03-22-2011, 09:16 AM
Aldarron Wrote:hock:
One thing you mentioned in an earlier post I found curious, that Dave had hired some of his civil war reenacting buddies. What was there roll in the business?
There was indeed a lot being published for Tekumel during that period, and I had a hand in all of it. (There's twelve running feet of shelving in our game room to hold it all.) After TSR sold EPT to Zocchi/Gamescience, we also did "Swords and Glory" as part of that deal. I was also doing all of the big conventions, eight hours of miniatures gaming and six hours of role-playing games a day, as Dave's Tekumel guy. As part of that, we built my (well, Chirine's, really) suit of armor, and so I was wearing 38 pounds of steel and brass for the whole convention. I was also a founding member of GAMA, as well.
(Somewhere in there I also painted something like 3,000 Tekumel miniatures for the game demos; I must have been either young and full of energy or nuts. Probably both...)
As for the First Minnesota Volunteer Infantry guys, they were pretty much the whole of the AGI staff. Jim Moffat was the marketing guy, and very good at that; John Grossman was the 'game developer', whatever that was, and a very good editor. John Luecke was a writer (and the author of "Rails Thru the Rockies"), Peter Quinlan the staff artist (along with Ken Fletcher), and Frank LeBreque (spelling?) did the packing and shipping. John Grossman and Gene Hendricksen also wrote "The Compleat Brigadier" and also did their own line of 20mm historical figures. Artist Ken Fletcher and typesetter Sarah Prince were not part of this crowd, but came in from local F/SF fandom. Miniatures sculptor Steve Lortz also lurked around the place, primarily as a free-lance writer.
The First Minnesota guys were both the biggest strength and the weakest part of AGI, from my experience. They were all very good at their jobs, and very hard workers, but they were all historical miniatures players; none of them were role-players, and they never really accepted that RPGs were what were driving the game hobby after D&D took off. They felt that the 'real' game industry was the one based on historical miniatures, and never really could understand why I and my friends (the 'Tekumel boat people') could make lots of sales at conventions and via mail-order. I kept advising them to run demos of their games at conventions, and that it wouldn't hurt to wear their uniforms when doing ACW games, but they didn't feel that was 'proper'; they tended to sit at the dealers' tables we'd get at the conventions and be baffled as the world passed them by - and the boat people's section of the tradeshow booth was usually stacked three deep with RPG gamers desperate to give us their money.
I did a recent posting on my blog where you can see our travelling circus in action; photo by Dave Arneson:
http://chirinesworkbench.blogspot.com/20...gygax.html
And I usually got the girls, too, which also baffled them... :lol:
Feel free to ask any questions; I'll try to answer them for you...
yours, Chirine