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Progress and Predictions: the future of D&D
The news that John Hight, formerly of Blizzard, has joined WotC as the new company President has reignited the speculation that WizBro is moving into an online, subscription, micro-transaction model for D&D, and the hand wringing and finger pointing has been interesting, to say the least. Evidently, this is something D&D has wanted to do since 4th edition, but the technology wasn’t quite right yet.
I don’t know if the fuss is coming from Gen-X gamers who don’t want to play a game without firs shelling out $150 or more for hardcover books to have on the table, or from Millennial gamers who resent being nickeled and dimed to death online in-game, but either way, I think it’s doomed to failure, and here’s why:
As good as video games are, and continue to become, they will never be able to do in their coding and programming what I do in a split second in my head. Boom. Done.
That’s not to say that computer games are inferior; go play Red Dead Redemption 2 and tell me that you didn’t have a jaw-dropping time. At their best, large “role-playing” video games (I absolutely loathe that the video game industry has co-opted that term) are like a lengthy series of YA novels with subplots, short stories and a wiki fan page all rolled into one package. Video games can deliver a thrilling and sometimes emotional story, so long as it’s a story you personally want to experience.
Compare this to any role-playing game I’ve run in the last 39 years. Back in the day, when we were playing more frequently, my sandbox campaign was predicated on the players telling me what they wanted to do, and it being incumbent on me to provide them with something cool, on the fly, and make it fun. If my group decided, on a lark, to charter passage to the continent on the other side of the ocean, who was I to deny them the chance to travel? Only, now I’m responsible for coming up with a city on a coastline they can dock at, and fast. If they wanted to get off the ship, go into a tavern, eat lunch, then get back on the ship and go home, they can do that. I will, as a matter of course, ensure that the passage home is fraught with peril, and no, Brock, that’s not a punishment, okay? It’s not my fault you rolled a random giant squid for your wandering monster.
That’s the difference in a nutshell, and it’s universal for any rpg setting out there. When you play Skyrim, you are locked into being “the dragon born” (eye roll) and sure, you can go bang out that thieves guild quest, but the second you leave town, some dragon is going to land right next to you because you’ve been ignoring the main story, but the main story isn’t ignoring you.
That experience, that sensation of being able to do virtually anything (with consequences, of course, you can’t just go around in my game and start murdering people. What do you think this is, Grand Theft Auto?) is what initially attracted us to role-playing games in the first place. There wasn’t a good computer option; Atari’s Adventure was anything but.
This is what we were promised… 
Now WizBro is working diligently on this new online D&D platform, complete with a robust character creator, the ability to build dungeon settings, and the interactive play environment similar to all of the other ones in the market. Build a character, put him on the map, and the DM, who lives in Bakersfield, talks into the mic and reads the flavor text aloud while you stare at a screen.
That may be fun. And it will certainly be novel. But what happens when I want to build a unique dungeon that is outside of the pre-loaded elements in the game itself? Are they going to let the community make the assets that would create a floating city? Or an underwater kingdom? I don’t know, but this is a fact: they only have so much digital storage space, and we only have so much computing power at our disposal. Maybe that’s part of the appeal; after all, the 5e default setting is one of the most generic, uninspired and lackluster environments out there. This isn’t a grimdark complaint; it’s a complaint about how they have aimed for the center of their demographic, hoping to cast the widest possible market share. In this new digital platform, I’ll be able to subtract (by mere omission) from the base assets, but I won’t be able to add anything, will I? Or won’t I? I have no idea.
The cover art to the 6th edition PHB But I do know that I won’t be able to create things on the fly, nor adjust things on the fly, nor pivot when the group decides to do something else that session. If I’m playing D&D online, I’m the game’s operating software, nothing more. On their app, I’m merely a not-as-cool version of Skyrim.
My prediction is this: the game, when launched, will pull a percentage of people out of tabletop gaming and we’ll never see them again. It’s not the percentage D&D thinks it is, not at first. I think most people my age or thereabouts will give it one chance and then give up, if they do even that. The very young demographic will embrace the technology, and they will love it, until they get bored with looking at the same dungeon walls, the same black dragon, the same orc chieftain miniature in the digital space, and they will drop it and get a proper video game. What they won’t do is dial back to analog gaming. These two playing experiences are going to be the new “edition wars.”
I don’t know how long it will last. My guess is it’ll be mothballed by 2028. Role-playing games, on the other hand, will continue to build on this Second Renaissance that started when WotC blew up their own brand and decimated two decades of goodwill back in 2021. I’m mildly curious to see if the digital app will bring anyone into tabletop gaming. It would be an ideal gateway to other things if the players decide they want more out of their games.
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Chessex Stories: The End is Nigh
Our time in California amounted to somewhere between a year and a year and a half. I remain grateful for every second I spent there, every friend I made, and what lessons I learned from the experience. I got engaged, and then the engagement broken off during that time. I got to travel all across the country and visit exciting locations such as Fort Wayne, Indiana, Malvern, Pennsylvania, and Columbus, Ohio. I flew through Chicago so much that I have a lasting opinion about O’Hare International Airport, and it’s roughly analogous to Dante’s version of Purgatory.
When we weren’t on the company dime, Weldon and I explored the Bay Area. We ate at probably 20 or more different Chinese restaurants, no two alike. We were on the hook to entertain visitors, which meant we got to see Alcatraz multiple times, and the sea lions at the pier. I went to every bookstore in the East Bay and SF, and this was back when Other Change of Hobbit, Dark Carnival, and Rory Root’s Comic Relief were all a going concern.
We had a place we could retreat to, a brew pub called The Triple Rock, conveniently located about three blocks from our apartment in downtown Berkeley. We were regulars there, sometimes as often as three or four times in a week. This was the first bar I’d encountered that made their own beer, and it was wonderful, and the reason why I’m a beer snob to this very day. We got lessons on what to drink and what it should taste like from the folks that worked there, but our favorite bartender was a guy named Tom, who lived in Texas for a while. He and I could talk about the Dallas Cowboys, back when that was the thing to do. Once every so often, we’d both walk into the bar, sit down, and Tom would walk over, take one look at us, and draw us a pint. “This one’s on me,” he’d say. Good guy, Tom.
This place was our church. It kept us going through the dark times. On weekends, we hung out on Telegraph Avenue like old hippies and went to Moe’s and Rasputin’s. Weldon liked to feed the squirrels on the UC campus, and it’s a freaking miracle that he’s still got his eyes and his lips. I took public transportation to see KISS avec make-up in San Jose (thank God I knew the way!) And we were devotes of the UC theater on University Drive and their different double features every night. Some of my singularly best movie going experiences happened in that theater. Just to keep us on an even keel, we watched a lot of Shaw Brothers Kung Fu movies while eating cheap Chinese food from this place around the corner. It was magnificent.
The UC Theater was our other other second home. Our world in Berkeley was this four-block square area from Shattuck and Addison over to University and the edge of campus. In that small section of downtown, we had: Comic Relief, Sushi a Float, Other Change of Hobbit, the UC theater, the Triple Rock, two very different and beloved Chinese restaurants, a Ben & Jerry’s, a Starbucks, a separate bodega with coffee and breakfast sandwiches, a Taco Bell, and the downtown Berkeley BART stop, allowing us to go anywhere in the Bay Area that the subway went. For us, during that time in our lives, it was magical.
Work, on the other hand, was a decidedly mixed bag. There were other small successes during this time period. Chessex expanded into Euro games, which are everywhere now, but back then, they were these gorgeous, complex things that no one had seen before. We also started carrying Italian Tarot decks from Dal Negro, one of the largest producers of tarot, and they were all gorgeous, ranging from rustic to outright fantastical (the Fairy Tarot is still a favorite of mine, just because of how clever and cool the card art is).
It wasn’t all bad. But when it was bad, it was terrible.
Astute readers may have gathered that there was a cashflow problem with Chessex Manufacturing that started long before we were working there and continued well after we left. Our paychecks were adequate but there was a constant danger of there not being enough dough in the bank account to cover everything, like payroll. I distinctly remember us getting our checks on one Friday and being dismissed early, as we were told to “run and deposit them while you can.”
Money motivated nearly every creative decision we made, and it even drove a lot of my ad copy. Everything was urgent. Everything was also great. No, really, true believers! I felt like Stan Lee sometimes, spinning plates and rah-rah-ing it up for the company.
Most of the decisions for what happened to Chessex Manufacturing and later the whole company can be laid at the feet of Don Reents. As these things happened nearly 30 years ago, I’m sure I’m not speaking ill of the current version of Chessex Manufacturing, or even the current version of Don. It’s ancient history, so I’m going to talk about it historically, and with my butt firmly in the Monday Morning Quarterback chair.
Don came up through retail, and as such, he was always on the lookout for a good deal. Quantity at a discount was his kryptonite. That’s how Chx Mfg ended up with games like Skyrealms of Jorune, Albedo, and Sherlock Holmes, Consulting Detective under the same umbrella that sold lead figure cases and blank wargame counters. It was a mishmash born of opportunity.
Don was also a chess master, and what he did well—what he was best at, really—was his ability to see four or five moves down the line. That is how Chessex Distribution expanded so rapidly that it scared the shit out of the other regional distributors and even Diamond Comics. All of those warehouses were all doing very well, when they didn’t have to prop up Chx Mfg so we could, for instance, buy vinyl to make Battlemats or pay a customs bill to get pallets of Indian hardwood chess sets off of the docks. Sure, those chess sets were expensive and we had to order a three-year supply at a time to make it worth shipping, but on the other hand, they took forever to hand sort, didn’t sell that quickly, and ate up a lot of resources. Clearly a win-win for everyone
Probably the most galling thing about all of it was that both me and Weldon were hired for our expertise, and then that expertise was rarely utilized. In fact, it was just the opposite. We both came from retail sales, and both of us were veteran gamers with years of experience working in and around creative people, artists and writers. This should have been our first grown-up dream job. Instead, we ended up fighting a company that hired us, but didn’t want to use us.
We weren’t the only people frustrated with the company and its practices; folks in distribution were just as peeved about having to take junk product they didn’t need. Within a few months of me showing up, people started to drop off like flies. Stanley, the one man sales department, was the first one gone, but I don’t think that was a great loss. Stan had a thing he’d do on business trips where he’d disappear for a few hours and not tell anyone where he was going. After the trip was over, he’d break out his pictures he’d taken, and they were all photos of him standing next to pretty girls in front of gardens, fountains, etc.
One of the other people we worked with was the accountant for Chx Mfg, an older man named Bill. I don’t remember his last name, but I will never forget him—he had a low, nasal voice that was reminiscent of Burgess Meredith’s Penguin, if the Penguin had never laughed at his own maniacal plots. He spoke in almost a deadpan monotone, which wouldn’t have been so bad, if he didn’t also have a tic—his eye would occasionally twitch so violently that it would slightly jerk his head to the right, and his hands would occasionally shake. It was impossible to to not notice. Me and Weldon just assumed it was Parkinson’s. He was usually in his corner of the office, head down, working whatever magic he possessed to try and shore up the company’s scattershot finances.
