Provenance: Birthday present, 2022. Read while at the Alderbrook Resort.
Review: This one is going to be a little weird for me. When I reviewed the authoritative works of Jon Peterson on early RPGs - here, here, and here, I could safely dodge out the side door by noting that his history ended before I really showed up on the scene. At best I am that guest-star that shows up in the second mid-credit scene after a Marvel movie.
Not so here. I am definitely in this book. I was a source for Ben, and continue to be for some of his articles. Some of the stories in this book are mine. I stand behind what I said. They are the "truth" as in "Yep, I said this, mostly."
Those previous histories are origin stories - they start with the Castle & Crusade society and Gary's basement and the Horticulture Hall in Lake Geneva. and move up along the timeline to Gary losing control of the company to Lorraine Williams. Riggs covers that territory to give a base-line, but deals primarily with the Williams years - 1985 through 1997, when she in turn sold the company (through a roundabout manner) to Peter Adkison and Wizards of the Coast. It was a time of Second Edition and Forgotten Realms and best-selling novels and regular layoffs and crises.
And there are a lot of witnesses and sources. I know my own stories, and I can identify a few of the others Riggs talked to by the tales that are told. And he talked to a lot of people. His history is well-sourced and no one individual's. By the same token, there are a lot stories remembered from 40 years ago, and the speakers (myself included) actually had the JOB of telling stories, so we need to take things with a suitably-sized grain of salt. Riggs recognizes this, and there is a good deal of "Jeff says this, but Flint disagrees with him". And that's a good thing. Our memories often play us false - Steve Winter and I spent an hour one evening trying to figure out the seating chart on the 3rd floor of the Hotel Clair, where the designers and editors were quartered. We couldn't quite put it together.
Also backing up all the anecdotes, Riggs had the numbers. I THINK he had access to the green sheets, which were our sales histories for all the products. They were huge printouts on green and white paper, hence the name green sheets. For a while the designers would get a set every month (and this was until 1989, since I did have the numbers for the Marvel boxed sets at one point). Then they stopped. It looks like Riggs got access to them (or more accurate info) and could track sales (and profitability) of the various products. And often the facts would cross over what the storytellers said.
Riggs is even-handed. Not all the traditional villains in the regular stories are villainous, and not all the heroes heroic in all situations. That's fair as well.
Reading the book brought back a lot of memories of my time at TSR, not all of them good. There are a lot of stories untold by this volume. Dragon Dice. Dawizard. The Christmas our bonus consisted of a discount coupon on a turkey (not even a turkey, but a discount coupon). Various executives who were let go right after buying a house in the area. And some good things as well. Radio Free Roger. Quote of the Day. Peter, when he took over the company, not only returning the original art to the artists, but also tracking down the original designers of the SPI games he inherited and returned their rights as well. And pranks, like the time when Lorraine stole Design VP Mike Cook's brand new Aerostar (he was very proud of it), loaded it into a truck, and got him down to the loading dock claiming he had to "See what Random House had just returned." The back gate of the truck then dropped to reveal his brand new vehicle.
This is an important book in that it covers the period between the Gygaxian years and the Adkisonian era. Riggs may toss the word "genius" around a bit much (and sometime in my direction) but we did have a fantastic crew of creatives working there at the time, and there are more stories to be told.It is a worthy addition to the behind-the-scenes lore of TSR. And now we need to launch into the WotC years, the history of Magic, and the eventual sale to Hasbro.
More later,
