Writing Histories

[shannon_a]

One of my most recent writing projects has been writing up the history of the roleplaying industry. I got interested when I was putting together the RPGnet Gaming Index, and I started inputting all of the books from Imperium Games. It was weird, considering this company that put out almost twenty books over a one-year period, flaring up and then disappearing without a trace.

Out of curiosity I started hunting down USENET postings to try and figure out what had happened to Imperium, and when I figured it out as best I could, I wrote a history of the company. After that I got the bug, and looked at more companies, writing about big-dog Wizards of the Coast, my alma mater Chaosium, and others. I had three or four different articles in the work at one time.

Wizards of the Coast was the first one that got published, in my new column for RPGnet, "A Brief History of Game". You can find the syndication here on brief_history_o or just bop over to RPGnet itself.

My fifth article was just published today, on Green Knight, and I've now expended my entire catalog of articles I had ready, with the exception of that Imperium Games articles (which I expect to hold onto until I write about GDW, and then revise greatly).

These things are darned hard to write, with lots of research required, but I've also been getting nice comments on them, and I'm vaguelly considering whether they could be a book down-the-line. (Clearly, they could, but whether it'd be salable at all is a totally different issue.)

So, having run through my backstock, these last few days I've been writing the next one, on Pagan Publishing, and as of tonight the first draft is done. Whew.

On the other hand having written about several smaller companies, I now need to move back to a bigger company, and those take even more time because they have longer histories. I've got a few thousand words on ICE right now, that I wrote a month or more ago, but it's going to take a lot more than that to get it done.

I'm planning to get into that this weekend, along with my at-least-3k-words for the ElfBook.

Comments

[mylescorcoran]

I'm certainly enjoying the series on RPG.net and am looking forward to seeing the next article. I can only imagine the amount of work you have to put in though, so it might be a question of diminishing returns as you move on to long-dead companies (where the information is harder to come by) or smaller companies (where the audience is smaller). Have you put out a call for other people knowledgeable in the industry's history to contribute, or at least be interviewed for their insights?

[bobmungovan.livejournal.com]

I love the series as well. They're obviously well researched, and very interesting. I think it is a great resource, and will eventually be the thing that people refer to for the "true story" on the companies you report.