This was all well and good, unless he lost his cool. Then he’d stand up, unleash a torrent of profanity, in that same nasal monotone (only much, much louder), and he’d slam things around on his desk: “God-DAMN sonofaBITCH What the HELL bunch of SHIT!” and then he’d stalk off to Fitz’s office or to the break room for a cup of coffee.
The first time he did it, I thought it was a bit or something, and I started to laugh, but Monica, one of the employees who worked for Castle Books, the book side of Chessex Manufacturing, caught my eye and shook her head. Evidently, Bill exploded once every couple or three months, and the company policy was to just let that grenade go off and pretend like it didn’t happen. I saw that sideshow act twice before Bill finally put in his notice. He wasn’t the first one to go, but he was close.
Tellingly, Weldon and I bumped into him in public a few months later, and we both almost didn’t recognize him because he was smiling, a thing we’d never seen before. He greeted us warmly, another thing we’d never seen. We talked to him for several minutes and this is the clincher: Bill didn’t twitch at all during our visit. No tics, no shakes, nothing. We bid him adieu and I said to Weldon, “I wonder when our tics are going to start?”
Monica and Patti of Castle Books, at Halloween. As people dropped off of the payroll, we had to take on additional jobs, some of which were so all-encompassing that they took us away from the things we were supposed to be doing. We stopped being polite about it.
And lest anyone think otherwise, we weren’t always nice. Sometimes, we could be real assholes, cocky, maybe a little too confident, and brash. In other words, Texans. I know we rubbed folks the wrong way occasionally, and I’m truly sorry that y’all didn’t get us at our best all of the time. I know we weren’t always the easiest people to get along with. We liked nearly everyone we worked with, even the goofy people. By that point, it had stopped being fun, and that frustration had to go somewhere.
“Don is a POOPIE?!”
One of the last things we worked on was a Arrows of Chaos pendant, made of pewter, that was the latest in a line of jewelry for gamers. We were in charge of its design. Weldon wanted to use the square logo he’d created as a basis, but it was a bit too plain. We decided it would look cool with runes on the four sides of the square frame that the pendant sat on.Sure, I could have looked up some Norse runes or some sort of font or cipher, but I had another idea, and I was bored enough to give it a try: I made my own runes. They weren’t great, but they looked runic enough that we could write with them on the border and fill it up. It looked good, hand-made, which was what we were going for. Everyone signed off on the design and we sent it to the jewelry maker.
Only after we did that did we take the illustration in to Patti, the head of Castle Books, and showed her the design.
“I wrote these runes myself,” I said.
“Cool,” she said, looking at the drawing.
“Can you decipher what it says?”
She squinted. “Um…something…it looks like ‘Monkeyhead’ and ‘Well-Done’…”
“Good! What about that part?”
Now that she’d seen the runes, it was easier to decipher. “Does that say… ‘Don…is…a…Poopie!?’”
“I told you she’d figure it out!” Weldon said.
Patti was aghast. “You can’t do that!”
“It’s done,” I said.
Patti looked ready to throttle us both. “Oh my God! We’re going to get fired! What is wrong with you two?”
“Relax,” I said. “Fitz loves you. If anyone’s going to get fired, it’s us.”The pendants came back from the silversmith, and they were fantastic. The runes looked even better than the artwork, because of the sculpty-crafty mold making process. We shipped them out to the warehouses and no one was any wiser. Patti, if you’re reading this, I’m sorry for the minor heart attack. I told you folks, we were assholes. I do think some of it was justified assholery, though.
After Banemaster sales stalled out (about thirty minutes after they hit the warehouses), the pressure increased exponentially to produce something that we could sell that would pay for tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of unusable orange and green cards. The speckled dice were paying for themselves, and the other products were slow but steady sellers. Nothing to provide a splash of cash in a flash.
Attitudes soured. We were practically camped out at the Triple Rock. The new person in charge of production was an outside hire because no one who was left wanted the gig, for it was the Hot Seat. This new head of production didn’t know us and also didn’t know the business at all. We clashed, frequently. We were tired of fighting. Weldon tendered his resignation and about four or five weeks later, I followed suit. We made a brief, pyrrhic attempt at looking for another job to stay in California, but we knew what we really wanted to do. We rented a U-Haul (a 21-footer this time), threw everything in the truck, and drove back to Texas, a little older, a little wiser.
I don’t have a picture from the return trip, but this was taken on the way out to Berkeley. We were in Bakersfield, California, and it was a sobering and revelatory experience. What Happened Next
I returned to Austin, and Weldon fell back to Dallas. We both got other jobs and got on with things, thus ending our personal and professional partnership of several years, but I am pleased to say we are still best of friends.Other people followed our exodus, but a few folks held on until the bitter end. Gilbert finally got a chance to do some product development, based entirely on Weldon’s speckled dice color charts and theories. Their Area 51 Speckled Dice set was made out of all of our leftovers. The one thing Gilbert did right was a Call of Cthulhu dice pouch and dice set. The pouch had the old Call of Cthulhu RPG logo on it and the dice were the Ninja speckled dice with bilious green ink. They were really good looking and the bag was sweet. A solid product all around.
Gilbert’s swan song. Notice the 4 d6s? That wasn’t done back then. The last person to leave was Robert, the warehouse manager, who had been filling and shipping orders all by himself for several months. Everyone else was gone. I didn’t mention many of the other employees from back in the day, but they were all weird and wonderful and odd and sometimes, so very Californian (in the same way that we could be very Texan), and I loved them all. Most of them. Okay, many of them. I certainly bear no one any ill will and for the folks I still occasionally speak to, I’m grateful to still have them in my life.
Chessex Distribution merged with The Armory, a former competitor, to form Alliance Game Distributors, in 1998. I don’t have any details, but I don’t think it’s a stretch to figure out what happened and why. Two years later, Alliance was bought up by Diamond. Don kept Chessex Manufacturing for himself, and it’s still around to this day, making all kinds of dice, speckled and otherwise, as well as a modest line of tried-and-true accessories, like Battlemats and Megamats, figure storage cases, etc.
I hate that for Don. I really do. He did something that was a thumb in the eye to the industry. He created a national game distribution network during a time of rapid expansion and growth in the market. If you started gaming in the 90s and you bought your gear at a comic shop, or a place called The Dragon’s Den, or The Ogre’s Closet, or some other name like that, there’s a near 100% chance they were buying their products from a Chessex distribution warehouse.
Some of the policies at the distribution level were implemented so that fly-by-night bottom feeders who wanted Magic: The Gathering cards because they were “hot” were denied from opening an account with Chessex so that more cards could go to legitimate game and comic shops when they finally came back in stock.
Existing hobby shops expanded their lines and added locations. More new game stores opened up. More comic stores started carrying role-playing games because it was suddenly very easy to get them. That happened because of Chessex Distribution. That should have been Don’s legacy.
Now, most of this stuff is lost to the annals of time: the stories, the products, the history, all of it. No one cares about what happened to a game distributor nearly 30 years ago. In today’s culture, that might as well have been the Triassic Period. If anyone is going to talk about the 90s, it’s usually a World of Darkness conversation, or a brief mention in a larger discussion about the history of Magic: the Gathering.
Most of what we sold to game stores would come under the heading of consumables. Accessories. We didn’t publish a major role-playing game or a beloved customizable card game. We made cool dice, fun little kits, and not much else. A few of those products still exist; dice colors mostly. That’s cool. I’ll always be proud of the fact that we were able to contribute in some way, however small, to anyone’s fun time at the gaming table.
Flying home. This kind of shot was a lot harder to do with a disposable 35mm camera. My profuse thanks to Weldon Adams for helping jog my memory, for fact-checking me, and for providing some great candid photos from around the office. We really shook the Pillars of Heaven. No bullshit.
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Chessex Stories 7: Banemaster
“We need to talk.” Weldon looked worried. I’d met him at the airport to help him schlep his luggage back on the BART train from Oakland.
“Sure, what’s up?”
“I don’t know what to do,” he said. “They asked me to review this game they want to buy.”
“What’s the problem?” I asked.
“It’s a card game,” Weldon said, “and I don’t know where to begin.”
“That bad?”
“They swore me to secrecy,” Weldon said. “I’m not supposed to tell anyone…”
I looked at him. He shrugged. We’d long ago decided that if someone didn’t want both of us to know something, they shouldn’t tell either one of us anything. We shared one brain, and they bloody well knew it. But nevertheless, we always acted like we weren’t going to tell the other person and then that was the first thing we always did.
“They want to know what I think,” Weldon said.
I didn’t have to ask. I could tell. It was bad.Here’s what happened.
Don handed Weldon two decks of cards and the rules to Banemaster, an exciting two player game that lets you explore dungeons, avoid traps, fight monsters, and win the treasure of your opponent, who is trying to do the same thing to you. If you are thinking to yourself, “Hey, that sounds kinda like the description for Wiz-War…” you’re not wrong. The two games couldn’t have been more different in execution, but otherwise, kinda similar in theme.
The rules specify that there’s two decks—the adventurer deck and the banemaster deck. When you’re fighting off your opponent, you use the banemaster cards. When you’re trying to grab treasure from your opponent, you use the adventurer cards.
You play cards out of your hand and pump up their values with weapon cards and spell cards and so forth. There are power cards, too, that add attack and defense numbers to your traps and things. Play is quite lackluster; there are no inventive combos or clever gambits. Just throwing numbers at other numbers. It worked, more or less, but there was nothing to it, really. No strategy, no skill, and no real point. Then there were the cards.
The artist was a woman named Jamie Grant (not to be confused with the man named Jamie Grant that inks a lot of Frank Quitely’s pencils), and insofar as I can find, this was her first professional gig. She has gone on to do fine art and concept art for video games like Lemmings, and you know, I guess you gotta start somewhere, but did it have to be here? And now? It’s not that the artwork isn’t evocative, in its own unique way, and it’s not as if it’s the worst art ever produced in the gaming zeitgeist, but we were comparing it with the artwork on Magic: The Gathering cards, and these pieces came up very short by comparison.
Even if the overall quality of the art hadn’t been so crudely rendered, the subject matter would have been a bridge too far. But together? Here’s the thing: had I seen any of that artwork at the age of 10 or 11 when I was getting into Dungeons & Dragons, I’d have been all over it. Exploding heads, arrows through the face, beheadings… For a kid that was into sword and sorcery and Conan, it was pitch perfect. But Banemaster was ostensibly aiming for an all-ages tone and the simplistic and uncomplicated game play meant that was an intentional design choice.
