My sister Kim, my brother Mark, my mother, me, and my sister Jody.

My mother’s funeral was on Sunday, January 21. While it was a somber affair, the fact that I had my entire family around me helped buffer the sadness. We all held up well by leaning on each other.

I have to thank my wife and kids for being so supportive and understanding throughout this whole experience, and I’m especially proud of how my brother and sisters and I banded together to help Mom out in her final weeks and days–and how well we worked together once she was gone too.

Over a hundred people braved the cold Wisconsin weather to join us for Mom’s funeral. Her sister Joanie spoke first and did a wonderful, heartbreaking job. My nephews Henry and Leo played a few songs in her honor, including a haunting rendition of “Danny Boy” on the guitar. Their father–my sister Kim’s husband Todd–spoke second and brought some smiles to faces that badly needed them.

I wrapped it up with a longer eulogy, and I want to post it here for you to read.

I actually wrote two eulogies. The first was a fine piece of writing, with a clear progression and theme. In the end, though, it was drier and less personal than I wanted it to be, so I scrapped it and wrote a new piece from scratch. Here’s what I wound up with:

Hi. My name is Matt Forbeck. I’m Helen’s eldest child.

I want to thank you all for coming here this afternoon to remember my mom with my family and me. It’s no surprise that you all showed up to send her off. She made so many wonderful friends over the years and treasured every one of them.

I especially want to thank my mom’s sister Joanie and her brothers Tom and John, and my brother Mark and my sisters Kim and Jody and their families, plus my wife Ann and our kids, for all their support over the past several weeks. It was a rough time, and I couldn’t have picked a better family to weather it with.

I’d like to tell you about my mom.

She was a spitfire. She always believed that if you weren’t part of the solution, you were part of the problem. And she set out to solve problems.

She was one of the fiercest, strongest people I ever met, and I had the privilege of knowing her my entire life. By every account, even from folks who knew long her before I was born, she’d always been a force of nature, ready for anything at any time.

She was always ready for a discussion – an argument, even – and never failed to speak her mind. At the same time, she always kept her mind open, and she always remembered to treat people who disagreed with her with respect. She was a card-carrying Democrat, but she counted many Republicans as her lifelong friends. She learned how to manage that at her childhood home in Menasha, where she was the lone liberal, arguing for women’s rights, even as a girl.

She took time to teach us about the history of women’s rights, and she put those lessons into practice. When there wasn’t a local equivalent of Cub Scout softball for girls, she helped set up the Beloit Girls Softball league. She served as the president of the League of Women Voters here in town, and she was the first woman president of the Beloit city council too. She always fought for equality and fairness for people of all kinds.

Nothing stopped her. Ever.

When I was a kid, we needed a coach for our soccer team, which was a new sport for us at the time. No one around here was up for it, so Mom stepped forward to volunteer, even though she’d never played the game. She just got herself a book from the library, read the rules, and set to it.

She loved to play games of all sorts. She was a champion tennis player when she was younger, although she took it a little easier later on. Moe Carroll reminded me recently about how they made their way to the championship round of a mixed-doubles tournament here in town. Mom kept taking a smoke break between sets, and despite winning to that point, they forfeited the final match because they were too beat to keep at it!

She played games like Farkle – which we called Dice – and Thirty-One with us and her grandkids for money, which was a family tradition from my father’s side. But if anyone happened to be shy of the quarters we needed, she’d pay for every pot.

Still, she never let us win. We had to earn it. When she won, she’d smile and give us the chance to win it back.

She loved this game called Speed Solitaire, in which you each play with your own deck and have to slap down cards on each other’s piles in the middle of the table. She was so sharp at it that my wife gave up playing because she wanted to keep her fingers.

Mom believed that politics were the way to change the world. When my brother and sisters and I were little kids, some of us barely able to walk, she used to cart us around Beloit with a little red wagon full of political campaign literature and have us stuff it into doorways across the city with her.

When she worked at the Department of Defense under President Clinton, the people in her office called her the Conscience. She was their own Jiminy Cricket, always speaking up whenever they considered doing something potentially sketchy. They knew they could run things past her to see if they passed the Helen test.

When Governor Walker set out to destroy the public unions here, she joined the protests. My wife and kids and I marched with her both here and in Madison, with the kids carrying signs that pointed down to clearly mark them as Union Thugs.

She was always engaged. Never distant or removed. She was passionate and intense. She ran hot.

