Rolling for Initiative is a weekly column by Scott Thorne, PhD, owner of Castle Perilous Games & Books in Carbondale, Illinois and instructor in marketing at Southeast Missouri State University. This week, Thorne gives us a great story on game designer Lester Smith.I attended Quincon, a small tabletop gaming convention in Quincy, Illinois, this past weekend and had the opportunity to reconnect with Lester Smith, a prolific game designer during the 80s and early 90s, who has gotten back into the game, so to speak, in the past few years. Since we had time, I wanted to find out how he got involved in the gaming industry and what he had in the works now.
Smith entered the gaming industry in the fall of 1984, submitting what was called at the time a "capsule review" of Wizard's Realm to Steve Jackson Games' Space Gamer magazine. Emboldened by his success, he then submitted a full game, Mind Duel, for inclusion in the magazine. Unfortunately, SJG sold off Space Gamer just then and Mind Duel instead appeared in the first of the renamed VIP of Gaming magazine, which folded after only a few issues.
Moving forward a few years, now pursuing an English degree in Bloomington, Illinois, Smith landed a proofreading job at Game Designer's Workshop, (GDW). While proofreading, Smith developed the habit of making marginal notes, suggesting corrections or improvements to the material. The higher-ups at GDW noticed this and, rather than getting annoyed, Marc Miller, the designer of Traveller, asked if Smith would write the first adventure module for the company's new Traveller 2300 RPG. He did and then wrote a memo to GDW head Frank Chadwick with suggestions to improve the realism of Traveller 2300 when the company reprinted the game. Chadwick agreed with his suggestions, then turned the situation about by asking Smith to do a complete revision of the game, now called just 2300. Then, when GDW decided it wanted to do an ecologically themed horror RPG, it handed that to Smith too. The result: the cult classic RPG Dark Conspiracy. By the end of the 80s, Smith was line manager for both Dark Conspiracy and 2300, as well as working on other games for the company such as Test of Arms and Space 1889.
A good friend, Tim Brown, had left GDW for TSR and let Smith know that TSR needed designers immediately, so Smith sent in a resume. Apparently "immediately" at TSR at the time meant something different than it does to most people as Smith heard nothing for a year. A callback for an interview resulted in another year's wait. A third interview, this time with Jim Ward, who was vice-president of Creative Services, resulted in a tour showing where Ward's desk had been during previous TSR layoffs and a job offer with several conditions that he could not accept, including a requirement that all of his writing would belong to TSR. Smith passed, resulting in a fourth callback a year later, with a similar tour and Ward and TSR opting to meet all of Smith's conditions from the previous interview. In fact, when he didn't respond immediately, just processing the size of the salary offer, which was larger than expected, Ward responded by bumping the salary offer up another 20%. Just shows that silence can be profitable.
During his tenure at TSR, Smith wrote Bug Hunters for the Amazing Engine system, developed Dragon Dice (the original DiceMasters), and worked on Red Steel, PlaneScape and an unpublished follow-up to the DragonStrike game.
Leaving TSR about 1995, he joined Brown at the comic publisher Comico, which had them develop a collectable card game based on the company's characters. Nothing ever came of it though and in 1998, he left to work for Sebranic, formerly known as The Write Source, a publisher of educational textbooks, where he has remained since, writing poetry and short stories in his spare time, only designing a few gaming products, notably Chaos Progenitus and the Zero RPG.
In addition, for several years, Smith has published an annual anthology of Halloween poetry and short stories and is looking for contributors to this year’s edition. Interested writers can go to http://www.popcornpress.com/ for more information.
The opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the writer, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the editorial staff of ICv2.com.
