One of the reasons why I’m writing these stories down is because of the ephemeral nature of the role-playing game industry. It’s great that we have so many sources for things like Dungeons & Dragons and the other tentpole games that defined an era. But for every TSR rags-to-riches-to-rags story, there’s a hundred tales from smaller game designers and manufacturers that run the gamut from hilariously ribald to a cautionary tale for others who might try to walk the same path. Chessex Manufacturing in the 90s was just such a place.
It should go without saying that these recollections are mine and mine alone (with an assist from Weldon and others who were in the same space and time) and should be taken as such, without any acrimony or residual anger. Unless I’m venting. You’ll know it when you see it, because there will be much more profanity strewn about.
Marching Orders
Weldon was brought out to Berkeley from Austin with a specific mandate in place—find a way to make new products as cheaply as possible that Chessex Manufacturing can sell through their distribution system. A somewhat tall order, but nothing that Weldon hadn’t done before, many times, in other jobs.
That mandate came with a bit of a learning curve. Weldon was surprised to find the place operating in a very “seat of the pants” way. For instance, no one at Chx Mfg had any idea how much money their various products generated for them. That was one of his first big projects; he did a cost analysis on everything in the warehouse and was surprised to find that some things were making as small a profit as 9%. A couple of items on the list actually lost money.
Feel free to skip over this section as I explain to the uninitiated how products are costed out. There’s a very simple “Rule of Fifths” that states your retail price should ideally be five times your total cost to manufacture. If you make a widget and it costs $1 to assemble and package, it should ideally sell for at least $5. Here’s the breakdown: you aren’t selling your product to the end consumer. You’re selling the product to the distributor, who then marks it up so that they get their percentage, and then they set a discounted price that is bought by the retailer. If he bought it from a Chessex warehouse, his discount was 50% of retail. He then marks the widget up to the retail price (or a little under or a little over; that’s the prerogative of the retailer). You come into the store and go “Five bucks for a new widget? What a bargain for me!”
Everyone makes money. We double our $1 manufacturing cost, selling the widget to distribution for $2, which they then mark up to $2.50 and sell it to the retailer, who puts it out for $5. Get it? And for those of you unfamiliar with how the supply chain works in America and think that the distributor is getting the short end of the stick, remember that the 10% markup is for every single item they sell, so it’s a volume and quantity calculation.
So, some of the items that we were selling barely covered the cost to make it. Using the above numbers, that widget only netted Chx Mfg nine cents.
Weldon showed his findings to the production staff and management alike. They were taken aback and confused. No one had ever done anything like that for any of the extant products. They just called the place up that made the thing that they needed more of, and that was it.
It didn’t take much to convince the powers-that-be to stock making the few items that were losing money. A price bump on a few items improved our margins. And while there were a few legacy items, like the imported hardwood chess sets, that we weren’t allowed to mess with, it didn’t take much work to make a few things more profitable.
What Have You Done For Me Lately?
By the time I had joined the staff, Weldon had a system in place. He’d been doing it alone, but now that the other half of his brain was here, I became a sounding board and a second opinion for him. As with most creative endeavors, people who aren’t creative don’t understand that 85-95% of the work is done in one’s head. That’s why you’d walk by Weldon’s desk and find him staring at a bag of glass stones, or fiddling with a bunch of dice, arranging them into ROYGBIV order.
Broadly speaking, everything we did at Chessex Manufacturing fell into three general categories, arranged by order of difficulty. The easiest thing to do was to take existing products or things that could be acquired with little difficulty and recombine them into new things. There were a shit-ton of loose components in the warehouse and any time we didn’t have to buy something new, that was a bonus. The next least-expensive thing was printing on a product we already handle. We leaned on that a lot. The biggest projects involved paying for new artwork, printing, etc. You know, publishing.
Dragonskins Collectible Card Folders
An earlier Chessex product, well before our time, was Dragonskins, a vinyl cover for your hardback gaming books, designed to protect them from scuffs, wear, tear, and spills. The vinyl slip-on cover featured artwork printed on the front so that you could still be nerdy when you were walking around with the Dungeon Master’s Guide in your hands.
