jamesmishler wrote:
Well, we never got to see the original office, which was at Bob's first house. Nor the second office, which Bill Owen mentioned was in a small strip mall and was now a travel office. Both of those offices were during the "PO Box 773" days.

We got to see the office at 1165 N. University Ave. That one is today a YWCA annex office. I took a picture of that office.

We also got to see the big office at 1221 N. Sunnyside Rd; once in the boonies, today it is on the verge of the suburbs. It is also a church! I got a picture of this office, too.

We passed by Bob's last home, at 1737 North Walnut Grove Avenue, where he had his office until his cancer struck. This home was also the office of Group One back in the day; it had belonged to his sister Debi and her husband, Marc Summerlott, though they sold it some time ago (or so I understood from Bob, who was renting the house). SNIP

I will be sending both pictures to Plaag to be put up on the JG subweb.

As a very occasional lurker here, I wanted to fill some blanks because I was there at the beginning... and I thought JG fans might enjoy the context of the time.

JG locations (all in Decatur IL):
1.        810 S 16th St (from mid-1976-early 1977)
2.        304 S Franklin St (early 1977-2nd quarter 1978)
3.        1165 N University Av (2nd quarter 1978 til ???; the former church, then pizza parlor with avocado colored shag carpet on the walls)
4.        1221 N Sunnyside Rd (the former schoolhouse)
5.        1737 N Walnut Grove (Bob's house)

1. FYI, the original headquarters (outside of our homes) of JG was my ICD wargame club's location on South 16th St (#1 above) which I will send a picture of to James. This is where the JG phone number (217-422-1930) came from, the ICD wargame club. JG certainly had its direct roots in wargaming! It was 2 basement rooms that had game tables which I signed the lease on before JG was thought of or official.

This location was apt because it was opposite a historical miniatures wargame shop! I think we moved in, early 1976 or late 1975… but not because of JG. I was fairly skeptical in the 1st half of the year about going into business with fantasy play aids and did numerous breakeven studies on my lunch hour at the travel agency.

Finally I was convinced, so Bob & I started JG with a handshake on the 200th anniversary of country's birth. At some point I was so deep into getting printed materials ready that the only way we used the S 16th St location was to store boxes of maps & guidelines booklets. Ominously (for me at least), there was no time to PLAY games. I was still producing paste-ups (with rubber cement, believe it or not even before wax and certainly DTP) on my homemade light table upstairs in the travel agency.

During our 2 years together, Bob mostly worked at home and he also attended college. Bob's obvious gift was in world creation. My area was play aids and the hobby industry. My father had been in retail & wholesale toys & hobbies with 15 midwestern Hobby House Toyland stores from 1946-1968. I did the Dungeon Tac Cards, Ready Ref Sheets & Judges Guild. D&D was an incredible hodge podge of materials. We helped make it more organized and playable.

By or before early 1977, I had moved to full-time (80 hours/week) plus occasional part-time fill-in at the travel agency still (like during my father's heart operation and recovery). Anyway, at some point we moved the boxes to Bob's house where Norma did the collation of installments, City State bubble packs and d-tac cards.

2. Late in 1976 or early in 1977, we rented a 3-room upstairs suite at Franklin Mall (#2 above) from my father. This was not just a strip mall as James understood (they didn't get to stop by here when attending Bob's funeral) but an antique-filled, covered mall that my father converted from a warehouse downtown. As such, it is the oldest covered mall in Illinois though much smaller than the cookie-cutter retail malls around the U.S. You can see a picture of the interior at: www.franklin-mall.us or http://www.g-design.us/mall/  â€¦and if you see the statue of Justice in the center of interior street, just above it was our offices. The FM website is a bit out of date as it still shows Franklin Travel, Head Case (both moved) and Winters' shops have reduced their space to just 1 storefront (out of 15 spaces). Sadly there are just 4 spaces occupied including my office, 2 hair stylists & 1 retail.

Bob would bring up to the mall collated products and his sister Debi would come in and fill orders on a part-time basis. I was up there mostly alone, covering the phone calls from distributors and hobby shops, doing paste-ups and typing materials. Norma did the bulk of the typing (although my girlfriend, Lynda did some too). Bob would handprint everything and we had a standard page size for the original guidelines booklets (if I recall) 7.5x10" @75%.  Marc did some paste-up work part-time. I was more the publisher and Bob the author. I went to early cons (in case Detroit's con flying free because of maintaining my travel agency privileges) and was the hobby industry contact.

