What Am I Doing Here?

A History of the Roleplaying Game Industry Through One Designer's Eyes, Part 1

I'd followed the directions carefully, but I still had gotten lost. Eventually, I just parked my little white Hyundai -- a car I'd been talked into buying by my girlfriend, who liked the sun roof -- and walked around the Charlottesville downtown walking mall , a single long street of shops and offices closed to traffic, until I found a sign.

That sign was small and innocuous, but professional looking. It read "Iron Crown Enterprises."

The building was a four-story office building connected to the walking mall, next to a laughably small parking lot. It was a late Friday afternoon in June, and it was hot and humid. How on earth had I gotten here?

Iron Crown Enterprises, or ICE, published a number of games, but at that moment in time I was mainly focused on one called Rolemaster. Rolemaster (or RM) had come out in the early 80s originally as a series of adjuncts to D&D with names like Claw Law, Arms Law, and Spell Law. In 1984 my high school pals and I had found an ad in Dragon Magazine for Spell Law and we pooled our money to get it. It added literally thousands of spells to our game and introduced us to a concept called spell points. Well, actually, we'd cobbled together our own spell-point system for D&D even before we got Spell Law, but theirs was a lot less complicated than ours.

In 1986, when I went to college, I decided to take the plunge and buy all of Rolemaster. I gave up D&D partly as a rejection of the 2nd Edition of the game, which I hadn't been too thrilled with, but mostly because the intricacies of RM were just the kind of arcane complexities that had drawn me to D&D in the first place. I wanted to be involved in something that was difficult to master -- that's the kind of kid I was.

In college, I ran RM for a number of years for a lot of different players and had a great time with it. In 1987, one of the players, Steve, had gone to Origins and met the ICE guys at their booth. He told them about me and said that I should be writing for them. They gave him their writer's guidelines and some advice about what they were looking for, which he then gave to me. Now, having been on both sides of the convention booth, as it were, I'm sure that Steve believed, after this conversation, that the ICE staffers were eager to hear from me. But I'm also sure they handed out hundreds of writer's guidelines at that show. Still, I was excited to hear what Steve had to say. They told him they were looking to do a sequel to their book Creatures and Treasures, a monster and magic item collection. So I worked very hard over that summer and put together a proposal for Creatures and Treasures II. It was accepted, and I wrote the book over the summer of 1988, and it came out in 1989. By that time, I was already working on my second book for ICE, called Dark Space. By the time it was done, I was getting ready to graduate, and hit up my editor, Coleman Charlton, for a job. Instead he offered me a summer internship, and I took it. Next thing I knew, I was driving across the country to Virginia.

That Friday afternoon when I arrived, the staff of ICE was taking part in a Friday afternoon ritual which they called "Happy Hour." This was a time for the whole staff to hang out, eat snacks, have a drink, and blow off steam. As I got off the elevator on the building's fourth floor and entered the ICE offices, I suddenly found myself being introduced to the names I'd seen in dozens of RPG books: Coleman Charlton, Kevin Barrett, Pete Fenlon, and Terry Amthor (and, of course Swink, the ferret). My head was spinning. It was as though I'd won a lottery for ubergeeks.

By the next week, I'd settled into a place to live just a few doors down from the "commune," so called because four different ICE staff members -- all single -- lived there. (By the end of that summer, I'd be living in the commune as well. I've lived in a lot of places over the years, but if you assembled them into a graph, this was clearly the low point. No one cleaned. Ever. Dishes were done on a monthly basis. If you lay down on the carpet in the living room, you'd probably stick. That kind of thing.)

My office was communal as well. I shared a large room with three other editors, the aforementioned Coleman and Kevin, and Jessica Ney, who handled the Middle-Earth line. Coleman was the RM guy, and Kevin basically handled all things sci-fi, including Spacemaster, Cyberspace, and Silent Death. My first duties were varied and often menial. I made photocopies, I transferred computer files, and I retyped hardcopy manuscripts turned over by freelance designers who did their work on typewriters rather than computers.

Yes, I'm old. You kids get off my lawn.

There was another intern on staff for the summer as well named Chad Brinkley. While I worked for Coleman, Chad worked for the infamous Rob Bell, the Champions editor. Rob would go on to become one of my best friends in Charlottesville, although sadly he left the company (but not the city) not too long after I arrived. More on him later. Chad wore a lot of black, including big black boots all the time. I thought it was just a point of personal style. Honestly, I didn't even know what Goth was then. I was just a naïve kid from South Dakota. Chad was a nice guy, but I always felt there was a territoriality thing going on with him (he'd been at ICE longer than I).

It was, sadly, long hours of pretty boring work. Not a lot of fun game design or anything like that -- because, remember, I was just an intern. I got involved in some games, although I was disappointed to find that a lot of the people there didn't play RPGs regularly. They played a lot of board games, including strange but interesting games from Europe (which weren't at all common in the US in 1990). Mostly, I just heard about the fabulous games of the old days. Pete Fenlon's famed Middle-Earth game, in which the PCs struggled to obtain the Iron Crown of Morgoth (and thus the name of the company), as well as his surreal game of shifting realities called Dreamtime. Pete was the president of the company and a lawyer. A friendly and welcoming guy, but at the time I didn't react to him well. I was kind of a quiet, geeky sort, and he was gregarious, quick-witted, stylish, and not at all geeky. In an if-I-knew-then-what-I-know-now sort of way, I think Pete and I could have become good friends, but I lacked the confidence for it back then. I was intimidated as all get-out, probably in part because he was the president of the company. At the time I thought that really meant something. (Having owned my own company now, I know that it really means very little.)

So I had two books under my belt, and a few weeks of working at a game company, but you could hardly call me a part of the game industry. I still didn't know anything. But my foot was in the door. I'd had a taste of living the dream, and I wasn't going anywhere...

Next: In Part 2, I use my foot to pry the door wide open and discover that not everything beyond is as great as I'd hoped. Still, I begin to learn a lot of interesting "insider" info about the industry.

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