A letter from Ken

Not long ago we received a letter from Ken Fletcher along with a scan of an old convention poster.

Our passion is the preservation of first hand accounts of the early days of RPG with as little alteration as possible. Ken's reflections on the old days of SF fandom, as well as the initial stages of Role Playing games, are invaluable to all of us who are studying the Twin Cities gamers and related social groups.

Ken's email to us about this artifact should be shared for other historians to copy and save along with the image. Ken has been very kind and given us permission to do so.

The poster now resides in our archive and we have tagged it with our website. Feel free to use this image, or excerpts of it, yet, please respect our web tag when doing so. Too many images are now on the web without any patrimony making them nearly useless to serious researchers.

Chris & Griff --

I have empathy with the printer/bindery redo. I'm glad its working out.

We went through near-things like that at Adventure Games, doing boxed table-top projects. We had one or two of the staffers that had worked some with printing in their previous work, but they might have worked only on museum pamphlets, for example. The specifics of doing the preparation for the printing would change with each category and format of publication. Game rules collated into boxes with slick color covers were outside of everyone's experience... Including the printers. Most all of the game company staff were learning as we went along, We learned that was also the case with the printer's staff.


Distracting Document follows:

As a distraction, attached is a scan of a flyer for a Minneapolis/Saint Paul tiny science fiction fan convention in 1971. The flyer was posted in a few bookstores & magazine stands & libraries in the Twin Cities, but batches were also sent to other regional sf conventions, to be put on a convention's 'freebie table' near the convention registration areas.

The Minicon 'committee' (all unpaid volunteers) were only expecting about 100 attendees, and that's about how many showed up. (The local active club had only been organized in about 1967.)

You may notice that in the lower middle cartoon panel, there is a listing of some of the possible events. "...and Games (Avalon Hill, that
 is!)". For this convention that meant that there would be one or two round hotel tables in the open event space with several boxed Avalon Hill wargames available for any convention members to set up and play
during the convention hours. Nothing more organized than that. The games might have included some of Avalon Hill's more middle-class table-top board games, like "Acquire", but there would have been standard war-games like "Tactics II",  "Gettysburg", & "Jutland". Those games were there to attract the war-gamers among the science fiction (& fantasy) fans.

In the upper right-hand cartoon panel, is a cartoony caricature of the
convention co-chairman: "Blue Petal" & "Louis Fallert" (the same person). In the caricature he has been aged about 30 years, to provide
the proper gravitas for a Con Boss. He was about 25 years old.

"Blue Petal"/Louis Fallert, (as you probably & thoroughly know), was the
sf club member who had been attending the U of Mn Student Gaming Club meetings in 1974, when Dave Arneson and some of the Blackmoor Bunch showed-up to show-off and play-test the new D & D rules (or maybe Blackmoor?) with a test-batch of fresh war-gamers. It was a hit at that weekly meeting, and was a hit with Blue Petal, too. He went home and did up his own abbreviated version of dungeon-exploration-fantasy role playing to test out with his room-mates (mostly sf fans) It was a hit. I believe that other gamers in the sf club went to the UofM Game Club in following weeks to experience Blackmoor-style play. Richard Tatge was one of those, I think. They liked the idea. The idea was a hit. Within weeks, the simplified variants (at least one for each new gamesmaster) started being played in corners of the sf club meeting (which rotated about every 2 weeks around at member's homes).

Or so is my version of the legend. 8) I was one of the cartooners,
drawing & lettering that Minicon 5 flyer, to BluePetal's specifications.
I had visited one meeting of the U of Mn Games Club, but I am pretty
sure it was not one of those 'Blackmoor introduction D&D' meetings. I
did visit Blue Petal at his apartment in Saint Paul early in his sharing
of his version of 'Dungeon' and played several of his surface-exploration & dungeon-diving games there. I was at the sf-fan club that year, when a significant number of the members started to develop & play their own 'Dungeon' variants. I played in Richard Tatge's
'Dungeon' version many times.

Wishing you publishers well,

Ken

We are still working away on various projects.

Today we are going to be picking up the redone Lost Dungeons of Tonisborg books, which should make those of you who have waited much too long for these very excited.

We are also about to launch our first war game KickStarter of an old-stock game from the '70s.

The image above is a teaser of what you can expect to find on the KickStarter.

Some other hints:
-game design by Lonnie Gill
-1/4800 WWII miniature ship models by Randy Hoffa

If you have not told a friend about the documentary, please do:
https://vimeo.com/ondemand/sobfinal/