A Talk With Wolfgang Baur

A 30th Anniversary Interview

Wolfgang Baur started writing as a freelancer in the 1980s, and worked full time at TSR in the early 1990s. He wrote for a lot of different game lines, but personally I remember him mostly for his work on Al-Qadim and Planescape. I really admired his work from the first time I saw it, because it married imaginative game design and excellent, evocative writing, something which was always my own goal as well. And here's a bit of trivia: in Wolf's In the Cage sourcebook, you'll find the first-ever 2nd Edition reference to a demon (not a tanar'ri).

Wolfgang also worked on the magazines while I worked at TSR - as the editor of Dungeon, and then Dragon. From my point of view, that made Wolf part of the books-and-magazines crowd. It's funny, looking back. Here we all were, working on the same sorts of stuff, but the magazine people (and even more so, those who edited the novels) were sort of a different clique in many ways. I suppose it's mostly because we worked in different parts of the building.

When Wolfgang left TSR to go to the then up-and-coming game company Wizards of the Coast, he left with class and dignity, not burning a single bridge behind him. Thus, when we all joined him in Seattle two years later, it was a happy reunion. I imagine that, of anyone involved in any way with Wizards of the Coast's buyout of TSR, Wolf probably had the most interesting perspective (but I'll let him tell you about that).

I'm extremely pleased to have been able to ask Wolfgang some questions about his experiences for the 30th Anniversary of Dungeons & Dragons.

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

Wolfgang Baur: I saw the "blue box" in a local craft store that carried a few games... and I wanted it pretty bad. A dragon! Adventurers! Orcs! I was pretty much sold at the word "dragon," long before I ever tore the shrink wrap off that thing.

I didn't have the cash, but got it for Christmas. I promptly recruited my little sister and next-door neighbor kid to play. Before long, I had found other hard-core geeks at school as well. I ran the adventure in the back of the book. I bought the 1st Edition Monster Manual the day it arrived and tried to imagine what the Player's Handbook might contain. I ran any module that looked moderately interesting, and soon started writing my own.

Monte: What did you do before coming to work at TSR, and how did it prepare you for a job dealing with roleplaying games?

Wolfgang: Before TSR, I was a student who played D&D, AD&D, Traveller, Cthulhu, Paranoia, and the Warhammer RPG. Since I had free time, I wrote for the TSR magazines, mostly for Dungeon. That was the preparation that counted, that and a love of European history and storytelling. I sent in my first queries in high school, and continued to publish in college while studying biochemistry and molecular biology. The submission process at the time involved writing your draft on a PC, printing out the pages, and sending the paper through the U.S. Mail. The wait was a killer; a turnaround time of weeks or even a couple of months was normal.

So, I enjoyed writing and gaming and was a long-time subscriber to the magazines, but I never really thought of it as a career. That changed when Steve Kurtz, a friend and fellow Dungeon freelancer, told me that the magazines were hiring. It seemed like a lot better idea than staying in grad school dissecting fruit flies and reading the deconstructionist critique of the scientific method. I figured I'd go back to grad school in a year, but of course I was having far too much fun by then.

Monte: What did you do first at TSR?

Wolfgang: I was an editorial assistant to start, reading the slush pile [unsolicited submissions], answering query letters, stuffing form letters into SASEs, and proofing every set of galleys. I did good work and got promoted.

Monte: How did you get that job?

Wolfgang: I landed the job because I'd been writing for the magazines for years, and [the editors] knew I could complete a sentence, spell the jargon correctly, and turn a phrase. At the time, they asked me to show up for a lunch interview and even a short editing test, and I was pretty nervous about it. I worked very hard to try to impress them with my steely competence. I was wasting my time; years later [longtime Dungeon editor] Barbara Young told me that "basically, we figured as long as you didn't drool on your shoes, you were hired."

There's two ways to take that: either I'd already impressed them with the work I mailed them as a freelancer and the interview was just a formality -- or they were really desperate for help.

Monte: What was your indoctrination into the company like?

Wolfgang: I was hired in a batch in October with editors John Rateliff and Thomas Reid, and designer Rich Baker (who had just left the Navy). We had a few lunches together and called each other the "New Fish." John still organizes a "New Fish" lunch once a year in October.

