Bill/Larsen--
First, let me apologize for the flippant and cryptic nature of my post.
Although it is nice in you to offer an apology, there is no need for you to do so. I fully understood where you were coming from, and a person so thoroughly tarred with the brush of flippancy and crypticness as me can hardly afford to stand on ceremony.
Reading through your posts was a delight. As silly as it sounds, it left me with a bounce in my step. Had to believe, isn't it? Here's a man in his forties so happy in learning the answers to a few mysteries leftover from a dead version of a role-playing game? Then again, I shouted out loud and pumped my fist in the air when I read the Strephon still lived in Survival Margin. Yes, I should get a life.
That doesn't sound silly to me at all. It makes me very, very pleased that I was able to come here and share this stuff. I don't think that there is a nicer sensation than feeling that one has somehow made other people happy. I should have done this years ago, except that I didn't know a place like this even existed.
Bari kept doing all this because he had faith. Indeed, after his hitch in the Army, he was ordained as a minister. His faith in his god was a comfort to him and, oddly enough, his faith in the possibility that Dave Nilsen would eventually deign to 'spill the beans' as he put it was a comfort too. As a wholly a-religious person, I couldn't understand the former and, as a confirmed cynic, I wouldn't believe the latter. Nilsen has had close to a decade, I'd tell Bari, and nary a word. Besides, I'd remind Bari, the fans savaged the man. Why should he bother, I'd ask.
This morning I knew Bari was right about one thing; Dave Nilsen would spill the beans. I just wish to hell that Bari were still around to see it.
Thank you very much for the story about Bari Stafford. I wish very much that he could have lived to read this stuff. And I know that sounds like I'm implying something vain-glorious about myself, but I hope you know that's not what I mean. Rather, if my sharing this stuff meant this much to you, I wish that he could have had his share of that enjoyment as well. And I'd like to have done my tiny part in vindicating his faith in reconciliation, and that there will be a good end to all of this, all of the contrary evidence notwithstanding. Everybody who knows me says I'm the most cynical person they know, but I still say, "believe, always believe." I wish that I could have met him.
I'm sorry I didn't make it back in time for Bari. Maybe you could pass this onto his daughter. Tell her, "your dad was right. He kept the flame, and the world is still a brighter place because of it." Yes, I have tears in my eyes as I type this, and a tightness around my heart.
May I say thank you for all your work at GDW? I know you and all the others do not hear it often enough. Thank you.
Yes, you may. And you are very welcome. Words like yours are really the only reason worth doing it. Thank you for reminding me that that large part of my life was worthwhile.
While I did not personally care for the TNE setting, I would have to be a complete hypocrite not to stand in awe of the majority of TNE's products and the work that went into them.
Thanks. One of the things that I've thought about over the years but never shared is my suspicion that over time, every product that we put out got bigger, and by definition, harder to produce. The state-of-the-art of gaming kept advancing to bigger books (just think of 5x8, 48-page LBBs as the standard for most of CT, moving to 8.5 x 11 96+ page books being the standard by the end), more art, etc., and we kept moving with that current.
If you measured our 1991-1995 output in terms of column-inches rather than numbers of products, you might find that our productivity increased a lot over the years.
Okay, I admit it, this next part is going to seem self-congratulatory, but I think you know how important this stuff was to me, and after 10 years, it would be wrong to pretend to ignore an attaboy, wouldn't it?
Survival Margin so neatly wrapped up the Rebellion's shambles as to be a miracle, something I couldn't imagine ever occurring.
Thanks. And it was something I had to assemble rapidly over my Christmas vacation, but it felt inspired. That was the first product where I could tell that I had earned Frank's respect. He sat me down in his office and told me how impressed he was with it. That made me feel really good.
Path of Tears should be the sourcebook model for all others to follow.
Give Frank a lot of credit for that one. Although we both wrote portions of it, he did more. I think I was working on Phase Line Smash at the time.
As a wargamer, Brilliant Lances is still part of my active rotation. Product by product, the list of TNE items can stand against anything else in the RPG world. Again, thank you all so very much.
I'm glad you like BL. BL, as I said in another post, was nominated for best science fiction boardgame of 1994, but lost to....Magic the Gathering, a fantasy card game. That should have been a sign...
BL is associated in my mind with the only non-Christmas vacation I had while I was at GDW. My wife and I wanted to get away for a long weekend, probably Labor Day or Memorial Day, something like that, but by shortly after lunch time, it became clear that I was not feeding ship pages to the art department fast enough for the ship booklet to get into UPS* that evening, and I just felt sick. I was standing out on the second-floor back porch at North Street, feeling so sick that I was going to have to call Devon and say, "I'm sorry, but I've got to work all weekend to get this out," and so frustrated that I was actually crying. I think that Steve Olle and Loren and Kirk Wescom or Steve Bryant were standing out there with me, silently commiserating. At that point, Susan Schug, our office manager and print buyer at that time came out and said, "you know, even if we got it in now, they won't be able to work on shooting it or printing it until next week. So if you took the weekend off, and came back and finished it the first day you get back next week, it really won't slow anything down." I literally felt like Susan saved my life. For that moment alone I will love Susan for the rest of my life. I mentioned in an earlier post that I remember reading only one book for fun while at GDW, a Theodore Roosevelt biography. I read it in the car while we drove down through southern Indiana along the Ohio River, to Fort Knox. We just stopped at whatever places looked interesting, like Squire Boone Caverns. It's still poignant to be reminded that I live there at those sites now.
Thanks, by the way, for putting up with these windy posts. Apparently I'm exorcising a lot of ghosts, and falling in love with my old co-workers again, which is nice to do.
*By the way, the Lauritson-class picket was named for our UPS driver.
Q: If the floor is still open for questions, I have a small one from Aliens of the Rim. I've never been able to quite get the name of the ur-Hiver document the sidebar commentary references. What is the significance, or joke, behind 'Mechnod Photo Hello'?
A: Sir, yes sir! The floor is most assuredly still open for new questions. That is a reference to one of Frank's favorite humor pieces, I think from National Lampoon. It was a piece called "Soviet Mechnod Photo Hello" that was a brilliant piece of satire, an encapsulation of every piece of Soviet Cold War propaganda you could imagine. He used to quote it a lot, and after he brought it in to show it to me, I would quote it back at him. Its inclusion was a little gift from me to Frank.
Thank you so much, Bill, for the lovely words, and the chance to love my old job again.
Dave
