Harold--
EGG, TSR, DJ, $: I'm sure that any press releases were intended to put a
good face on things. And I don't mean that deceitfully. The DJ lawsuit to
the contrary (it was a personal vendetta sort of thing), until WoTC the
game industry was like one big family that had spats and fights but
remained a family. It took WoTC and their MBA talk and their
Lockheed-Martin tradeshow BS to turn the whole thing into the scorched
earth they created. And the press release was written against that family
ethic before it was clear that the family had been murdered with
deliberate malice aforethought.
As to the money, I never knew the details, mostly because I didn't care,
and it was important to some people to keep that insider-y and secret, but
we were in early retrenchment mode at that point (we didn't replace Les
when he left, I just had to take over DJ and DC) and the money went to
cover sunk costs like print runs. IIRC the press releases said something
like, "we didn't have to pay anything to TSR," but that doesn't mean the
investment was covered or the books balanced.
CoE: You shouldn't feel like you failed in any way, this goes back to
squishy things like feel and tone in a line that was still trying to
establish those for the first time. Again, IIRC, CoE felt too big and
organized, which could have been adjusted, but Conquistadors in Space
(that's not a dig, just shorthand) didn't feel right. Personally I am
intrigued by religion in space, but I don't think it felt like a good fit
for TNE or Traveller in general. There's a tendency/need to shorthand the
major polities, and if the Solomani had previously been "Nazi Nutjobs" did
we want to go with "Religious Nutjobs?" If religion has become ascendant
where it previously was not salient, what are the mechanisms by which that
happened? And I want to emphasize that I made none of those decisions
about your work. I already felt bad for fending you off and fearing that I
had allowed you to undertake a hopeless errand, so I punted it to Frank.
His answer that he wanted something like the Terran Confederation goes
back to feel and tone and shorthand and caricature, and Confederation has
a not-overly-colorful quality that makes it easier to work with when you
don't intend for it to steal focus from other things.
Stars: And that all of those luminosity classes are stages of
metamorphosis and white dwarfs have killed most of their systems off. I
also personally don't believe that multiple star systems, as common as
they might be, are conducive to liveable environments, much less poor
referees who have to figure out what is going on there.
KK: My quibble with him was the way he would periodically call us up and
say, "I'm going to publish the official TNE XX Sourcebook, let me know if
you have any requests," and then argue with us for a few weeks that his
Marc party-favor fanzine license gave him control over GDW's IP. Kevin
Sembieda (sp? first name?) used to threaten to sue us once or twice a year
(over words like Recon), and eventually KK became as much of a welcome
name as KS. There are some things that people could do out of simple
innocence and naivete, but if they keep doing it, it starts to appear
weasely.
Market dynamics: Probably some combination of print-on-demand, pinpoint
Internet marketing, crowd-sourcing, and people doing it on the side. GDW
was the last wargame company with full-time staffs, but arguably we were a
wargame company that had become an RPG company. The world needs more
gamers who own lucrative Italian shoe companies.
To recap, I'm not going to be a stickler about you saying, "I forgive
you," but I do genuinely owe you an apology. If I could have found a way
to not let you make an unlikely gamble I would have, but at the time that
was the best I could manage. And in the spirit of Kirk's "you can't take
away my pain, I need my pain," you are probably happier having made the
effort against apocalyptic odds anyway.
> EGG, TSR: GDW got a good portion of the money out of the investment it
> made in DJ, or at least that is what Loren and Frank's press release said.
> What couldn't be replaced was the wasted time. As you have indicated
> elsewhere, that was in constant short supply or more precious than gold.
