Saturday, November 21, 2009

Sad News

Havard, over on his blog, is reporting that Richard L. Snider, a player in Dave Arneson's Blackmoor campaign -- he played The Flying Monk -- and co-author with Dave of Adventures in Fantasy, died earlier this week. That's very sad news, as Richard, along with his brother, John, were important figures in the prehistory and early history of the hobby. The loss of yet another person associated with those halcyon days only underscores the need to learn more from those who were around back then and are still with us today.

Requiescat in pace.

4 comments:

  1. Akk... so very sad to read that, but thank you for forwarding, James.
    It was quite some time ago that I last talked with Richard but he was always helpful and approachable. (Had only just posted referring to him on Fin's board and now re-editing, alas :/ )

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  2. Agreed, and I applaud your purposes in this blog of trying to capture that history.

    As an aside, we don't quite seem to have the same problem in the model rocketry hobby. It seems rocketeers are inveterate record-keepers, so the key figures of the early days (the late Harry Stine, the not-late-yet Vernon Estes) journaled most of the benchmarks in the development of the hobby over its first dozen or so years. Vernon and his wife Gleda are preparing a physical museum for such; Harry's son Bill has put many key documents from that time online.

    One could, possibly, invoke an interesting discussion about the way people think, contrasting the historians of wargaming with the engineers of rocketry. But I don't think I will.

    VerWord: "syclov" (n): a relative to the Greek cyclopes, found in the steppes of Siberia.

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  3. That's a shame. It's been a hard two years on RPG designers :(

    Allan.

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  4. Richard Snyder was also creater of the Powers and Perils rpg back in the day. Rest in peace Richard.

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