I still love this. Evidently, so did Season 4, Episode 5 of The Boys. Despite the childish and almost-comical amounts of violence and gore, a few gems stuck out from the feverish, ramshackle card art. This was our favorite Marauder card by a considerable margin. It’s not great art, but it’s still brilliant anyway. Mad Vampire Sheep? What the hell? That’s the kind of thing you look at and instantly wish you’d come up with it. We considered ‘porting the Mad Vampire Sheep into Wiz-War: Chaos Keep as a monster to summon along with the Feral Chickens and Frankenstein’s Cow to protect your loot.
When the heads of Chessex reconvened for the report on this product, Weldon didn’t mince any words. “I recommend we stay away from it. It is not good and won’t sell well on the market.”
This did not go over well. After some blank looks, he was informed that they had already invested a large sum of money into the game. Weldon’s response was something along the lines of “Then why are you asking my opinion now?”
Someone at the table asked Weldon exactly what was so bad about the game, and he said, “The rules are juvenile and boring, and the art is childish and it’s not what the market wants.”
Can you imagine if these had hit the market during Satanic Panic? He was asked what could be done to make the game better. “I have two suggestions,” he told the assembled. “The first thing I’d do is to scrap this artwork and this card design and get a better artist and redo the cards completely.”
After more shocked looks, he was informed that the cards were already printed, and we are stuck with them. “What is your other suggestion?” they asked.
“My other suggestion would be to completely throw out the rules and re-write them so that the game is more engaging.”
“We can’t do that,” someone said. “The rule book has already been printed, and inserted into the sealed decks.”
Weldon’s blood pressure rose about ten points. “Okay, I’m really confused as to why you are asking my opinion at this point.”
Don spoke up. “So, your two recommendations are to rewrite the rules and redo the cards completely? Why don’t we just make our own game at that point?”
“Hey,” Weldon said, “now, that’s a great idea, Don.” That did not go over well, either, which is a mystery because Weldon was smiling when he said it.
“We can’t,” Don said. “We’ve already invested in the game. Pallets are sitting on the dock waiting on us to ship them over to the US.”
Oh, shit.
Fun for the whole family! And there we were. Chessex had a card game now, and it was rubbish. I remember us being furious and taking out our frustrations on our boss, Fitz, who usually just listened to us until we calmed down and then sent us on our way. This time, though, he had a few words that were galvanizing and brought us up short. “It’s Don’s company,” he said, after we’d talked ourselves out of breath.
And he was right; Don could do what he wanted with his company and his money, and our job was to put some lipstick on whatever pig he brought home from market. Weldon had already proven he could find money in dead stock, and I’d not embarrassed the company with a simple spelling mistake (yet!) and whatever else people might have thought about us or our ideas, we had to play the hand we were dealt. In this case, literally. This was just more of the same, right?
Our frustrations aside, some part of our rant must’ve gotten through, because soon after we were informed that the creator of Banemaster would be flying in from Scotland to talk to us about the game and work with us to address some of our concerns. We wondered just how much could be addressed with the components already printed, but hey, it was something.
A few weeks later, we were introduced to Alexander Duncan (“call me ‘Sandy,” he insisted) and he was very charming and charismatic. We got to know him a bit in the few days he was in the Bay Area, and found out that, among other things, he was a practitioner of Pencak Silat, an Indonesian martial art, and a lot of other chitchat I’ve jettisoned in the intervening years. He was very personable, and he listened to our recommendations graciously. We were able to get a couple of concessions from him.
Alexander “Sandy” Duncan at the Chessex Booth, looking at what he hath wroth. However, when we asked for a complete list of the cards, we were told there was not one. Why? The answer was simple: Sandy didn’t know how many different versions of some of the cards there were. There were no common, uncommon, and rare cards in Banemaster—a concept that was already well-established—there were just…cards. Some of the monsters had three or four variations to their stats. A couple of the weapons are different. There’s even a couple of misprints, the wrong names on the wrong cards. Whoopsie!
Artwork on the left is correct. Artwork on the right is for the Scorpion Orc. Whoops! No card list? There wasn’t a spread of common, uncommon, and rare cards. At least, not deliberately. See, some of the cards were repeated on the sheets because there were holes to fill and Sandy just plugged them, willy nilly, with no thought to rarity or having a master checklist, which is a thing that makes collectible card games, you know, “collectible.” When Sandy told us that, Weldon actually physically threw up his hands in the meeting.
The rules would be re-worked and reprinted, and someone in Edinburgh would have to open every box, take out the old rules, put the new rules in, and reshrink/reseal every deck box. I’m stunned that they agreed to do that. Sandy was insistent on giving us credit for the changes to the rules. We didn’t want that credit, so we jokingly/not jokingly asked to be listed as “the high potentates,” because no one would know what the hell that meant and we could slip the issue if it ever came back to haunt us.
Oh COME ON! Now you’re just messing with me. Not Enough Lipstick
When the cards arrived, it was on us, the Mark and Weldon Show, to come up with a way to sell these boxes of regret. This was the brilliant plan: Don had decided that the various distribution warehouses would be automatically shipped a pallet of each, starters and boosters, and they were on the hook to sell them to get their money back. This would pay back the initial investment and theoretically give Chessex Manufacturing some operating capital to do things like buy hardwood chess sets from India and oh yeah, pay its employees.We were not thinking that far ahead. We had two major concerns: how to help distribution somehow sell as much of this card game, now called Banemaster: The Adventure, because in the 1990s, we loved our colons and our subtitles, and how to hang on to as much of our dignity and professional reputation as possible. We were booked to appear at all of the distribution warehouses’ Open House events, flinging cards, shaking hands, and kissing babies. The powers-that-be were counting on us to move some product. We knew that there was no help for it. This wasn’t some diamond in the rough that just needed a signal boost. This was a simplistic, lackluster game that looked for all intents and purposes like someone trying to cash in on the CCG craze.
Nobody’s feeling it. Nope. Weldon had had some luck with mailing products to game reviewers in the past. So, he tried it again, with a twist: Weldon wrote some rules to turn Banemaster into a drinking game. There were certain plays you made that forced your opponent to drink. Anytime certain cards, like the Mad Vampire Sheep, showed up, take a drink. Lose a treasure, take a drink. And so on and so forth. Weldon also included a bottle of Shiner Bock in every reviewer’s box. Nothing worked, and no one reviewed the game, which was probably for the best. I don’t think an envelope full of twenties and tens could have elicited a favorable review.
See the forced smile? I’m dying inside. We made it clear that at all of the open houses, we’d be demo-ing Banemaster: The Drinking, hoping like hell we could make the game seem more fun. The various distribution warehouses were taciturn and tight lipped, but the people at Chessex Southwest, our friends? The people we knew and loved? Yeah, they ripped right into us. “What the hell is this shit?” they wanted to know. We told them what we could, and then we quietly told them what we could not: this wasn’t our call, we had no control, quality or otherwise, and we were being railroaded. They threw up their hands, too. Welcome to the party, y’all.
To this day, I am convinced that the reason why we sold those initial boxes of cards was because of our dog and pony show at the Chessex Open Houses. It was exhausting, made even more so by the fact that we didn’t want to do it.
All of the Chessex Warehouses ended up with half-pallets full of Banemaster cards for years. I don’t know what happened to them. They didn’t sell, drinking game rules or no. Worse than anything, someone in the upper echelons of the company (a lickspittle we used to call “Muppet Head” because he permed his thinning hair into a puffy, kinetic mess that would have only looked good on a Fraggle) suggested at a meeting that the reason Banemaster tanked was because “Mark and Weldon didn’t support it.” Everyone else at corporate was only too happy to swallow and repeat that line of bullshit, because then no one had to tell Don he was wrong to have bought the game in the first place. The end was nigh.
L to R: Muppet-Head, Sandy, Fitz, Don, and Weldon, at the Safehouse, in Milwaukee, WI. Three Decades Later
When Weldon and I occasionally tell war stories about our Chessex Days, Banemaster always comes up. It no longer pisses us off, but for a long time, it still did. We get upset about it because this was the thing that spelled doom for us in California and also Chessex as a company. When Don backed Banemaster, it officially killed our CCG project. That our game was flattened by an inferior version of the same idea was all the more galling.
A couple of years ago, I re-examined Banemaster, and while all of the initial criticisms about the childish inappropriateness of the art remain, especially framed in the context of “is this comparable to other trading card game art?” I do think there’s a quirky kind of charm to them. They feel more like Old School Revival style illustrations now, as if someone was intentionally trying to make it look like outsider art. I have a couple of ideas for repurposing some of the card art; it’s something…I don’t know quite what yet. The game itself is still terrible, barely playable and just not any fun. But, looking at what happened afterward, I no longer harbor any ill will or resentment about my time in Berkeley.
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Chessex Stories 6: The CCG and the RPG
Try to imagine, if you can, a world where the only collectible trading card game in existence is Magic: The Gathering, and it’s so popular, you can’t even buy it anywhere because there’s not enough cards to go around. You’ve got people clamoring for it, and eBay is in its infancy, so there’s nothing more to do except wait…and wait…and wait…
That was the snapshot in the mid-nineties. There was nothing to turn to for succor. Wizards of the Coast was having cards printed overseas, at Carta Mundi, and they were backed up for months with other jobs, so they were scheduling WotC’s little card game around the other print jobs.
It didn’t take long for other companies to rush a collectible card game to market. The first one was called Super Deck, a generic super hero based card game with god-awful artwork and a simple, not challenging card mechanic. There was also a WWII card game that was essentially a skirmish battle without terrain, miniatures, or fun. I can’t remember the name.
There were real comic book artists involved in this game’s design, but you can’t see it on any of the cards they published…in orange and yellow…with flat colors…oh, I could go on and on… Then there was On the Edge, from Atlas Games, based on their Over the Edge RPG, a weird, gonzo-mondo head trip of a game that was very high concept—Twin Peaks meets Naked Lunch. The card game boiled a lot of that down into “Try to control the island.” Instead of doing damage to your opponent, you build influence up for yourself. Side Note: We loved this game and played the bejeezus out of it.
Other companies announced their intention to make a CCG and the race was on. There was talk of a Vampire-based CCG from White Wolf, Steve Jackson was repurposing the Illuminati card game into a CCG…it was a gold rush. Everyone was certain that Magic players, tired of waiting for their cards to come back in, would turn to (your ccg here) and that would be that. I told you all that to tell you this: Don wanted a collectible card game. It’s where all of the interest and the majority of the money was. That’s where Weldon came in.
One of the games in the Chessex Manufacturing fine line of products was Wiz-War, a quick and dirty beer and pretzels game created by Tom Jolly. The premise was simple: pick a square 6” title. That’s your dungeon. Drop your two treasures on it, wherever you like. Now your wizard has to traverse the two boards, leaving your “home base” to grab the wizard’s other treasures and get back to your base without getting killed. Both players have spell cards they can use, offensive, defensive and utility in nature. You can play a game in about 20-30 minutes or so. It’s quite fun!
