Stu has spent more than 80 hours interviewing Joseph and many other contributors to Goodman Games history, a project that continues to this day. Joseph has unpacked his storage unit to review two decades of product, promotional material and photos with Stu. Stu’s manuscript turns these historical recollections into an entertaining chronicle that reads like old friends swapping stories at a bar. As Stu described it:

For twenty-five years, Goodman Games has been crawling dungeons. Everybody knows that. But did you know about the pigeon? Or the hordes of troglodytes? Then there’s the esteemed RPG designers, talented artists and an alarming number of ziggurats. Nunchucks! Communists! Vintage paperbacks! Dinosaurs! There’s so much you don’t know, so get in the wizard van, gongfarmer, we’re going to learn some history!

Reading this history with fresh eyes, it seems like a miracle we’ve survived this long! At the bottom of this page, you can find two excerpt’s fro Stu’s still-in-progress manuscript.

The Art of Goodman Games is organized into major chapters around the popular artists most associated with Goodman Games. In consultation with Erol Otus, Doug Kovacs, Stefan Poag, William McAusland, Brad McDevitt, and Peter Mullen, each chapter pulls together a wide variety of their most impressive Goodman Games work from the last 25 years, as well as biographical notes. Additional chapters then showcase other important works published by Goodman Games. The list of artists who have contributed to Goodman Games works is extraordinary, and includes Ken Kelly, Jeff Easley, Sanjulian, Ian Miller, Jennell Jaquays, Jim Holloway, Jim Roslof, Russ Nicholson, and others.

After Joseph emptied his storage unit and organized 25 years of historical publications, Phil Reed spent two full days at the Goodman Games offices paging through physical copies of this vast archive of material. The resulting collection will doubtless impress any fan of fantasy art.

Jim Roslof was TSR’s first art director. Goodman Games commissioned art from him during the 3E era, and Jim painted covers for DCC adventures starting as far back as DCC #28: Into the Wilds. In 2010, Jim drew the frontispiece illustration for DCC RPG and it was used at a flyer to advertise the new game. Jim passed away soon after, and the final 4 illustrations that he completed in his lifetime were for the DCC RPG core rulebook.

After his passing, Joseph, Harley and Doug visited the Roslof home to pay their respects to his wife. They were given a chance to tour his studio. It was amazing. During the tour, they came across some old Prince Valiant comics that Jim had used for inspiration.

Prince Valiant began in the 1930s, but the comic is timeless and Fantagraphics had just started publishing a new run of Prince Valiant hardcover reprints in late 2009. Inspired by what they’d seen in the Roslof studio, the Goodman crew started reading Prince Valiant. Their research revealed that Prince Valiant in turn inspired many Appendix N authors and artists.

Fast forward many years later. DCC RPG is popular and foreign publishers have started translating it. Our German publishing partners, System Matters, are inspired by our work in variant covers. They seek out a fantasy artist to create a variant cover in their market. This variant cover artist is named Ertugrul Edirne. He is most famous for… painting the covers to the Prince Valiant translations published in German.

This variant cover by Ertugrul Edirne, which we have nicknamed “The German Castle cover,” is so amazing that we in turn would like to offer it in an English-language edition. We are pleased to present this DCC RPG cover variant, part of the wonderful ecosystem of inspirations which ultimately come from Prince Valiant, TSR, and Appendix N.

Hear more from the creators in these videos!

While Joe was working on the production side of Goodman Games, crisis loomed on the logistical side of the operation, though through no fault of his own. 

Despite, or perhaps because of, the d20 feeding frenzy, there were already signs of weakness in the D&D ecosystem. In order to capitalize on demand and compete in an increasingly crowded field, publishers were flooding the market with product at a pace that was too great for players to absorb and for store shelves to contain. That left distributors and consolidators with a glut of product and a shortfall of cash. Eric Rowe’s Wizard’s Attic was in a particularly precarious spot because the glut hit as the company was moving to a new warehouse in Louisville, Kentucky and transitioning from consolidation to a more traditional distribution model. As a consolidator, Rowe had a lot of cash on hand between the time when the distributors paid him and when he, in turn, had to pay his clients. Moving to a distribution model simplified the operation—he no longer had to provide extra services—but he also lost the ability to hold onto the cash that cushioned his operations three weeks of out a given month. Not that there was a lot of cash around to begin with.

