for the next new thing (diceless roleplaying, ultra-complex roleplaying, rules-lite roleplaying, DMless roleplaying, and many another jeux de jour) and generally ignored the gems being rolled out at their feet on a pretty regular basis.

Monte: Although you worked with TSR/Wizards for a long time, when you think back what's the most memorable period?

John: Since I've been there at three distinct periods ('91–'96, '97–'01, and '03–present), with a somewhat different set of colleagues each time, it naturally falls into separate groupings for me. For the old Lake Geneva days I think the period around '94-'95 particularly stands out; most of the folks that'd been there when I started were still around, and an interesting mix of new folks had begun to arrive or transferred over from other departments. I'd been there long enough to get comfortable with the job, made a lot of friends, and build up a catalogue of projects I'd worked on that I was proud of. To have been able to work with the likes of Bruce Nesmith, Andria Hayday (quite possibly the industry's best editor), Lester Smith, Rich Baker, Colin McComb of the Clan McComb, Steve Winter, Wolf Baur, Slade Henson (whose curse was to always be ten years ahead of his time), Jeff Grubb, and mapper extraordinaire Dave Sutherland, to name only a few, was a wonderful experience.

The second period started when I was brought back by Wizards of the Coast to edit a game world that was cancelled before it could be released; this was a disappointing end to what had promised to be an interesting project, but at least I got to work with a team made up of Lisa Stevens, Jonathan Tweet, Chris Pramas, Jesper Myrfors, and myself. For some reason, I tended to appear in Jesper's nightmares throughout this period (I've always considered this a compliment, though you never know with a man who collects human skulls). This segued into work on the Silver Anniversary ("Return to") line, both as a designer and as an editor, which in turn led into the Third Edition project, co-editing the Player's Handbook and Dungeon Master's Guide with Julia Martin. It was unimaginably time-intensive work, but very rewarding.

After that came a busy period of freelancing (Chaosium, Green Ronin, Decipher, White Wolf, Guardians of Order, and of course Wizards). The third period began about a year and a half ago when I returned to Wizards as an editor. As always, there are many familiar faces and much new talent. It's the nature of the beast that there will always be turnover, good people coming and going. No one is indispensable, but the pool of talent out there, past and present, is enormous; I'm glad to have known so many people over the last fourteen years who are part of it.

Monte: What products are you the most proud of still today?

John: All of them, really. With very few exceptions, I get totally immersed in each project while I'm working on it; anything that goes out with my name on it is something I've put my best effort into it. But I do have favorites: I think Carl's Sargent's design for the 1995 boxed set Night Below was a masterpiece which I'm very happy to have been the editor of. I'm also pleased to have been the editor of Bruce Cordell's first project (in fact, his first three projects), especially his brilliant redesign and expansion of Gygax's old killer dungeon as Return to the Tomb of Horrors). As a designer, I think Return to the Keep on the Borderlands came out almost exactly as I'd hoped, and I'm pleased that Standing Stone apparently succeeded in its goal of playing against PC expectations and keeping the players guessing. Of freelance projects, I think d20 Cthulhu, which I helped write (I did the gods and monsters section with Bruce Cordell), developed (the Insanity chapter), and co-edited, combines the best of both worlds: D&D mechanics and Call of Cthulhu's sensibilities and mythology.

Of product lines, I think Ravenloft, al-Qadim, and the underrated Mystara, all of which I did a lot of work on over the years, are my favorite TSR game worlds. More recently, Eberron really impressed me (I was one of the editors on the core book). In the end, though, I've done more work on core D&D than anything else, and I think it trumps everything.

Monte: Having worked at both TSR and Wizards of the Coast, what are the major differences between the two companies from your perspective?

John: The corporate culture at TSR was autocratic, almost paternalistic in style, while Wizards was a friendly, open, creative chaos. To borrow a term from Kenneth Grahame, TSR's senior management were Olympians. While we interacted on a day-to-day basis with our immediate supervisors (all of whom were designers or editors who had been promoted to run the various product groups or game world lines -- people who were extremely knowledgeable about our games and for whom we had great respect), we rarely saw any of the VPs (most of whom had never played an RPG, never read our products as they came out, and knew nothing about our customers or what they liked about our products). It was a strict dichotomy: gamers creating games, business people running the company. Wizards was much more integrated: very like TSR had been in its early days, from all accounts I've heard. I knew I'd stepped into a different world when, my first week [at the Wizards offices] in Renton [Washington], I was hauling boxes into the office to get my new cube nicely populated with all the reference material I thought I'd need when Peter Adkison, Wizards' president, saw me out his window and came out to help. Between us we got all those boxes out of the car and inside in no time; a good example of how approachable Peter was (not mention a really nice guy).

Monte: Can you give us a look at the editorial process at Wizards? What's it like? How does it differ now than, say, when you started back at TSR?