Weldon was casting about for a game idea that Chessex could produce, and while they didn’t own Wiz-War outright, a CCG based on the game of the same name would be proprietary if we licensed the concept from Tom Jolly. Weldon and I started talking over how that might work. That’s how Wiz-War: Chaos Keep was born.
As with the Wiz-War board game, players took the role of a wizard, but in Chaos Keep, it would a choice of one of four types, that specialized in different kinds of magic. Shapers could manipulate the dungeon itself. Elemancers were pretty much glass cannons. Animalists could summon and control creatures. I don’t remember what the fourth class of wizard did, but it doesn’t matter; you get the idea. There were 9 wizards of each type, all with different stats for Attack, Defense, and Move so that you could customize what wizard you wanted to match your play style.
The game was played in two phases: first each player builds the “keep,” their secret lair, using cards with walls and floors and rooms that did extra things—if you could get back to the chapel in your keep, for instance, you could heal some damage. Players took turns laying down cards and building their lairs, with teleport circles to get in and out, and so forth. In phase two, you teleported your wizard into their keep and tried to grab their treasure, but see, the keeps had traps and monsters that you could play out of your hand. If you could make it back to your home base in your own keep with your opponent’s loot, you win. Or if you kill his wizard before he kills yours.
Weldon built prototype cards for us to test out. He got some keep tiles made, thanks to his brother, Lee Perry, who was already working in the video game industry at this time, before he landed on Gears of War. I asked my longtime friend and collaborator John Lucas if he’d draw a set of Wizard cards for us so we could show the people at Chessex what we were talking about in terms of artwork. We used every spell and monster in the Wiz-War game, plus a few new ones. Some of the spells were unique to the class of wizard, and others were more general in nature. Two of our favorite monster cards were the Feral Chicken and Frankensteins’s Cow, a patchwork-looking bovine with the flavor text, “Before the monster, there were many failed experiments.” We were making ourselves laugh, for the most part.
The game was clever, all right? It might not have been as elegant as Magic: the Gathering, but it did seem to manage to be a CCG and still feel like a board game. It worked great, allowed for some randomization of cards to make the keep, and kept that “casual game” feeling from the board game. In a real “cart before the horse” move, we figured out how the cards might me distributed to allow for rarity in the booster packs, but not be so irritating that you couldn’t get a wizard to play the game with. There was math involved. Weldon made a chart.
During one of the regular sales conferences, Weldon had a separate meeting with Don and a couple of trusted advisors to pitch him the idea. He started explaining his concept to Don, who listened until Weldon had finished and then said, “Oh, we could include dice with the game. And tokens! On chipboard. And glass stones, that’ll all fit in one box…”
Don was essentially naming the various components we had in the warehouse; the stuff we already made and sold. Don wasn’t trying to mess up the pitch; he just wanted to maximize what we already had on hand. Also, as a chess player, Don tended to think several moves ahead of everyone at all times.
Weldon diplomatically replied, “Don, you’ve just created the travel version of Wiz-War.”
Chuckles and mumbles ensued, and Don told Weldon to pitch the idea to the branch managers. Their next meeting included Don and every branch manager from every warehouse, along with legal and a couple others. It was a packed room.
Weldon started his pitch again, and everyone seemed pretty interested. After he’d laid it all out, there were a couple of questions and then Don asked. “What about the dice? And the chits?”
Weldon replied. “I appreciate the feedback, Don, but if you want to make a collectible card game, you’ve got to start with a collectible card game.” Weldon went on to say that future expansions and accessories might include such things… and that’s when Don got up and walked out of the meeting. And in doing so, he took all of oxygen out of the room with him, and thus the wind out of Weldon’s sails. As soon as Don left, there was a sudden and noticeable chill that crept into the room. If Don didn’t like the idea, so then neither did they.
Wiz-War: Chaos Keep wasn’t officially dead—but it wasn’t greenlit, either. We tried to keep the project alive after I was in Berkeley, but there was a tacit disinterest in the part of management to chase after that idea.
It’s All T.R.U.E.
Even before I was summoned to Berkeley, I had been working on a role-playing system to encompass my modern-day heists and capers game. I’d even been playtesting the system to favorable reviews and helpful suggestions. Because it was fashionable at that time, I was trying to develop a set of rules that were (forgive me) universal and that somehow bypassed the problems of the HERO system, GURPS, and any other one-size-fits-all game (a task that I now believe to be folly), I was trying to scale up the mechanics for super heroes and scale them down for fantasy and magic. The working name was The Roleplaying Universal Engine, or TRUE. When coupled with a genre or a setting, you had a brandable name. TRUE Crime. TRUE Heroics. TRUE Fantasy. You get the idea.My design approach was to build the system to handle super powers, and then scale it down for other genres. This made the modern-day game, with guns and knives, very deadly. I could live with that. The TRUE system when paired with a setting, created a unique one-volume rulebook. That was my big idea. There wasn’t a crime game on the market at the time, and there certainly wasn’t a modern-day game that didn’t also have vampires and werewolves and shit in it.
This in-development game got listed with the other reasons why they needed me in Berkeley—not at the of the list, mind you, but it was on there. I continued my writing on the West Coast between other projects and on weekends. It’s not a coincidence that what I was working on looked a lot like a marriage between Chaosium’s Basic Roleplaying and R. Talsorian’s Cyberpunk in terms of system usage and design choices. It was a big coincidence that both R. Talsorian and Chaosium were located in the Bay Area.
Regardless, I had the system 85% done. Combat worked, character creation was cool, skills developed, assets and detriments, etc. The mechanic was a simple percentile dice roll and d6s to supplement. Super powers weren’t fully developed, but how they worked was foolproof. The World of Crime information was all that I lacked. I started working on heist mechanics, not as a genre, but as a plot structure. It was about ready to show off to Don and the managers.
That was when we heard about the new game. It was a top-secret project. Weldon got a copy of a rulebook for a card game, with instructions to read it, tell no one, and then report on his thoughts. He was told this was something that had come up and Chessex was considering investing in it.
That game was Banemaster.
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Chessex Stories 5: Our Greatest Hits and a Few Misses
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.
Chris, myself and Patti, working on…something cool, I’m just sure of it. 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.
DragonskinsCollectible 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.
Deathless prose from the product catalog. But check out that Cthulhu art, man! 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.
Behold! Chaos Lives! 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!)
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Chessex Stories – The Mark and Weldon Show
It wasn’t all fun and games working for an RPG manufacturer in Northern California. Some days we had to do real, actual work…like acting as party hosts and cruise directors for visiting people or being flown out to trade shows and retail open houses to represent the Chessex brand name in person. This became known around the offices as “The Mark and Weldon Show.”
Both Weldon and myself were no strangers to conventions and business conferences, and we are likewise not scared of crowds, public speaking, or playing host. And we were working in an industry not exactly well known for its collective savoir faire, if you know what I mean and I think you do. That meant we were usually conscripted to run a booth, talk to retailers, or otherwise glad-hand and schmooze whomever needed glad-handing and schmoozing.
One of the nice things that Chessex did for its customers was throw an annual Open House event. It was scheduled Post-GAMA, so everyone had heard of the new products coming out. Each regional retail warehouse would throw open its doors and invite all of their clients to come see the place, look at how we did things, and even buy stuff if you wanted. Local publishers and manufacturers would have a table or two set up so they could speak directly to customers and showcase their upcoming wares.
Yeah, that’s a Three Stooges tie I’m rocking. Why do you ask? The manager for the Midwest warehouse (who’s name escapes me) had perfected the art of grilling steaks, so the meal for the open house was steak, baked potatoes, corn, etc. And the steaks were really good. People ate, shopped, shook hands, and then went home. It was a nice little one-day rah rah fest. Chessex manufacturing was obligated to be at all of them.
Initially, the open house trip, which included plane fare and a hotel stay, was treated as a kind of in-house perk, an ‘attaboy’ for a good job, or somesuch. We heard a lot about being ‘fair,’ so that everyone got a chance to eat grilled steak in a warehouse, surrounded by wargames on metal shelves. But by the end of our time there, it was just assumed that we’d be going, along with whomever else needed to be there. No one complained about it, either. We had our shtick down pat by then. Besides, anyone who’s ever manned a table at a sales conference knows that plane fare and a hotel room aren’t nearly enough to offset the amount of work that goes into being at such a place.
Our main job was to rep our line of quality products and, well, just kinda be ourselves: chatty, entertaining, fun-to-be-around, etc. We never gave any presentations or anything like that, but we did stick around for the after-hours gaming and the adult beverage consumption that followed such an august soiree.
One thing about these Open Houses: while we were happily demonstrating new products and chatting up older items with the various retailers who showed up, we were really in charge of selling to our fellow Chessex employees, who would better represent us to their clientele if they remembered what swell guys we were. Sometimes this meant a little harmless bribery, like buying some beer and bringing it to the warehouse. Other times, it meant just showing people a good time; it was a case-by-case basis, and no two episodes of the Mark and Weldon show were the same.
My first Chessex Open House was at Chessex Midwest, in Fort Wayne, Indiana—not exactly known for night life and culture. Don’t google the city name and the word “controversy.” Trust me. Aside from that, the Midwest warehouse was the largest and busiest in the Chessex family, as they serviced the entire Midwest, including a few large hobby store chains. It wasn’t the first Open House I’d been to, but it was the first one I was to be working at.
We didn’t get much of a chance to really work our magic on the cheese-eating, dice-rolling, game playing population of Fort Wayne. They were a well-oiled machine. However, at Chessex East, they were a little more loosey goosey, and they were subsequently down to clown. We kept some of the warehouse staff up well past the festivities’ end by telling them stories of our various exploits, including the saga of moving from Austin to Berkeley in a 17-foot-long U-Haul filled to the brim with 21 feet worth of stuff. One of the warehouse guys (I think his name was Jeremy) laughed himself sober listening to us tag team the story of how we got stuck in the mountain range outside of L.A. We made it back to our hotel and crashed, well after midnight, quite pleased with ourselves.
The ‘One Damn Thing’ Rule of Real Estate
A brief digression: we moved into a new apartment a few months after I got to town. Our new place was in El Cerrito, two BART stops away from Berkeley, so we were still pretty much in the thick of the East Bay. We moved into the place over the weekend, which wasn’t so bad, since most of the big stuff we brought from Texas was in a storage unit already.Our new place had two bedrooms and only one bath. It was located in the hall, between the living area and Weldon’s bedroom. My bedroom was directly off of the living area. I mention this because, since we had to share a bathroom, it was determined that Weldon would get first use of it, since he took longer. His hair, for God’s sake, was a massive mane of curls and it required time and product to bring to heel. Also, Weldon doesn’t shower so much as he schvitzes, okay? I was quite used to watching the bathroom door open after Weldon was through with his morning ablutions and a cloud of steam came rolling out in a grand rush.
