D&D General The First Demise of TSR: Gygax's Folly

[Alzrius]

In '82? Absolutely not. Gary didn't go to CA for another year, and he didn't hire Lorraine until '85.

Minor correction, here: Gary was in the process of moving to California in mid-1982. According to Flint Dille in his book The Gamesmaster (in the section "Meeting a Wizard in a Medieval Tower in Anaheim"), he met Gary on Saturday, May 29th, 1982, while Gary was looking for a place to set up the DDEC (Dungeons & Dragons Entertainment Corporation). A few pages later (in the "Most Expensive Classroom Ever" section) he notes that while Gary was looking to get that set up, he was staying in "a bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel."

Now, there might have been some back-and-forth between Wisconsin and California during this time, but that's pretty straightforward about Gary's having been in Southern California no later than the summer of '82.

 

[JLowder]

What you've written there is just totally ignoring that Gary and the Blumes did the exact same kind of stuff. Picking unnecessary fights (Origins, Chaosium, Mayfair, etc.), disrespecting Rose Estes' work on Endless Quest, failing to adequately compensate her and denying her promised stock options, bullying other companies with C&D letters, developing failed games like Indiana Jones or Boot Hill or what have you. Mistreating other creative staff, including refusing to honor stock options, refusing to honor royalty agreements and physically taking signed contracts away from staff, refusing to honor promised creative bonuses which were supposed to replace the royalties (look at how Zeb Cook and Lawrence Schick got absolutely screwed over by Gary and the Blumes on Star Frontiers), etc.

One of the constants at TSR, no matter who owned and ran the company, was the inability to deal fairly or constructively with creators, both staff and freelance. With the book/fiction program, the company was handed staggering international successes three times over the course of a decade and then proceeded to screw over the people most responsible for those successes. (Rose and the EQ books; Margaret & Tracy with Dragonlance; Salvatore, Golden, and several other writers and editors connected to the flourishing of the fiction program from 1987/88 to 1992.) In my time there, many in upper management actively and openly resented creators. (The "Richard Awlinson" name on the Avatar Trilogy was intended as a test move toward the use of house names on fiction, for example; I am still surprised I managed to get bios in the books themselves with actual creator names.) Those of us who cared about the matter had to fight for any and every improvement to contract terms and working conditions.

TSR wasn't alone in this. To be fair, the inability to deal fairly and constructively with creators has been a sad constant with the entirity of the TTRPG industry.

 

[Mannahnin]

Minor correction, here: Gary was in the process of moving to California in mid-1982. According to Flint Dille in his book The Gamesmaster (in the section "Meeting a Wizard in a Medieval Tower in Anaheim", EDIT: starting page 29), he met Gary on Saturday, May 29th, 1982, while Gary was looking for a place to set up the DDEC (Dungeons & Dragons Entertainment Corporation). A few pages later (in the "Most Expensive Classroom Ever" section) he notes that while Gary was looking to get that set up, he was staying in "a bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel."

Now, there might have been some back-and-forth between Wisconsin and California during this time, but that's pretty straightforward about Gary's having been in Southern California no later than the summer of '82.

Nice catch! From what I read in there it does look like Gary did a lot of travel back and forth between WI and CA; maybe more before he settled at the mansion? The chapter "Gen Con 1984" (starts on p 107) talks about the two of them hanging out and working at Gary's place at Stone Manor for some weeks.

 

[MGibster]

One of the constants at TSR, no matter who owned and ran the company, was the inability to deal fairly or constructively with creators, both staff and freelance. With the book/fiction program, the company was handed staggering international successes three times over the course of a decade and then proceeded to screw over the people most responsible for those successes.

That was something I noticed in the podcast. From it's earliest days, TSR effectively told their employees to go pound sand when it came to pay. "You want to work full time in gaming? You have no other options besides us. It's our way or the highway."

 

[Mannahnin]

That was something I noticed in the podcast. From it's earliest days, TSR effectively told their employees to go pound sand when it came to pay. "You want to work full time in gaming? You have no other options besides us. It's our way or the highway."

Mostly. Rob Kuntz, Jim Ward, and Mike Carr were among those lucky few who got royalty deals before TSR reneged on those or stopped offering them at all, and they were able to make some significant cash. Like, solid middle class homeowner money easily.

Although Gary and the Blumes tried to back out of their royalty agreement with Carr once the 1977 Basic set (with his B1 In Search of the Unknown in it) became a big hit in the wake of the Egbert incident, he managed to argue them into honoring their contract. At least until Gary wrote B2 and substituted it into the Basic set, recapturing that chunk of the royalty money for himself.

Part of the appeal and the pitch of working for them originally was this promise of royalties if you wrote a hit product. And those few people making bank (especially Gygax and Arneson, but to a lesser extent the three guys above) made that a tantalizing prospect. Sadly, they repeatedly reneged on those promises.

 

[JLowder]

That was something I noticed in the podcast. From it's earliest days, TSR effectively told their employees to go pound sand when it came to pay. "You want to work full time in gaming? You have no other options besides us. It's our way or the highway."

In the 80s and 90s there were other companies where you could work full time--West End, GDW, Chaosium, eventually White Wolf, and so on. Those houses were nowhere near as large as TSR, but there were other full-time gigs designing TTRPGs to be had. As the 90s wore on, a lot of those other companies downsized or vanished (TSR hired a wave of ex-GDW folks, an ex-West End wave, etc), but by then TTRPG designers were also regularly jumping to computer game companies, often for much better money.

