The KODT Development Team is KENZER AND COMPANY JOLLY R. BLACKBURN • STEVE JOHANSSON • DAVID S. KENZER • BRIAN JELKE Honorary Henchman The Java Joint JOHN O’NEILL PDF edition, June 2011 ____________________ Cover Art by Jolly R. Blackburn © Copyright 2011 Kenzer and Company, All Rights Reserved. TABLE OF CONTENTS The characters appearing in this book are just some of the KENZERCO AND ME by John O’Neill . .2 cast that makes up Knights of the Dinner Table. If you are ROMANTIC DESCENT (BLACK GATE 1) . .7 interested in learning more, DUNGEONS & MORE DRAGONS (BLACK GATE 2) . .10 please visit our website www.kenzerco.com. There THE BARBARIAN OF THE RINGS (BLACK GATE 4) . .12 you can view web comics and experience the adventures of CONAN, TEXAS RANGER (BLACK GATE 5) . .14 the ensemble cast. Knights of SPEED READING (BLACK GATE 6) . .17 the Dinner Table is available in monthly comic book form CHALLENGING LOGIC (BLACK GATE 7) . .20 plus we have a wide selection of trade paperback compila- BARBARIANS AT THE FOURTH ESTATE (BLACK GATE 8) . 23 tions of past stories. NON-TRADITIONAL DANCERS [OF GOR] (BLACK GATE 9) . .26 DRACULA SHRUGGED (BLACK GATE 10)… . .29 Legal Notice: Knights of the Dinner Table is a registered trademark of Kenzer and Company, LADIES AND THE VAMPS (BLACK GATE 11) . .32 Java Joint, KODT, the Kenzer and DOMAIN NAMESampleGAME (BLACK GfileATE 12) . .36 Company Logo, and all prominent charac- ters and likenesses thereof are trademarks of Kenzer and Company. THE UNWITTING NIGERIAN FLIM-FLAM SCAM (BLACK GATE 13) . .39 THE NOTEBOOK (BLACK GATE 14) . .42 Digitized in U.S.A. SWORDS TOGETHER!! (BLACK GATE 15) . .53 BOOK LOVE (JAVA JOINT SPECIAL) . .59 KenzerCo And Me Enhanced Mosaic, to Microsoft and they renamed it Internet Explorer 1.0. Spyglass, one of the first true Internet start-ups, Hello, and welcome to our book! I'm grew from 15 employees to 150, and went John O'Neill, co-author (with Steve public in 1995. Our stock jumped from Johansson) of the Knights of the Dinner $17 to $120 in eleven months, turning Table strips inside. I'm not part of the many of those young software engineers famous creative maelstrom that is Kenzer into stock-option multimillionaires. & Company, producers of Kingdoms of Roughly simultaneous with all this Kalamar, Aces & Eights, the Origins excitement, I first stumbled across Kenzer Award Game of the Year winner and Company. It was in the dealer's room Hackmaster, and the insanely popular of a Chicago comic convention where I magazine Knights of the Dinner Table -- not struck up a conversation with Brian Jelke, officially, anyway. who was manning an unassuming booth. I know what you're thinking. How is this There on the table was a comic book with possible? How does a civilian come to be artwork I recognized from the back pages involved with KoDT, one of the most endur- of Shadis. It was the first issue of Knights ing and influential comic magazines of the of the Dinner Table. Shadis was my favorite last few decades? A combination of two independent gaming magazine, and I'd important ingredients: chance, and blind conducted a friendly correspondence with luck. Plus perhaps a sprinkling of fate. its industrious and brilliant editor, Jolly R. The tale begins in 1994. I was newly Blackburn, while ordering back issues. married, happily unemployed, and living in Brian was happy to sell me KoDT #1, and Champaign, Illinois, while my wife worked an extremely impressive boxed set called on her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature at The Kingdoms of Kalamar, and I became a U of I. Life was pretty good in those days, fan of both immediately. I should tell you. While Alice didn't con- Meanwhile, the day job continued to be sider watching Babylon 5 and playingSamplefilled file with constant challenges and surpris- Amiga games to be a promising occupa- es. Like when I was promoted to manager tion, I was willing to give it a year or so to in 1995 and transferred to Chicago to take see if it amounted to anything. charge of the fast-moving support team in Such bliss couldn't last however, and I our shiny new corporate headquarters. Or quickly learned that elemental truth of all when the CEO flew the entire company -- married couples: if Momma ain't happy, spouses included -- to an all-expense-paid ain't nobody happy. And so, when Alice resort in Phoenix, Arizona for a weekend. came home one day and announced that Or when the Internet bubble burst early she'd found me a job answering phones at for Spyglass, and I found myself laid off in a small software company, I found myself early 1997, along with Eric and the entire gainfully employed once more. Champaign facility. It turned out to be fun working at So now I was unemployed again. Worse, Spyglass. I made a lot of friends, including I'd never gotten around to unloading any a bunch of young software engineers led by of that high-flying internet stock. My nest a young man named Eric Sink. It was even egg of stock options -- valued at roughly more fun in 1995 when we sold our prod- half a million dollars less than a year ago - uct, an early Internet browser named - was now essentially worthless. 