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Author: Steven H Silver

Forgotten Authors: Howard Schoenfeld

Forgotten Authors: Howard Schoenfeld

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Howard Schoenfeld

Howard Schoenfeld was born on January 2, 1915 in Hot Springs, Arkansas. He attended the University of Syracuse. For Christmas in 1933, he visited Manhattan for the first time and a year later moved to Greenwich Village, where he got a job an editor for See magazine, a photo magazine and as deputy editor-in-chief for Uncensored. He also worked as a public relations officer for the Workers’ Defense League.

Schoenfeld refused to register for the draft in 1940, stating that he was a pacifist and that peacetime conscription was unlawful. He wound up spending 11 months in prison before being paroled to serve an additional seven months at a Quaker work camp for conscientious objectors. Schoenfeld wrote about his experiences in “The Danbury Story,” and went on to write a political column for The Conscientious Objector.

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Forgotten Authors: Hal K. Wells

Forgotten Authors: Hal K. Wells

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Hal K.Wells

Harold  Kerton Wells, who wrote as Hal K. Wells, was born on September 2, 1899 in Little Hocking, Ohio and grew up there and in the nearby town of Belpre, both along the Ohio River border with West Virginia.

He enlisted in the Ohio National Guard of May 18, 1917 and served in the infantry and field artillery during World War I, eventually being discharged on July 27, 1918 with a certificate of disability. He returned to Ohio and settled in Athens, about 35 miles away from where he grew up, and took a job working as a clerk for a dry goods store.

By 1930, he had left Ohio to move to Los Angeles and was publishing articles in Motion Picture Magazine, beginning in 1927. He also wrote the film A Moony Mariner, which was made in 1927 starring Billy Dooley, Vera Steadman, and Billy Engle. The film is the story of a sailor who is sent to the moon, but instead his rocket lands in a nearby Turkish bath, which he takes to be the moon.

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Forgotten Authors: Richard Tooker

Forgotten Authors: Richard Tooker

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Richard Tooker

Richard Tooker was born in Farina, Illinois on July 3, 1902 to George Lattimer Tooker and Laura J. (nee Switzer) Tooker. His family eventually left the small town of 600 people to move to North Dakota and also lived in Minneapolis.

After graduating from prep school, he took a job as an editor of Westerns before serving for two years as a private in the U.S. Marine Corps during the 1920s. As with many authors he worked a variety of jobs, including as a musician, journalist, cowboy, railroad clerk, bank clerk, and a farmer. By the 1930s, he had settled in Phoenix, which would be his permanent home.

His first short story was “Planet Paradise,” published as by Dick Presley Tooker was written when he was only fifteen, but did not appear until the February 1924 issue of Weird Tales. His only other publication in the 1920s was the novel The Day of the Brown Horde, published by Payson & Clarke in 1929. It would be reviewed in both Amazing Stories and Wonder Stories and later an excerpt would be reprinted in Famous Fantastic Mysteries.

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Thoughts on Designers & Dragons: Origins

Thoughts on Designers & Dragons: Origins

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Designers & Dragons: Origins, by Shannon Appelcline. Covers by Lorne Colt

This is emphatically not a review of Shannon Appelcline’s Designers & Dragons: Origins, although if you have an interest in 1970s and 1980s OD&D, D&D, or AD&D, you should grab a copy. Rather it is a collection of personal reflections having read the first two volumes and part of the third for reasons that will be made clear later.

I started playing D&D in 1980 with the Holmes box and the included module In Search of the Unknown. Someone else in the group wound up with a copy of The Keep on the Borderlands. My group quickly moved on to Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, leaving the box set behind. When we began, one of us bought the Monster Manual, one bought the Player’s Handbook, and I bought the Dungeon Master’s Guide (I remember riding my bike home from Klipper’s hobby shop with the book in my backpack). Eventually we all filled out our collections. We made our way through our own worlds, but also through Greyhawk, once it was released and I had the folio version of Darlene’s map attached to a wooden board.

Reading these books made me understand why we were never going to see details of Greyhawk the way we eventually did of the Forgotten Realms, and why it would be impossible for Gary Gygax’s “real” Castle Greyhawk to be published.

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Forgotten Authors: Robert Arthur

Forgotten Authors: Robert Arthur

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Robert Arthur

Robert Arthur, Jr. was born on November 10, 1909 at Fort Mills on Corregidor in the Phillipines to Robert Jay Arthur and Sarah Abbie (nee Fee). His father was a Lieutenant stationed there at the time. As his father was stationed in various places, Arthur grew up on the movie, in Massachusetts, Michigan, Kansas, and Virginia. He attended Hampton High School in Virginia and was elected Senior Class President.

Although accepted to West Point, Arthur chose not to follow in his father’s footsteps, instead enrolling at the College of William and Mary. After his sophomore year, he transferred to the University of Michigan, where he earned a Bachelor of Arts in English in 1930. Following graduation, he worked briefly as an editor for Munsey Publications before returning to work toward his Master of Arts in Journalism, which he received from Michigan in 1932.

After earning his Master’s, Arthur moved to Greenwich Village and began writing stories for the pulp magazines, appearing in Wonder Stories, The Shadow, Argosy Weekly, Unknown Worlds, Black Mask, and more. He also worked for Dell Magazines as an editor and as an associate editor for Photo-Story.

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Ad Review: The Dragon Magazine 41, Part II

Ad Review: The Dragon Magazine 41, Part II

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The Dragon, Issue 41, cover by James Holloway

Last week, I began looking at the ads from issue 41 of The Dragon magazine.  This week I take a look at the ads I didn’t get to last week.

