Money, God Level Play - Tidbits

 Money, Money, Money

Immediately after Rob and I signed the contract to split royalties with Gary, Gary slapped his quarterly royalties check down on our side of his desk and said, "There's money out there in them thar hills!"

The check was for over 257k in 1982 dollars, equivalent to $889,374 in today's dollars.

Our contracts were generous splits of Gary's very high 10% of cover. As I recall, most royalties are given as a % of net or gross. But TSR stopped paying royalties roughly at the advent of Advanced D&D (1e), except to the authors of the OD&D books. For instance, James Ward and Rob Kuntz received about 4% of the cover on the AD&D volume, Deities and Demigods. Ward greatly expanded the OD&D supplement Gods, Demigods, and Heroes, which he and Rob co-authored. So Ward received around 3/4 of the split, IIRC.

Rob's roughly 1% was around 20k, which may have been quarterly or yearly. But at the time, he lived above Brian Blume (TSR VP, author of Boot Hill, and major early investor in TSR) and his wife, who had endured an entire summer of Jane's Bar after-hours parties at Rob's, above them. And Rob thought he was being overpaid those royalties. In his mind, Blume's tolerance and seemingly excessive pay meant they were keeping him fat, dumb, and happy so he wouldn't come forward to testify in Dave Arneson's case vs TSR for royalties as co-creator of OD&D.

I thought this was unlikely since Arneson's lawyers could call him at any time and he'd be forced to testify. And why didn't they call on him? Was it because Rob was still a kid when witnessing those events? And why didn't Blume ever complain? Those parties were raucous, loud, and attended by everyone from millionaires to bikers, hippies, and Playboy bunnies.

Also of note: Rob had sold his OD&D Greyhawk supplement rights to Gary while still underage; otherwise, he would've had royalties from at least all Greyhawk products and possibly a small piece of AD&D. 

Someone once pointed out to Rob that he could go to court to reclaim those rights because he wasn't yet 18 when he signed them over. Rob took no action. In a sense, it would've been like going after one's father. And the egos of Rob and Gary did frequently clash, but that must have been a step too far. Plus, Rob has never chased more money than he needs to live comfortably. It's the hippy side of him.

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God Level Play

Early in the Greyhawk project, Gary told us he'd received a lot of mail from players who wanted rules for god-level play. And I don't recall his reasoning, but Gary absolutely hated the idea while I loved it! So imagine my surprise when he said the demand was so high that he wanted to get it done. But it was put on the back burner, after the Castle, City, and Starstrands and more. So we'd cogitate about it now and again down at Jane's Bar, while getting soused. Which is probably why I remember almost none of it.

Years later, circa 1990, when Rob had moved to Tucson, where I was living with my mother post-Navy — we were European on the Nelson side about living with family — I DMed Rob at the god level.

The most interesting thing happened. Rob, perhaps one of the boldest adventurers in the history of at least the early game, and certainly for years in mine, became so cautious that one could say he was being timid. His character sheet read like a wishlist of almighty powers. This indicated, since he was a demigod, that all the other major and some minor gods in his pantheon were even more awesome in power than he. And very accurately, Rob understood the real game was entirely social at that level, and played accordingly. Every god could pretty much nuke another god on some crippling level, or they simply wouldn't be Gods.