While my wife Ann and I lived in Virginia in the mid-’90s, Mom invited us to Bill Clinton’s second inauguration. That night, we went to the Midwest Inaugural Ball, held in the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum. The highlight for her was when Stevie Wonder came through, and she snapped several pictures of him. I can still hear her shouting at him as his security team swept him past us. “We love you, Stevie!”

When my wife Ann became pregnant with our quadruplets, we were terrified, of course, but Mom – who was living in Virginia at the time – knew exactly what she had to do. She came straight back to Wisconsin to help out full-time with all five kids. As part of that, she slept on an old twin bed in my unfinished basement for six months.

Most kids worry they might someday wind up sleeping in their parent’s basement. She volunteered to sleep in her kid’s basement to help out with her grandchildren, and she didn’t hesitate about it for a second.

That’s dedication.

She loved with a wild abandon that knew no limits. You saw that with her family and friends, but also with her Irish heritage. She loved Irish music, Irish beer, and the place where you got them both: Irish Fest.

Maybe the only thing outside of her family that equaled that was her love for the Packers. You knew where to find her on game days.

She loved us all so much – her family and her friends – that she strove make the world a better place for us to live in. She dedicated her whole life to that in every way.

We should all do our best to live up to her legacy.

I’d like to leave you with an Irish blessing that hung in a frame by her door. It reads:

May there always be work for your hands to do.

May your purse always hold a coin or two.

May the sun always shine on your windowpane.

May a rainbow be certain to follow each rain.

May the hand of a friend always be near you.

May God fill your heart with gladness to cheer you.

Thank you.

Helen Forbeck with my son Marty and my (then newborn) quadruplets in 2002. 

I’m sure I’ll have more to say about this later, but for now:

My mother’s obituary:

Helen Fink Forbeck of Beloit, Wisconsin, passed away at her home on January 14, 2018, surrounded by her loving family.

Helen was born in Appleton, Wisconsin, on December 7, 1944, and was raised in her family home in Menasha, Wisconsin. She graduated from St. Mary’s High School in Menasha in 1963, and she then attended Marquette University and graduated in 1967 with a bachelor’s degree.

She taught middle school in Milwaukee until she moved to Beloit in 1970, where she was a devoted mother to her four children. She later worked as a job developer at OIC. She was an active member of the Democratic Party and the League of Women Voters for decades, and she served on the Beloit City Council from 1985 to 1991, during which she was elected the first woman president of the City Council. She left the Council to work for US Congressman Les Aspin as his ombudsperson. When he became Secretary of Defense in 1993, she moved to Alexandria, Virginia, to work at the Pentagon for the Department of Defense. She returned to Beloit in 2002 to help with the arrival of her quadruplet grandchildren and spend more time with the rest of her children and grandchildren. In 2003, she opened the Beloit office of US Congresswoman Tammy Baldwin and ran it until her retirement in 2013. She became interested in genealogy many years ago and spent countless hours researching her family’s history. She volunteered regularly at Caritas and spent much of her retirement visiting with her children and grandchildren, playing games (especially multiple-hand solitaire) and doing jigsaw puzzles.

Survivors include her children Matt (Ann) Forbeck of Beloit, Wisconsin; Mark Forbeck of Lake Mills, Wisconsin; and Kim (Todd Dunsirn) Forbeck, and Jody (Nanni Marta) Forbeck of Shorewood, Wisconsin; brothers Tom Fink and John (Sue) Fink and sister Joan (Dick) Kuhn; grandchildren Martin, Patrick, Nicholas, Kenneth, and Helen Forbeck; Savannah and Delaney Forbeck; Murray, Henry, and Leo Dunsirn; and Luke and Matteo Marta, along with several beloved nieces and nephews.

She was preceded in death by her sister and brother-in-law Mary C. (Fink) and Charlie Atchinson; sister-in-law Barbara Fink; nephews Thomas and Gregory Fink; parents Berenice (Murray) Fink and Ray J. Fink; grandparents Mary (Daly) and Martin Murray, and Bridget (Finnerty) and John B. Fink; great-grandparents Winifred (Kelly) and Thomas Murray, Ellen (Hogan) and John Daly, Anna (Lauterbach) and Herman Fink (Vinkenvleugel), and Catherine (Keating) and Thomas Finnerty.

The greatest hope she had for this world as she left it is that our current president leaves office as soon as possible, along with any other bigots, homophobes, and racists. She asked those who support such beliefs to not dare to attend her visitation or funeral.

