Our/Kuntz's Gaming Group

In the summer before 7th grade, in '76, my mother and I moved from 1003 Main, across the street from Library Park, to 1008 Wisconsin St., kitty-corner from the Jr. High. [Of note: Library Park is where the masterful hand of Paul Stormberg is overseeing the installation of the Gary Gygax memorial granite gaming table at the moment.]

On the Madison Street side of the building at 1003 Wisconsin, Rob Kuntz lived with his mother. One afternoon, I was out studying the ant mounds in the cracks of our sidewalk for a science project, and Robert, from his front porch, invited me up to game. But because of how we met, for a long time I was nicknamed "The Lurker." LOL (It was better than my next nickname, "Princer," but that's another story, and embarrassing, but, hey, I was only 13.)

Rob was still DMing Greyhawk, and I recall initially playing a very incompetent thief who was hanged for killing a nobleman. I also played Gothmog, the second Nazgul in Rob's Tokein campaign. We played everything from Tractics (Gary Gygax's pre-D&D tank/miniatures rules) to Napoleonic miniatures, chainmail battles, and naval miniatures.

The cast of characters in the Kuntz gaming group was all patently eccentric.

The Goodfellow brothers, Joe, the older, and James, whom I later also knew from the high school debate club. In fact, James Goodfellow and Skip Williams, co-author of the 3rd edition of D&D, took 3rd in state debate as a team. Jimmy went on to graduate from Cambridge and Yale, where he was on the Law Review, and later practiced law in San Francisco, where he came out as gay. He's since passed. Just imagine a very collegiate, herringbone-attired eccentric waggling his pipe at you, who WILL debate anything, but who also parties quite hard, holding his own easily. I'll likely tell a few Jimmy-Robert stories and post his pic when I find it.

Tom Christensen was in my class and obviously gay, but he went on in life to become the top expert on the Perl programming language and has published several books on the topic. His college professor had something to do with inventing Perl. He was my 7th or 8th-grade science partner, and he began our dissection of a frog by heating the scalpel on the Bunsen burner and then burning the blade into my wrist while my attention was elsewhere. We were competitors since we were both considered the brightest guys from our separate grade schools. But I wasn't about that. Tom was smarter than I was, without a doubt, in science and math. But I had him on social skills, street smarts, breadth of experience, travel — and all the soft skills.

Joe Fisher, AKA "Fiiish," occasionally gamed with us. Joe created the D&D Ranger class. He argued it wasn't just Tolkien's Aragorn he'd taken it from, and to prove it, he had developed several variants drawn from diverse sources long before sub-classes were introduced into the game. Joe was known for wearing a well-worn, wide-rimmed leather hat.

I actually met Terry Kuntz before Rob when he was tending the 1st location of the Dungeon Hobby Shop @ 723 Williams St. (Recently the site of the Dungeon Hobby Shop Museum debacle. (More to say on that in a future post or two.) Terry taught me a Roman gladiator miniature battle game, which we played right at the counter. Remarkably, Terry is more eccentric than his brother.

Bob Burman... Always trouble. An eccentric, too. I remember him wearing a caftan like he was a backup musician for Cat Stevens (it was the 70's). He rolled a VW Bug off the highway, got thrown from the car, and it rolled over him in a snowbank, and he walked away unharmed. In a WWII campaign Kuntz ran, Bob "Burmania" Berman sent all his subs into a Japanese port, where being in shallow water eliminated them all. Anyhow, the dumbest among us--I was probably batting for second, but look at the guys in the room with me. (You can just search for "Kuntz and Burmania" and find Rob's numerous online stories about Bob.)

Tom Champney sometimes came by for miniature battles, a later manager of the Dungeon Hobby Shop when it moved to Broad and Main's SE corner. Tom was one of those fellows who would call you over, "Hey. Hey, Shhhh!" (Quietly signaling with his hands) "Come here." And then he'd say something crazy funny in your ear, like, "Don't drink the water; fish fuck in it!" He could make a person chuckle all day long. Unfortunately, Tom took his life when his game company later failed, and I was coincidentally on leave (USN) playing pool in the UW Whitewater student union with Neal Christensen and Rob Kuntz when we found out. That was a hard day.

There was a broader cast of characters coming through, but because I'm recovering from an accidental withdrawal from misordered, prescribed medication, I'm still disoriented and will have failed to mention several other players; I'll just post them later. But one of them who popped in from afar was Mark Ratner, co-author of Space Opera (Fantasy Games Unlimited, also publisher of the influential Chivalry and Sorcery FRPG rules, a fave of mine).

Ratner was a bit more reserved than the rest of us eccentrics but loved visiting. He was more sci-fi when I met him. And while his intellectual, science officer demeanor might fool you, once playing, the eccentricity was apparent.

My point is that our group of eccentrics was somewhat diverse: we had a wonderful, unpredictable energy at the dawn of D&D, and our group included published game authors who gave us industry inroads to influence rulesets. So we were all highly opinionated rules lawyers.