Storytellersunplugged

Personal history stares down at me from the wall over my computer. It hasn’t blinked in six years, which means that I’m the one who occasionally has to look away. Never for too long, though – the challenge is always there, and there’s only one way to answer it.

In this case, personal history consists of a series of illustrations from assorted role-playing books I worked on back in my misspent youth. There’s a haunting Ron Spencer pencil sketch of a ghost at a railroad crossing, a gorgeously detailed rendering of a Chinese demon, a long-legged ghostly Redcoat from the Revolutionary war, and a cackling Rasputin off in the corner. Behind me sits the frontispiece from a book touching on the Holocaust; look closely at it and you can see where the artist used whiteout to take withered angel wings off the back of a spectral ferryman. It’s all beautiful work, and I can tell you which book each of those illustrations is from. I can tell you the chapter, the context of the illustration, and in one case, the movie I had to mail to Nebraska in order to provide visual reference on a character sketch. Yep, we took those pictures seriously, and the text that went with them, too. Hard work, good books, solid sales, long nights in a converted warehouse/office while someone went berserk on the Darkstalkers III machine in the break room – that’s what these are evidence of.

It’s been six years since I bailed out of the tabletop role-playing industry, three since I stopped writing for RPG books. Enough was enough; I’d worked on over a hundred and twenty of the suckers, in capacities ranging from writing and designing from word one to “Can you do the index, because Bob had a bad breakup with the Pagemaker manual and doesn’t want to be left alone in a room with it”. It was a good run, with a lot of work I’m very proud of. For five years, give or take, I was seeing print regularly and – God help us all – getting fans.

That’s right, fans. People who enjoyed my work. It was mildly terrifying the first time a signed-and-numbered prerelease edition of one of my books sold out at a con, even if signed-and-numbered in this case meant “Rich and a Sharpie in his hotel room an hour before the show floor opens, and here’s hoping he remembers how to count”. People quoted me in arguments and sent me potentially inexplicable gifts in the mail (I’m still waiting for a good explanation of the bottle of Everclear that got sent from Connecticut. I didn’t know you could even buy Everclear in Connecticut.) And if a small voice said that it was the licensed universe I was running around in rather than my writing that folks were lining up for, I honestly didn’t care. I was the one
signing the books and getting name-checked online and in general sopping up a fair bit of water in the small pond marked “Tabletop RPGs”. It was fun and it was great egoboo. Someone even made “I Know Rich Dansky” boxer shorts and tried to sell them online. It might not have been top of the world, ma, but it felt like it at times.

And still, I decided to move on. I got tired of playing in someone else’s sandbox. I was tired of vampires and werewolves and the ninety-seven clearly delineated subspecies of each (each with their own t-shirt, cloisonné pin, comic book and breakfast cereal), bored to friggin’ tears of writing up character statistics and deathly done with online arguments over whether Rage Across Sheboygan contradicted the continuity established in LaGrange By Night. For all the good times and good books and good people I’d worked with, I was simply done. I’d said what I had to say. Besides, I wanted to write fiction, and I couldn’t do that if I kept on taking RPG assignments. There were only so many hours in the day, so I had to cut myself off, step away and say “no” to the offers of work. The demon tempter of “just this one more” had to be bound, gagged, and dropped into the Neuse River with concrete galoshes on his flabby feet.

Eventually, word got around. The offers stopped coming. I had what I wanted – space to do my own work – and it was put up or shut up time. No more excuses, no more “I’d write the novel if I didn’t owe someone 20000 words on cannibal space elves”. No more guarantees, either. I’d gone from picking and choosing jobs to being picked and chosen – or not. I’d moved on to a new world with new rules, a pond that could delicately be described as “big”. I’d turned back into a very small fish indeed. Krill, if I want to be honest. We’re talking serious diatom action here.

There are times when the change is frightening. Writing fiction instead of games is like going from undrafted free agent to the starting lineup. Nobody cares what you did on the last level. That’s over and done with. What can you do here and now and on your own?

It’s a good question. When I sold my first non-licensed long fiction, it was an incalculable feeling. There it was, proof positive that I could in fact write my own stuff, that I didn’t have to lean on someone else’s world. I’d written the novella, known intellectually it was good, but until someone else looked at it and said, “Yeah, this will do,” I had been constantly afraid that I wouldn’t be able to cut it. Maybe I could start swimming out into deeper waters after all.

Those pictures are still there, looking down at me. They tell me that I could go back, that I could be a big shot again. That there’s enough room in that old, smaller pond for me, time and room to play at being a shark.

There are even moments when it’s tempting. See enough “good story but not for us” letters and you get wistful for guaranteed publication. Wander through enough bookstores that don’t stock the magazine you just sold to and you find yourself stopping in front of the Games section, mentally ticking off how many of the books on the shelf were written by friends or former collaborators.

It’s not an option, though. Not a choice, just the illusion of one. I’ve moved on to new challenges, and there’s more to be said for the uphill climb than for the retreat to safety with inflated stories of the dangers on the heights. The pictures on the wall are good reminders of how far I’ve come. The empty spaces next to them are reminders of how far I have to go.

–Richard Dansky