Incidentally, if there was an early, offical wargame presence in Decatur (i.e. at a publicly accessible location as opposed to people's houses), it was also at Franklin Mall. In the basement from 1970-1973 the ICD wargame club met weekly.

Then the next 'official' meeting of ICD was at the library in 1974... only 1 meeting happened here and only 2 new people. But they were key people: Marc Summerlott whose father flew us up to GenCon where I bought D&D and David Petrowsky who introduced me to his cousin, Bob Bledsaw. David wasn't interested in D&D when I called him to play in my first Dungeon but said he would tell Bob about it. After that first game in my uptown apartment (I had moved out of the Franklin Mall) Bob, and Mike Petrowsky (David's brother) came. Afterwards, Bob borrowed my D&D books and the rest is history. For the next 18 months we played in Bob's world nearly every weekend. How many times would I roll out bed (I'd moved back to the mall apartment) and down to the travel agency bleary-eyed to sell travel?!

Franklin Mall is full of old-time store fronts and in some sense looks a little like a narrow City State but a bit too modern. I will provide some pictures to James (promised already but saying good-bye to Bob has cut into my efficiency). Due to my losing my interest in the game aids business (I'd lost my hobby!), I sold my half of the company to Bob.

3. So in approximately March 1978 when we dissolved our partnership, Bob moved out of the Franklin Mall to the University Avenue location (#3 above). I really only popped in here a few times especially to deliver consulting projects to help Bob and Norma. I had to put some distance so wasn't here much. I think at some point this year or 1979 that Bob & Norma incorporated JG.

When JG moved out of the Franklin Mall, I started a general game company, Game Design, in 1978 and sold about five thousand of a game called Going Places to travel agencies to use as customer gifts. I did not feel that this was good enough and returned full-time to the travel agency (Franklin Travel). I bought out other family members in 1999 (including Franklin Mall) then sold Franklin Travel 2003, after surviving the catastophic 9-11 year of 2001 with God's help. After working for the new owners, Rio Grande Travel of Albuquerque NM, I started a tour company as an independent contractor through Rio Grande & LLC and am redoing specialized group software at www.tourgrouppro.com.

The point of bringing this up is that JG's classic products came from this 304 S Franklin location. And I have been in the same space or elsewhere in the building ever since. Bob and others came up to play games here several times in various empty shops or the basement since 1999... and you can see that... http:members.aol.com/wmowen/con.htm ...is not up to date as we've had more games at Mark's house or in Springfield at Scott's since then. Bob was always a regular and gung ho.

The JG headquarters was in succession, Game Design, Rogues Hairstyling, The Brass Scissors, Bourbon Street Barber Shop, The Magic Touch (massage, but not 'messy massage' like in CSIO or so far as I know, illegal) and empty now for 2 years.

4. I know little of Sunnyside School other then playing a game or two, getting games etc.

5. I visited Bob at his home regularly, game together and there we started the cafépress site with a limited partnership to split sales' income of his JG Wilderlands overview map (which he asked me to add a hex grid to because Necromancer forgot to or didn't see why it was necessary) and my D-Day maps. This will now transfer to Bob Jr. But I have elected to give it some time before I report to him.

I miss Bob but had a wonderful time with him...

Thank you very much, Mr. Owen.

yeah that would be cool!

*readies 30,000 questions about tegel manor*

Great to have a chance to read some of the JG history.
Thank you very much!

Plaag wrote:Yeah, Bill's a great guy to talk to about Judges Guild's past.

Bill would you be fine with having a forum thread started where people can ask questions?  You can participate as often as you wish, but I thought to ask before I create it.

ShaneG.

Okay with me. Please forgive me for being sporadic in my responses though.

I have 3 jobs now with what amounts to 2 business being started up www.tourgrouppro.com and selling ebay stuff... plus I still produce crazy game projects a bit here and there. I'm working on a 3x4' full color historical wargame map in illustrator and a Top Secret project besides.

plus I broke a finger, got to see my step-daughter walk as a Doctor of Psychology and my Mac crashed! I'm VERRY slowly unbacking now onto the ancient g4 -- yuck!

and I'm not just being modest by saying that i know more about the nuts and bolts of early jg than the campaign assumptions--that was Bob's area and I expect that bob jr and james m have gotten a lot of that to carry on.

but i hope to give a little help on that too. I'm pleased to see your many efforts to document and post details about the amazing jg story that I got to be part of with Bob--but here's the bittersweet fact... the best part of all of it was... Bob.

i miss him but trust i will see him again.

How did you first meet Bob?

