An odd blast from the far past
May. 14th, 2005 01:01 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
wsmithLast night I was on OKCupid, taking quizes as I do. I found one called "Dice!" that measures your knowledge of pen-and-paper RPGs. One of the questions asked to what game the World of Glorantha belonged. The correct answer is, of course, Runequest. One of the options, however, was "The Lost City of Eldarad." This was the first product that had my name on it from Avalon Hill when I was put in charge of their RPG line in 1989. I was tickled that something so obscure came up.
Not that Eldarad was a good supplement. It was absolutely wretched. When I walked in for my first day of work, they handed me a set of typeset gallies and told me it had to be out the door in under 30 days. They forbade me from editing it. They forbade me from making any meaningful changes at all. It was printed pretty much as it came from the author. It wasn't set in the popular world that went along with the game due to licensing issues, something which I argued was a mistake. The art was a last minute rush job with a total art budget of $500 (peanuts, but who listens to me?) It was truly horrendous. There's still hate mail about me over the treatment of Runequest during my tenure at AH. You can find it all over usenet among the hard core RQ fans. They refer to them as "the bad ...wsmith... years." I do wish I'd had some degree of creative control. In retrospect, I suppose I should have explained to the fan base why things were happening the way they were, but I was 19, inexperienced, and really didn't know any better.
Ah, sweet nostalgia. Being paid less than a MacDonalds fry cook to work 80 hours a week doing the job of a full department, only to have my hands tied and my work trashed. Yes, those were the days. :)
Not that Eldarad was a good supplement. It was absolutely wretched. When I walked in for my first day of work, they handed me a set of typeset gallies and told me it had to be out the door in under 30 days. They forbade me from editing it. They forbade me from making any meaningful changes at all. It was printed pretty much as it came from the author. It wasn't set in the popular world that went along with the game due to licensing issues, something which I argued was a mistake. The art was a last minute rush job with a total art budget of $500 (peanuts, but who listens to me?) It was truly horrendous. There's still hate mail about me over the treatment of Runequest during my tenure at AH. You can find it all over usenet among the hard core RQ fans. They refer to them as "the bad ...wsmith... years." I do wish I'd had some degree of creative control. In retrospect, I suppose I should have explained to the fan base why things were happening the way they were, but I was 19, inexperienced, and really didn't know any better.
Ah, sweet nostalgia. Being paid less than a MacDonalds fry cook to work 80 hours a week doing the job of a full department, only to have my hands tied and my work trashed. Yes, those were the days. :)
