InQuest, the tabletop gaming magazine published by Wizard Press, is shutting down. I wrote many articles for InQuest in its early years, enough so that I’m still on the magazine’s comp list to this day. Now, 150 issues later, it’ll be gone.

Ironically, the last issue of InQuest will ship in September, the same month that Dragon and Dungeon magazines end their run. Games Quarterly Magazine ended earlier this year. What does that leave for adventure gaming magazines in print? Between the internet eating their lunches and a rough few years for gaming, there doesn’t seem to be much room for a professionally run consumer magazine that’s not based around some sort of catalog like White Dwarf or Game Trade Magazine.

Someone tell me I’m missing something. Please.

My friend Dale Donovan wrote over the weekend to report that Chuck Crain, one of the founders of Ral Partha, had died. Apparently he suffered a heart attack the Tuesday after Gen Con and died a couple days later. The Miniatures Page has an excellent obituary for him.

I’d known Chuck for many years, since before I became involved in gaming professionally. He could be a gruff guy, but he always had a smile and warm word for his friends. He did a great job running Ral Partha, one of the first fantasy gaming miniatures companies, for years. Even after Partha went away, he helped out with its successor company, Iron Wind, and I still ran into him at conventions from time to time.

It has to be over a year since I’d seen Chuck, and I’ll miss him. To me, he was part of that same crew of early game industry folk that was always happy to fill me in on the real facts of how things started out and how that led to how things work now. I count Dan Matheson, who also passed away a few months back, among that now-poorer crowd.

We were lucky to have Chuck with us for as long as we did, even if that time was far too short.

A couple weeks back, a copy of The Frodo Franchise by Kristin Thompson arrived in the mail. In it, Kristin describes how The Lord of the Rings went from literary classic to licensing powerhouse. For this, she interviewed 76 people, including me in my capacity as one of the developers of Decipher’s The Lord of the Rings Roleplaying Game.

If you’re interested in the big business behind turning books into blockbusters–using Tolkien’s especially winding road as the example–be sure to pick this up. My contribution only amounts to less than two pages in the 332 pages of actual text, so it’s not a personal plug. I haven’t had time to read much of it yet, but what I’ve seen so far intrigues me, and I’m looking forward to devouring the rest.

It’s that time of the month again, and my latest post is up at Storytellers Unplugged. Given where I’ve spent the past week, I ramble on a bit about the nature of networking at conventions and how I like to view such things.