The thing that makes consolidators attractive to small companies is their ability to bundle services. Wizard’s Attic and their primary competitors, Fast Forward Entertainment and Osseum Entertainment, were not only doing the traditional distribution work of storing product and filling orders, they were managing distribution deals, marketing, sales and store solicitations all for one fee. That’s great for the publishers, because they don’t need to manage a bunch of separate vendors, but for the consolidators, it’s a bit like buying a lottery ticket. They’re taking on clients in the hopes that a few of them are going to have popular games that move enough units to basically float the whole company. The middle tier clients are modestly profitable to represent—Goodman Games was in this bracket—but the lower tier publishers were dead weight. The consolidator still bears the expense of storing, soliciting and fulfilling their meager sales and, eventually, too much dead weight will sink the company. Rowe seems to have been aware of this, hence his move to convert his business solely to distribution, but either he was too late or the extenuating circumstances were too great to overcome.

In December of 2001, Aldo Ghiozzi began to sense something was amiss with Wizard’s Attic. His company, Wingnut Games, was an Attic client, and payments weren’t coming monthly as promised. When he started asking around, he found that Rowe owed money to a lot of other publishers. One, Rob Stone of Citizen Games, suggested Ghiozzi could do a better job. “The funny thing was that if you look at the quality of my Wingnut Games line, it was mediocre art and layout at best,” recalls Ghiozzi, “and so many other game publisher friends were like, ‘Wait, you got distributors to buy this? How, when my games look so much better than yours?’” Ghiozzi’s background in advertising and business development in the videogame industry gave him an edge calling up distributors and selling them on his products, so he decided to take a crack at the consolidation business. He used his personal marketing company, Impressions Advertising & Marketing, as the vehicle and started recruiting clients that Christmas Eve (to the consternation of his wife, who was ready to get on with the holidays). His first three clients were his own Wingnut Games, Rob Stone’s Citizen Games and Troll Lord Games. He sublet space from Rowe’s warehouse to store their products and Wizard’s Attic took care of their fulfillment. At the 2002 GAMA Trade Show, Ghiozzi had a table next to Goodman Games and, wouldn’t you know it, Joe signed on with Impressions along with seven more clients. When Rowe shifted his operation exclusively to storage and fulfillment, he passed all of his remaining consolidation clients on to Ghiozzi.     

A few months later, Wizard’s Attic was out of money and on the brink of collapse. Jennifer Stone, who managed the Louisville warehouse, heard the landlord was going to lock Rowe and his staff out of the building and seize the stock in lieu of unpaid rent. Now, as big as it may seem sometimes, the RPG industry is a small world and everybody knows everybody else. In this case, Jennifer Stone was the soon-to-be ex-wife of Rob Stone of Citizen Games. That Friday, Jennifer called Aldo and said he better get to Louisville and get Impression’s stock (including a large amount of Goodman Games products) because the lock was going on the door Monday morning.

“I was lucky,” recalls Ghiozzi, “my wife was a flight attendant for United Airlines at the time, and spouses can fly for the cost of the taxes. I flew out from Oakland on the red-eye to Chicago then on to Louisville and slept over at Rob and Jen’s. I was there, I had access to the warehouse, but I had no idea how to move the product, or where. So, I called Don Reents, who owns Chessex.

“Now Don is one of the nicest guys in the industry, he’s my mentor. I called him and said, ‘Don, I don't know what to do. I’m about to get locked out of eleven pallets of product.’ And he says, ‘Eleven, that’s nothing. I can just go rent a truck for you. You can just put it in my warehouse.’ 

“Don rented a truck, drove it from Fort Wayne, Indiana, to Louisville. That morning, I went in with Jen and got everything together on those eleven pallets, wrapped them, got back on a flight and went home. Jen let Don in, and they put eleven pallets on a truck. Don saved me, saved Joe's stuff and the other clients I had at the time and moved it all to the Chessex warehouse.”

The products that Ghiozzi didn’t move out got trapped in legal limbo, or liquidated for pennies on the dollar. Wizard’s Attic’s subsequent bankruptcy was the death of many of the smaller companies who lost their stock or never got their back payments. Even larger companies that could theoretically weather the loss had a difficult time. Ghiozzi recalls hearing that Wizard’s Attic owed Mongoose $80,000. Worse, many publishers fled to Osseum and Fast Forward only to have history repeat when both companies were also pulled under by the d20 glut. Smaller companies were killed outright, larger ones were grievously wounded. 