2 Well, I'd learned an important lesson. nonsense and knew his stuff, including This whole working thing was for the intellectual property law, and the intrica- birds. I returned my attention to computer cies of software warranties and interna- games and table-top RPGs, and gave up on tional patent indemnities. Which was gainful employment as a one-way trip to sweet, because I had no clue what any of heartache and broken dreams. that stuff was, but Dave kept telling me it Now pay attention here, and see the hand was important. Meanwhile, reading in bed of fate at work. at night and laughing out loud at the latest issue of Knights of the Dinner Table, I would A few months after getting sacked, tell Alice, "It's funny -- David Kenzer, the around June of 1997, I got a call from a publisher, has the same name as the guy I man named Jerry Upton, a Vice President work with at Motorola." at Motorola. Jerry was working on a super secret project, an almost impossibly- You know what's funny? The way the advanced phone called a smart phone, which universe works. That's funny. would have a fully functional web browser Things were pretty fast paced in my new (I know -- crazy, right?). job, even with Dave helping me. I remem- Fresh from the Spyglass debacle, I was ber Jerry walked into my office in early understandably uncertain about working 1998 and told me he wanted to buy a com- for a living, and this guy Jerry was clearly pany. "I need you to work with Dave to pull loopy. I ditched him the same way you together a proposal for the Board of ditch your loser friends at a party: by intro- Directors," he said. ducing them to someone more interesting "No problem," I said. "When do you than you, and then slowly backing away. I need it?" introduced Jerry to Eric Sink, who by now "Two weeks." had started up his own software company Two weeks wasn't much time to write a in Champaign, and washed my hands of comprehensive buyout proposal, especially the whole business. Eric called me a few for a company I'd never heard of. But Dave weeks later to laugh about this crazySample phone file and I had handled worse. "Sure thing," I Motorola was building. said. “They're throwing crazy money around, Jerry popped his head back in my office a too,” Eric said. He told me what Jerry had few hours later. "The schedule's been offered to try to lure him to Motorola. moved up," he said casually. "I need that I hung up and dialed Jerry as fast as proposal a bit earlier." humanly possible. “This phone sounds I braced myself. "How much earlier?" great,” I said. “Tell me more.” "By four-thirty today." So I went to work for Jerry Upton. Jerry dropped me into his business development We delivered. Using a proposal based team, working on high-powered software largely on information copied wholesale acquisitions, and I got to meet my new from their website, Jerry won approval to office mates at the Commerce Drive facil- acquire an up-and-coming software com- ity in Schaumburg, Illinois. Including the pany in California for a quarter of a billion hot-shot lawyer who handled all of Jerry's dollars. Ah, the good old days of the software deals, named Dave Kenzer. Internet Bubble. I still get misty-eyed when I think about them. I was impressed with Dave. He was no- 3 Dave and I worked on numerous deals ber of projects. He invited me to work with together in our years at Commerce Drive. I famed fantasy author Ed Greenwood, cre- discovered that both of us had learned ator of the Forgotten Realms, on the huge most of what we knew about managing Geanavue: The Stones of Peace book in people at the gaming table, and it has 2002. I wrote a monthly book review col- served us extraordinarily well. We were umn for KoDT for years, and joined the Game Masters, which meant we had expe- KenzerCo crew – including Jolly rience bringing people together around a Blackburn, Steve Johansson, Brian Jelke, table, gently guiding an argumentative and Mark Plemmons – for their raucous team to the conclusion we wanted, running and wildly entertaining weekly gaming ses- meetings and giving presentations with vir- sions, where I had the chance to play-test tually no advance warning, and looking and contribute to some of their most pop- poised and in control when dealing with ular games, including HackMaster and Aces wildly unexpected situations.