Those products had come and gone. They were a thing, once, but by the time we got there, they were emphatically not. Despite having some great art on them, my favorite being the Cthulhu bust drawn by future Stan Winston Studios concept artist Miles Teves (he also did the gorgeous artwork for Skyrealms of Jorune), there just wasn’t a lot of demand for them. The reason was not the fault of Chessex, but rather, Wizards of the Coast, who changed size of the 3rd edition hardbacks and made them thicker and juuuuuuust outside the tolerances of the vinyl covers.
Instead, people had hundreds and hundreds of Magic: The Gathering cards, and no place really cool to store them (not at first, anyway). Weldon played with in and found that the Dragonskins would fit snugly around a three-hole punch paper folder, the kind you use for book reports in school. By taking a Dragonskin and installing it around the folder with five nine-pocket sheet protecters, you had yourself a card binder, slim profile, easy to carry and you could add pages if you wanted to.
The folder inserts and the 9-pocket sheet protectors were a bulk purchase. The Dragonskins were already printed. And the finished product wasn’t expensive. These were quite popular and we blew out a ton of dead stock with it, and I do mean a ton.
The All-Seeing Eye
One of the big non-Magic: The Gathering card games (well, maybe not that big) was Steve Jackson’s Illuminati: New World Order, which amounted to the old card game rewritten so that every player needs a deck instead of drawing from a communal deck. Simple, effective, and about twenty years ahead of its time.
The game made use of a lot of tokens and counters to keep track of resources. Weldon designed “World Domination” accessory pack, which included two dice (one of which had the pyramid on the 6), glass stones, some special “link” tokens, which were wooden pyramids, and a dice bag with the all-seeing eye pyramid printed on it. None of those components required any heavy lifting; they were available and affordable. We asked Steve Jackson if we could use their logo and they said “sure,” and we were off to the races. It wasn’t our best-selling product of all time, but it did sell, and we didn’t lose any money on it.
Printing on things was an easy way to come up with a customized item. Anything that could be stamped, inked, screened, or etched upon, we did it. We made a number of dice pouches with slogans on them that were instant hits. This was partially for branding purposes, but also because we hadn’t seen anything like it in the marketplace at the time. We made sure to put “You can never have enough dice” on the large velour pouch. We charged more for those pouches and they still flew off the shelves.
The Ankh of Chaos
One of the proprietary elements of Chessex was the “arrows of chaos” logo design, which they wasted no time in slapping on Dragonskins, dice, and anything else they could think of.
The design combined the ankh with the arrows of chaos and it was simple enough to be recognizable for what it was and also unique enough that we could slap it on Dragonskins, coffee cups, t-shirts, and our big seller, a champagne flute that could be used to hold red glass stones for people playing Vampire: The Masquerade. We even made pewter jewelry out of the design, which looked very cool, indeed.
How that happened is kind of funny. In a production meeting that included Don, he informed the table that the legal department said the Chessex logo is too generic and thus can’t be copyrighted, and can we redesign the logo to be more protected? “So, I guess we need to start thinking about logo ideas,” said Don.
Weldon started drawing. The meeting went on, and at the end of it, Weldon showed Don the two designs he’d quickly sketched out. Don approved them on the spot, and that’s how the Ankh of Chaos came into being, not as a corporate logo, but as a thing we could merchandize.
The other logo was a square that enclosed the compass rose, and that was used for a while; we even made a pewter pin of that design. Gradually, they went back to original logo that Weldon had tweaked while he was at Chessex Southwest, which was nothing more than the stretched out arrow pointing east and specifying what branch of the company underneath it: Southwest, Midwest, East, Manufacturing, and so forth.
The Whateley Brew Haus
My last project that I worked on for Chessex Manufacturing was my favorite. We had a handshake deal to do stuff for Chaosium at the time, but we wanted to do something that was a familiar product, but in a different way. Weldon and I were regulars at a local bar called the Triple Rock, one of the first places in the Bay Area to make their own beers.