> Freelancers: All the joys of cat herding combined with the efficiency of
> 19th century strip mining. Still, it wasn't like hiring at least another
> couple of staff members full time to work on Traveller was ever going to
> happen. Even if it had, CCGs... :-P
> Children of Earth: Looking back 20 years later, I really didn't do a good
> job selling it to you. Certainly my initial presentation could have been
> much better. But ultimately unless you bought the essential premise, that
> you could do a story in which religion *may* be a central theme in a
> sci-fi setting, and it could hold together without becoming "jihadists in
> space" (actually I was aiming more for the Spanish in the New World during
> the Age of Exploration), then none of the other cool stuff associated with
> it mattered. For what it's worth though, I never saw the Terrans marching
> relentless out in all directions conquering the Universe. Indeed, I saw
> the storyline developing such that I wanted to avoid contact between the
> RC and the Terrans as long as possible, and then it would have been the
> sort encounter where the RC would not be particularly impressed with the
> Terrans, nor the Terrans all that interested in contact with "Hiver client
> states". The Terrans focus would be firmly rimward and on the Dingir
> League spinward, oh and whatever was going on trailing in the area simply
> known as "The Abyss" (around Cymbeline). Ultimately the Terrans would have
> certainly showed up for the final big showdown with whatever was behind
> the Black Curtain, but they were more a replacement for the Solomani
> Confederation in the end, not co-founders of any new Imperium.
>
> The Stars: You did what you could. Ultimately it's hard to have an
> intelligent conversation with the detractors on the issue when they think
> a 'M6D' means that the star is a red dwarf (no, that's a M6V) or a brown
> dwarf (no, those have a different designation) or they get that 'D' means
> white dwarf, but don't understand that a white dwarf that dim would be
> very, very rare, not the most common star on the bloody star map.
>
> Kevin Knight: I think he had the best of intentions, but he clearly wasn't
> ready to make the transition from being a wrangler of freelancers and
> journal publisher to being a full time publisher of sourcebooks. Heck, I
> even toyed with the idea of taking over Kevin's magazine and doing some
> TNE manuals when I was sort of between jobs, and even found an investor.
> When we looked over the numbers after the license fee though...nope.
> Publishing in that era and making money at it was hard--too hard
> ultimately for GDW, TSR, Avalon Hill, and a number of other major industry
> players. Publishing when you don't own the copyright? That would have been
> the real science-fiction. I'm still trying to figure out how the market
> dynamics changed to make it doable again...or maybe they haven't and
> people who want to publish just find a way.
>
>
EGG, TSR, DJ, $: I'm sure that any press releases were intended to put a
good face on things. And I don't mean that deceitfully. The DJ lawsuit to
the contrary (it was a personal vendetta sort of thing), until WoTC the
game industry was like one big family that had spats and fights but
remained a family. It took WoTC and their MBA talk and their
Lockheed-Martin tradeshow BS to turn the whole thing into the scorched
earth they created. And the press release was written against that family
ethic before it was clear that the family had been murdered with
deliberate malice aforethought.
As to the money, I never knew the details, mostly because I didn't care,
and it was important to some people to keep that insider-y and secret, but
we were in early retrenchment mode at that point (we didn't replace Les
when he left, I just had to take over DJ and DC) and the money went to
cover sunk costs like print runs. IIRC the press releases said something
like, "we didn't have to pay anything to TSR," but that doesn't mean the
investment was covered or the books balanced.
CoE: You shouldn't feel like you failed in any way, this goes back to
squishy things like feel and tone in a line that was still trying to
establish those for the first time. Again, IIRC, CoE felt too big and
organized, which could have been adjusted, but Conquistadors in Space
(that's not a dig, just shorthand) didn't feel right. Personally I am
intrigued by religion in space, but I don't think it felt like a good fit
for TNE or Traveller in general. There's a tendency/need to shorthand the
major polities, and if the Solomani had previously been "Nazi Nutjobs" did
we want to go with "Religious Nutjobs?" If religion has become ascendant
where it previously was not salient, what are the mechanisms by which that
happened? And I want to emphasize that I made none of those decisions
about your work. I already felt bad for fending you off and fearing that I
had allowed you to undertake a hopeless errand, so I punted it to Frank.
His answer that he wanted something like the Terran Confederation goes
back to feel and tone and shorthand and caricature, and Confederation has
a not-overly-colorful quality that makes it easier to work with when you
don't intend for it to steal focus from other things.
