In part 1 of this lengthy essay, I mentioned that the Lost Worlds relaunch had stalled out. In fact, we weren’t even working on it at the time. That changed the day we learned that Al Leonardi was coming to the office, presumably to meet us, assess the situation, and help get things back on track. We were trying to get Lost Worlds back into print in time for GenCon, because Al wanted to run his long-standing Lost Worlds tournament there. You played it by affixing a Lost Worlds button to your shirt, with a picture of the character you planned to fight with. You could walk up to anyone else with a Lost Worlds button and duel them. The results of the duel were then reported back to Al or one of his people and they kept up with who won the most fights. I later found out, at GenCon, that the people playing in the tournament had been doing so for years.

Here’s where the project stood: we had four books’ worth of art, from really good artists, including people who were doing art for Magic: The Gathering. Doug Shuler was the big “get” for this, having produced the artwork for the Serra Angel card. He was a name, and he’d done the covers and interiors for three of the four books.

The books also came with new cards (what didn’t, back then?) that added conditions, tactical maneuvers, magic items, and in some cases, altered the battlefield. They were to be inserted randomly into the books so that it was a “collectible” incentive to buy more than one. Kinda dumb, since you needed two books to play, but we were trying like hell to fit these books into the marketplace at the time.

So, what was the hold up? Two things: the art on the Lost Worlds combat cards was really bad. It was manipulated clipart at 72 dpi. It looked like a playtest set of cards, which it was. There were two more books being produced, and they’d gotten the artwork in for one of them and were singularly unhappy with it. The artist was a guy named Mike Kimble, another Magic: the gathering card artist. He was in charge of the bugbear character, but what he gave us looked more like a really rough drawing of Lon Chaney, Jr.’s Wolf Man.

There was a lot to do, and I was coming in mid-project, so I was thrilled to meet Al and his son-in-law, Dennis. They showed up and Weldon and I were put in charge of the meet and greet. All I really did was flatter him, but that’s okay; Al was very nice, very humble, and pretty lively, especially when talking shop. We had an ulterior motive, though.

Weldon has a brilliant analytical mind. He had two skillsets that he used nearly every day during his tenure at Chessex. He could make a prototype of nearly anything out of cardboard and tape. After all, it was easier to hand someone a thing than to describe what it will look like when it’s made. Weldon was also really good at collecting data points into a chart. It was his go-to move. I can’t even count the number of times me or someone else has said to Weldon, “How the hell did you come up with that?”

Weldon would invariably reply, “I made a chart.”

Weldon did something prior to Al’s visit that blew me and him away. Weldon managed to reverse engineer the combat matrix for the Lost Worlds books. When he showed his work to our guests, Al was surprised and delighted. He took Weldon into his confidence and explained how the matrix was sort of set in stone, but it was possible to change the outcomes on the results pages to make a character faster, stronger, more agile. He said there were ultimately four different character matrixes and the character with the fastest reflexes? The Woman with Quarterstaff. If you played against her, she was quite hard to hit. Weldon had correctly deduced that Al had taken a hex-grid map and folded it into a line-of-sight matrix for Ace of Aces, and Lost Worlds worked mostly the same way.

Our way of thinking was this: if you’re gonna relaunch the game, make those few small adjustments to the system and keep going. The biggest change Weldon wanted to make was to move the starting page from 57 to page 1. As in, the instant you open the book, the instructions are on the inside cover and your starting page is directly opposite that. It wouldn’t have messed up anything, but it would have made the new books a bit more difficult to match up with the old books.

Other ideas came to mind. You see, the initial run of the Lost Worlds books included a few monsters, including a very challenging Cold Drake, as well as a matches set of Feudal Japan combatants, the Samurai and the Ninja. They also licensed and designed four BattleTech mechs to punch and shoot each other—all with the same combat matrix as the other books, mind you. In other words, it was really stupid, but if you wanted to, you could fight a Mech against the dwarf with the greataxe. Eh, what was done was done.

We thought it would be cool to see other things fighting. Things like dinosaurs (we were only a few years past Jurassic Park, after all), and even superheroes. Weldon came up with an idea for a Jester character that used a mace that looks like a marotte, and the artwork would look crazy, like a drunken fighter, because he’s a funny guy, see, and unpredictable and silly in combat. But the real gem was this: a transforming character that used a flip-book format. In other words, the first half of the book was a woodsman with an axe, and when you flipped it upside down, he’d transform into a werewolf. Or a berserker that turns into a werebear. You get the idea. If you can maneuver your character onto the “transforming” page, your opponent would flip his book over and begin on page 1—now he’s fighting a monster. Do enough damage and the character reverts back.

