Tales of Jackson, IL: For Whom the Bell Tolls

 It's April and I want to kick off a semi-regular feature on my Jackson, IL game for the NIGHT SHIFT^® RPG.

I want to talk about the characters and the adventures from my "Tales of Jackson, IL" game.

The NIGHT SHIFT^® Character Keeper!
The MUST-HAVE school supply for the 1986-87 school year!

For Whom the Bell Tolls

This first adventure, For Whom the Bell Tolls (all adventures will be named for songs from the 1980s) begins over the Fall of 1985. The large school bell, which hasn't worked since 1935, begins to ring. The problem is that only people and creatures of supernatural backgrounds could hear it. So PCs and some NPCs do. So do all the monsters in the nearby area, and they are all coming to Jackson. If that sounds uncomfortably like a "diner bell," then you would be right.

The antagonist of this adventure is/was "The Bell Ringer." His job is to announce the arrival of an even bigger bad guy later on. I have not hinted this yet, but this Big Bad is known as The Hollow King. He was pretty easy to deal with once found, but he had already done his damage.

I'll detail some of the player characters in future posts. One of the characters that was here for this adventure did not make it to later ones. No character death, just new characters. But I wanted to make this so that characters can come and go as needed. 

For levers, this is a Cinematic game, with Cinematic violence and healing. 

Look, I am wearing my influences here on my sleeve. This is Stranger Things meets Charmed meets Buffy meets Supernatural meets The Craft. But also a little bit of Dark, since I do pick up these characters many years later. 

Welcome to Jackson, IL!

The Cheerleader, The Outsider, and The New Girl

Jackson, Illinois, seems like the kind of town that blends in with a hundred others in the mid-west, at least until night falls. On the surface, it is all Friday night football, crowded school hallways, two local colleges that give the town just enough polish to feel more important than it is, and grown-ups going through the motions as if nothing is wrong. 

It is the 1980s in full neon color, with mixtapes, faded denim, old trucks, pay phones, greasy diners open too late, and gossip that never stays quiet for long. But under the steady pulse of small-town life, something far older and far stranger is waking up. Forces beyond understanding are creeping into the edges of everyday life, and the kids of Jackson are about to learn that coming of age can be just as frightening as anything lurking in the dark.

At the center of the story is a close-knit group of friends and families: outsiders, golden boys, first loves, brainy overachievers, and kids who have already seen too much. Each of them carries private wounds and hidden truths into the shadows. Some have never left Jackson. Some have only just arrived. Some already know that the town is not what it pretends to be. Together, they become the emotional core of the campaign, a web of teenagers and adults bound together by fear, loyalty, and survival in one deeply haunted American town at the tail end of the Reagan years.

What I want to do with this series, at least, is present some of the games we have played and the NPCs. The NPCs were where I started here because I wanted these halls to feel like they were filled with people, not archetypes like "The Jock." "The Wierd Girl," "The Cheerleader." I wanted them to have names and motivations. So I started building them based on characters I have posted here before, which gave me instant personalities and buy-in. But not every character I have is a good fit. Grýlka and Doireann, for example, are a lot of fun, but to fit them into this game, I'd have to take so many liberties with the characters that I might as well have started from scratch. So I used mine, and since I had a pack of Pathfinder minis sitting on my desk here, I started adding them as well. 

I also very specifically did not want to do a modern version of West Haven. West Haven does appear in the NIGHT SHIFT^® rules, but that is the future (or rather the present day). I wanted something smaller. Plus, I already have a NIGHT SHIFT^® version of West Haven going with Elowen. But that is not an ongoing game at the moment.    

I have teased some characters, but again, I want this place to feel alive. I think I owe that to the players. 

The Witches

I knew from the start I wanted three witches who look like they come from three different walks of life. I knew Larina was going to be one of them; in fact, I wanted to use the date I first created her, July 1986, as the time when this game starts. But I needed at least one summer break, so I pushed it back to 1985. Why are you so specific about the dates? One big reason. Music. Music was a big deal in your 1980s high school. So I wanted to build authentic playlists.

• 1985
• 1986
• Tales from Jackson, IL (Campaign playlist)

Of course, with three witches, they all can't be "the weird one," so I split that up a bit. Since Pathfinder was at hand, I adopted Feiya and Seoni as Faye and Stephanie, respectively. 