Goodman Games dodged what could have been a mortal wound through knowing the right people at the right time. “I doubt I would have just quit, but it would have been a big problem,” Goodman recalls, “I had a small amount of stock I kept separate for direct orders, but Wizard’s Attic probably had more than 90% of my inventory.” Eric Rowe did quit and moved abroad. He told Aldo his wife got a job teaching at the University of New Zealand; Goodman characterizes it as fleeing the country. Folks in the games industry occasionally sight him in Australia. He still owes Joe $1,400, and probably much more to many others.

Joe took his first real step toward finding his niche and becoming the “old-school” guy on January 1, 2003, when he placed the print order for Dungeon Crawl Classics #1: Idylls of the Rat King. But old-school D&D had been on his mind for a while, and not because of visions of pulp sword and sorcery fiction dancing in his head.

Back on February 7, 2000, Ryan Dancey, the architect of the Open Game and D20 System licenses, released a study conducted through Wizards of the Coast titled Adventure Game Industry Market Research Summary v1.0. It was the product of a mail survey conducted in the summer of 1999 via 20,000 postcard questionnaires; a more detailed follow-up was sent to 1,000 of the original responders. The result is a specific sort of snapshot—of players in the United States, in 1999, who are willing to participate in a mail survey, the results of which intentionally omit collectible card games and players over 35—but quibbles over methodology aside, it remains one of very few glimpses of the hobby gaming demographics available to the public. Joe was particularly struck by chart breaking down the ages of tabletop RPG, miniature wargame and computer RPG players:

 

The age breakdown of players within the marketplace is:

Age                 TRPG             MWG             CRPG             All Gamers(*) 

12-15               23%                 27%                 23%                 11% 

16-18               18%                 17%                 16%                 7% 

19-24               25%                 24%                 23%                 13% 

25-35               34%                 32%                 37%                 29%

(*) “All Gamers” means people in the study population who reported playing any of the game types monthly, not just TCGs, RPGs, MWGs or CRPGs.

 

“I remember reading this and thinking, ‘Wow, D&D is not being played by kids. It's being played by grown-ups who have jobs, are out of college and remember the 1980s,” says Goodman. “I should deliberately think about customers as being in their thirties as opposed to teenagers, which is how I mostly experienced D&D.”

Coupled with seeing the recently released HackMaster parodies of classic D&D covers, the demographics made a compelling argument to embrace not just a retro aesthetic based on TSR’s old cover trade dress, blue maps and black and white illustrations, but also an older mode of play that focusing on dungeon crawling and the explore/fight/loot play loop. Joe dug through his old D&D modules for more inspiration. 

And inspiration he found, with plenty to spare. The opening lines on Idylls’ cover say a lot: “Remember the golden days of role playing, when adventures were underground, NPCs were there to be killed, and the finale of every dungeon was the dragon on the 20th level? Well, those days are back. Dungeon Crawl Classics feature bloody combat, intriguing dungeons, and no NPCs who aren’t meant to be killed. Each adventure is 100% good, solid dungeon crawl, with monsters you know, the traps you fear, and the secret doors you know must be there somewhere.” Jeffrey Quinn is the credited writer for the adventure, but that intro sure sounds a lot like Joe! Because it is: that blurb is included on or in nearly all the 3rd edition Dungeon Crawl Classics adventures. 

It speaks to something essential about the line and, perhaps, its enduring appeal. While the trappings resemble the original D&D adventures, Joe’s conception of the line wasn’t rooted in a powerful nostalgia for those scenarios. He only owned a few as a kid and besides X1: The Isle of Dread and a few others, he played through even less. His real passion back then was writing his own material. While D&D is clearly part of the DNA of DCC, it isn’t from the monolith of the official game but reflects instead that homebrew feeling of a game cobbled together by kids with no cash to buy the “real” books, but a surplus of imagination to write their own material. “I do feel quite nostalgic about it,” says Goodman, “But I got the aesthetic from other places as well. The same look and feel was in Warhammer 40,000 and Grimtooths Traps.” The result is something both new and familiar at the same time.