It was a cool idea. We saved it for last in our creative meeting. After all, none of this could happen without Al’s buy-in. And it wasn’t just a pitch session, either; we had some concerns. For starters, no one else in the office was really taken with the idea, and that’s because it didn’t originate from Chessex Manufacturing. Rather, it was a deal done by Don and then handed off to Chessex Manufacturing, who was told to make it happen. Okay, fair enough. Al and his son-in-law Dennis were spearheading things like art and development, and the results were coming into the Chessex Manufacturing for us to make sense of it all.

There were two critical issues that we needed to address: The newest component to the Lost Worlds game was random combat cards that would be inserted into every book. They represented the magic items, spells, and tactical maneuvers that were one-time tricks that really changed up the flavor of the game. Al had a field day designing them, too—lots of in-jokes. A lot of it was “gamer humor” and that’s okay, as long as it was funny. This flavor text wasn’t—it was an absence of humor. The artwork was clip art, and it was low res clip art, at that. A couple of the pieces were straight out of Dover’s catalog. The new logo was nice, in that mid-90s overwrought kind of way. I’d asked about changing the backs of the cards up and that’s when I found out about Flying Buffalo.

You see, Al hadn’t just made a deal with us; he’d put his eggs into a couple of baskets. Flying Buffalo, Inc. was the publisher of Tunnels & Trolls and Rick Loomis, the head honcho over there, was only too happy to license a branded set of Lost Worlds characters based on iconic T&T characters and monsters. There was just one problem with that…

I don’t know how we got lucky with the artists we had on our books. Doug Shuler actually did the artwork for the BattleTech mech combat books back in the late 1980s, so I’m assuming he and Al went way back. Doug Shuler went on to become quite popular at that time, thanks to Magic: the Gathering. He didn’t have to take the job, and I’d always wondered if it was a favor to Al or something. Either way, our books looked noticeably better than the T&T books.

One of the other tweaks they came up with was to personalize the characters—no more “man in chainmail.” Sure, okay, no problem. Our four character’s names were, uh, okay. They were good enough. Sir Percival, the mounted knight, Brimstone, the fire giant, Othere, the Djinn, and Cimeree, a wood elf. Cool. Not at all where I would have gone with it, but what’s done is done.

Al and Dennis seemed very impressed with the ideas we’d presented to them, except for starting on Page 1. Al admitted that it would have been better to lay out the book that way, but with all of the old books still around, it would only confuse people trying to fight a new character with an old character. They were suitably impressed with the changes we’d made to their combat cards.

Al admitted some of the flavor text was just a placeholder or was something that amused them that maybe didn’t translate. He pointed out to me that one of the cards mentioned the “Twa Corbies Tavern” and do you know what that means, he asked me. “Two Ravens!” he said. I told him I got that, but naming the tavern the Two Ravens Tavern doesn’t change the meaning of the card in the slightest but it also won’t send someone scrambling for a dictionary to look up what a ‘corbie’ is. He paused for a second and said, “Yeah, you’re right, let’s change it.”

If Flying Buffalo was already putting out new Lost Worlds books ahead of us, maybe it would benefit us all to put up a unified front, you know? Cooperate, share resources (like the combat card backs, for instance). Rick was up for it, and he even let me write a couple of flash fiction pieces for his nascent Lost Worlds newsletter. These were little more than vignettes that featured the named characters currently being published. And since Tunnels & Trolls was an established property and our characters were not, we decided to suggest that these one-on-one fights were happening in a pocket universe that the characters would travel to, which is why you could fight characters from different product lines. High toned bullshit, of course, but we were really trying to sell this analog product to an increasingly digital marketplace and we were baiting every hook we had.

It’s obvious in hindsight that Rick was going in a different direction with his Lost Worlds books. You don’t have to be a marketing genius to think that maybe they should have published a different character than “Flaming Cherry—Barbarian Beauty.” I mean, it’s personalized, for sure. Ken St. Andre designed the character. But man…read the room. The room back then may have been medieval, but it wasn’t that medieval.

So much for playing nice. We had zero control over what anyone else was doing, but by God, we were determined to not embarrass ourselves. We sought instead to implicitly separate us from the other Lost Worlds books with quality, rather than mediocre cheesecake. We couldn’t change any of Flying Buffalo’s character names, obviously, and we couldn’t fix the names of our first four books, because the covers were already laid out and no one wanted to broach the subject. But we could fix our cards, at least.