Everyone starts out at 1st level, but the girls here are just a notch higher in case they need to rescue anyone.

Larina "Nix" Nichols

2nd-level Witch, Human

Strength: 9 (0)
Agility: 10 (0) 
Toughness: 11 (0)
*Intelligence: 18 (+3) P
Wits: 17 (+2) s
Persona: 17 (+2) s

Vit: 3 (1d6)
DV: 9
Fate Points: 1d6

Check Bonus (P/S/T): +2/+1/+0
Melee bonus: +0  Ranged bonus: +0
Saves: +3 to spells and magical effects

Special Abilities: Arcana, Casting 60%, Enhanced Senses, Arcane Bond (Steph and Faye)

Skills: Research (Int)

Languages: English, Latin, German, Greek

Spells
1: Magic Missile
2: Continual Flame

This is not witch queen Larina, or even really powerful Larina. This is "new girl in town" Larina. Normally, she is the "weird one," but here I am opting to make her "the smart one." She is the one with the research books and systematized knowledge. So if the PCs need help they can go to her.

Hair: Red
Eyes: Blue

Archetype: The New Girl
Quote: "I am sure I just read that somewhere..."
Quirks: Right-handed, wears her watch on her right hand.
Theme song: "Night Bird" - Stevie Nicks

Family: Her father, Lars Nichols, is a professor at MacAlister College. Mother died 18 months ago.

Faye Thorne

2nd-level Witch, Human

Strength: 10 (0)
Agility: 12 (0) 
Toughness: 14 (+1) s
Intelligence: 18 (+3) 
*Wits: 18 (+3) P
Persona: 17 (+2) s

Vit: 4 (1d6)
DV: 7 (leather jacket)
Fate Points: 1d6

Check Bonus (P/S/T): +2/+1/+0
Melee bonus: +0  Ranged bonus: +0
Saves: +3 to spells and magical effects

Special Abilities: Arcana, Casting 60%, Enhanced Senses, Arcane Bond (Steph and Larina)

Skills: Intimidate (Cha)

Languages: English, German

Spells
1: Chill Ray
2: Cause Fear

Fiona Voss, or as she is known now, Faye Thorne, is the creepy goth girl outsider. She lives with her two very strict and terrifying aunties (really hags in disguise), and hides under headphones, a leather jacket, and enough sarcasm to power a small city. She and Steph used to be best friends until their falling out a couple of years ago. Unlike Larina, Faye has learned all about witchcraft by doing it.

Hair: White
Eyes: Gray

Archetype: The Outsider
Quote: "Wow. You really think your opinion matters to me."
Quirks: Always wears headphones and a pentagram necklace. Loves super spicy food, scary spicy.
Theme song: "A Forest" - The Cure

Family: Her parents, the Vosses, died in a car crash when she was a toddler. She was raised by her aunties, who changed her name. Her aunties are really disguised hags hoping to use her natural magic.

Stephanie "Steph" Vale

2nd-level Witch, Human

Strength: 12 (0)
Agility: 14 (+1) s
Toughness: 13 (+1)
Intelligence: 13 (+1) s
Wits: 10 (0) 
*Persona: 18 (+3) P

Vit: 4 (1d6)
DV: 9
Fate Points: 1d6

Check Bonus (P/S/T): +2/+1/+0
Melee bonus: +0  Ranged bonus: +0
Saves: +3 to spells and magical effects

Special Abilities: Arcana, Casting 60%, Enhanced Senses, Arcane Bond (Larina and Faye)

Skills: Drive (Agl), Gymnastics (Agl)

Languages: English, French

Spells
1: Charm Person
2: ESP

To the outside world, Stephanie Vale is a ray of sunshine, but on the inside...yeah, she is pretty much the same. Stephanie is a nice girl who moves in and out of social situations with the skill of an adult twice her age. She just broke up with her long-time boyfriend, Val, and her mother and father wish she would start dating Andy Thompson. But Andy is so deeply in love with Rowan that Hallmark follows them around for ideas. She is captain of the Cheer team, but now she is involved with new girl Larina and Faye Thorne, of all people. 

Like many things, witchcraft comes naturally to Steph.