I got fifteen extra minutes of sleep, and the bathroom was nice and warm. It was a win-win. Until we moved to the apartment in El Cerrito.
Our first day of work at the new place, I was awakened by the smoke alarm going off. I ran drunkenly out of my room to find Weldon in his skivvies, attempting to fan the steam away from the smoke alarm that was mounted directly opposite the bathroom door in the hallway. I stood there, bleary-eyed, still groggy, but flooded with adrenaline, as he finally managed to get the steam away from the unit and it stopped making the horrible shrieking sound.
I was a little upset. I know he didn’t do it on purpose, but I was still addled with sleep. “What the fuck were you doing?”
Weldon was torn between being sorry he set the alarm off and pissed that they put it in the hallway. “Showering!” he said. “I didn’t know,” he sputtered. “Why would they DO that? Who puts smoke alarms right there?”
I muttered, “Well, that’s not going to get old.”
That’s the “One Damn Thing” rule of Real Estate. No mater if you’re renting or buying, there’s always going to be One Damn Thing you didn’t think to ask about or check out, because why would you? It’s never been a problem before. But now that you have noticed it, you’ll always check out subsequent places for that potential problem. You’ll check it out in your new place, and count yourself lucky that the same problem isn’t here. However, as soon as you move in, you’ll discover a separate, totally different and equally random problem that you hadn’t thought to look for, because why would you?
In our case, we didn’t think that we needed to check the proximity of the smoke alarm to the bathroom door, but there it was. Weldon set off the smoke alarm at least once a week after that. So often, in fact, that we developed a system. We kept box lids outside the door so that if the alarm went off, we could use the lids to quickly fan the steam away and quiet the smoke detector. It became very routine, almost matter-of-fact. I’d hear the alarm go off, and I’d get up with my eyes still closed, shuffle walk into the living room, grab a box lid, and help Weldon disperse the steam. He’d say “Sorry,” and I’d grunt and walk into the still-steamy bathroom for my morning whiz. Aaaaand scene.I told you that to tell you this:
We’re at the Chessex East Open House. We’re dead asleep in Malvern, Pennsylvania. It’s 3:23 AM—truly the middle of the night. And we hear the smoke alarm go off in our room. Oh God, it’s so loud. We’re both jolted into a state of unsleep, neither awake nor dreaming.
I don’t move. “Turn it off!” I moan. After all, this is Weldon’s fault. He always sets off the smoke alarm.
The loud, shrieking device in question was mounted high on the wall opposite me, above Weldon’s bed. We both knew this because the red light was blinking in the darkness, so we knew exactly where the god-awful cacophony was coming from.
Weldon gets up—standing in the bed in his undies, and starts fanning the smoke alarm with his pillow.
“It won’t stop!” he yells.
“KILL IT!” I scream. “Turn it OFF!”
Weldon jumped up, and after a couple of tries, managed to hit the reset switch on the outside of the smoke detector, and it fell silent. He literally collapsed back into the bed, falling down like his strings had been cut. I rolled over and faced the wall and we went back to sleep.
The next morning, we’d forgotten all about it, more or less. We showered, got dressed, headed down to meet the rest of our group, and the first thing they asked us was, “Where were YOU last night?”
We recounted our movements leading up to us falling asleep, and they said, “No, last night, when the fire alarm went off?”
“What fire alarm?” we asked.
“You didn’t hear it? There was a fire in the kitchen.”
“Well, yeah, we heard it, but we just…” We looked at each other and the realization that we could have died in a fire wiped us out. We laughed about it for the rest of the day. We tried to explain it to our group, but they just looked at us like we were insane. “That’s not funny!” one of them said.
“It’s hysterical,” we assured them, but they remained unconvinced.Office Shenanigans
We tried to have fun at work whenever we could. This included spearheading a couple of dinners, and a few inter-office activities. For example, we decided to dress up as super heroes for Halloween—make your own or pick a favorite. So, we did. I came as the Golden Age Sandman. Weldon had a western-themed hero named Lariat. Our graphic artist, Dave, went as SuperFresh, a home-made, idealized version of himself, which would have been fine, except that the night before, Dave and his friends went to the Stinking Rose, a restaurant known for its aggressive use of garlic in everything they made, including ice cream. Dave ate a 16-clove chicken and, I dunno, something else, but the amount of garlic he consumed was way more than the human body can process, so, it started coming out of him. He was literally sweating garlic. And you could smell him from ten feet away. I love garlic, but not on that day.
Weldon, Dave T, Me, and Joseph, as the Harlequin. We would often gather up a few folks to go with us, because there was a sandwich shop a couple of blocks away, run by an Armenian man named Albie. He made great sandwiches, soups, etc, you know the drill; nothing fancy, just good. He had an egg salad sandwich with bacon on it that was the bee’s knees. But that’s not why we were regulars.
Albie knew a guy who knew a guy and he stocked Kinder Surprise eggs at his cash register. These were the old school Kinder Surprise eggs, from back in the day when they were illegal to import to the United States because they didn’t want a child to put the capsule or the toy into their mouth and choke to death. Kids in Europe? No problem, folks, Vaya con dios. Apparently, German toddlers were smarter (or maybe just better managed) than American toddlers. The candy, if you don’t know, consisted of a thin double wall of white and milk chocolate, surrounding a plastic yellow capsule, that contained—well, what didn’t they contain? The first Kinder Surprise toy I got was a 1.5 inch long tin soldier, no fooling. A metal Saxon knight. From a little chocolate egg.
Soon all of our desks and computer monitors were liberally festooned with these strange little toys. One of them was a Ferris wheel, for crying out loud. The damn thing, when assembled, was three times the size of the capsule it came out of. Weldon and I brought the eggs home with us for Christmas. We couldn’t get enough of them. And every time we’d pull something new and different out of the capsule, we’d always say, “And all that from a little chocolate egg.”
We used to gripe that these were illegal in the US, but looking at them now, yeah, I can kinda see it. Cruise Directors
Our party-planning skills were in such demand that other companies began to use us. We shared an office door with Berkeley Game Distributors, another regional game distribution company, and by that I mean, there was a door in our office that we could not open, as it would lead into the offices of BGD. We had to knock on it if we needed to speak to them, and vice versa. It was never a problem, but it was a little weird.Berkeley Game Distributors was having their own version of an Open House, and they very considerately invited all of us to attend, as well, even though we were cordially not-competing with each other since we were so closely aligned with Chessex Distribution. Regardless. Don and the owner of Berkeley Game Distributors were friends, so we got the invite. And they were feeding their guests, too! They had the hot dog grill all fired up.
Several of the manufacturers in attendance were not especially blown away by the idea of all the grilled hot dogs you could eat. In particular, a large contingent of people from Iron Crown Enterprises was there, and we knew some of them from previous shows and events. They were happy to see us, and we readily decided to spirit them away from the evening’s group dinner to wine and dine them ourselves. We ran it by the Berkeley Game Distributors people, first, so they wouldn’t think we were being jerks, and they fairly jumped at the chance to have us be the cruise directors for their little open house, because they sure as hell didn’t want to do any of it.
We piled twelve people into three cars and took them into downtown Berkeley, to our favorite sushi restaurant, one of those great places with the river and the dragons boats that sail around the bar, and as they float by you just grab whatever you want from the boats. At the end of the night, they count your trays and sort them by color and that’s what you owe. It’s a great restaurant to begin with, but for a group of fun-loving people, it was super cool. One of the women on ICE’s sales team was named Monica and she was something of a firecracker. She bragged that she wasn’t worried about sushi; she loved all of it, had tried everything, it was all so blase to her. Weldon and I decided to test that. We asked the chef for something special, something interesting. That’s what we told him. We didn’t know what to ask for. He cocked his eyebrow and gave us a “are you sure?” look and we nodded vigorously. He got to work. We went back to schmoozing.
When the boat came around, carrying the “special” it was like nothing I’d ever seen before or since. The chef had made two tall rolls full of rice and fish eggs wrapped in dark green seaweed; sticking up out of the top was a full set of tiny, black octopus tentacles. It resembled a deranged Halloween tree, with the arms going in every direction, twisting and curling. There’s a Lovecraft monster in gaming called the Dark Young. That’s what this sushi roll looked like. It was amazing and weird and didn’t look like something you ought to put in your mouth. Monica took one look at it and freaked out.
I said, “Come on, don’t be chicken. I’ll eat one if you eat the other.”
I don’t have the picture, but someone took a photo of us, each with the tentacles hanging out of our mouths, looking silly. The special roll didn’t taste like anything because I was holding my breath, trying to crunch through tiny black tentacles. Yeesh.
Everyone agreed that dinner was great. Ten out of ten for presentation. As that was our restaurant and they recognized us, we were treated like rock stars, which made the ICE staff very happy. We asked them what they wanted to do next. There was a new David Fincher film showing at one of the several movie theaters within walking distance of the UC Berkeley campus, and several of the ICE folks were hot to see it. A movie? It’s not exactly an ideal group activity, but afterward, it’s always good for a follow-up conversation, preferably at a diner over a cup of coffee. Yeah, why not? Let’s do this!
…So, we all walked out of SeVen drained of emotion, shell-shocked, and freaked out. It was one of those movies where you remember exactly where you were when you saw it. Jeez, Louise. Weirdly, no one felt like talking much after we watched it. That lightly flirty, chatty vibe we’d established prior to buying our movie ticket was gone, so very gone. It’s almost as if a dark thriller about a horrific series of murders that ends with a head in a box was contrary to the convivial tone we’d worked so hard to establish. It was not, for the record, the worst movie choice I’d ever made for a first date. That honor goes to the movie was David Cronenberg’s Dead Ringers. This was close second, however.
It wasn’t our idea, I swear. We wanted to go to a bar… Thankfully, ICE didn’t blame us for David Fincher’s unique directorial vision. We got points for providing an interesting evening and the Berkeley Game Distributors staff was happy that they didn’t have to put on a clean shirt. Also, the ICE folks? We were “in” from that point on. Any time we were at a conference or convention, they’d come find us to see if we wanted to go out or something.
There were a lot of oddities and weird things that happened during my time at Chessex Manufacturing, but one of the things I appreciated was after a while, they let us do our thing for the betterment of the company. We didn’t have a lot of say in how things were done, or put together, or worked on, or prioritized, but we at least had the trust and confidence to represent the company in front of the industry at large.
In hindsight, we may have been a little too good at our jobs.
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Chessex Stories – Lost Worlds, Part 2
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.
This was the proposed line-up on new characters. We were SO optimistic when we listed them all. 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.
A typical Flying Buffalo combat card. 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.
I’m guessing this was some of Doug’s first professional work. 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.
I’m not trying to be an asshole here, but COME ON! 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.