Bill,

I done some cartography of my own and for some of the JG Revival projects (The three goodman games modules)

I am curious about a couple of things. I know they are detailed but anything you remember would be cool.

Was campaign map one (City-State) done earlier as sort of a prototype. It is a slightly different style?

Also the Campaign Map One is "shifted" down a hex. If you put every other map together they will line up by the same rules (52XX overlapping 01XX) except for map one.

How was the original maps made? I think they looked like zipatone or one it's competitors. Some of the symbols (like mountains and hills) look hand drawn but there are so many to reproduce. I was able to track down a CD from letraset that has scan of their transfer what I am able to reproduce much of the old look.

Finally how did you setup the maps. By this I mean there were designed to interlock. Did you have a master to work off and sectioned it? Or each map draw by eyeballing a smaller scale map.

I know this is some old stuff but anything you can shed on this would be appreciated.

Here some of the work I done over the years. .

My own interpretation of the City-State Map for my own Majestic Wilderlands.

http://home.earthlink.net/~wilderlands/Map_Key.jpg

Map 19 which I drawn to be north of Map 5 (Valon) This is meant for the Boxed Set Wilderlands of High Fantasy. Meant to emulate the full Judges Guild Style. Still trying to figure out how to draw the coasts like in the original.

http://www.ibiblio.org/mscorbit/beta/ca ... ap19lg.jpg

A map of the Ghinor/Southern Reach done in Harn Style for my own Majestic Wilderlands.

http://www.ibiblio.org/mscorbit/beta/Ca ... Ghinor.jpg

Some half done maps of the Village of Woe one hex north of City-State
http://www.ibiblio.org/mscorbit/beta/woe_area.jpg
http://www.ibiblio.org/mscorbit/beta/woevillagelg.jpg

Enjoy
Rob Conley

FormCritic wrote:How did you first meet Bob?

I can address this and the following post via the project I've been writing since about January. I expect to have a little book out this summer maybe sooner.

Of course it may only create new questions! Stay tuned for more news.

PS check out my ebay auctions (gamedesign4u) in 15 days, the white fang vault will deposit several ancient JG and TSR... some of which are in mint condition.

<<I done some cartography of my own and for some of the JG Revival projects (The three goodman games modules)

I am curious about a couple of things. I know they are detailed but anything you remember would be cool.

Was campaign map one (City-State) done earlier as sort of a prototype. It is a slightly different style?>>

It was done first for Installment K as I remember it. And yes, it is likely the style evolved a bit.

<<Also the Campaign Map One is "shifted" down a hex. If you put every other map together they will line up by the same rules (52XX overlapping 01XX) except for map one.>>

Yes. I screwed up in not thinking through how they would fit together properly. I can't remember but we may have realized after the 1st one how the grid had to be a certain # of columns & rows to match up left/right & up/down. My excuses are: I was an untrained 22 year old working alone. Bob and I were surprisingly autonomous and compartmentalized about how we put the materials together.

I have flayed myself enough on this though. 30 years is plenty.

<<How was the original maps made? I think they looked like zipatone or one it's competitors. Some of the symbols (like mountains and hills) look hand drawn but there are so many to reproduce. I was able to track down a CD from letraset that has scan of their transfer what I am able to reproduce much of the old look.>>

As I remember it, the we would cut the lower 2/3rds of the hand-drawn mountain out of zipatone and with the exacto knife, place it in position.

Most of the initial maps were drawn by Bob and I think I went over to Wood Printing to use their typesetter to set the type for all the text.

After I was gone from the Guild, later Wilderlands maps may have been drawn by Bob's employees under his direction.

The maps were drawn with Rapidograph drafting pens on vellum with an SPI grid underneath. The original grid with coordinates was taken from an SPI grid and halftoned to be lighter than full strength Brown ink. I had called SPI and asked for permission to use this copyrighted art, which they agreed to. They were incredibly helpful to other companies. When I contacted Dunnigan to lead a tour of European battlefields in 1991 he said he remembered JG. But on the tour he advised against getting back into wargame publishing. He'd had enough.

The printing plates for the maps were "doubleburned" with the art full strength and the hexes/coordinates at a lighter tone via the halftone. Because digital reproduction is a black box to 99.99% of the population you may not appeciate how painstaking this process was for the printers. They charged a lot for the halftoning because every time they gingerly laid it on the stock negative of hexes that we'd made from the SPI blank grid, they risked scractching the emulsion and ruining it for future use. At least this is what Keith Phillips of Allied American Graphics told me. Later on we printed the maps via Bob Bridgman of Abbott & Foran.