Hair: Blonde
Eyes: Blue

Archetype: The Cheerleader
Quote: "Alright, everyone! Teamwork makes the dream work!"
Quirks: Positive attitude hides a crippling desire to please everyone.
Theme song: "We Got the Beat" - The Go Go's

Family: Second-richest family in town (behind the town founders, the Thompsons). Father Arthur is a lawyer, and Mother Beatrice is a stay-at-home mom. She has an older brother in college, whom she thinks is the best ever, and a younger sister who spends a lot of time on a computer.

--

My NPCs are coming along. I will likely talk about the "nice" ones, since they are most likely to help the PCs. By halfway through the first quarter, watching Stephanie, Faye, and Larina always hang out together will be the stuff of talk and darker gossip. 

I will say this. These characters have been a blast to use, and I am so pleased with them.

Because I like to think of these things, I also have plans for everyone some years later. Just have not nailed all that down at all yet.

Steph, Faye, and Larina at breakfast. Why is Larina wearing sunglasses? Photogray lenses? Maybe she is hungover.

--

Night Shift^® is a registered trademark of Elf Lair, LLC.

This Old Dragon: Issue #124

Let's go back to a transitional time for me personally. August 1987. I was starting my first year at university, and pretty much everything in my life was changing. I had moved to a town that would be my home for the next 7 years and 2.5 degrees. I was about to meet the woman I was going to marry, though we never actually dated in college. Just hung around each other like 24 hours a day for five years. And in gaming, I was getting ready to move over to the "new" 2nd edition of the game that had been part of my life for 10 years or so. Stakeout was the number one movie. U2 and Madonna filled the airwaves, and on tables and shelves everywhere was This Old Dragon #124.

I will admit, I don't recall this one very well. I don't think I actually owned it.

The cover by Teanna Byerts is good, but I am not sure I recognize her name at all. Like many of the Dragon of this time frame, it is a themed issue, this time on "Aerial Adventuring."

Also, my copy is in pretty terrible shape. There are a lot of pages falling out, and it is missing the Forgotten Realms map, much to my disappointment. Though given that it is nearly 40 years old, this is hardly a shock.

Letters cover some of the changes in Dragon and some of the ones coming up. 1986-88 was a big transitional time at TSR as we all know now and there is evidence everywhere. 

Roger E. Moore asks in the Editorial what other changes do people want, including a dedicated BBS (bulletin board system). Kudos for the forward thinking. I got onto a lot of BBS back in the day and TSR one would have been fun. 

Checking my PDF it looks like I am missing the Forum page.

Ken Rolston is up first with Role-playing Reviews. He covers two books from the Warhammer Fantasy line, though he spends a lot of time talking about the merits of various other Fantasy RPGs including AD&D/D&D, GURPS Fantasy, RuneQuest and Harnmaster among others. When we get to warhammer he likes the character creation and combat, but doesn't seem to care for the magic system. Though he loves the races and monsters. The review is long, but not so long as to be overpowering. Given the impact that Warhammer will soon have on the hobby, it is likely the right size. 

Sage Advice covers the Frank Mentzer-edited D&D Expert set. 

Ah, page 17, we get into our feature articles. 

Ed Greenwood is up first with Sailors on the Sea of Air, detailing the skyships of the Forgotten Realms. Since these pages were already falling out, I just took them and stuck them into my 1987 "Gray" Forgotten Realms boxed set.  These are not Spelljammer ships, at least not yet, but they are a nice fantastical piece that separates what makes the Realms the Realms and not Greyhawk. Does Greyhawk have flying ships? Maybe, but they seem to work well here. Ed, of course, is dropping names here that will soon become minor D&D celebrities in their own right.

On a Wing and a Prayer is next from L. Gregory Smith and covers gliders for AD&D. Not quite as fantastical as flying ships. It seems to be complete. When were gliders first used? 1880s it seems. 

Thomas Kane is back with Flying the Friendly (?) Skies, or a guide to aerial adventuring in the AD&D game. This covers mounts of various types and spells. He also gives us weather effects and altitude adjustments. 

