Me 'n' Star Wars

Long ago and far away, I worked on a Star Wars project.  So long ago and far away, in fact, that my copy is buried somewhere in my massive game library, and -- until this morning -- I no longer remembered the exact name of the product. The product is Star Wars Galaxy Guide 4: Alien Races , and it was one of the first (if not the first) book to detail many of the aliens in the Star Wars universe.  My friend Troy Denning (now a major Star Wars author) was the lead designer on the product, and Andria Hayday (one of my favorite people and Troy's future wife) and I helped him with the work, taking the aliens from the films and creating their backgrounds out of whole cloth.  Imagine my surprise when, a couple of years ago, Troy casually mentioned to me that everything the three of us had written on that book was now part of the Star Wars cannon -- sacred text for the enormous franchise.  Wow.  Who knew?  At the time, we were just trying to till in the blanks left by the original 3 movies and come up with cool stuff for game players.  (We'd done similar work on the Pacesetter game Star Ace several years before.)

So, for reasons I may go into some other time, it recently became important for me to be able to cite which Star Wars product I'd worked on.  I could have turned to digging through my library to find the book, but I remembered that I'd once seen a pretty long list of my game credits somewhere on line.  A quick search turned it up at the Pen & Paper RPG Database.  It's cool that someone is keeping track of the game products I've worked on over the last 28+ years, because I certainly haven't been.  (Though, again, it's probably all in my library.)  And while this list probably isn't complete (or always entirely accurate), it is a pretty cool list--and impressively long, as well.  So, if you're ever wondering what games I've worked on, that site is probably a good place to start.

Looking through the site is a real trip down memory lane.  There are listings there for products I barely remember doing, and then there are projects I will never forget like B3: Palace of the Silver Princess, the D&D module so infamous that they destroyed the entire original print run.  In a recent conversation among friends about the "good old days," someone posed the question "Who was responsible for that fiasco?"

The short answer is: I was.

But that's a tale for another day.