A memorial service of remembrance for Helen will be at 2:00 p.m. Sunday, January 21, 2018 in the Daley Murphy Wisch & Associates Funeral Home and Crematorium, 2355 Cranston Road, Beloit, WI. Visitation of remembrance will be from 12:00 p.m. until the time of service Sunday in the funeral home.

In lieu of flowers, she requested that donations be made in her name to Caritas Community Resource Center or Beloit Regional Hospice.

I may be on the splash image, but I’m only in it for a handful of seconds. If you’re the impatient sort, my part starts around the 3:46 mark.

Maddie lives in the DC area and flew out to Wisconsin to grab some interviews. Mark Spreitzer – who would be my assemblyman if not for the ridiculous way my house was carved out of my neighborhood by partisan gerrymandering – recommended she chat with me. Maddie landed in Chicago and picked up her mother, who lives there, to come along for the ride. She also pressed her into service as her camera assistant, which was honestly adorable.

We talked for about an hour about all sorts of things, occasionally waving at passing cars on my street. That seems long considering how little of that actually made it into the video, but as someone who works in all sorts of media, I totally understand. You have to grab as much as you can and trim it all down into whatever works best. In any case, I had a wonderful time chatting with Maddie and geeking out over things like games and craft beer.

Be sure to watch the video in full. Gerrymandering is one of the greatest assaults on our democracy, and Wisconsin’s playing a big role in it. A case about our troubles is going before the US Supreme Court next week, and the results are going to be vital. See this article at FiveThirtyEight.com for a summary, and the Wall Street Journal has a companion piece too.

Honestly, it’s things like this that make me think we could use more game designers with a strong sense of fairness in the legislature. People who know how to create something balanced, who can anticipate problem players and fashion a set of rules that works for everyone. That’s just a pipe dream, of course, but putting an end to partisan gerrymandering would be a good step in that direction.

Here’s hoping the court does the right thing.

To help out, please support the Bibliobabes (the bookclub’s fake band) directly. If you chip in any amount at all, drop me an email at matt@forbeck.com, and I’ll send you a free ebook of your choice from this list:

• Amortals
• Vegas Knights
• Carpathia
• Hard Times in Dragon City
• Brave New World: Revolution
• Dangerous Games: How to Play
• Monster Academy: I Will Not Eat People

Just tell me the title and the format you want it in, and I’ll email it straight out to you – with my gratitude!

To top it off, I’ll ship the highest donor an autographed copy of Halo: New Blood, which won’t be in stores until March 15.

The deadline for this offer is 5 PM Central Time, February 27, 2016, so get to it! 

Also, if you’re local, you can join us that night. Tickets for the evening are $16.49 each (plus Eventbrite’s ticketing fees), and the night features hors d’oeuvres, a dessert buffet, a cash bar, raffles, music trivia, a “dress as your favorite singer/band” contest, and more. If you do make it out, be sure to stop me and say hi.

Even if you can’t make it out that night or manage to kick in something to support the Bibliobabes, please help spread the word. The more people who know about the event, the more who can help. Thanks!

My wife, Ann, is one of the founders of Project 16:49, a non-profit dedicated to helping homeless teens here in Rock County, Wisconsin. While she’s no longer on the board (she’s focusing on her job as a high school social worker instead), she still regularly helps out the organization with all the wonderful things they do for some of our area’s neediest youth.

As part of that, Ann and her book club are joining Project 16:49’s Lip Sync Battle, a big event in Janesville, WI, on February 27, 2016. They’re going to be performing on stage as part of the competition to help those kids.

There are few ways you can help out, if you’re so inclined. First, you can join us that night. Tickets for the evening are $16.49 each (plus Eventbrite’s ticketing fees), and the night features hors d’oeuvres, a dessert buffet, a cash bar, raffles, music trivia, a “dress as your favorite singer/band” contest, and more.

Second, you can support the Bibliobabes (the bookclub’s fake band) directly. The band that raises the most money gets a bump in the competition, so that not only helps raise money for Project 16:49, but can also make the Bibliobabes’ premier appearance even more triumphant.

Even if you can’t make it out that night or manage to kick in something to support the Bibliobabes, please help spread the word. The more people who know about the event, the more who can help. Thanks!