After looking at the in house ads places by TSR, ads for local gaming stories, miniatures, and a variety of accessories, it seems like a good time to turn my attention to some of the games being offered in the issue.  I’ll start, not with table top or board games, but rather play-by-mail games, which I attempted to play once, but could never really figure out how to interact with them.  For me, they were more an intriguing concept than a recreational outlet. I may not have been alone in that.  I only see four other articles on Black Gate that even mention play-by-mail games.

Two play-by-mail games were advertised in the issue.  The first, World Campaigns IV was a military campaign set following World War III as the players attempt to rebuild civilization. Rather than a massive player game, players set up in groups of 35 (and if you sent in your application with friends would be grouped together). The rules and first move cost $8, with subsequent moves costing $5 and a maximum of 8 moves per year. World Campaigns IV was based out of Dover, New Hampshire. Playtesting for the game began in 1977 with the game launching in 1980. In 1988 the game relaunched as World Campaigns V, which allowed for longer games. A computer moderated version was also launched in 1988.

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Forgotten Authors: Margaret Irwin

Forgotten Authors: Margaret Irwin

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Margaret Irwin

Margaret Irwin was born on March 27, 1889 in Highgate Hill, London to Andrew Clarke and Anna Julia (nee Baker) Irwin. Her father was originally from Perth, Australia. After her mother’s death in 1899 and her father’s death in 1902, Irwin was sent to be raised by her uncle, Sidney T. Irwin, a classics professor at Clifton College in Bristol. She was educated at Clifton High School in Bristol and went on to study at Oxford, where she took a degree in English.  Her uncle died in 1911.

Irwin’s earliest novel, How Many Miles to Babylon, was published in 1913 and was followed by a couple more novels in the teens before she hit her stride in the 1920s. Her 1924 novel Still She Wished for Company was a fantasy novel in which an occultist drew the heroine into 1779. It was followed a year later by These Mortals about a woman raised in isolation in a magical palace. Although she continued to, occasionally write short fiction with fantastic elements, such as “Monsieur Seeks a Wife” and “The Curate and the Rake,” the majority of her writing was historical fiction, for which she became well known.

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Ad Review: The Dragon Magazine 41, Part I

Ad Review: The Dragon Magazine 41, Part I

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The Dragon, Issue 41, cover by James Holloway

In  August of 1980, I wandered into Klipper’s, my local toy shop that had a counter devoted to Dungeons and Dragons and other role playing games, and picked up a copy of The Dragon, issue 41. It was the first issue I purchased. On the cover, by James Holloway, a man in a wizard’s robe carrying a staff was walking a lizard child carrying a lunchbox to school, while the human students were starting wide-eyed.

At the time, I was most interested in the parts of the magazine that could most directly be added to my game. Dragon’s Bestiary, introducing the silkie and tomb tapper, the Giants of the Earth, which not only gave me heroes I could use, but introduced me to fantasy novels to track down, the Bazaar of the Bizarre. I remember incorporating the idea of dragon’s blood advanced by Robert Plamondon into my campaign. I ran my players through The Halls of Beoll-Dur, and enjoyed the exploits of Finieous Fingers.

Other parts were of lesser interest. I was not playing Metagaming’s Melee, which seven pages and four articles were devoted to. Similarly, the Avalon Hill articles by John Prados and Tom Wham were not things I was looking for at that time. Since I didn’t have a TRS-80, the computer program offered by Mark Herro didn’t offer me anything. The article on Napoleonic guerilla warfare was targeted at wargamers, not RPGers.

Revisiting this issue 46 years later, I’m looking at a different aspect entirely.  I found myself wondering “What was advertised in that issue of The Dragon and did any of the advertisers make enough of a splash to still be around after all this time?”

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Forgotten Authors: John Lymington

Forgotten Authors: John Lymington

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John Lymington

John Lymington was born on April 21, 1911 in London, England. His birth name was John Richard Newton Chance. His father was Dick Chance, who served as the managing editor of Amalgamated Press. Raised in London, he attended a private school and then went on to technical college with the intention of becoming a civil engineer or quantity surveyor (insert Ethel the Aardvark).  Instead, by 1932, he decided to work full time as a writer.

He learned to fly in 1928 and during World War II served as a flight instructor for the Royal Air Force, based out of the Cotswolds. He served there, overseeing training at three different airfields until 1943, when he was given indefinite leave and eventually invalided out of the service as a flight lieutenant. Around the time he was put on leave, he met Shirley Savill, who was serving as a WAAF section officer and the two married on July 22, 1943.  Following the war, they settled in Hampshire, where they had three sons. By 1956, they had moved to the Isle of Wight, where Lymington managed a pub.

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Spoiler Free Review: Coyote vs. Acme

Spoiler Free Review: Coyote vs. Acme

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Coyote vs Acme

In the early 1990s during grad school, I stood outside Professor Derek Penslar’s office, waiting to talk about a class I was taking with him. He had a variety of cartoons and articles posted on his door. Two that I remember were an efficiency consultant’s report on Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony and Ian Frazier’s New Yorker article “Coyote v. Acme.” I picked up a copy of Frazier’s collection titled after that piece when it became available.

Tonight, my wife, a friend, and I got to see the movie inspired by that Frazier article: Coyote vs. Acme. We almost didn’t get to see it.

Filmed in spring of 2022, Warner Bros. Discovery announced plans to shelve the film in November 2023 in order to take a tax write-off, much as they did with Batgirl and Scoob! Holiday Haunt. After a private showing of the film for the cast and crew, however, Warner Bros. Discovery allowed the filmmakers to seek another distribution deal, partly because of public backlash to the decision caused by comments made by the filmmakers. In March of 2025, Ketchup Entertainment bought the distribution rights, screening it first at San Diego Comic-Con and then releasing it on August 28, 2026.

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