As you can well imagine, they sold completely through their initial print run. In the midst of trying to get them to reorder the glasses, for Crom’s sake, we slapped the beer labels on t-shirts and they sold briskly, as well.
My idea was this: what if we came up with barware from a fictitious bar in Arkham, Mass, and made up some specialty craft beers to go with it? It had a similar sub-culture cache as the t-shirts from Miskatonic University, only it was something that was not present in the marketplace. Thus was born the Whately Brew Haus.
I got to take the lead on this because I envisioned three different beer bottle labels: Arkham Pale Ale, Dunwich Dark, and Innsmouth Stout (with the slogan, “Taste the Taint.” In hindsight, that particular phrase has not aged well…but at the time, we all thought it was hella clever) along with the logo for the fictitious Brew Haus itself. The art elements on the beer labels are all public domain sources. That cloven hoof, for instance, is from a Gustave Dore Bible illustration plate.
Because I just love a good hoax, I wrote up a quick, totally bogus history for the venerable beer joint and made it sound like there was something more to place than just quality craft beer. Our initial plan was to print the labels on pint glasses, but Weldon noticed we could also get a glass pitcher imprinted, so we offered a set—one of each pint glass and a pitcher to go with it.
I regret that I didn’t grab a set for myself. I’ve scouted them for years, but when they infrequently appear on eBay, they always fetch high prices, even for Cthulhu-ized merchandise.
Swing and a Miss
There were several projects we didn’t get to do for one reason or another. That one reason was usually a lack of funds, but sometimes there were other roadblocks, as well. And by “roadblocks,” I mean Don.
In the category of “so easy to do we just need a label,” Weldon got the idea of matching a bunch of d6 dice to the colors of a University and selling them to bookstores and spirit shops as “Liar’s Dice.” We wanted to actually brand the dice with logos or mascots—a longhorn silhouette in place of the “6” on the University of Texas dice, for instance, but the cost of making new molds was prohibitive. Better to stick with colors and just sell the dice in an all new market that we’d not ever tapped into.
I don’t remember why they nixed that idea. Maybe it wasn’t “sexy” enough. Granted, it wasn’t that exciting an idea, but we knew it would have generated money for Chx Mfg. We tried to convince them that selling existing dice to a new segment of people was the same as inventing a new product, even better, because there’s no shortage of dice at the warehouse. It would have created some challenges down the road, because at the time, there was no Burnt Orange urea to make UT dice from, but that was a downwind issue. We could’ve put Berkeley dice together with what he had and put them in the gift shop as a test market.
After we were both gone, one of the last things they did was to put out a brick of d6 dice with a small booklet of dice games you can play. The whole thing came in a weird little wooden box. It was certainly in the vein of our idea, but no one in the game stores needed more d6 dice when they already had bricks of them.
I mentioned in an earlier post about the Endangered Animal speckled dice I pitched. The idea was to donate a percentage of our sales to the World Wildlife Fund so we could glom onto their advertising and their supporters. The dice themselves would be based on the colors and patterns of six endangered animals, like the Mountain Gorilla (black and brown speckles with white ink) and the African Rhino (light gray and dark gray speckles with black ink). Plenty of animals on the list had crazy color combinations that would have looked so sweet. Who wouldn’t have wanted Bengal Tiger dice? Come on!
Two things killed the project—this would have meant surrendering control of the speckled dice production over to us so we could select the colors and inks that would simulate or suggest the animal they represented. There was to be some precision there, because we were basing color choice on a real thing, and not slamming colors together nilly-willy and going, “Uh, that one looks like blueberries.”
Even if they had been willing to hand us the metaphorical keys to the dice factory, there was the problem of the World Wildlife Foundation, starting with the size of the donation needed to make use of their logo, which was cost prohibitive. When we said, “Okay, we’ll ditch the WWF and just do the dice,” they said, in not so many words, “See answer number one.”
The two biggest projects, the ones we were ostensibly tasked and hired to create? A card game we could bring to market and a role-playing game that the company would own. Neither project came to pass. That’s another story.
*edited to add the reason why the Dragonskins were dead stock (thanks, Weldon!)