Memories of Tom Moldvay

Bob Kindel (dba The diceman), was one of the guys who answered my flier looking for players at the library, and has been playing in Telengard.

Bob’s been attending conventions (as a player, GM, vendor, and convention organizer) for a very long time, and seems to know just about everyone in the industry. I met him at Border’s so we could check each other out, as you have to do these days. Turned out he’s nice guy with no obvious social stigmas. When we got down to the crunch and I said I’m using the Moldvay D&D rules, he asked me if I knew Tom. I had learned a few years ago that Mr. Moldvay lived (and died) in Akron, the next town over. But I was stoked to find out Bob and Tom were friends and had gamed together.

When I mentioned that as boys, my brother & I had started with AD&D and considered “Basic” D&D the kiddy version and AD&D the “adult” version, Bob quickly interjected that Tom Moldvay held the reverse to be true. After all, AD&D really tried to cover every eventuality and provide a rule (or at least a random table) for every occasion; Basic D&D leaves it up to the DM and players to work out how they want the game to to play, and invites tinkering, expansion, and customization. Thirty years later I can see that Moldvay was right. The third thing that came up in our first conversation was that after Tom’s death, his only heir was his sister, a religious fanatic who burned all of Tom’s papers, games, and even his miniatures in a bonfire, since they were tools of Satan. <disconfirmed, 1-6-2012>

Gygax, Arneson, and Holmes have been justly celebrated and are well-documented among gamers on various web sites and forums, but I think that Moldvay deserves more recognition. Anyway enough from em; the point of this post is to reproduce the essay Bob wrote after I began pestering him about writing down some of the oral history of D&D and its creators.

Tom Moldvay

I have been asked by Mike to write about Tom Moldvay as a sort of “living history” effort. I don’t know about “living history” but I will give you some living memories before my cerebral cortex shorts out.

I won’t give you the nuts and bolts stuff you can get from wikipedia.com. I reviewed their entry and it’s about as accurate as Wikipedia gets.

I first met Tom in the mid-70s. He was at Kent and ran an excellent SF con called 1^st Dimension Con or something. It had Harlan Ellison (who spent Saturday evening standing outside the film site trying to convince people to boycott the showing of A Boy and His Dog) and Frederick Pohl (who sat in front of me at an Ellison reading and spent most of the time making fun of him). It was such a good con, in fact, that Tom once told me that he and the committee had spent four years paying for it. Tom was always more interested in being an SF writer than game designer. It chagrined him that he couldn’t make a living in SF.

At gaming, however, he was a natural. When Boot Hill was first published, an editor asked him to write a module for the system as soon as he could. Tom finished one over the weekend. “Could have done it quicker,” he said “but I needed to read the rules first.” The module? The legendary Mad Mesa with cowboys fighting dinosaurs (1 copy available on Amazon for $83.19).

When the orange cover Palace of the Silver Princess (D+D module B3) was pulled by TSR, it was to Tom they turned to do a superfast edit so that the revised edition (with green cover) could go out close to schedule. Legend has it that TSR pulled it because of “x-rated art.” The art really wasn’t much worse than one found in comics. It was changed, however, because D+D was under fire from the religious right. Tom insisted it needed to be rewritten because when it was reviewed, the editor noticed that there was no way to get into the 2^nd story of the palace. He also cleaned up a lot of detail stuff and gave it the Moldvay touch.

Tom was always a good man to turn to when you needed fast work — both professionally or in gaming. When I needed my 7 figure Asterix minis painted in two days for a con event, Tom did them for me in one.

I didn’t know Tom during the TSR years but got to know him well after he left TSR for health reasons and moved back to Akron. He was always active in the local gaming group, the AKS, and was on the con committee with me at many NeoCons (later NeoVention). If you like, I’ll share some memories of those days in a later post. {©2011 Bob Kindel}

[Comments? Questions? Leave a comment and I’ll forward it to Bob.–Mike]

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