The real indoctrination was, "Hey, we're on deadline, proof this story in half an hour" and "Oh, you'll be rewriting the minis column" and similar trials by fire. I learned a lot from proofing material, then seeing what [magazine editors] Kim Mohan, Roger Moore, or Barbara Young did to improve that same manuscript after I was done with it.

The time when I knew I was right to move to Wisconsin was shortly after my first day, when Roger came by the office distributing employee copies of a new product. He tossed one on my desk, a Dragonlance module. "What's this?" I asked. "Are we reviewing this or something?"

"No, it's a freebie. You get copies of all the products." I sat there stunned, and Roger took his stack of shrink-wrapped products and moved along. ALL the products? I was in love with the job already. And I would clearly need more shelf space at home.

Monte: What was the relationship between the periodicals staff and the R&D staff like?

Wolfgang: It wasn't always good. The R&D staff was the heart of the company, making the next set of hits, the next worlds, the next whatever. And I think a few designers saw the magazines as a publicity machine for their genius. But in fact, we rarely published material from the R&D staffers, other than Skip Williams' regular Sage Advice column. Most of the people we interacted with were freelancers such as Ed Greenwood or John Bunnell (our book reviewer).

The reason we rarely asked for material from R&D was that it always meant running a risk of offending someone by rejecting their work. Not to be snide, but some of the R&D staff didn't write all that well. The editors on the R&D side could and often did clean up or rewrite some spotty prose. By contrast, the magazines didn't have to clean up a fundamentally flawed manuscript; we could just reject it as a dud, because there was plenty of great material available from our stable of regular freelancers and up-and-coming new contributors. So those two attitudes didn't always make for an easy co-existence: some R&D staff seemed to think that we'd accept anything they sent our way, and maybe the magazine staff may have been a little too touchy after getting burned once or twice.

The real trouble came when one of the R&D bosses decided that the magazines would print some damn thing no matter what: a puff piece by a manager, or a guest editorial to plug something new, or a set of Buck Rogers feature articles. I suppose it's a cliché in magazine publishing, but we hated getting that stuff crammed down our throats by advertisers or execs. We strove to be independent and not a house organ. It didn't always work, but it was what [Dragon's longtime editor] Roger Moore fought for every month. The magazine readership was much larger than the readership of any individual sourcebook or module, and we defended that audience pretty fiercely.

Looking back on it, we probably came across as stiff-necked, elitist jerks some of the time. But dammit, there's no point in editing a gaming magazine if you can't raise hell and defend your readers.

Monte: Give us some insight into what it was like to be a member of the TSR staff back then. What was it like to have a bunch of extremely creative people all gathered together in one strange building in an extremely small town in Wisconsin?

Wolfgang: If the creative community is big enough, the size of the town isn't as important. Other folks will probably discuss the various antics within the building; the thing to realize is that everyone also saw most of the same people after hours as well.

Because TSR was so self-contained as a social set, the social nights were pretty impressive. [Senior designer] Zeb Cook hosted "Bad Movie Night", introducing many folks to their first taste of wuxia and Hong Kong goodies like Mr. Vampire. Every year, [cartographer] Diesel's Halloween party brought out terrific costumes from the art and cartography departments, and some pretty wild stuff from the creative staff. For sheer bad punning, though, I still like Rich Baker's costume when he and his wife were expecting their first child. Yeah, you guessed it, they came as a baker and an oven.

Gaming-wise, we played a lot of board games over lunch but we also ran roleplaying games and minis a couple nights a week. There were lots of memorable games, from Vampire to Gamma World to Toon, but the night that Zeb Cook commandeered the local astronomical observatory (Yerkes, run by the University of Chicago) for a Call of Cthulhu live-action game probably ranks at the top of my list. It was an amazing building, and the real-world history of the observatory included a blind director and a visit by Albert Einstein. Making a creepy evening of "The Stars are Right"-style peril was definitely helped along by the setting.

As much as I loved the staff, I couldn't stand the small-town atmosphere. I tried it out for a while, but eventually I moved to Milwaukee and drove the 40 miles each way, sharing the driving duties by carpooling with editor Anne Brown.

Monte: Describe the process involved with putting out an issue of either Dungeon or Dragon magazine back in those days. How do you suppose it differs to how things are done now?

Wolfgang: In the old days of the early 1990s, TSR was still using the cutting-edge technology of the 1970s.