To that end, I set up a page for the quads on Crowdrise.org. Thanks to some truly generous family and friends, they already shattered their initial goal of $500 in donations, and they’re hoping to be able to help out even more. If you’re so inclined to help, stop by the page and chip in whatever you can. The homeless teenagers around here would truly appreciate it–as would my kids.

Meanwhile, for your daily dose of cute, check out this video of the quads getting ready for their first day of four-year-old kindergarten. And thanks to you for all you can do!

Our mutual friend Allen Varney posted an excellent obituary for Aaron last night. Go give it a read.

Aaron was most famous these days for his many excellent Star Wars novels, but he started out in tabletop games. When I first met him at an Origins Game Fair some twenty plus years back, he was a compatriot, a fellow freelancer writing for Hero Games, working on books for Champions and Justice Inc. about the same time I was writing Western Hero. He was hellaciously talented, always ready with a wry joke or a bit of well-considered advice.

I watched Aaron move from games into novels, blazing a trail before me, much in the way of Mike Stackpole and Troy Denning, two mutual pals who mentored me along the same path. I cheered on every one of his successes. There’s something heartening about seeing good people achieve the kinds of goals you’ve set for yourself.

I’d seen him many times over the years, most recently at a Gen Con, I believe. The last time I spent any real time with him was at Comic-Con a few years back. He was recovering from heart problems, and like many freelancers didn’t have much in the way of health insurance to pay for something as costly as emergency bypass surgery. The SF and gaming communities had come together to help raise funds for him, though, and I know he appreciated that more than he could ever say.

Despite those troubles, he’d started taking better care of himself and had lost weight in an effort to improve his health. Even in the face of those challenges–both physical and financial–he put on a brave face and wore a ready smile. And he kept writing, telling fantastic stories to entertain hundreds of thousands of people for as long as he could.

He left us far too early. He was only 53.

I’ll miss him, and I know I’m not alone.

Jon has a great video called “A History of D&D in 12 Treasures,” which reveals a lot of the background behind how D&D came to be. It’s well worth the watch. In that same vein, I thought I’d share some images from my own Players Handbook for the first edition of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. 

The Players Handbook became a great treasure of my childhood, and I brought it to my first ever convention, which was held in my hometown at Beloit College back in 1982. My friends and I played in a D&D tournament and somehow managed to win it. (While you can’t really win a D&D game at home, you could manage to triumph in a convention tournament by doing better than the other teams of players.)

I met Gary there for the first time, and he signed my book, as you can see. As our prizes for winning the tournament, my friends and I won memberships in the fledgling Roleplaying Gamers Association (RPGA), which came with a subscription to the Polyhedron magazine. (Polyhedron #9 saw my first published game design work: a gadget I designed for a Top Secret RPG contest, which came in as a runner-up.)

I brought that same Players Handbook to my first Gen Con (XV, later in 1982) and hunted down more autographs for it. Jake Jaquet, then editor of Dragon magazine, signed it on the title page too. But the list of names on the frontispiece (which was just a blank page before the title page) is even more amazing. It includes an all-star cast:

• Doug Niles (game designer, novelist, and fellow Alliterate)
• Phil Foglio (of What’s New with Phil & Dixie and Girl Genius)
• JD Webster (of Finieous Fingers)
• Bill Willingham (of Fables)
• Jim Ward (game designer, novelist, and former VP at TSR)
• Tom Wham (game designer)
• Steve Perrin (game designer)
• Tracy Hickman (game designer and novelist)

(There’s another one there below Phil’s, and for the life of me, I can’t make out who it’s from. If you have any idea, please let me know!)

It stuns me that many of those names–the ones that stuck with the industry, at least–are now my peers, and I’m honored to call at least a few of them friends. I’ve had a wonderful, lucky run as a creator myself, and games and the people who make them have been a huge part of that.

I turned fourteen just before that first Gen Con of mine, and I’ve kept going ever since. I had my first booth at Gen Con, selling a fanzine called The Quill and Scroll, when I was seventeen, and this summer will be my 33rd year in a row. It’s my favorite time of year: a family reunion, summer camp, and marathon of fun all rolled into one.

(Pre-registration for Gen Con badges opens today, by the way. Grab yours before they sell out, and join me there!)

I could–and maybe should–write a book about how D&D has changed the world in just four decades. It created a new art form and a new way of thinking about entertainment that will outlast every one of us. It’s seeped into just about every part of our lives, whether we realize it or not.

And it’s so much fun.