We went through and renamed nearly every combat card. We changed most of the flavor text, too. When we could, we used the names of the characters we were producing. All of the cards were redrawn to feature the other characters in our line-up, fighting each other, doing cool things, or getting into trouble with spells and so forth. We chose an artist we knew that I’d done some comic book work with years prior—Tim Czarnecki. His style was light and expressive, but he was capable of drawing action and detail and best of all, I could write the art descriptions as comic book panels since we shared a common vernacular.

Tim did the art for us as a favor; it was a lot of work and we didn’t have a ton of money to pay him, but he was a champ and really helped us out. Once we got the black and white artwork back, we colored it in-house using flat color and the results were sharp. Everyone agreed the new cards were demonstrably better than the janky-looking cards they’d provided.

They also looked much better than any of Flying Buffalo’s cards—though they did adopt our art direction for their future releases. Weldon insisted that the combat cards included with our books had to be usable by them, so we front-loaded certain cards with certain characters. We also produced a random pack of combat cards, because that’s what one did back then. We printed four tournament posters, using the cover art and some clever writing. For example: Brimstone’s poster said “Giant? Yes. Jolly and Green? Hardly.” Hah! I kill myself!

The bottom portion of the poster was a tournament form that retailers could use to write the names of players in their store for a cool little event. No idea if anyone ever did that, but it was a nice touch on our part. We made sure that every customer got one of the four posters.

We got the books out, and all was well. They sold…okay, I guess. We managed to move a few more thanks to a couple of reviews Weldon managed to wrangle. One of the reviews from Dragon Magazine read an awful lot like the original review for Lost Worlds back in the day—not that I’m accusing the reviewer of plagiarism; rather, these books landed the same way, as a novel beer and pretzels game, maybe a bit expensive, but with ridiculous replay value, so it evened out.

Weldon also got a review in Games Magazine, and this was a big deal. This magazine was a print version of BoardGameGeek before they had websites. If you were a board game player—hell, any kind of game player—they were your bathroom reading of choice. Chessex had never had a product reviewed in Games before. He sent their reviewer all four books, all the cards, posters, etc. with a nice letter. Then he called the reviewer to make sure he got the package. Weldon told the guy to pick a book. Weldon grabbed a different book and taught him how to play over the telephone. That impressed the reviewer and I’m sure it’s what tipped the review in our favor. I do have to wonder if anyone read the review in Games went to their local game store, asked for Lost Worlds, took one look at “Flaming Cherry, Barbarian Beauty,” and said, “They recommended that!?”

There was one other matter to attend to: Mike Kimble’s bugbear art. The consensus opinion was that we needed someone else to redraw it and, since our budget was microscopic, we were stalled on that. I wasn’t ready to concede. “Let me talk to him and see if I can give him better direction,” I said. “Make that, any direction at all.” Our boss was dubious. So were Al and Dennis. But I got the go-ahead and gave Mike a call.

He was very nice, of course, and after I explained to him where we were in the project, I said, not unkindly, that the art he turned in was a little too basic for what we were doing. He said that he’d not been given any real instructions, but rather a list of stock poses that the books all needed. I shook my head; that sounded about right. I told him about Doug Shuler’s art and we got into a spirited discussion about line weights, halftone screens, forced perspective and Craftint, which was still being made at that time. It was a pretty technical discussion and I think Mike really appreciated it. I gave him detailed notes on what I would like to see changed. About four weeks later, we got a stack of Xeroxes from Mike, and it was a 100% improvement. Heavier line weights, zip-a-tone screens for contrast and texture, a more detailed redrawing that resembled Henry Hull’s make-up from Werewolf of London (I guess Mike liked werewolves). It didn’t look very bugbear-like, but it was gorgeous figure work. I showed it to my boss and he (and everyone else) agreed that they were wrong about Mike Kimble.

Flash-forward to a few months later, at GenCon, back when it was still in Milwaukee. I was at the Chessex booth, trying to deal with set-up, assigning tasks and answering questions, and looking frazzled, when I heard someone say my name. I turned around and looked at his badge. It was Mike Kimble. “Oh, hey, Mike! Hi, nice to meet you!” I said.

“Yeah, you too,” he said, smiling, but in his eyes there was confusion. He was a few years older than me, and evidently, I was not who he pictured, at all. His face fell when I shook his hand and his eyes were full of questions. I don’t know what it was. Maybe my age? I just don’t think he was expecting me for whatever reason. I told him how much better the new bugbear art was and that he went above and beyond. He thanked me and said he really appreciated the notes I gave him.

Unfortunately, I was in the middle of putting the booth together and trying to get ready for the crush of people who were going to crowd around the table with our row of acrylic dice trays and start rolling to find the “lucky” dice. I didn’t have a chance to really talk to him, and I would have happily grabbed a beer with Mike, but he disappeared into the bowels of the convention and never came back around.

