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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mannahnin" data-source="post: 9062465" data-attributes="member: 7026594">What?  Could you give a citation? Gary and Mary Jo divorced in 1983.  As far as I have ever read, she didn't have anything to do with him being forced out in 1985.  The Blumes had more stock than Gary from the point that they bought out Don Kaye's stock, after he died in 1975 (well, technically Gygax had a controlling share for a brief period, after he exercised a stock option but before the Blumes exercised theirs).  Is Kaye's widow Donna Kaye the wife you're thinking of?Lorraine Williams, an unrelated third party, was the woman who was brought in to help save the company both with her cash and management skills, in 1985.  By Gary.  Then ironically she and he clashed in management, and she wound up buying the Blumes' shares and forcing Gary out.  This is pretty well-known history at this point.[MEDIA=medium]3a29d07f6836[/MEDIA]Well, yes.  I cited those books in my earlier comments.Yes and no.  Are you confusing Boston college student and NEWA member Leonard Patt with the more famous <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fletcher_Pratt" target="_blank">Fletcher Pratt</a>?  The latter's 1930s naval wargaming rules also come up in discussions of the history of gaming.Chainmail's fantasy supplement absolutely took some stuff from Leonard Patt's two page Tolkien wargame rules from The Courier, 1970.  But the original Chainmail rules appeared in Panzerfaust in April 1970, and Patt's rules were published later in the same year.  And Chainmail is a full length game, with a 14 page fantasy supplement designed to cover more than just Middle Earth.  Patt's rules were clearly a major source of inspiration for the fantasy supplement, but to call Chainmail a modified version of Patt's game rules seems extremely hyperbolic.[URL unfurl="true"]http://playingattheworld.blogspot.com/2016/01/a-precursor-to-chainmail-fantasy.html[/URL][URL unfurl="true"]http://playingattheworld.blogspot.com/2016/02/a-conversation-with-len-patt.html[/URL]White Wolf Magazine didn't start publishing until 1986, the year after Gygax had been forced out of TSR.  If TSR stole anything from them (this is the first I've heard of such, but I'm interested in details!), I can't imagine that he had anything to do with it.I definitely agree that things were much looser then.  The amateur wargaming community in the 60s and 70s was constantly borrowing stuff from one another.  That was the culture.  It's reasonable to expect a higher standard once professional publishing got underway, but  at the level of pro-am publishing Chainmail was at in 1971 it was barely above a hobby.Game Wizards and other histories go deep on the causes of TSR's financial woes.  Amateurish mismanagement, egotism and excessive optimism about how long the game would go on exploding like a fad (end of '79 through '83), and some rampant nepotism in hiring and in retaining incompetent staff were all parts of the mix, and the Blumes and Gygax share equal responsibility.</blockquote>

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