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A Talk With Steven SchendA 30th Anniversary Interview0Steven Schend was one of the very first people at TSR that I interacted with (I'd say "met," but I talked to him on the phone for months and months before meeting him in person). My first freelance job from TSR was working on the Marvel Super Heroes line, and Steven was more or less the in-house shepherd of the whole line, being the comics expert of the comics experts in the office -- which is saying a lot with comics experts like [editor] Michele Carter and [designer] Jeff Grubb around. We talked on the phone a lot, and when -- about two years later -- I was hired as a full-time designer, he even offered to let me stay in the guest room of his house. So Steven and I were roomies for about a month, maybe more. I have great memories of that time, although Steven liked to get up a lot earlier than I did. Steven's a great editor and writer. He's the kind of guy who'd not only go the extra mile when working on an assignment, he'd go the extra 10 miles beyond that. The old Marvel Super Heroes Game line certainly owes him a lot, and even more than that -- if you're a Forgotten Realms fan, many of those well-researched and carefully detailed sourcebooks and adventures on your shelf probably have his name on them. He's also a heck of a nice guy. I certainly wasn't the only one to benefit from his generosity at offering new hires a place to stay (which he'll tell you about), or his warm welcoming attitude when you confronting strangers in a very strange land (TSR). In fact, Steven's just a generous guy all around. Those action figures that Ray Vallese and Colin McComb wrote about in their interviews? Most of them were donated by Steven to the cause. I'm very pleased to be able to interview Steven Schend to help celebrate the history of Dungeons & Dragons. Monte Cook: How did you come to start playing D&D? Steven Schend: I got the D&D box for my 13th birthday in 1980 (the slim box with the color piece of Dave Sutherland's red dragon on the outside, the blue-screened cover on the rule book and B1 "In Search of the Unknown" inside) along with the original G1-3 series of modules. While I read the modules and the rules twice each, I couldn't wrap my brain around the game until a family friend who knew the game took me through my first adventure to give me a shake-down of the rules. My first character -- the wizard Gamalon Idogyr -- lost his left eye to a band of orcs but managed to win the day. Ever since then, I've been a fan of fantasy roleplaying, playing through junior high and high school but tapering off a bit in college. I started up again with my old gaming buddies after graduation due to all the hoopla over 2nd Edition, and since 1990, it's as much a career as a hobby to me. Monte: Did your background in teaching prepare you for a job dealing with roleplaying games? Steven: The education skills were very handy in prepping me as an employee at TSR, if not specifically for editing or design of games. Every GenCon (and any other convention we attended, for that matter), we were expected to run game demonstrations to highlight the major releases for the year. Trying to teach D&D to nongamers or new players -- and to do it in any meaningful way in 15 or 20 minutes -- was always a challenge; I ended up focusing like I would any subject -- grab your audience's attention with an anecdote or something visual and unexpected, keep their interest by focusing on the most broadly fascinating aspects, and literally show them why they should learn more about this (in this case, D&D). It almost always works without fail in a gaming standpoint (and to a lesser degree among high school students not really wanting to learn more history ). There was rarely enough time to give people a true game/story experience, but we could always give them a taste of D&D and show them roughly how it worked in a 20 minute window . . . and then do the same for another group of five to eight people in the next 20 minutes. Made for long hours at a show but usually the fun and excitement of the players outweighed the exhaustion... or losing one's voice...or the gongs(1).... Honestly, I've had far more experience running demonstration games and seminars than I have had work as a classroom teacher. My only teaching experience prior to working at TSR was student teaching in Oregon, Wisconsin, in the winter/spring semester of 1989. By the time I got back into teaching as a substitute in Port Townsend, Washington, I'd had 10 years of conventions and games and playtests under my belt. Lots of tricks from seminars to keep an audience focused on a topic were helpful in classroom management and in finding new ways and angles from which to approach an otherwise dull subject (uninspiring at least from a high-schooler's point of view). One last short note on how teaching and gaming intersect in my brain: I fight to never "dumb down" or simplify words if their meaning is caught by context. If we did that in D&D, none of us would ever learn what grimoires or phylacteries or incuabula were. And I for one am glad to have those gems in my vocabulary (so I thank Gary Gygax and Stan Lee's Dr Strange for my convoluted lexicon).