On the other hand, once the plates were made they'd last for 10's of thousands of copies (and multiple print runs) and as long as they had the negatives still, they could make new plates if the first ones got worn out. Every 5 years or so, I'd call up all our printers in town and ask them if they found any of our old negs or plates. It's none of my business per se but Bob would bug me every so often about remaking the maps. I figured I'd stay in the printers' "face" so they might think of me if they couldn't find Bob when cleaning out their attic. I have had a higher profile locally as a business owner and have been in the same location since 1970 so easier to find.

<<Finally how did you setup the maps. By this I mean there were designed to interlock. Did you have a master to work off and sectioned it? Or each map draw by eyeballing a smaller scale map.>>

Bob had drawn a world view in the Guidelines for the City State which was the 3rd component made after the CSIO maps and D-Tac Cards and I don't think it was sectioned off at that early point. But then we did do that before Installment K. That became the master plan... but obviously a lot of detail had to be fleshed out on the Campaign Maps.

I did something similar sectionwise to make my D-Day beach maps at www.cafepress.com/judgesguild/310224. I took a Michelin map from 1946 that was sold to returning GI's, Tommies and a few Germans I suppose. I spent a lot of time deciding the scale of the hexes, their interlocking nature and allowing for the unprintable part of the Epson 1520's 13x19" paper. All this care because of the embarassing glitches in JG Wilderlands!

And I was working with pixel level precision via Photoshop! A bit over done but if was no more than 1/300th inch off, that should be good enough.

I managed to drag this projecct out for 7 years to finish 10 22x34" full color maps (which would be equivalent to 20 wilderlands sized maps because it was such a giant pain to make each map (40-60 hours each). Part of it was because I really didn't know how to use Illustrator that well but these 400 hours of effort fixed that. That version of Illustrator (v5 or v7) did NOT have layers and so I had to hoke up a work around or it would have been hopeless. The solution was to group each like item (every block of buildings or every little woods) and move it to the back or top and move everything else. Part of the time was just waiting for the dang screen to redraw! By the time I had a Mac G3 that was less of an issue.

Originally when I started that in 1997 I planned to do it 2 colors (black & blue) because we had a 2 color copier at work but I realized how much nicer they'd look in full color and have greater utility because of varying contour levels etc. And color printing had finally become practical through big inkjets that had incredible quality.

Blah blah... I know that the D-Day maps aren't particularly germane to JG but things occur to me:

1. I was shopping for grape tomato plants this afternoon and I realized how making the maps' hexes an odd scale might have actually helped our sales since people had to buy our blank hex maps to add to the 'world' of their imagining. We did not make the odd size because we were trying to sell more (like a Sony Betamax/VHS sort of battle).

We did the maps with tiny hexes purely so that you'd have more world to explore and more baronies to create! I really regret this choice though, I think we should have gone with standard 5/8" hexes because people DID want to use them as boardgame style counter maps (that had NOT occurred to us).

And I think that the denser terrain made more work for Bob. Protecting him from burnout was vitally important. He seemed indefatiguable but that couldn't really be true.

2. I also regret not having the maps cut half way along each hex so they'd butt together 'out of the box' (maybe I would have caught the problem mentioned above during the 1st map). On the other hand, the frame effect probably made them look nicer.

3. Why not do color or have higher production values? It wasn't affordable at this stage (although later with the KK Stevens web offset it was but the paper stock was not as heavy and not textured). These installments went out to people at roughly $2 each! And even with inflation making that $8-10 in today's dollars, too much cost for that minimal retail price.

We and a lot of customers liked the classic, olden look of the maps. And I think it's important to remember how our level of quality may have impacted customer usage. What I mean is that if we'd provided extremely high quality (printing wise) materials especially if on slick, glossy paper, how many people would have felt comfortable or even able to mark them up with their own personalization.

The last time I saw Bob, he still brought up "remember how we were worried whether we were giving them enough material?" I sensed a wistfulness in that question or unfinished business. And responded with reassurance that "you blew'em all away Bob!" And we did. Even TSR seemed to have to play catch up with what we were doing. And I think we helped them make their game a lot more playable.

Sure, later on people could do better using our stuff as a basis to improve on. But they needed the prototype to do better. I have always appreciated people able to make the first draft... making improvements was relatively easier using the realized vision of the pioneer.

<<I know this is some old stuff but anything you can shed on this would be appreciated.
Rob Conley>>

Thanks Rob! I appreciate the care you've gone to match our original pre-digital age efforts!

I will look at your stuff later and comment but AS USUAL, my blah blah blah spell has run too long already!

Bill