The Wings of Eagles by J. E. Keeping details the aarakocra as a PC and NPC race choice. I don't recall ever seeing anyone ever play one back then, so not sure if this article had much traction. Of course, today they are ubiquitous enough to be a character and a plot point in the last Dungeons & Dragons movie.  Again my copy was falling out, so I just punched some holes into it and stuck it into my Monstrous Compendium for AD&D 2nd ed. There is even a god of aarakocra, Krocaa, listed. 

This ends the feature.

Buy quirk of layout, Sage advice continues here on the same page with the updated Beastmaster XP tables. Now I kinda want to make an aarakocra beastmaster. 

Joseph R. Ravitts is next with Kicks and Sticks, Introducing escrima to Oriental Adventures. A system of escrima martial arts as well as a class to use it, the Escrimador. It *seems* fine, but feels like a solution in search of a problem. Honestly, I never used Oriental Adventures much and got into their martial arts sections even less. 

Rich Stump is up with Front-End Alignments about "Quasi-alignments" of gamers like "Chaotic Everywhere" and "Lawful Bored."  Not really my thing, but I'm sure someone was amused. Feels like filler to me. 

Far more useful is Rich Baldwin's Arcane Lore: The Secrets of Odeen the Arch-Mage. This details the known background of the Arch-Mage Odeen and, more importantly, the discovered spells of the Arch-Mage. There are five new spells here, nothing earth-breaking, but fun ones. Perfect for a quest to uncover this lost book. 

Stuck in the middle of this issue is this AD&D Game 2d Edition Questionnaire. It is pretty comprehensive. The mail in reply card is still attached, but sadly I think I missed the window to send in my responses.

What is most interesting to me is what is here that made it into the game and what didn't. 

Packing It All Away by Ian Chapman offers tips on what to pack for a wilderness adventure. Most of the people I gamed with were at the time or had been Boy Scouts, present company included (yes, I was a Boy Scout, no, I didn't stick with it because they didn't like Atheists then, still don't I think.).  So this material was a bit of a repeat. We all had access to various Boy Scout manuals. Still this is a useful list of items and advice. Not sure if the GP values translate to other systems, though. 

Ah, now here is a fun one. Ed Greenwood is back with The Ecology of the Gelatinous Cube. A monster that, by all accounts, was created just so Gary could mess with his players gets the full Ecology treatment. Here the deadliest of the all the Jello-O flavors gets situated into the dungeons of the Undermountain. Ed even manages to make these things make sense. They even get a proper name, Athcoids. Since this was already falling out, I punched holes in this one too and put it in my Monstrous Compendium binder. Blasphemy? Eh. The magazine is falling apart anyway, and this at least allows me to keep the best parts. 

Michael Dobson give us some sneak peaks of AD&D 2nd Edition in The Game Wizards. I know that at the time I was excited to get this new AD&D. Despite starting in 1979 I always felt I was on my back foot when it came to AD&D 1st ed. I began with Holmes Basic and then on to Moldvay Basic before getting into AD&D proper. This of course is silly for me to think, since the Holmes Basic I was playing then was a combination of that and the AD&D Monster Manual. So I was only two years late for the start of AD&D. But still, I felt AD&D 2nd Ed would be "mine" the one I could invest into. This article covers the new AD&D, but also other offerings from TSR. I didn't fully comprehend then what was happening with TSR and Gygax even if I new the broad strokes. Still, it felt like a change, and I was already in the middle of my own changes that this felt custom-made for me. College and AD&D, 2nd ed., would be forever linked in my mind.

Peter R. Jahn has some rules for guns for various systems in Blasters & Blunderbusses. Really, I should say it is more system-agnostic.

Following on that is A Shot in the Arm, or a new damage system for Star Frontiers by Jason Pamental and David Packard. I enjoyed SF back in the day, but by 1987 I had moved on to other sci-fi games in my search to find the perfect sch-fi game for me. Eventually, I just had to write my own. 

Thomas Kane is up again with The Most Secret of Secrets, real world secret tech for Top Secret and Top Secret/SI games. This includes such things as the Stealth Bomber and Stealth Fighter. I had a high-school buddy who became an engineer and was WAY into stealth tech. Then later on in college I had a roomate that bought all the flight simulators for the stealth fighters when they came out in the early 1990s. I liked this article for the coverage of the nearly forgotten Soviet "space plane," their answer to our space Shuttle. 