Steven: I graduated from the University of Wisconsin at Madison with a secondary education degree in English and spent the summer of 1989 applying and interviewing for dozens of teaching jobs, never getting any offers. I worked at a J. Crew factory outlet by day and applied for jobs teaching or at educational publishing houses as an editor. One day I took a break from retooling the resume for another job and read the latest Dragon magazine. On a whim, I decided to retool my resume to send a cold query in to [editor] Roger Moore at Dragon; having recently picked up the Monstrous Compendium I as well, I sent another resume to Karen Boomgarden, the editor in charge of that product (as I didn't know to whom else I should send it). I enjoyed the cover letter for the first time in months, focusing on things that were more fun and still in my skills set. Still, no one was more shocked than I to get a call the next week from Roger, looking to interview for an assistant editor. I interviewed with Roger in late 1989 (but lost that job to Dale Donovan), and within a few weeks had another interview with Jim Ward of the Games division (after Karen sent me a nice note explaining that she had sent my resume on to Jim, as she couldn't hire anyone). Two months to the day of my interview, I got a call offering me an editor's position. By sheer dumb luck (or the whims of the universe), I'd happened to drop them a line just as they were expanding their staff. They'd hired [designers] Blake Mobley, Tim Brown, and Bill Connors around November, and I was the first of a new wave of designers and editors. I started on Monday, February 5, 1990; [designer] Dale "Slade" Henson started on the Thursday of that same week.(2) Monte: What were your impressions of TSR, both as a new hire and as you got to know your way around? Steven: It was my first job out of college, so I didn't have much experience for comparison. It seemed to be a good place to work and very creative and open. It very much was a sink-or-swim training method, but Anne Brown and Jeff Grubb got me through the rough patches as I got up to speed as an editor. My first impressions were trying to keep from getting fired, make sense out of the chaos, and make friends as well. Everyone's cube reflected something about who they were, be it Zeb Cook's cube filled with Astro Boy and Godzilla figures, Jon Pickens' "Cube of Doom"(3), or Jeff's poster of the Marvel Universe(4). The best way I got to know many of my coworkers was the games we played over lunch; imagine going to work your first week and being introduced to a game called Space Hulk that was built across three cafeteria-sized tables with six players at once. Good game, but made better by the people (not the least of whom was Roger Moore's insistence at calling his gene-stealers the "Conga Line of Death."). Other great games I played over lunch included Star Warriors, En Garde, Junta, Kremlin, Car Wars, Magic, and Empires of the Middle Ages.(5) While we editors and designers remained relatively removed from the business end of things, the bullpen environment upstairs in "Cubeland" was something I'd try to duplicate if ever I was to start a creative company. Almost without fail once a day or so, someone would stand on a chair and sing out with a query on a particular product or some strange random statement(6), and a chorus of answers would crop up around us. Sometimes it was even a legitimate and insightful topic. ;) It was a team environment just as much as it was a lot of individual work, and everyone knew that all you needed to do was ask for help and it was there for you.
Monte: You worked with TSR/Wizards for a long time. When you think back, what's the most memorable period? Steven: The most memorable period for me was 1993 into 1994 when the company and AD&D 2nd Edition seemed to be riding high. All the excitement and energy of releasing all the new lines around then -- Al-Qadim, Birthright, Dark Sun, Planescape, Ravenloft, etc. -- was infectious, whether you were on those lines or not. I had recently switched from editorial over to design and was doing more and more work in the Forgotten Realms line. We had probably doubled our work force in the four years since I started, so now-famous names like [editors] Thomas Reid, David Wise, and others were getting started and up-to-speed. By then, [Realms creator] Ed Greenwood had stopped being merely a voice on the other end of a telephone and was a fast friend, as well as a second mentor for my own writing. At the time, I was in the Forgotten Realms/Al-Qadim group and worked with great people like [editors] Karen Boomgarden, Julia Martin, Rob King, Jim Butler, David Wise, [artist] Paul Jaquays, and many others. The groups could be fluid, trading around other product lines and special projects. So, while I worked in the Realms from about 1991 through 1999, I also worked with every TSR trademark world, with the exceptions of Dark Sun and Dragonlance. Monte: Since you
experienced it first-hand, how about a funny or interesting story involving