Nice posters with good art that retailers could display. It wasn’t difficult to do. 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.
Offered without comment, so that you may decide for yourself as to the quality of these books. 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.
Yeah, no shit, Tony. -
Table Talk: Chessex Stories-Lost Worlds, Part 1
One of the things I was most excited about working on was the relaunch of Lost Worlds, by game designer Al Leonardi. Al’s contributions are largely forgotten now, as the world has moved well past what he was able to do on paper. His company, Nova Games, came to prominence with an airplane dogfighting game called Ace of Aces, wherein two World War I biplanes dueled in the skies for supremacy. This was nothing new, except for the fact that the game was played with two picture books, each depicting the enemy airplane from different angles and elevations—first person shooter-style, before that was even a thing. You played the game by choosing a maneuver for yourself, turning to a page, and then telling the page number/maneuver to your opponent, who did the same thing for you, and then you flipped to the corresponding page and you could see what your opponent did. If his plane was pointed right at you, there were bullets flying.
It was novel, bordering on genius. They made a WWII version with warbirds, and a modern age version with jets. By choosing a different character sheet for your plane, you could be more agile or harder to maneuver, depending on your aircraft’s make and model. It was a combat flight simulator, years before you could feasibly do it with a computer.
Al’s follow up to this award-winning game was called Lost Worlds, and featured single man-to-man(ish) combat, which worked much in the same way. Actually, it was a lot easier to do, because your combat maneuvers weren’t as complicated as flying a Fokker DR III tri-plane, Enemy Ace. Each combatant was based on a Ral Partha figure of the same name and came with a coupon for ten cents off the purchase of that figure.
The line was not particularly extensive, but the replayability of the books was incredible. Fights took no more than ten to fifteen minutes and were fun and fast to do. Remember, there was no Fortnite at this time; watching the combat matrix play out in real time was almost like a magic trick. For what you got, a 32-page half-size (A5) booklet, they were a bit on the pricey side, but that’s because there was a full illustration on every single page. Lots of art to produce.
This was always one of the most terrifying pages to land on… It’s fair to say that the game was a cult classic. Not everyone was into it, but if you were into it, you were evangelical about it. I say this because I was really into it and I was absolutely evangelical with it. Anyone I could show how to play was gonna get dueled by me. Unfortunately it was a little too niche for some people. As a result, despite winning the Origin Award for the game design, it wasn’t a big seller, and the art quality on the later books was very inconsistent and ultimately, the line was discontinued.
…because it usually meant this was about to happen to you. Cue Don Reents, the owner of Chessex, and his genetic inability to pass up on a bulk deal for leftover games. He bought the rest of Nova Games’ stock, including the Ace of Aces line and the Lost Worlds remainders. I don’t know if the new Lost Worlds books were part of the overall deal to buy all of the old stock out, or vice versa, but Chessex Manufacturing made hay by putting new sets of books and games together and selling them through Chessex Distribution. It was an easy fix and in the 90s we weren’t so far removed that we all didn’t remember when those games were a big deal.
Get Lost!
When I showed up in Berkeley after mine and Weldon’s harrowing cross-country trip in the 17-foot long U-Haul truck filled to the brim with 21-feet worth of stuff, the Lost Worlds relaunch was in progress: 12 new books with new art, and new game play features, aimed at the casual play crowd (we thought we could sell the books to kids who were waiting their turn in a Magic: the Gathering tournament). The art had been mostly done on the first four books, and they were in their final stages of development. The next four books in the series were in their infancy and the project had kinda stalled out (I later found out why this was so—see part 2). We also had a shitload of the old stuff that we had to do something with.
Despite the similar play action, each character had unique features built-into the book. The easiest thing to do was finish assembling components and sell, sell, sell. If you were one of the folks who bought an Ace of Aces boxed set in the mid-to-late 1990s, then you know that they were labeled as “Deluxe” editions, which included more airplanes to duel with, campaign rules, and a bunch of other stuff they’d come up with in the time since the game first came out. We also gathered the Lost Worlds books up into a stack, shrink-wrapped the lot, and sold them that way. The four Battletech books were the first ones to get this treatment. They sold middling well, but were by no means hot ticket items. After all, it was dead stock and an unsupported game.
Did I mention there was a lot of it? Well, there was. So much so, in fact, that we didn’t quite know what we had. There was a bunch of random stuff in the boxes, like some of the Ninja gimmick cards, but we didn’t know which ones, or how many. Weldon decided to wander back to the warehouse and make a detailed and specific inventory of the stock, which meant dragging boxes out of stacks and off of the pallet, counting books, writing quantities down, and so forth. It was a hot and sweaty one-person job, and was both necessary and time consuming.
A Venomous Attack
This is where Gilbert comes in. It occurs to me that I don’t remember what Gilbert’s job was at Chessex Manufacturing. I honestly have no idea what he was doing there. However, I know what he wanted to be doing there: mine and Weldon’s jobs. You see, Gilbert was a gamer—old school, prototypical, close-your-eyes-and-picture-a-gamer-in-your-head-and-that’s-him Gamer. He was deeply immersed in the subculture. How immersed? Castle Falkenstein Live Action Role-Playing. That’s how immersed. As such, he was kinda hard to deal with sometimes.
Here’s an example: one day, Weldon and Patti were talking idly amongst themselves at their desks, which were perpendicular and situated on either side of a corner in the office. Patti mentioned that she was seriously contemplating a trip to Australia. Weldon mentioned something about 8 of the 10 world’s most poisonous snakes living in Australia, and Patti was all, “Oh, really? Wow, I didn’t know that.” Chit chat.
Gilbert was leaning over in his seat, craning his head to look at both Weldon, on his side of the wall, and Patti, sitting at her desk just around the corner, and he finally spoke up. He had a low, breathy, sibilant voice that would have earned him big money these days as an ASMR source. Back then, it was just wearisome. Plus, he had a way of over-emphasizing the “sh” sound so that it came out as “SSCHH,” hollow and reedy, not quite a whistle. It drove me crazy, every time he said “Sschadowrun.”
Gilbert finally caught Patti’s eye and said, “Uh, you know, Shadowrun has the most realistic treatment of poison rules of any role-playing game.”
They stared at Gilbert for a long second, silent, mouths agape, and then Weldon turned back to Patti and said, “So, when were you thinking about going?”
That was Gilbert, all day, every day.
Where was I? Oh yeah, in the warehouse, counting Lost Worlds books.
The original illustrator, Arne Starr, was great and he clearly used photo reference to great effect. I knew where Weldon was. I’d heard of his intentions. He walked away with a clipboard and a pen and I thought nothing of it. I didn’t see Gilbert get up a few minutes later and follow Weldon out to the warehouse, but I did see him come back, stomping into our boss’s office, fuming, at the “venomous attack on my person.”
A few minutes go by and I can hear Gilbert having a meltdown in front of our boss.
Gilbert went back to his desk, and Weldon was summoned. I was starting to get the picture. The whole thing took about a half an hour to sort out, but here’s the bird’s eye overview.
Weldon was in the warehouse, hair tied back, sweating, moving boxes, labeling the ones that were mislabeled, moving stacks of books and games around, etc. In other words, he was working, and it was obvious to anyone who looked at him.
That’s when Gilbert came out and started trying to “help.” He started trying to explain to Weldon what system he’d used when this stuff first came into the warehouse. Since Weldon was re-organizing everything, it didn’t matter what system Gilbert had used—it was being dismantled. But whatever system Gilbert had drummed up, it wasn’t helpful or accurate, because those mislabled boxes were in Gilbert’s handwriting. That’s why Weldon was redoing it.
Weldon never stopped working, trying his best to dismiss Gilbert with guttural “uh huhs” and “yeahs” while he studiously avoided eye contact, but it was not working. Instead of getting the hint, Gilbert leaned in on one of the concrete support columns, fully intending to have a conversation with Weldon, come hell or high water. When Weldon realized that Gilbert wasn’t getting the hint, he looked up from his boxes and said, “Hey, Gilbert? I’m kinda busy here, so why don’t you go peddle your ducks somewhere else?”
The admonishment was calmly and quietly delivered, but it apparently cut deeper than a chainsaw into Gilbert’s psyche. He stormed out of the warehouse and tattled on Weldon, who was asked to provide context on what constituted a “venomous attack.” Weldon had no idea what our boss was talking about and it took a bit of instant replay for him to realize he was being dressed down for telling Gilbert to leave him alone so he could do his job.
After being told he can’t “venomously attack” Gilbert anymore, Weldon resumed his task with a shake of his head. Once he was done, he made a point of heading back into the office, leaning into the doorway of the break room, and saying, “Gilbert? Sorry about earlier.”
Gilbert hopped up and followed Weldon back to the warehouse, all sins apparently forgiven, to re-explain what he was trying to tell Weldon the first time, but it was too late; the job was done…but that was really just the beginning…
MORE LOST WORLDS in PART 2 -
Table Talk: Chessex Stories – Ork Flesh IS Flesh!
Showing up for work at Chessex Manufacturing, in Berkeley, California, in the mid-90s, was exactly the kind of adventure I thought I should be having in my twenties. I’d moved far enough away from my comfort zone that everything was noticeably different. There used to be a tourism slogan: “Texas. It’s like a whole other country.” When we stopped using that phrase, we should have gifted it to California, because every day was like waking up on one of Neptune’s moons.
They were just…different from us. Not in any obvious way; it was a mindset, or maybe an attitude (and yeah, I know, I know, I can hear what that sounds like, okay? I’m not oblivious to the fact that the exact same thing could be said about us…and was.)
This was not helped by the fact that Weldon and I share a brain. We used to refer to ourselves as Earth-1 and Earth-2 because, aside from a slight age difference, and different clothing and appearances, we were functionally the same person. This made it very easy to live with and worth with Weldon, because we could finish each other’s sentences, we knew all of the in-jokes and references of the other person, and we also shared a similar sensibility about most things, creative and otherwise.
Me being in Berkeley was a big help to Weldon, but it made us difficult to deal with. We were a voting blockade on creative decisions and more than once, things got heated in the Monday meeting. Mostly, it was garden variety office politics, but every once in a while, we found ourselves in a needless argument over the dumb stuff that we were dispatched to put the kibosh on.
Magic Wand Paints
Back in the 90s, the dominant power in miniature wargaming was Games Workshop, and they were pretty universally disliked across the board at the retail level and distribution, too. They were difficult to deal with, expensive for both retailers and consumers, and set up to gouge their customers by retooling the various factions in Warhammer to make them the new, “tournament legal” armies to play with, until six months from now when another faction gets a boost and players have to buy all new stuff to keep current. If that sounds kinda like what collectible card games do these days *Cough*magicthegathering*Cough* that’s because they learned it from Games Workshop.
