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The story of Chaosium and Avalon Hill is an epic of what a small company should not do.
Now, I’d had a lifelong goal to have Avalon Hill produce a board game done by me. I had bought U-Boat, an AH game, in 1959 or so (I still have the game.) It was the first “realistic” war game I’d ever seen, though I’d played Conflict avidly before that (unrealistic, because your unit movement depends on dice rolls.)
In 1962 I moved to Illinois from Connecticut, just before my freshman year of High School. I had two friends: one was a war gamer, and the other was a juvenile delinquent, so I spent half my time playing war games. It was Dave Murphy who introduced me to them. They were all Avalon Hill, of course: Tactics II, D-Day, etc. So ever since then I’d always dreamed of Avalon Hill publishing one of my games.
When Chaosium was successful with RuneQuest we eventually decided to stop producing board games. They took twice as long to produce, cost twice as much to manufacture, and sold half as much. So Tadashi and I went to Avalon Hill to see if we could sell them our board games. We met Eric Dott, who was a pretty unlikable old guy. Cantankerous, foul mouthed, crude and one of the leading slum lords of Baltimore. The game business seemed to be an appendage to his printing business, which seemed to be more of a front for Eric than a real day job. The interview went well enough, and Eric agreed to purchase Dragon Pass (the new title for WB&RM) and Elric which they did eventually produce. So my dream came true.
After closing that deal, Eric told me that what he really wanted was to publish RuneQuest. Now RuneQuest was one of our real moneymakers, but we’d reached a business plateau by that time. It was clear we needed to have a full time marketing guy to expand our market and keep up with the rest of the market, which was at that time getting larger and increasingly professional. But no one had miraculously appeared to be hired.
Well, I told AH I’d sell them the game, which was what they wanted, for a million dollars. And I would have, too. But Eric balked. So instead they discussed a license deal.
Back home we discussed the options, and decided that AH might be just the right ticket to do the manufacturing and marketing for us. They were still one of the largest game manufacturers in the industry. Chaosium, meanwhile, would do the acquisitions, writing, design and layout—all our strong suits. Looked good!
We worked out a contract where they promised to spend such and such in advertising, etc etc. Looked great!
Of course, they wanted a new edition. We seized the chance to do a new edition and threw in every house rule we had, plus some more. The result was RQ3. One thing that I did insist on was keeping a close grip on the Gloranthan content. We didn’t license that to them. Thus the core game came out and was set in Fantasy Europe, a setting we planned to develop at length.
When we got the color proofs back for the first release of the game I hit the ceiling. In direct violation of the contract they’d taken the designer’s names off the box! I protested to Eric, who simply said, “We don’t do that at Avalon Hill. Want to kill the deal right now?” I should have said yes, but I chickened out. I backed down. Big mistake. From "dream come true" to "nightmare."
And from then on things just got worse and worse. They ignored our expertise and kept making demands that we tried to meet, and it never clicked. We made a set of character sheets, just to have a quick product. They demanded that they had to be in a box, and then they complained that it cost too much to make and sell. They demanded product come quickly, even if it was to be reprints, and then complained that they were reprints.
At one point Eric revealed he was going to have three RPGs available through AH, and RuneQuest would be “the Cadillac” of the line. He sent me a manuscript of Powers & Perils and asked for an honest assessment. I told him it was awful, neither original nor well written. He accused me of professional jealousy. Go find a copy yourself and make your own mind up about which of us was right.
Relations got worse and worse. They weren’t spending the promised money on promotion, etc. Finally I told them Chaosium was going to withdraw from the deal. I sent a letter stating the contract violations they had committed, and we stopped working with them. They tried to do a new edition of RuneQuest, which never got into print for various reasons, but I had already forbidden then to use any Gloranthan content in their game.
It ended up with bad feelings all around. It was a business disaster for Chaosium, because we ended up pouring a lot of our energy into it and not getting as much out of it as we would have if we’d just done our own product. Thank the gods that Call of Cthulhu was a success for us, so we stayed in business.
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