Article queries showed up as letters and were answered on letterhead (printed on a laser printer, but still...). Manuscripts that we had requested showed up on paper, with paper maps attached and self-addressed, stamped envelopes -- usually dozens and dozens every month. We read them all, and sent most of them back.
A few manuscripts we kept and bought. We'd send the paper manuscript to a typist to convert back into soft copy, and edit that into the magazine's format, checking stat blocks, rewriting sections as needed, assigning art and map requests, and printing out rough versions to check the length and layout.

Once we got final clean copy, we sent it to typesetting and got back films (slick, heavy paper versions of the text). Because the films were too slick to write on with pen or pencil, we usually photocopied them and then edited for typesetting accuracy, line breaks, and symbol errors. Typesetting errors always crept into those old machines.

Larry Smith, the periodicals' art director, would paste up the final films, using the film from typesetting plus the maps from the cartographers, advertisements, and black-and-white art. These became the boards, which we'd send off to the printer. The printer shot photos of the boards, turned those into film, which would come back as bluelines from the printer. That was the last chance to fix any problems; after that, it was etched onto plates, printed, bound, and shipped. The boards went into the archive.

Man, I wish we'd had the money for the desktop-publishing software available at the time. Before joining TSR, I had edited a college SF magazine using a Macintosh and Pagemaker; going to TSR was like returning to the Stone Age of print publications.

These days, email replaces letters, soft copy arrives as an attachment, and the layout is all done on standard templates in a WYSIWYG layout program that is fed more-or-less directly to the printer's press. The guys at Paizo have it pretty good, technology-wise. But I don't envy the work that goes into proofing the 3rd Edition stat blocks.

Monte: You have a unique perspective on the TSR buyout, since you left TSR to work for Wizards before that happened. What was it like to be a part of the company that purchased your old company?

Wolfgang: It was very strange. I was thrilled that TSR wasn't going to go under, and that all my friends and colleagues from Wisconsin might be joining me on the West Coast. At the same time, the Wizards employees were pretty giddy about the acquisition -- except for the small roleplaying game department I was working in, which saw it as a bit of a threat (and rightly so!). There was some angst about launching any roleplaying titles when D&D was so clearly the future core of Wizards roleplaying.

In the end, I played advance scout for TSR colleagues, calming people during some moderately frantic phone calls (some people had the mistaken notion that Seattle and Renton were Big Bad Cities of Sin). I showed people the town when they visited and recommended apartments near the offices. I explained the creative ferment at Wizards, the youthful energy, and the enthusiasm that people had for gaming, and how well that would mesh with the experience, business savvy, and even-keeled temperaments of the TSR crew. I was in a good position to appreciate the strengths of both sides, and to explain the nature of the Wizards R&D funhouse to the new arrivals. They didn't really need my help; their found their footing quickly.

Of course, Hasbro ate up both TSR and Wizards of the Coast, setting off another round of angst and moving the political center off to the East Coast. But that was after my time.

Monte: Will you share with us a funny or interesting story about working on D&D, either at TSR or Wizards?

Wolfgang: Three other designers and I had been working for months on a new RPG prototype for Wizards. We finally took a printout, character sheets, and the rest to a meeting with the executive who would approve it, reject it, or send it back for more work. We launched into a description of the goals, then character generation. The exec cut us off: "No dice. It has to be diceless."

The meeting stopped cold. Diceless design wasn't exactly new: board games did it all the time, and Amber and Everway had done it in roleplaying games. It would have been an interesting design requirement months ago, before we'd spent weeks on the prototype. At this point, it was a little late. For a moment, I wanted to string up the executive responsible for that rather late-breaking design requirement in a game designer riot. Didn't happen.

Oddly enough, I'm not bitter. Ten years later, it's one of my favorite memories of that chaotic, wild, anything-can-happen period at Wizards, when design requirements were a fevered dream. The whole field of roleplaying games was in a Dark Age at the time - many of the previous generation of designers were abandoning the field for card game and computer game design. In a very real sense, only [Wizards founder and then president] Peter Adkison's love of the genre kept the department alive at Wizards -- and saved TSR from failing. In the real world, Magic was storming the sales charts and D&D was barely holding on to a player base.

When the Magic R&D staffers spoke, no matter how off-base they were, the experts among the D&D designers often said, "Sure, we can do that." Later on, the two design cultures merged, but at the time... Oh, boy.