And get this: Games Workshop was only too happy for retailers to buy their stuff from them…at an exorbitantly small discount. So small, in fact, that retailers would have to charge more for models and games in order to make any money. But hey! If you lived near an actual GW retail store, you could get all of their stuff, at the proper retail price! What great guys they were! Someone, I think Don himself, might have negotiated a more favorable percentage for Chessex Distribution, but it was still less than 50%. We had to list all of their stuff at a net cost (I think it worked out to 40% off retail).
Their dominance in the miniatures marketplace extended into accessories, such as Citadel paints—still considered the gold standard by so many wargamers. Chessex had its own paint line, called Magic Wand Paints, and they were really good—maybe not superior to Citadel paints, but certainly comparable. It was a good product, less expensive than the competition, but no one really knew about it, such was Citadel’s hold on the marketplace. One of the ways we could slap them back was by selling the Magic Wand paint line at a reasonable price point. Weldon came up with a great slogan for the paint: “Because your Distributor Should Never be your Competitor.” Boom, sucka!
From the full-page ad we ran in Dragon #230. Note the chin music at the top. To make matters worse, we had something of a control problem. The original paintmaster had left, and his apprentice was having a ball coming up with new versions of blue and green—his favorite colors. There were, I think, like seven different shades of both. It wasn’t really a coherent line of paints. Before I had arrived, it became necessary to fire the apprentice, after they found out he’d moved some pallets around in the back corner of the warehouse and was living there. Cot, hot plate, a couple of books, you name it. He also had something of a substance abuse problem and so it became necessary to fire him and move him and his accoutrements out. The new apprentice was his helper. He did not have a substance abuse problem, and so we were off to the races.
The first thing Weldon did was to organize the colors. He re-numbered them to be consistent and ensure that similar paints were in the same number range. He made a chart, using the paints, grouped along color and shade: colors, neutrals, metallics. He even designed a paint rack for retailers who order a starter kit, filled with the most popular and useful paints. It was very nice, and comparable to the Citadel line. Now, all we needed was consumers to buy it.
As you can see, it was a robust line of paint colors and types. The first thing Weldon came up with was a starter kit: three paints and a mini to paint so that people could try Magic Wand out for themselves. He presented the idea to our boss, who balked at the idea of spending money on miniatures. No problem, said Weldon, we’ll get the mini companies to give us minis in exchange for a plug. “Babe, no one is going to go for that,” our boss said.
One thing that Weldon and I have in common is that we hate people telling us what we can and cannot do, especially when it came to stuff like this. Weldon went away and called Reaper (a Texas company that he had a contact in) and he explained the idea to them, and they said “hell yes” before he’d finished the pitch. Come to think of it, a lot of the products Weldon came up with were a result of someone in the office going, “We can’t do that!” Hold my dice bag, chum.I don’t remember how many starter kits we made, but they were grouped around the minis themselves. A bone color scheme for the skeleton, green paints for the goblin, etc. We wrote some simple instructions, talking about applying the base color first, and then thinning the darker color to create a wash, and then dry brushing the lighter color over the raised areas. Pre-YouTube, when people had to read stuff.
Another catalog page with the starter sets listed. Note: “Alien Tyrant” was for Warhammer’s Tyranids, which was the big army everyone was playing with at the time. We REALLY wanted their market share. The starter kits were priced right—basically the cost of the three paints. We used minimal packaging, a wrap around cardboard sleeve on three sides, shrink wrapped to the bottles. It looked nice, and really showed off the paint colors. Ral Partha also sent minis for us; it turned out all of those miniatures companies had tons of spare minis lying around, doing nothing (surprise, surprise). These kits sold out and were very popular.
This led Weldon to come up with his next big idea: a six-color paint set, using basic shades, neutrals, and metallics. This time, no one said anything contrary.
Well, almost.
Our production manager was a guy named Joseph. He was probably my age, give or take. He was a very nice guy, and he was pretty good at his job, which was making schedules and pricing out components. But Joseph had this very annoying habit of wanting to put his two cents in wherever he could, and he’d float an idea out, any idea that came into his head, and then he’d plant his flag and prepare to die on that hill. That way, Joseph could point to whatever change he’d made in a project to justify his existence; a tangible way that he could prove he had contributed to the process.
The Monday Meeting
We’re going over the status on all of our projects, which changed from week to week. Weldon was showing everyone his six color sets, wherein he explained his rationale and his desire to keep it simple at first, and then if these sets went over, expanding into other color schemes. “We can produce a Flesh set,” he pointed out, “since we have exactly six flesh tones from pale to dark. It’s perfect,” he added. “We can sell this to the historical wargamers, since they need flesh tones for all of their soldiers.”
Joseph’s eyes lit up. “You can include Ork Flesh!”
Three decades ago, orks weren’t sexy. They were green. Our ork flesh paint was a deep, rich, swampy green, closer to bluish rather than yellowish. It was a good green. But it was not neutral flesh color. It was, and I cannot overstate this, green.
When Joseph suggested that the green Ork Flesh paint be included in the beige-brown-neutral Flesh Set, it was as if the needle scratched across the record. Weldon took a beat (to his credit) and said, “Well, not that one, since it’s green, and this would be a flesh colored set.”
“But Ork Flesh is a flesh color,” Joseph pointed out.
“But it’s green,” Weldon said.
“But we call it Ork Flesh. Therefore, it’s a Flesh,” said Joseph, now fully committed to his premise. “It says ‘flesh’ right on the label.”
“It’s not really a flesh color. We call it ‘ork flesh’ because it’s a shade of green you can use to paint orks with. It’s not really a flesh color,” said Weldon, now well into a slow burn.
“I’m not trying to be difficult, here,” said Joseph. Weldon shot me a look and I had to bite my lip to keep from laughing. “But it’s called ‘Ork Flesh’ and…” he looked around the table, hoping for a sympathetic eye. There was none.
The idea that Joseph didn’t think he was being difficult was too much for Weldon, who kinda snapped and said, “Okay, where do you think this ork flesh should go in the kit?” He indicated the line up of all the paints he’d assembled as a prototype, which were arranged from light to dark. “Joseph, if you put a green paint in this beige line up, it’s going to look stupid. We’re going to look stupid.”
“I don’t see how!” Joseph knew he was in an argument at this point and he was certain he had no idea how he’d gotten there.
This went back and forth a few times, each time increasing in volume, until at last, Weldon could take no more. “Okay,” he said, all pretense of composure gone, “you go outside and if you can find me one person with this color of skin, I’ll put it in the flesh kit!” He waved the jar of Ork Flesh around emphatically.
Our boss came in shortly thereafter and concluded the meeting, as our “spirited conversation” was audible throughout the office. We won the day, in the end, and the six-color paint sets did very well, too. And no one ever called us out on our flagrant omission of Ork Flesh in the Flesh set. But that argument was indicative of our time there; a tremendous amount of drama and slap-fights over dumb stuff like that.
Weldon’s best idea was one that never came to pass. He designed a square box for four paints that could be opened and reassembled into a small building to be used as terrain on the table. It would have meant printing graphics and all of that, and our charge at the time was to sell what we had, not make new stuff, unless it was new stuff that they wanted.
We produced the Magic Wand rack and starter set and ran an ad in Dragon Magazine (we had bought a year’s worth of one page ads) and all was well…until the law was passed stating that we had to label anything deemed to be a choking hazard, potentially toxic, or even just dangerous. There was already some blowback about naming the speckled dice, which looked like candy already, after food, like Candy Corn, Blueberry, Icing, Squash, Lemon, Mint, etc. Our paint was the other critical issue and we needed to protect ourselves from possible litigation. This involved first sending our paint off to be tested. It was made with base, pigments, and distilled water, but who knows how that would affect someone who pounded an ounce of Black Primer like a shot of Jägermeister?
Yet another catalog page from back in the day, this one featuring the wire rack Weldon designed. When the tests came back, it was about what we expected; the paint was not really safe to drink. I remember Weldon spending about an hour on the phone with Kathy, the company lawyer, trying to design a sticker we could put on the paint bottles. At one point in the conversation, Weldon said, “How do they even test for something like that? ‘Here, suck on this paint brush, will you? Oh, look, he died? We’d better write that down.’”
It took some doing and some tightening of the language but we ended up with the smallest possible warning label we could devise. It just wasn’t small enough. In fact, the sticker was so big that it wrapped around the entire jar of paint! So much for being able to see the nice colors. Weldon’s favorite line on the label was “May cause death in humans.” I’m sure Orks would have been fine.
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Table Talk: Chessex Stories – Speckled Dice!
I found myself working at Chessex Southwest at the time when the company was growing like Audrey 2 in Little Shop of Horrors and scaring the hell out of The Armory, Wargames West, and anyone else who was distributing games and game supplies at the regional (meaning, not national) level. Chessex had parlayed its success as a minor game accessories provider to actually selling games themselves. It started small, with Don Reents selling stuff out of the back of his van in the Bay Area, and became a major thing, nationwide, seemingly unstoppable thing. If you ever played on a vinyl Battlemat, or used Dragonskins on your hardcover books, or owned a set or two of Speckled dice, that’s all thanks to Chessex.
When I became a salesman for the company in the mid-1990s, Chessex was making a killing as a full line distributor, but they also were selling the hell out of dice. They first imported the “European style” dice from Denmark, and they were a great thing. Nice colors, rounded edges, with slightly retooled numbers that were easy to read. They also put the number at the top of the d4 instead of at the base of the triangular face. Little things like that.
These Euro-Dice were made out of urea, a dense, granular plastic that was primarily used to make toilet seats and other not-exciting thing. Urea is strong and impact resistant, and if you’ve ever dropped a Chessex d20 on a tiled floor, you’ve seen their “impact resistant” qualities first hand as the bounced hither and thither, often settling in the least accessible place in your house, like under the fridge.
Baby-Faced Finn, mid-90s, at
Chessex Manufacturing, in Berkeley, Ca. Frazetta Representin’!They make the dice by pouring the urea into molds, use heat and pressure to solidify it, and then strike the molds to get a set of dice. Those dice would all get dunked into a paint bucket, which filled the numbers up, and then they would dry on racks. After that, the painted dice are tumbled in what amounts to a giant rock polisher, which knocks the excess paint off and rounds the edges and points on the dice at the same time. The result is a clean-looking die with nice heft, polish and color.
Then the Danish manufacturer stumbled onto something; basically, you could put two different colors of urea together and make dice out of them, only the colors wouldn’t blend like play dough. They stayed separate, and when tumbled, took on a soft edge that looked like a robin’s egg. Speckled. With a little experimenting, that was the start of Speckled Dice. Chessex already had a good relationship with the dice manufacturer, and they locked him into an exclusive deal for several years—in other words, he wouldn’t sell Speckled dice to anyone but Chessex. And in return, Chessex would buy tons of those things and sell the hell out of them. And so we did.