The salaries TSR paid in the late 1980s were not great, but not absurdly bad. I started at $18,000 a year (about $48,000, or $23/hour, in 2025 bucks) as an editorial assistant in the Book Department. I very quickly moved up to full editor and then series editor, with a couple pay bumps along the way. Staff could also freelance for the company. I made several thousand more a year editing or writing RPGs under freelance contracts, along with pitching stuff to Dragon and Polyhedron, but that also meant putting in absurd hours at work and then at home. (Dragon paid real money, Polyhedron store credit for the Mail Order Hobby Shop.)

TSR game freelance projects were flat fee deals. Novels paid royalties, not only on the books themselves, but on translations and even direct adaptations (e.g. audiobooks). The fiction contracts were better than the game contracts because TSR was competing in the book publishing market for writers. The Book Department in the late 80s also lobbied, successfully, to improve the contracts, arguing we were just going to lose everyone who had a hit to New York—as TSR had mostly lost Rose, Margaret, and Tracy—if the rates and schedules were not at least close to competitive. Book contracts were worth a lot of money, circa 1990.

In 1994, as the company's finances started getting more obviously dire, management cut the rates staff could make from game and magazine freelancing for the company, meaning the highly trained TSR staff would get paid less than freelancers for the same work, even if they did that work off the clock on nights and weekends. I was already on my way out when that edict came down, but it was yet another sign it was time to move on as quickly as possible.

 

[MGibster]

The salaries TSR paid in the late 1980s were not great, but not absurdly bad. I started at $18,000 a year (about $48,000, or $23/hour, in 2025 bucks) as an editorial assistant in the Book Department.

It's great to hear from someone who was there. You're like a living artifact? Did you actually have any qualifications to be an editorial assistant when you were hired? I ask because I was quite impressed with what sounded to me like people just jumping in and essentially training themselves how to do various jobs at TSR.

 

[JLowder]

It's great to hear from someone who was there. When I worked at a museum, you're like a living artifact? Did you actually have any qualifications to be an editorial assistant when you were hired? I ask because I was quite impressed with what sounded to me like people just jumping in and essentially training themselves how to do various jobs at TSR.

TSR was very much a trial-by-fire sort of workplace, where you were challenged quickly and expected to step up and learn multiple jobs. Anything that might be connected to your formal role and then some, really. In Books, editors handled the usual proofing, copyediting, and story editing, but even there you held different roles on different books. An editor would proof one novel, copyedit another, do story edit on a third. We also would get called in to work on ad copy and ad campaigns, draft back cover copy, create art orders for the covers or maps or interior illos. The art orders meant working with the art directors, who never get nearly enough credit for what they did, and the artists, many of whom were in the building, up in the art room—so you could go up and talk with Brom or Caldwell or Easley as they were painting the cover for your project. You got assigned promo articles for Dragon and Polyhedron. At one point I ended up writing a translation routine/procedure to allow various flavors of PC and Apple machines in the building to access content files. (This was in '88 or very early '89; I do not have a programming background apart from one intro class as an undergrad.) I did some typesetting corrections here and there on the giant typesetting machine when the typesetters were jammed up and Books needed something turned around quickly. I handled the department presentations at the Random House sales conference one year. I did a lot of work with the slush (unsolicted manuscripts) and "discovered" Elaine Cunningham, Christie Golden, Mary Herbert, and others. We were a very small department so we wore a lot of different hats. That was true throughout the building.

The Games folks came from varied backgrounds, with all sorts of different degrees or previous gigs. Books was a bit more uniform. Most of us had degrees in lib arts or journalism. I'm lib arts--double major in English and History, minor in Phil. I had other qualifications. I'd been a student publications editor and writer in high school, with workshops in editing at the Boston Globe and a writing class through the high school studies program at MIT. As an undergrad I was an editor on the university lit magazine for a couple years and also published some fiction with them, with one fantasy story being reprinted in a "best of" college lit collection. I was pursuing a Masters in English at the time I first interviewed at TSR and had experience teaching composition, film, and fantasy lit as a grad student. (Editing and teaching are related skill sets.) I'd volunteered for the local public TV channel magazine. (Proofing TV listings was great prep for editing game stat blocks). I'd already published a few reviews in genre film magazines and had sold an article about designing cities for superhero RPG campaigns to the hobby gaming magazine Gateways. I'd been a TTRPG gamer since the release of the Holmes box.

I interviewed with TSR three different times, twice with Books, once for the job running Gen Con (which I came very close to getting, but am grateful I did not). They hired a different editor the first time I interviewed with Books because they were looking for a different skill set. But they made it pretty clear I would eventually do some editing and possibly writing for them, even if as a freelancer. At the time they hired me, Mary Kirchoff had just taken over the department and was looking for someone who would be able to handle fiction projects with heavy game crossover. (Mary knew games but was now management, and the other editors all had strengths but were not gamers.) I moved up quickly and within a year was story and eventually series editor, running projects that would turn out to be fairly important for the department and the company. I also got to do some editing and design work in Games, once I proved to Bruce Heard and the other editors up there I could meet their expectations.

I was fortunate to start at TSR when I did and to get all those opportunities.