Stars: And that all of those luminosity classes are stages of
metamorphosis and white dwarfs have killed most of their systems off. I
also personally don't believe that multiple star systems, as common as
they might be, are conducive to liveable environments, much less poor
referees who have to figure out what is going on there.
KK: My quibble with him was the way he would periodically call us up and
say, "I'm going to publish the official TNE XX Sourcebook, let me know if
you have any requests," and then argue with us for a few weeks that his
Marc party-favor fanzine license gave him control over GDW's IP. Kevin
Sembieda (sp? first name?) used to threaten to sue us once or twice a year
(over words like Recon), and eventually KK became as much of a welcome
name as KS. There are some things that people could do out of simple
innocence and naivete, but if they keep doing it, it starts to appear
weasely.
Market dynamics: Probably some combination of print-on-demand, pinpoint
Internet marketing, crowd-sourcing, and people doing it on the side. GDW
was the last wargame company with full-time staffs, but arguably we were a
wargame company that had become an RPG company. The world needs more
gamers who own lucrative Italian shoe companies.
To recap, I'm not going to be a stickler about you saying, "I forgive
you," but I do genuinely owe you an apology. If I could have found a way
to not let you make an unlikely gamble I would have, but at the time that
was the best I could manage. And in the spirit of Kirk's "you can't take
away my pain, I need my pain," you are probably happier having made the
effort against apocalyptic odds anyway.
> EGG, TSR: GDW got a good portion of the money out of the investment it
> made in DJ, or at least that is what Loren and Frank's press release said.
> What couldn't be replaced was the wasted time. As you have indicated
> elsewhere, that was in constant short supply or more precious than gold.
> Freelancers: All the joys of cat herding combined with the efficiency of
> 19th century strip mining. Still, it wasn't like hiring at least another
> couple of staff members full time to work on Traveller was ever going to
> happen. Even if it had, CCGs... :-P
> Children of Earth: Looking back 20 years later, I really didn't do a good
> job selling it to you. Certainly my initial presentation could have been
> much better. But ultimately unless you bought the essential premise, that
> you could do a story in which religion *may* be a central theme in a
> sci-fi setting, and it could hold together without becoming "jihadists in
> space" (actually I was aiming more for the Spanish in the New World during
> the Age of Exploration), then none of the other cool stuff associated with
> it mattered. For what it's worth though, I never saw the Terrans marching
> relentless out in all directions conquering the Universe. Indeed, I saw
> the storyline developing such that I wanted to avoid contact between the
> RC and the Terrans as long as possible, and then it would have been the
> sort encounter where the RC would not be particularly impressed with the
> Terrans, nor the Terrans all that interested in contact with "Hiver client
> states". The Terrans focus would be firmly rimward and on the Dingir
> League spinward, oh and whatever was going on trailing in the area simply
> known as "The Abyss" (around Cymbeline). Ultimately the Terrans would have
> certainly showed up for the final big showdown with whatever was behind
> the Black Curtain, but they were more a replacement for the Solomani
> Confederation in the end, not co-founders of any new Imperium.
>
> The Stars: You did what you could. Ultimately it's hard to have an
> intelligent conversation with the detractors on the issue when they think
> a 'M6D' means that the star is a red dwarf (no, that's a M6V) or a brown
> dwarf (no, those have a different designation) or they get that 'D' means
> white dwarf, but don't understand that a white dwarf that dim would be
> very, very rare, not the most common star on the bloody star map.
>
> Kevin Knight: I think he had the best of intentions, but he clearly wasn't
> ready to make the transition from being a wrangler of freelancers and
> journal publisher to being a full time publisher of sourcebooks. Heck, I
> even toyed with the idea of taking over Kevin's magazine and doing some
> TNE manuals when I was sort of between jobs, and even found an investor.
> When we looked over the numbers after the license fee though...nope.
> Publishing in that era and making money at it was hard--too hard
> ultimately for GDW, TSR, Avalon Hill, and a number of other major industry
> players. Publishing when you don't own the copyright? That would have been
> the real science-fiction. I'm still trying to figure out how the market
> dynamics changed to make it doable again...or maybe they haven't and
> people who want to publish just find a way.
>
>