John: The main difference is a streamlining of processes. When I started at TSR, once we were done editing a project we had to run a macro program to prepare it for the typesetters, since none of the formatting we entered into the document on our machine would translate over into the typesetting machines. However, the program wasn't perfect, so we'd have to spend hours going through the document after it was done and inserting little codes like [BI], [EI], [BB], [EB] (for "begin italic", "end italic", "begin bold", and "end bold" respectively).
Then too the only way to get a file from machine to machine was to copy it onto a disk. We could only print by copying a file onto a disk, carrying it over to the machine hooked up to the printer (one printer for the entire department), load it up, and print it out. Later we were networked to the extent that we could send files directly to the printer, but I never did get access to the Internet (when I asked, circa 1995–96, my VP told me he couldn't imagine how having access to the Internet could help me do my job). To the end of my time at TSR I worked on a 286 [IBM clone] which periodically had to be defragmented. Switching over to shiny new machines with email and Internet connections when I came to Renton was quite a shock, albeit a pleasant one.

Monte: You've done some work as a designer as well as an editor. Which role do you prefer?

John: Just as I enjoy being both a player and a DM, I also enjoy being both a designer and an editor. I make cleaner turnovers as a designer because I'm sensitive to grammar and know how to proofread; I'm a better editor than I would be otherwise because when there's a problem with a project I can put myself in the designer's place and see what he or she was trying to do, which gives me more insight into how to fix it.

Monte: In addition to being a professional game editor, you're also a Tolkien scholar. How did you get interested in J.R.R. Tolkien?

John: This is going to sound silly, but I first read Tolkien early in my third year of junior high (9th grade) because I was reading through all the books in the junior high school library and that was when I got up to "T". I read The Hobbit straight through, twice, and wrote my first book review right afterwards for the campus paper -- my first piece of scholarship, if you will.
Lamenting to the librarian that there wasn't another like it anywhere, I got pointed to The Lord of the Rings, which lived down at the Magnolia, Arkansas, public library downtown. That really got me going: over the next few years I tracked down everything I could find that Tolkien had written, even out-of-print poems like "Imram" and "The Lay of Aotrou and Itroun". I also delved heavily into myth and medieval lit (Beowulf, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, The Mabinogion, The Prose Edda, The Saga of King Heidrek the Wise, and much much more), and fantasy beyond Tolkien (Dunsany, Eddison, Morris, Thorne Smith, Bellairs, etc.).

I managed to petition my college (Southern Arkansas University) to offer a course on Tolkien, which I took; at Fayetteville and Marquette I occasionally used The Hobbit as the book my freshmen did their research papers on, and for years at Marquette I offered a series of night courses in their Continuing Education program on Tolkien, fantasy, and related topics (these classes actually led to the creation of the Burrahobbits, a Milwaukee-area reading group that's still meeting today, over twenty years later). I chose Marquette for my doctorate degree because their library has Tolkien manuscripts, and spent a lot of time for the better part of a decade transcribing semi-legible passages in their archives.

I've also helped organize several Tolkien conferences and symposiums over the years and have delivered papers at more, the most recent being at Marquette this past October (a piece called "And All the Days of Her Life Are Forgotten," which will be appearing in a volume this fall).

Monte: And now you're working on a book as well...?

John: The big project, which I've been working on for years and will finally be sending to the publisher near the end of this year, is a book called The History of The Hobbit . It's rather along the lines of Christopher Tolkien's editions that make up the History of Middle-Earth series (which I highly recommend if you haven't read them): an edition of the original manuscript of The Hobbit with extensive commentary on how Mr. Baggins' story fits into Tolkien's legendarium. It's a big book filled with the entire text of Tolkien's first draft, along with short essays about everything from rings of invisibility or Tolkien's spiders to a detailed account of just when Tolkien wrote the book (which can actually be reconstructed from available evidence to within a month or two on either end). I hope people will like it when it finally sees the light of day.

Monte: Will you share with us a funny or interesting story about your time working on D&D?

John: There are so many. Possibly the best roleplaying moment came during a Cthulhu game when Keith Strohm's character tried to hide behind a rope ladder from an enraged cultist with a gun (short version: it didn't end well. slightly longer version: listen carefully when the GM describes the room). There was the time TSR's president turned down the Tolkien [roleplaying] license, with the words "It's not worth our while" (a sad day all round). There was Black Friday, when half the roleplaying staff got laid off on the last working day before Christmas; I was the last one to be let go that day, because I was handing out candy canes (an Xmas tradition) and they couldn't find me to give me the news.

And then of course there's the cat-bite incident. Shortly after starting at TSR I went home to Arkansas for a visit, where I got bit by a cat I was trying to rescue that'd crawled under a house. One fang went right into the middle joint of my left index finger, which got badly infected. The end result was that a week later I had red streaks running up my arm and wound up spending thirteen days in the hospital with septic blood poisoning. When I finally returned to work about a month later, one of my new co-workers congratulated me on having done something memorable; he'd thought me too bland before. A number of references to nine-fingered characters in TSR products date from about this time, and at least one adventure map has a promontory named "Rateliff's finger."

Such is fame.

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