Monte: You left Wizards of the Coast a few years ago. What have you been doing since?

Wolfgang: I've been writing as a freelancer again! I've been happy to ratchet down my involvement with design and work on fiction and other fields -- but I'm still a big gamer. In many ways, I've reclaimed the joy I had in the hobby before it became a full-time job, and I've been playing more and more 3rd Edition D&D and d20 Call of Cthulhu without feeling the designer burnout.

I've freelanced for most of the majors and some of the minors lately, including Wizards of the Coast (Frostburn), Malhavoc (Beyond Countless Doorways, Book of Roguish Luck), Chaosium (Pulp Cthulhu), Green Ronin (The Secret College of Necromancy, The Assassin's Handbook), Gaslight Press (The Gryphon's Legacy), and Paradigm Concepts (Bloodspeakers).

And I've gone back to the periodicals. Since I lived the magazine editor's life for years, I've found it remarkably easy to write queries that the current editors seem to like. When I get the itch to put something together, I pick up the keyboard and write a few articles for the magazines where I started years ago. My first publication for TSR was in Dungeon issue #15; now 100 issues later I contributed "Raiders of the Black Ice" for Dungeon #115.

I've also done a slew of Dragon articles including three feature article write-ups of George R.R. Martin's Westeros setting (issue #307), plus occasional reviews of card games for Undefeated and book reviews for Amazing Stories. And there's a half dozen more articles in the pipeline.

In a way, I've come full circle, and it's a good place to be.

Related Articles

Sue's TSR Scrapbook During my years at TSR/Wizards, I took a lot of pictures. If there was an event, I was there with my camera. And as much as I loved the books and games that we produced, I loved the people even more. So, as my contribution to Monte's D&D anniversary series, I thought it would be fun to wrap things up with a photographic look at the many faces of D&D during my Wisconsin years with TSR.	A Talk With John D. Rateliff 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.
A Talk With Jesse Decker I met Jesse Decker when he was the editorial assistant for the Dragon and Dungeon magazines. I'd been in a few meetings with him and discussed articles or whatnot and found him to be not only a real devotee of the game but a really nice guy. So, when a vacancy opened up in my Ptolus campaign, I suggested to the (Black Lantern) group that he might be a good addition and other members agreed.	A Talk With Steven Schend Steven Schend was one of the very first people at TSR that I interacted with. 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. 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.
A Talk With Douglas Niles I never had the pleasure of working directly with Douglas Niles. He left TSR before I came to work there. Still, his legacy was clear. Though he was no longer in the office, his presence was still felt -- everyone still talked about Doug, and he had parties at his home and invited the whole TSR crew, even the newbies.	A Talk With Cindi Rice I can remember Cindi Rice's first days at TSR very well. It was a period when the company was hiring a lot of new creative staff, and it was sometimes hard to keep them all straight. I remember Cindi seemed to fit in really well, and really fast -- which is to say that she figured out quickly how to have a lot of fun.
A Talk With William W. Connors Bill Connors was one of the few people I already knew when I got to TSR in 1994. We had a mutual friend, and I'd met Bill at a previous Gen Con. (I remember that he was wearing a really cool suit and I was in a T-shirt and shorts. In one brief evening he changed my opinion about the mystique of being a game designer -- that they didn't have to be dorks, they could be really cool -- and I immediately wanted to be him.)	A Talk With Skip Williams Skip Williams hardly needs any introduction from me. When I started at TSR, I looked on him as the voice of experience. If I had a rules question, I went to Skip. The cool thing about Skip was, when you went to him with a question, he didn't speak from on high. Most of the time, he'd tell you what a good question it was, and that there wasn't an easy answer. Often, we'd end up having a good discussion about the rules....
A Talk With Stan! Steven Brown, a.k.a. "Stan!", is a good friend of mine. Although we both were at TSR and Wizards of the Coast at the same time, we never actually worked together on any projects, although he has since written a couple of short stories for Malhavoc fiction collections. Stan! always seemed to be working on other things. And in truth, I never really got to know him until after the move to Washington and Wizards of the Coast.	A Talk With Sean K Reynolds Sean Reynolds came to TSR right as the company was preparing to have a big 25th anniversary celebration. It was a pretty lavish affair with a big tent outside, lots of food, and a big display of TSR products. My first memory of Sean was when Sue and I met him and kind of dragged him to the celebration...