Despite all of this effort, mental and otherwise, the Lost Worlds line was a casualty of Chessex Manufacturing’s rather unique financial situation. We never published the rest of the new lineup after those first four books; the money ran out. Not because they didn’t sell well, but because the monies generated went to pay for other things. This really bums me out, because I think our four books are stand outs in a long and confusing line of products. It’s all the more galling that most of the sources online for these books, including retailers like Noble Knight Games, don’t even list these as Chessex products. They are all listed under Flying Buffalo’s line. Hah! Flaming Cherry wishes they were…

As for Al and Dennis, they moved on, undeterred by our misfortunes. They reformed another company, Greysea, and did a number of inexpensive reprints that were, sadly, merely color photocopies of the old books on slightly better than average paper. Several out-of-print items from the old line were re-introduced, including the Tome of Red Magic—a series of oversized spell cards for the original Fighter Mage from back in 1983. Not something we would have done, since we have those great combat cards we went to such lengths to produce…

Yeah. Flying Buffalo wasn’t as ambitious as we were. Their cards? They had no qualms whatsoever about using clip art, computer rendered 3d graphics, and all sorts of visual clutter so as to render the art on the card meaningless at best and downright ugly at worst. Greysea’s cards were somewhat better than their original efforts, but still lacking in production value.

There were so many different iterations of Lost Worlds that the Internet can’t keep up with them all; there’s not a place online that lists the full range of what Al and his people worked on. Some of the projects that used this hex-based combat matrix are so small, so micro, and so random that it begs the question: what the hell? Suffice to say, the projects are all really different from each other. The ones I am most baffled by are the nearly-erotic Queen’s Blade series of books, which were published by Hobby Japan and have the stylistic charm of whatever hentai you may have been exposed to. The characters flash something with nearly every attack (upskirt, cleavage, headlights, camel toe, you name it) and the “fight” in the books stops just shy of the two characters “doing it.” Awkward. So. Very. Awkward.

I’m well and truly flummoxed by the chaotic nature of it all. The whole line is a mishmash, from a pair of books featuring Robin Hood and Little John (not a fox and a bear, alas), a quartet of licensed characters based on the Runesword novels, a series of books based on Knights of the Dinner Table, and a smattering of odd, one-off, or just plain baffling characters that really don’t bring much to the table. I’m looking right at you, Daniel the Pirate.

Then there were the “other” books. The Dino-Fight series…um, I know, you can’t copyright dinosaurs, and we’re not wanting that kind of credit. But we brought this up to them in our big creative meeting. That wasn’t the worst one, though. They made a jester. His name was Chester. Chester the Jester. I have no idea why they went with two words that both rhymed with “molester” but they did. And this jester does silly stuff, too, like tweaking the opponent’s nose. Geez, Louise. I’m not going to show you the cover. You can google it.

Overall, the list of Ace of Aces and Lost Worlds adjacent project Al as his team got to work on, were paid to produce, and publish, were more plentiful and varied than you might think. West End Games had the Star Wars license back then and they made a X-Wing/TIE fighter combat dogfighting game, and also a Luke Skywalker/Darth Vader lightsaber battle game. They also made a licensed Dragonriders of Pern aerial combat game wherein you’re flying on the back of a dragon! That should have been the legacy of Ace of Aces and Lost Worlds. Not that other crap. How cool would a Fafhrd and Grey Mouser Lost Worlds book have been?

All of the Star Wars/Dragonriders of Pern books are long out-of-print and fetch collector prices when you find them. Again, if you don’t know what they are, you won’t know who made them. Greysea didn’t help itself by publishing substandard books and mediocre artwork. When the artists ran out, they used photographs (a cosplayer in bikini chainmail…Crom give me strength!) with photoshopped backgrounds. Fumetti Lost Worlds. Crom give me strength. They even published Mike Kimble’s Ursa the Bugbear, with the original, bad art. To Mike’s credit, he illustrated another character for them, Arcanthus, the Sage, and his artwork for that book is demonstrably better in every way. Weird. It’s almost as if someone gave him really specific notes on what to draw and how to do it.

They even managed to produce superheroes! Well, Al and Billy Tucci did. Marvel Battlebooks were a real product that included a selection of all the then-current major Marvel characters, with a few independent heroes like Shi and Witchblade thrown in for good measure. At least the art was decent, comparatively speaking. In fact, they are the best-looking Lost Worlds books ever…even if they DO start on page 1. You’re welcome, I guess.