There were other dice in the Chessex line of game accessories; the translucent dice, of course, were a staple. There were some glow-in-the-dark dice in three colors. There were some special swirly-looking dice we called “Marbelized” and other companies called other names. It didn’t really matter, because, you see, there are only a few companies that make dice. Good dice, I mean. The kind you can really use. There are several American companies that make casino dice, but they aren’t practical for role-playing, not really. And there are companies—mostly in China, but not always—that manufacture game components cheaply and they make cheap, lightweight dice that feel light and cheap and you wonder aloud why even include them in your product if they are going to be like that. If you ever got the d6 dice from a Heroclix starter set, you know what I’m talking about. It’s those shitty dice that made us go foraging through our old family board games for those nicer, slightly heavier dice that felt good in our hands.
Our Convention Set-Up That’s what the Euro-Dice brought to the table. They were available in a nice selection of primary colors, and a couple of inking variations on the numbers. So, they weren’t sexy or flashy, but what they lacked in pizzazz, they made up for in weight, heft, and feel. Chessex opaque dice were the best example of that. Koplow also used urea in their opaque colored dice, but their molds were slightly different (and, I think, slightly inferior). Koplow, to me, always looked like they just appropriated a bunch of math dice and repackaged them. It took them a while to realize gamers wanted sexier dice. That’s what made Chessex Speckled dice such a game-changer: they were the first real style innovation in the dice making world that wasn’t a manufacturing upgrade, such as retooling molds or finding a different kind of plastic treatment that would make swirls or sparkles.
From 1993 to 1997, Chessex released over fifty different and unique “colors” of Speckled dice and sold them all—easily millions of dice. Chessex speckled dice dominated the market and saturated it and salted the earth for any speckled dice to follow. Our Danish dice guy made a few speckled dice for tip-in components in a few Eurogames and later, of course, started doing special d20 dice on commission for D&D games and TSR games, and others as well. I recall Pacesetter games’ various boxed sets including opaque Urea d10 dice, which is where I first became aware of these Euro-dice with the rounded edges and the heavy feel. But there was a gap between the last Speckled dice set in 1997 and the first new set in 2001. There are a myriad of reasons for that, but one of them was that by the end of the original run, Speckled dice sales had slowed. There were only so many people out there to absorb the stock of dice being churned out.
The first Limited Edition release of colors. Note the contrast problem with many of the colors. Not only did I get to sell dice to retailers, I ended up helping to make them when I was transferred to Chessex Manufacturing in 1996. You find out how cheap (or expensive) things are; you have to think about stuff that you never considered as a consumer, such as packaging—those AMAC cubes, for example, and those tiny slips of paper that served as the label all cost money, as well. There were frustrations, like dealing with upper management who had one idea—and maybe not a very good one—and trying to navigate a way to say that without getting fired. I drank a lot in Berkeley, California. For medical reasons.
My overall least favorite set of colors. Zoom in on “Squash” for a real treat. One of the most frustrating things about working at Chessex was the haphazard way that the Speckled dice came together. If you look at the first run of Limited Edition Speckled dice and compare it to the current line of Speckled dice, you’ll notice a couple of things right away. As pretty as some of the colors were in that original run, you couldn’t see the numbers for shit (see above). Also, half of the color combinations were white and another color. Or, in the case of Space, black with white speckles. The reverse? Dalmatian, which came out shortly thereafter.
More than one color had ink on the faces that matched one of the plastic colors on the dice, rendering the numbers situationally illegible. There was no design sense, no attempt at using color theory. It was just mishmashing random colors together to see what worked, from a team of two men, one of whom was not particularly artistically inclined, and the other of whom was a Danish Dice Gnome. That was our affectionate nickname for the dice manufacturer. It was most frequently invoked thusly:
Official Name: Carnival
We Called It: Floor Sweepings.“Where did these big ass D6 Speckled dice come from?”
“Dunno. Jorgen made them and sent them over.”
“Did you ask for these?”
“No, he just sent them.”
“Oh, Jorgen, you wacky Danish Dice Gnome.”
The above line works best if you say it like a Leslie Knope “Oh Ann” compliment from Parks & Recreation. What was I talking about? Oh, yes. Specked dice and the making of same.
The chosen and appointed colors were then handed off to the production department (me and three other people) and we were told to “make it work.” I won’t go so far as to say we single-handedly saved Speckled dice from themselves, but…okay, we were a good-sized cog in the overall machine that saved Speckled dice from themselves.
It’s not that Speckled dice were doomed to failure, not at all. But they were being made with no planning, on the fly, trial and error. There were lessons to be learned from the first three sets of Speckled dice that were not being applied. We wanted to fix that, and make a concrete plan and chart a logical choice for going forward on future sets.
Weldon was in charge of Product Development and he wanted to create a master sample chart with dice, using black and white urea, that would be mixed 10% black, 90% white, and then another die that was 20/80, and then 30/70, and then 60/40, and then 50/50, 40/60, and so on, back to 90% black, 10% white. That way, we could see the concentration of material at a glance and calculate color combinations using these percentages. He wanted to build a color chart, using these and other tools. It would be super easy, once everything was organized, to plot out every color combination ever made and yet to be made in a single codified matrix.
All it would have taken was a couple of phone calls, or a face-to-face meeting, but for reasons known only to upper management (i.e. Don), the Danish Dice Gnome and Weldon were kept as far apart as possible. Our jobs, it turned out, was not Product Development and Editor-in-Chief, respectively. In reality, we were juicers, in charge of making lemonade out of lemons (and later on, squeezing blood from a turnip).
Tropical Para-Dice
Weldon was completely responsible for the success of the Tropical Para-Dice set. He named them, and gave those dice a purpose and a reason to exist. They were evocative and the names made sense with the color combination. We were handed a selection of colors—that is, mashed up urea dice already made–and told to “pick the six best ones.” Shaping the Limited Edition release into a cogent theme was a desperate attempt to get some control over the release of our Best-Selling Dice Product.
Weldon was the one who got our Danish Dice Gnome to use metallic ink on some of the dice to kick up the contrast on the dice faces. They were against it, and fought him on it, but he eventually got them to try it and you know what? They were a big hit. Thankfully, we were given latitude to name the dice ourselves. This was the best part of the job. It also ensured that none of the small, candy-like objects that were terrible choking hazards to begin with were named after food anymore. The legal department could cross that off of their to-do list.
Action Dice!
My favorite set we worked on. This ad was a blast to put together. The guy getting punched out was one of the warehouse workers and the punching arm belonged to our graphic artist. The Action Dice release came together in a different way. One day, Weldon was working in the warehouse, trying to invent products we could sell that wouldn’t be a huge outlay of cash. He came in and handed me a die and said, “What would you name that?”
It was hideous: mostly yellow but with an even ratio of black and red speckles, which made the yellow very dingy and dirty. I stared at it for a few seconds. “It kinda looks like an explosion, but contained inside the dice.”
“That’s pretty good,” said Weldon. “They were calling it ‘Vomit’ in the warehouse.
The Explosion dice were one of the colors that was produced some time between 1992 and 1995. They may have been included in the first versions of loose Pound-O-Dice, or maybe the loose samplers, but we don’t know, and I doubt anyone else does, either. Regardless, we had a whole pallet of them in the warehouse, and no effective way to sell them; they weren’t named, and didn’t have a stock number.
The next Limited Edition (aka “LE”) Speckled dice Sampler was already scheduled, so Weldon got out some of the dice that had previously been foisted on us. One of them was a striking purple and red and blue die they were calling “Bruise.” Weldon pointed out that wasn’t an attractive or particularly marketable name. We changed it to “Knockout” instead. The idea of dice based on action movies was born. Explosion, Knockout, and Getaway were colors already created. Loot, Gunmetal, and Ninja were created by us.
The Action Dice Dice Pouch! To better sell the idea, I tricked up a logo with our in-house graphic artist and we envisioned an ad for the dice that would be a photo montage of action-movie-type things. We also put the Action Dice logo on one of our velour dice bags. I’ve still got mine. It holds up, I think.
These two themed sets sold very well. The idea of doing Limited Edition sets, and letting the market dictate what colors to keep, was brilliant (to his credit, Don was very good at logistics). Retailers who bought a LE Loose Speckled Dice Sampler got their store listed in a giant ad that ran in The Dragon Magazine—still Ground Zero for gaming news in the mid-90s. Thanks to the full-page ads and the modicum of marketability we added to the project, everyone in the sales departments at the distribution level had no trouble moving them. The sets sold like hotcakes. Some of the colors sold out within a couple of weeks.
Celestial Dice
Our third set of dice in under a year, but man, those look good…! By the time the third quarter LE set was due, everyone had seen the value of what Weldon and the rest of us were capable of doing and so when Weldon requested dice samples based on the planetary colors, lo and behold, Don took the requests to Norway and got the Danish Dice Gnome to fire off some D20s for us to look at. It was something of a miracle at the time, because up until then, Reents and the Danish Dice Gnome were the only ones allowed to play with the Speckled dice color combinations. Weldon purposely asked for a few colors that were outside the range of Celestial Dice, because we didn’t know if we would get another chance to ask for samples.
The Celestial Dice were smart, brightly colored, high contrast, and true to the theme and the names (Weldon agonized over the actual colors of the planets, versus our popular misconception of those colors, and what do you name our planet since we already have Earth dice?) They are, in my opinion, the best Speckled dice release Chessex put out at that time. They were a sign of what we would have done, if they had only let us do more of it.
There were other sets, as well, stand-alone items that came out piecemeal, even though we tried like hell to make them more ordered and thus, meaningful. Reggae, Fourth of July, Valentine’s Day, and Halloween were all just sort of thrown out there, haphazardly. Weldon wanted to make those (and a few others) into a Holiday Sampler, which would give people dice to buy all year around. The color we were most excited about? Mardi Gras.
Another set I tried to get off the ground was Endangered Species. These were animal themed colors based on, you guessed it. The idea was to create some interest around the cause and donate a portion of the profits to The World Wildlife Fund. This also did not come to pass, and that’s a damn shame, because you would have loved the gorilla dice. Black and Brown with Gray numbers. It would have been sweet, so sweet. Working on the Limited Edition Speckled Dice was the most fun, and the fact that some of those colors are still around and considered fan-favorites, and nothing else I did for the company exists anymore, it was also the most rewarding. Oh, and one final thing: those of you who might have seen the ads in Dragon, looked at the retailers who were listed as sellers of Speckled Dice, and noticed that in Springfield, there appeared to be a store called The Android’s Dungeon, and wondered if it was a real store…it wasn’t. We were just really big Simpsons fans.
Note: parts of this post previously appeared on Confessions of a Reformed RPGer
The North Texas Apocalypse Bunker
Headquarters of Mark Finn, who writes, broadcasts and navigates pop culture as he waits out the entropic breakdown of our beloved institutions.