the buyout of TSR? Steven: As late 1996 through 1997 were pretty stressful on all of us at TSR, it was tough to dredge back through the memories to find something funny about that time. Then I remembered May 17, 1997, as Jeff Grubb and I wandered Lake Geneva having a few beers for my birthday. We bumped into Peter Adkison on the street and dragged him into Harry's (our local and most frequented watering hole/pub) for a beer. We knew he and Lorraine Williams were in talks about the purchase of the company but nothing was certain at that time. Try though we might, Jeff and I couldn't pry any information out of Peter, so we settled on toasting beer to the process (and hopes that our jobs would continue), had a few more beers, and simply left it at that. It wasn't for another few days before we found out about the buy-out and the best belated birthday gift I got was an offer to continue my job out in Washington. Monte: What, in your views, were some of the differences between working at TSR and Wizards? Steven: The biggest differences both impacted how we had grown accustomed to working. At TSR, we all had relatively large cubes with high walls for privacy and solitude when you needed it for work. At Wizards, Peter Adkison preferred an open environment with low cube walls, shared cubes, and lots of discussion among the troops. Thus, that took a while to get used to.(12) Within TSR, the Creative Services department, while splintered among various locales in the massive office building, was pretty well insulated from the business side. We were left to do our jobs as creatives, sometimes seeing "the suits" as those out of touch with what the market/fan base wanted (especially since many of them didn't play the games or understand them). At Wizards, there was far less division between R&D and those who drove the company. Suddenly we had more influence over our product lines and more say in what sorts of products we'd produce. On the flip-side, we also found ourselves in many more meetings than we were used to. The other twist was the 40-odd TSR staffers who moved out to Washington were used to being the sole creatives and producers of fantasy materials; at Wizards of the Coast, we were the newcomers among many creative divisions, including the Magic staff and others. It took a little while to adapt to the lay of the land both professionally and socially, but I can't think of any who ever regretted the move. Monte: How about sharing with us a funny story about your time working on D&D?
February 5, 1990 This is my fourth day of work at the wacky factory that was TSR, Inc. I'm there early but others have preceded me; before 8:30 a.m. (when most of us have shambled into the office), nearly everyone has received a "HELLO MY NAME IS" sticker badge with "Jeff Grubb" written in for our names. The two servants of Loki behind this maneuver were Carol [Hubbard], the CEO's executive assistant and right hand, and Anne Brown, one of R&D's editors. By noon, everyone (with one exception) had their Jeff Grubb name badge, save for the suits, who often sadly lacked in the sense of humor department. I'm a wee bit ahead of myself here, but wanted to set the stage first. I was hired as an editor and had spent the previous few days getting to know my coworkers and find my way to fit into the machinery of roleplaying game editing and design. My office/cube was right next to the Games Library, where our department almost without fail gathered for lunch. Good camaraderie, good ways to catch up on gossip (industry or in-house), and always a game to observe or in which to play. Here I'll admit that my memory is failing a tad and I've probably got my facts mixed up, as it's been 15 years now. Jeff Grubb and Roger Moore (the editor, not the actor) had each received letters recently where people assumed that they were house names since their names were so prolific ("after all, no one person could do everything that is attached to your name" was a stray comment). In the spirit of them being "house names," one letter writer attended a convention as "Roger Moore" and let him know in a letter (also kindly offering to do so again in order to present some TSR presence where there wouldn't already be one). The offer was politely declined. One couple in Texas tried to attend a convention in Jeff's name, but the convention called TSR to check, and Jeff's response to the tune of, "Yes, I exist. No, I'm not a house name. No, I'm not a married couple in Texas..." may have springboarded Jeff Grubb Day, since Anne shared a cube wall with Jeff and overheard him. Needless to say, this both amused and disturbed those actual bearers of said names. The attendees (would-be or otherwise) were quickly served a cease-and-desist request to stop them from attending shows falsely (and for free, the main reason folks did it, I assume), but the joke of either man as a house name lived on... Anne conspired with Carol to get a roll of name badges and it was unofficially declared Jeff Grubb Day with each designer, editor, and perhaps the artists and mappers as well getting their Jeff Grubb badges. Meeting minutes from that day read as "Attending: Jeff Grubb, Jeff G., Jeff, Jeff, Jeff, and Jeff." All save for one person -- Jeff proudly wore his badge which read HELLO MY NAME IS ROGER MOORE. In retrospect (and perhaps it's one of those "had to be there" things), it doesn't have the same sort of impact as it did 15 years back. This was one of the ways in which the department all pulled together in silliness to have fun and made us more like a highly dysfunctional family of bipolar creatives rather than just coworkers. :)
