Down and Out in Lake Geneva, Part 2

(Missed Part 1? Read it in the Archives.)

So there I was, in a room full of TSR creative directors, waiting for the hammer to fall, for the game designer's longest mile to start.

And it never came.

No. Instead, I got questions like: "Sometimes you have to work long hours, and face multiple deadlines at once -- do you think can you take it?"

I answered (wisely, I think), "Yes."

After a few more questions like that -- "If you could write any kind of product, what would that product be?" and "Are you willing to go to conventions to support the company?" -- I was led, not to a little room and a typewriter, but back to Director of Creative Services Tim Brown.

There, he asked me only one question: "Would you like to work here?"

Only later did I learn that TSR had already decided to hire me before I ever walked in the door -- at that time, they wouldn't have flown me all the way from Colorado if they didn't know that. They had liked my previous work a lot (even though it was all for a game line that got canceled before my products saw the light of day). I was lucky.

But I still had to answer the toughest question of all. Did I want to work there? I had decided in advance that I didn't. TSR, I thought, was a creativity-dampening Evil Empire run by suits who didn't care about gaming.

Except that it wasn't. I had learned in my short afternoon there some interesting and incredibly encouraging things. Back then, the creative staff of TSR, not business managers, determined the direction of product lines. A designer could get together with his editor and his ceative director and decide not only what product to produce but what he should do with that product -- a small team of creative people, a "product group" could direct a whole line of products. That's where things like Dragonlance, Dark Sun, and Planescape came from -- not from business managers and brand strategists.

And Creative Services (that's what the editors' and designers' department was called) was a fun bunch of people more than willing to foster the creative process by injecting all sorts of fun into the job. For example, designer Colin McComb headed something called the Mask of Valor ritual, where a new employee would be forced to put on a fencing mask while another, older employee would throw metal-tipped darts at him to get the darts to stick in the holes of the mask. Except that at the last minute, they switched the darts with rubber-tipped ones so there was no real danger. There was a real feeling of tradition there. A tradition of obviously creative and fun people who loved their work.

Not that everything was perfect. The computers were surprisingly out-of-date, the cubicles were a little on the dingy side, and I had to be there by 9 in the morning (not a good thing for me, and certainly not the lifestyle I'd been living as a freelancer). And there was surprisingly little gaming. But I could change that (and to at least some degree, I did).

So, much to my surprise, I said "yes," to Tim.

Thus began the 7-year (almost to the date) hiatus I took from freelancing. Seven years wherein I would find myself living for a while with Forgotten Realms designer extraordinaire Steven Schend and learning strange things about the things Ed Greenwood liked to do at conventions. Wherein I would set up huge, bizarre dioramas of action figures with editor Ray Vallese. Wherein I would hide hundreds of Taco Bell sauce packets in every conceivable place throughout Creative Director Thomas Reid's office. Where I would eventually leave the old Q-Tip factory and move across the country to Seattle, Wash., as the company was bought up from around me. And sometime, during all of this, find the time to design dozens of D&D products -- eventually getting the privilege to help shape a whole new edition of the game. It was a great seven years, but things run their course. I'm not really sorry to be gone, and in fact am quite happy to be back on my own as a freelancer. Things have changed since I first came on, some for the worse, some for the better. A pretty good run at a job I didn't even want.

Oh, and of course, TSR is where I met my wife Sue. But that's a different story.