Matt Snyder’s maps are indeed blue and white; the original TSR adventures used a distinctive shade called non-photo blue to make photocopying the maps difficult. “The blue maps blew people’s minds at cons, it made Idylls an instant purchase.” Jeff Doten’s cover paintings and Bradley K. McDevitt’s interior illustrations are atmospherically darker than the heroic imagery in mainline D&D at the time. Doten establishes a grimy atmosphere, while McDevitt’s crisp linework evokes past masters like David Sutherland, Diesel LaForge and Dave Trampier without mindlessly imitating. Apart from the glossy cover stock, it looks like a TSR adventure from circa 1983; Joe’s layout credit is accompanied by a tip of hat, noting his work was done, “with all due respect to the early-80’s modules that inspired it.” 

As promised, following a brief introduction to the town of Silverton (where, I suppose, players could kill every NPC if they wanted, but that seems rather too broad a reading of Joe’s introduction), the entirety of the adventure takes place underground, in a once-abandoned silver mine now occupied by marauding goblins. In what would become a Goodman Games staple, though, all is not as it appears. The goblins are also wererats who serve the titular king, an exiled scion of Silverton who has returned seeking vengeance and to spread his shapeshifting curse (in an example of some light genre-mixing, if you removed the magic and the monsters, the story could easily be a western in the mode of Blueberry). But that’s not all! There’s also a gnomish necromancer, zombie miners and a slumbering, ancient evil that’s more than a match for any group of first to third level characters. Of course, the secret room it’s trapped in seems a bit like a treasure chamber if the players haven’t found the scraps of dire warnings left elsewhere in the complex. Modern mechanics aside, the book feels at home among the TSR adventures that predate the shift to narrative focus in I6: Ravenloft (1983) and the Dragonlance series (1984-1986).

The adventure tapped into an unmet appetite in the market and sold through in a few months. The reprint gave Joe the opportunity to update the rules for 3.5 and refine his vision for the line. “I got parts of the aesthetic right and parts of it really wrong,” he says, “The cover art was wrong, because I didn't know the right artist. It’s like that U2 song, ‘I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For.’” A more colorful piece by William McAusland replaced Doten’s front cover and a Jason Edwards piece now featured on the back; both illustrations are more firmly in the spirit of the early ’80s style. Joe also commissioned more interiors from McDevitt (“Brad got it right”). All three—McDevitt, McAusland and Edwards—would become staples of DCC adventures, and their traditional illustrations would help the line stand out in a market flooded with digital art.

Meanwhile, the Mike Mearls-penned Dungeon Crawl Classics #2: The Lost Vault of Tsathzar Rho went to press that May with a cover that featured art by a genuine old school master, Jim Holloway. Primarily an interior artist for books like Monster Manual II and Star Frontiers, he’s perhaps best known as the primary artist for West End Games’ Paranoia. He’d also paint a new cover for the third reprint of Idylls, in 2005.

Dungeon Crawl Classics #3: The Mysterious Tower was Goodman Games’ final adventure for 2003. It was the first of the line written by Joe, a testament to his transition from designer to publisher. And even then, it wasn’t part of the plan: Mike Mearls was supposed to write it but had to bail because of a scheduling conflict. The cover is also notable, as it marks the Goodman Games debut of one of the hobby’s greatest artists, Erol Otus. Otus worked for TSR and a few other publishers in the late ’70s and early ’80s, then moved into the more lucrative videogame industry. Before he left, he painted a number of iconic covers for D&D, including Deities & Demigods (1981) and S3: Expedition to the Barrier Peaks (1980). The same Otus cover appears on Dungeon Crawl Classics #3.5: The Haunted Lighthouse, an exclusive release for GenCon 2003 (the 3.5 numbering was a happy coincidence). It was (sort of) penned by none other than Dave Arneson, the co-creator of Dungeons & Dragons (see sidebar).

Working with artists like Holloway and Otus, or designers like Arneson, lent DCC a gravitas that bridged the past to the present. There are many products that are content to simply emulate or imitate older modes of play, but the DCC adventure line was meant to convey something essential about the past while still being exciting and attempting new things. From this point forward, a pattern emerges in the majority of Goodman Games products. Joe finds something from the old days—a whole game, a quirky accessory, a forgotten short story—and he tries to find the people best-suited to make something cool out it, often pulling in the original artists and designers to contribute. When done right, the result is something that almost stands outside of time, an ancient artifact made not just new, but expanded and mutated and evolved in ways that would have been inconceivable decades ago. Joe has done this so well and so often with his flagship line that he stopped being the “old-school guy” and quickly became the Dungeon Crawl Classics guy.

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