Paul passed away in August of 1985. He was one of my housemates in Santa Monica after we all graduated from UCLA in the late 70s. His writing style was breezy and easy to read, and he had a sharp wit. He had one unpublished novel, "The Autostart World", and had written a script for Battlestar Galactica (the original series) that he eagerly tried to sell.Cripes, what a day. It's like my childhood is disintegrating around me.
Paul was a good friend, and I miss him a lot. Thanks so much for remembering him!
-- Dave Opstad
A Return to the Stars
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After a veeeeerrrryyyy long, and mostly unplanned, hiatus, Stuart and I got
together to play more Stargrave in recent days. It was good! It was also a
bit ...
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Posts
Recently, I went to a (minor) bit of trouble researching and phone-calling and Googling in order to track down the author of some excellenty hokey old fantasy solitaire gamebooks, with the hope of licensing them for new editions ... and the end of the trail was finding only her surviving family :(
ReplyDeleteI'm still not done coping with the loss of Ed Simbalist jr a couple of years back ... and I don't just mean because we were doing a project together, either. That guy's stuff was a huge boost in my desire to make games when I was a kid, and I'm still haunted by how awesome it was to - years later - form a relationship where we could just yatter on the phone for hours before our ears got tired of having a telephone pressed against it. I miss Ed a lot :(
I understand that our heroes will grow old and die, just as we all will in turn. But these events have made me ask myself a lot of questions. But what's going to happen when they're gone? With Castle Greyhawk ever see print? How many Erol Otus masterpieces will be ignorantly chucked into a dumpster? How many of the people who built our hobby will end up shuffling off this mortal coil not even certain that they have any fans nowadays?
ReplyDeleteEven among the living, I feel for the "other guy" designers, of which there are many who've produced (or co-produced) some great gaming material. With EC I was nodding deliberately to just how many of the old games had _two_ designers, one of whom would become front-and-center in the minds of fans. V&V by Jeff Dee and that other guy ... Car Wars by Steve Jackson and that other guy ... Bunnies & Burrows by B. Denis "Chariot of" Sustare and that other guy ... The list is a long one.
ReplyDeleteSimilarly, for years it was the case that fans would never remember your name if you were a supplement/adventure designer without any credits in a core book. That's less true nowadays, fortunately, but its a slow change. Several years ago, when RPGnet ran a poll of game designers fans would buy work from sight-unseen, I think I was the only one on the list who was known for [mostly GURPS, at the time] supplements, and not at all as a designer of a whole game (Risus was around, but was virtually unknown until the very late 90s when I decided to add the stick figures).
Hmmm. Erol Otus :) I need Otus to stick around long enough to do that "Slimes dancing around the glowing slime-gusher they worship underground" sketch I want for a Uresia sourcebook ... There's no artist I'd rather hire to draw a gusher of slime than Otus, and he was booked solid when I asked him last year. Not sure if I can afford him, but I do intend to try :)
If I had the money and Otus had the time I'd totally commission a faux cover for the Companion set that was promised in the 81' Expert rules. The fighter dude and magic-user babe from the Basic set would be fighting alongside the wizard from the Expert cover. There foe would be a balrog or maybe Cthulhu.
ReplyDeleteAlso, in the swear-to-God-from-a-good-source-true department:
ReplyDeleteDave Arneson was at GenCon a couple years back and he wandered over to the Wizard's booth. Some bright-eyed thing asked him if he was interested in learning how to play D&D.
Heh. I think every game-writer has several anecdotes of that nature, though of course for Dave Arneson the irony is multiplied a hundredfold :)
ReplyDeleteWhat would _really_ be bad (and not at all impossible) is if he were to reply "I'm Dave Arneson," to the counter-response of "Great to meet you Dave! So, you wanna learn D&D?"
:)
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