Happy birthday, D&D! And thanks to Dave, Gary, and all the other wonderful people who made you, continue to create (and recreate!) and play you–and the multitude of games inspired by you–to this day.

1. Since few of us live in the same city, we’d do the exchange virtually.
2. Since this was short notice and meant for fun, we’d trade imaginary gifts, things we made up that didn’t cost us a thing.
3. We’d do it in public, on Twitter.

He called it the First Possibly Annual Lone Shark Games White Heffalump Exchange. Mike explains it pretty well here:

He also lists all the participants on his website. It includes world-renowned puzzle masters, game designers, and artists. If you know me, you likely know many of them, and honestly I was honored and delighted to be grouped with them in any way.

Anyhow, the event ran on Twitter yesterday afternoon, and it was an absolute blast. Just head over to Twitter, search for #whiteheffalump, and prepare to be delighted. It got to be so fast and furious at one point that #whiteheffalump actually trended on Twitter.

For my part, I picked up a Selinker Point from Mike himself. You can witness it here in all its glory.

For my gift, I created Treasure Table X(Mas): The Random White Heffalump Generator of Greatness. Although John Kovalic ended up with it, I’m posting it here to share with you all too. While it has my name at the bottom, I need to credit my son Marty with staying up late to help me concoct some of the goofiness. If there’s blame to go around, though, that’s all mine.

Pass it around and enjoy. And I hope all your holiday parties go as well as the First Possibly Annual Lone Shark Games White Heffalump Exchange.

Glaucoma is a disease of the eye that usually involves an increase of the intraocular pressure. This pressure builds up over time and can damage the optic nerve. It happens slowly enough–and creeps in from the edges of your field of vision–that most people don’t notice it until it’s too late. By that time, you’ve already lost a good chunk of your vision. This is why the disease is called “the silent thief.”

I have what’s called open-angle glaucoma, which is the most common type. In my case, I lost about 40% of the vision in my right eye. Fortunately, this started in the upper left quadrant of that eye, which means the loss overlaps with the vision from my left eye, which is still unaffected. While that made it harder for me to notice it at first, it’s not as troublesome now as it would be if I’d lost the vision in some other part of my eye.

To test me for this, they had me sit with my face in a machine, hold still, and look at a single spot while the machine flashed random lights in a grid around that spot. I had to click a button when I saw the light. This way, they can map out what you can and can’t see. My right eye looks like this:

The dark spots are the places where I can’t see  in that eye. The darker they are, the worse it is.

My son Marty asked me what the color of blindness is. He thought it would be black, but it’s nothing like that really. I don’t see black spots in those places. The nerve has been damaged and can’t see anything there at all. There’s no there there.

In terms of a color that doesn’t exist, it looks like the spots you see right after you look into the sun. But nothing brings it back, no matter how much you blink.

There’s no cure for glaucoma, and there’s no way to regain the lost vision. It’s treatable though, and the treatment usually arrests the disease in its tracks. In my case, I have to use medicated eyedrops three times a day. These don’t come cheap, but fortunately I have decent health insurance though my wife’s job as a school social worker.

With luck, there should be no further loss of vision. There’s still a chance of it, though, as the increase of pressure in the eye isn’t the only aspect of glaucoma, and that’s primarily what the eyedrops treat.

While it’s hard to tell what causes glaucoma, the doctors suspect mine is the result of decades of treating asthma with steroids. It seems that both of my grandfathers my dad’s father suffered from it too, which didn’t help matters. When it comes down to the choice between breathing and seeing, though, I have to go with continuing to breathe. I’m partial that way.

Fortunately, the treatment seems to be working well for me. My optometrist consistently tested me for this every year–it’s that puff of air they blow into your eye–and it had been climbing, but it spiked up to 32mm this summer for some reason. (Above 22 or so is when you should start watching carefully.) With the eyedrops, the pressure in my left eye has dropped down to 11, and my right eye is holding steady without any treatment at all.

So, if you see me ducking out of a convention hall in the middle of the day–or walking around with one eye closed for a bit–now you’ll know why. And it might influence my choice of Halloween costumes in the future, although I’d have a hard time deciding between going as a pirate or Nick Fury.

Sure, it’s a hassle to have to deal with it, but the threat of losing more of my sight helps remind me every time I need to use the drops. I asked my doctor when I could stop being paranoid about my eyesight. He said, “From here on out, you’ll always be paranoid about your eyesight.”

Fair enough.