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Left But Not GoneA History of the Roleplaying Game Industry Through One Designer's Eyes, Part 30I was sitting in my office at my dream job at Iron Crown Enterprises. Except my office was a small room with two other editors (my friends Kevin and Jessica), and my job was quickly becoming nothing more than trying to convince irate, unpaid authors that financially things at the company would soon improve and they would get paid. It was less and less the dream I had been dreaming for so long. It was late 1991, and my own paychecks were becoming irregular at best. More and more people were leaving the company, and those who stayed became surlier or more despondent. The low point for me came one day when I showed up at work and the door was locked. A sign read, "Closed by Order of the Sherriff." Apparently, the company was so behind on its rent that the landlord had locked the doors. They company's owners paid the rent and got the doors open just a few hours later, but the writing was on the wall. Or, actually, on a sign on the door. Not long afterward, I decided to leave ICE and move to Colorado. It was hard to leave, despite all the negative factors. In the first place, I had made good friends there with whom I really enjoyed spending time (although they would leave the company soon after, so in the end it was obviously the right choice). And plus, it was my dream job. How do you leave your dream? I suppose that's why it had to get so bad -- and it got really, really bad -- before I did finally leave. In a way, my dream had to not only be crushed, but stomped on for a while, buried, dug up and stomped on again, all while I watched, before I could finally give it up for dead. The New Dream Luckily, I was young and could get a new dream. That dream was to be a novelist -- not actually a new dream, because it had always sort of been the "other dream," after working in the game industry. Ironically, becoming a novelist had always seemed an easier goal to attain than full-time employment in the game industry. I suppose that was because there were more novelists in the world than professional game designers and editors. But full-time novel writing was a long-term dream and, while pursuing it, I would use what experience I had gained at ICE to work as a freelance game editor/designer. As such, I could live anywhere I wanted to. I had visited my friend Bruce in Boulder a few years earlier and had really liked it there. I liked the idea of living near Bruce again (we had grown up together in South Dakota) and becoming a Coloradan, living in the mountains and enjoying the cool atmosphere of Boulder. Except that I could not actually afford the rent in overpriced Boulder and wound up in a suburb of nearby Denver. But it was still a nice place and, despite being welcomed to the state with a terrible, unseasonable blizzard (the details of which make a good story but have nothing to do with the history of the RPG industry), I was happy to be there. As I left, my bosses at ICE offered me a full-time freelance gig basically still doing the job I had been doing. I would, in effect, be a telecommuter, which was still a pretty new thing in 1992 -- email was still pretty new, and the Internet was nothing more than Usenet and various download servers. In any event, I agreed, assuming that I would freelance for ICE until I was fully settled in and found something more reliable. An unreliable stream of income was better than none, I figured. There was just one problem. I didn't own a computer. One of the guys at ICE knew a guy at another game company (and I'm avoiding names here on purpose) who could get me a really good deal on a Mac Classic II. At the time, this would have been a huge step up for me computer-wise, compared to the 128s and Mac SEs we had in the office. The Long Dark Freelance Time of the Soul But getting this deal meant a long wait. I did what I could without a computer as much as I could, reviewing printed manuscripts, talking to authors on the phone, and handwriting letters, but during the weeks that I had to wait, life became very strange. I became very strange. Getting a handle on freelancing had its own unique challenges. Without an office to go to, I spent long stretches of time without leaving my apartment. My sleep schedule had inverted so that I was going to bed when the sun came up and sleeping until one in the afternoon. I look back on that time the way an alcoholic likely looks back on a terrible but memorable bender. I have a vivid memory of being up at like five in the morning scribbling a half-coherent note of congratulations to Peter Atkison for his first book, the Primal Order. I never asked him if he got that. I probably should. Eventually, though, I got my computer (another day I vividly remember). Money from ICE was actually fairly regular for a while, and I continued working for them essentially full time, first on both Hero and Rolemaster, and then -- when the guys who owned Hero Games pulled away from ICE -- just Rolemaster. But it didn't take that long before checks became erratic and rubbery, and I wondered how much longer I could take it. That question was answered for me, at least partly. You have to understand that, at this point, anyone who could put together a decent rulebook wouldn't touch ICE with a 10-foot pole. Either they'd been burned already, or they had heard the rumors (which were true) that ICE wasn't paying its freelancers. So the manuscripts that came in were pretty awful. Making them into decent products was becoming more and more difficult, with the schedule getting more and more demanding, so that ICE could publish more books and climb out of its financial hole. And paychecks were still rare. So my work suffered. The quality of the Rolemaster line sagged. I got a phone call in which my boss told me that the wife of one of the guys still at ICE had gone through a book and found a lot of errors*. I remember getting this call and thinking, "Are you kidding me? I practically do this job on a volunteer basis, and now I'm being criticized by somebody's wife who has taken a sudden interest in Rolemaster?" That's not what I said, because back then I was still a polite young lad. But it's what I thought. * Much later, I obtained a copy of the book that she had marked up and it actually wasn't that bad. A lot of the things she thought were errors were mistakes on her part, but these tales always escalate in the telling. I'm sure that, in the halls of ICE back then, I was the worst editor of all time in any medium. Unfortunate Lesson Learned The bit of wisdom that I garnered that day was that the guy who leaves becomes the convenient scapegoat. That may sound strong, but the truth is, I saw it saw happen again and again in my career (from both sides of the issue). When there were layoffs at TSR, for example, I watched as coworkers suddenly dragged former employees across the verbal coals, blaming them for whatever had gone wrong previously. When some TSR employees went to Washington after Wizards of the Coast bought the company, leaving behind others to work as telecommuters, there was an unspoken tension -- those who made the move assumed that those working from home weren't actually doing much work (or forgot about them altogether). And when I later left Wizards myself... well, you get the idea. Office work breeds a sort of camaraderie and, if you're not right there in the trenches, you're not "one of us." The distance breeds a mild sort of contempt. In the workplace, absence does not make the heart grow fonder. Plus, a lot of people think you can't really get much work done at home (and maybe that's true for some). You see it all the time: Office workers make the little air quotes gesture when referring to a coworker "working" from home. It's practically an ingrained part of the culture. So my boss and I came to an easy agreement. It was obvious that he was getting pressure back in the office that his telecommuting employee wasn't doing any work, and I suddenly realized that I wanted -- needed -- to work for someone else. That phone call was like an abrupt flash of light in which I could suddenly see clearly once again. In hindsight, it appears almost pathetic how many repeated kicks in the pants I needed to finally let go, even when it was so clearly the right thing to do. That first year in Colorado, I can see now, wasn't me really leaving ICE at all. What should have been a clean break just became messy. I suppose it just shows how important that dream job was to me. I pretty quickly found work that I was excited to do, and actually got paid for.* Another three letter acronym (TLA) game company was suddenly on the phone: TSR. Which, at the time, let me tell you, was a really big deal (RBD). Next: Things really do get better. *In defense of ICE, during the collectible card game boom of the mid-1990s, they finally sent me all the back pay they owed me, and I believe they did the same for all their other freelancers. These were not bad people. They were good people in a bad situation. Considering everything, I bear the company and the vast majority of the people who worked there absolutely no ill will. I don't know if the reverse is true. I suspect it is not. Time really does have a way of rounding off the sharp edges. When I think about the period of time I worked for Iron Crown, it's mostly the fun memories and the thrill to be there that come to mind. Only when I sit down to write something like this am I compelled to confront the harsh realities that actually drove events. Oh, and my ICE friend -- and my very first editor -- Kevin, actually finds his way back into this story much later. Related Articles
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