1 If you ever plan to run game demonstrations at a convention, make sure you're not next to a booth or another table in which hitting a gong is a necessary point of game play. Do not, under any circumstances, incorporate a gong into your own game demo. It might be amusing the first time, but by the afternoon of the con's first day, either you or everyone else around you at the con wants to melt the gong down into base metals. (This is all I can remember about an Al-Qadim demo done circa 1994 or so-fabulous setting and products, but hated the gong...). 2 The day that shall forever be remembered as the Day of the Jeffs, or Jeff Grubb Day (explained later in the interview). 3 Jon is a great editor with an incredible eye for detail and an encyclopedic knowledge of D&D and its history, having been there nearly from the beginnings of TSR. Thus, his cube was always overloaded with products on the shelves, on the floor, on his desk, etc. I came in one morning and found that one of the cube walls had fallen in under the weight of all the books on the shelves...but Jon was saved when the desk anchored itself against the piles of books on the floor. 4 I inherited this poster when I took over assistant managing the Marvel Super-Heroes Game line in late 1990 through late 1992 when the license expired. 5 Someone else will have to remind me exactly how many Ladislavs ruled the empires under [editor] Jim Lowder's control, but I know it was a dynasty of at least six of them... 6 "Say, ______, you know sheep. How much does one weigh?" The poor guy who was the target of this strange aside for no apparent reason had to endure bad sheep jokes for years afterward. 7 We didn't have PCs in our cubes until about late 1991 or early 1992. When I started, we had an old networked HP computer system nicknamed the Dinosaur. The only way you could do early layouts were to count the lines of text and hope for the best upon typesetting time. I can still remember a third of the codes for formatting, but I'm much happier just working with modern word processing. 8 From which I was glad to take the Ugly Bottle-Cap Boy figure and bring him out to Wizards of the Coast in 1997. 9 One that sticks to mind for some reason was an aside from Zeb Cook while working on The Horde boxed set-"Yurts don't float." The other perennial topic happened whenever a baby was due for any of the staff-I believe "Pinball Godzilla" was the mandatory first suggestion for baby names each and every time. 10 It almost became a running gag that nearly any new hire at TSR became my roommate for a time, the list including Tim Beach, Lester Smith, and the inestimable Monte Cook himself. 11 Come to think of it, I "met" you, Monte, in 1991 over the phone as we worked out details for your design of a Marvel Super Heroes product that never made it to press due to TSR losing the license. Too bad -- you gave 1000% and actually had pulled together details and histories on all the space-going races of the Marvel Universe, even statting up all the aliens from the original Marvel Universe Encyclopedia comics. 12 Especially those of us who worked best with quiet. Within two months of most of us arriving at Wizards, many of us bought headphones and used CDs for white-noise to help focus on work rather than the myriad distractions of people wandering around and dropping in at all moments. Related Articles
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Monte:
How did you get the job of being an editor at TSR?
Other
random memories and fun were the Dinosaur(7), the Tacky Gift Exchanges at the
holidays(8), the Quote Board(9), the "Steven's Roommate" phase(10),
and thoughts of the many good people with whom I got to work over 10 years with
TSR and Wizards of the Coast(11). Hard to believe it's been 15 years since a
very green editor started working on Skull & Crossbows for the Spelljammer
line. 
Steven:
Well, my best story is my 4th day of work (as noted above and in my blog a few
months back), so I'll resubmit the Jeff Grubb Day story. 
Of
course, some people's mileage may vary on this experience. After all, it was
Slade Henson's FIRST day at TSR, and he met all his coworkers being introduced
as Jeff.
Sue's TSR Scrapbook
A Talk With John D. Rateliff
A Talk With Jesse Decker
A Talk With Steven Schend
A Talk With Douglas Niles
A Talk With Cindi Rice
A Talk With William W. Connors
A Talk With Skip Williams
A Talk With Stan!
A Talk With Sean K Reynolds
A Talk With Jeff Quick
A Talk With Ray Vallese
A Talk With Miranda Horner
A Talk With Keith Strohm
A Talk With Colin McComb
A Talk With Wolfgang Baur
A Talk With Andy Collins
A Talk With David Wise
A Talk With Bruce R. Cordell
30th Anniversary Interview Series |