Yes, I was off to a good start...and I could have/should have/would have done more work.
I wrote
House of the Brothers for my campaign, and re-wrote it over a Thanksgiving weekend for
Dungeon.
The maps in the magazine are almost exactly as I drew them.
There was a funny letter in a following
Dungeon magazine where one guy complained about how the module was too tough for characters of the recommended level. (You could almost hear him squeak as Erdol and Karzahk stomped on him.) My own players massacred the brothers and looted their lair...taking almost no damage and falling for almost none of the traps...at a slightly lower level than the recommendation. (And the adventure as published was slightly easier than the way I wrote it.)
My second proposal was rejected...and like writers are apt to do, I lost confidence.
There are a few things I would like to go back to my 20's self and kick myself in the butt over.
Dungeon is one of them.
I did do a couple of editing jobs for TSR...one of the
Fighter's Challenge modules and
The Marklands...which was a huge and complicated job, particularly in those days, when TSR used a primitive form of Wordperfect. Carl Sargent (I'm pretty sure it was Carl) had written using an Amstrad computer and a program called Professional Writer (ironically...that was exactly what I used at the time). Everything had to be painstakingly re-done after Wordperfect had brute-force translated the text.
It wasn't that long ago that a large number of computers could not understand each other's programs and word processor files. I was always behind the technology curve because each new generation came with programs the old generation could not run for various reasons.
One (possibly) interesting anecdote...I tried to destroy the city of Prymp on the Greyhawk map. It was on the corner of the
Marklands map. I lobbied hard that such a
stupid name should be obliterated, but by then the Greyhawk map was considered canonical.
One thing I did get clarified...the town of Oldred, on Relmore Bay, was hard to read on the original Greyhawk map. The town's name could just as easily be read as "Old Red." Since the town was not mentioned in the original text of the world of Greyhawk folio, the name on the map could be read either way. The name is obvious...now...but I still think that it sucks.
One of Gygax's quirks as a writer is to create goofy, nonsense names for people and places...things like "Voolbar Hokrap of Furyondy, Marquis of Kloog." (OK, I just made that up, but it isn't far off the mark, is it?) Names like Blibdoolpoolp were typical of Gygax.
TSR could be a wacky company to work with. On the
Fighter's Challenge module, TSR kept sending me a disk that had to be painstakingly translated...only to reveal each time that they had sent me the wrong disk again. It kind of made for some harsh deadline pressures...and everything was by snail mail...and people in charge don't like to be told they have made mistakes.
At one point I was one person away from getting hired by TSR and moving to Wisconsin. I don't know who the other person they hired might have been.
Mark