Friend of the Other Side, Jeff Grubb is up with his Marvel-Phile discussing The Hulk and the Hulkbusters. 

The Lessers are back with The Role of Computers, detailing what was high tech in the Summer of 1987. They cover the games Black Magic and Realms of Darkness as well some clues for other games. The DNA that all computer games share with D&D is always a little more obvious in these early games. 

Small ads are next with the Gamer's Guide. Always a ton of great stuff here. Avil Enterprises still has its ad for illustrating your character. An ad for "Christian Adventure Novels," "Discipleship Games," and a few more. 

Order form for back issues of Dragon. You can get issues as far back as #80 and all five volumes of "Best of Dragon." Minimum $15 for credit card orders, please. 

The Convention Calendar covers all the best cons for late summer/early fall 1987, including Gen Con 20 in Milwaukee, WI, on August 20-23. I see the Midwest still dominates the Con scene, followed by the West Coast. 

Dragonmirth, Snarf Quest, and Wormy provide us with our comics this issue. 

All said and told, not a bad issue at all. Part of the transitional time of Dragon, D&D, and TSR. Some of those transitions were pretty obvious, others we only see in retrospect.

While some people claim that the best days of Dragon were behind it, as part of the Golden Age of TSR/D&D, I would argue that Dragon gained more focus and direction in these years, between the height of AD&D 1st edition and the beginning of AD&D 2nd edition. We are seeing the direction AD&D is about to go (again, this is retrospective), and honestly, I thought and still think it looked pretty good. I was not so creator-focused back then that the news of Gygax's, Mohan's, and then later Mentzer's departure affected me much. I suspected then that AD&D/D&D would go on. It did in fact. 

Had I been more "creator-focused" I should have noticed more the rise of Ed Greenwood. It was not a meteroic rise, but a gradual one built up over years of steady and reliable output. Maybe I would have given the Realms more of a chance back then. But it would not be until the 2000s that I really looked into it all and not till much later that I would be playing in the Realms. 

Still. One of the big reasons to keep doing these "This Old Dragons" is to appreciate what we had, how it has shaped the game and the gamers, and what we can still learn from it all today. 

Speaking of which. I have been periodically buying large collections of Dragon magazines. I am now just about out. I'll have to check, but I might not have many of these left. 

NIGHT SHIFT: Tales of Jackson, IL

 My son's group has been splitting their Sunday games up into two sessions lately. Usually, it is D&D 5e first, then dinner, then something else. Lately, the "something else" has been AD&D 1st edition (which they love), along with a combination of NIGHT SHIFT, Wasted Lands, and Thirteen Parsecs.

I got a chance to run some games with them. Since I was fresh off my "Stranger Things" high of this winter, I wanted to run a "proper 80s" style game with them. So I picked Jackson, IL, and set their adventure in 1986. The fun part was reminding them that no, there were no cell phones, no Internet, no Wikipedia, and if you wanted to call someone and you were not at home, you had to find a payphone. Cultural shocks aside, it also gave me an excuse to pull out some NPCs I have been dying to use.

Stephanie, Faye, and Larina

The players are all familiar with Pathfinder, and the various Iconics have made guest appearances in their D&D 5e games. Largely because we have the minis for them and they are all easily recognized. So I decided to have a little fun and fill the halls with characters they would recognize, but as high school students in 1986.

The big ones are Stephanie (Seoni) Vale, Fiona "Faye" (Feiya) Voss/Thorne (I'll explain later), and, naturally, Larina Nichols. They are likely the stars in their own tales, but here they are the NPCs. Everyone whispers that they are witches. Everyone is right.

Yeah, Larina is right-handed and wears her watch on her right hand. She was a weird kid.

Val (Valeros) is here as a super jock, as is RPG/LARPER dude Ed (Ezren), and more. Most of them just fill up the background of a school that has a lot of weirdness going on. But a few stand out.

Kyra is a sweet girl known as the "Preacher's Kid" and a star on the girls' track team. She is always hanging out with troublemaker Meriko (Merisiel). Kyra, though, thinks demons, devils, and other evil things are hiding in the shadows. She is also not wrong. Meriko dresses like a mid 80s ad for "Ninja culture" because she likes to irritate her conservative parents. 

Kyra and Meriko

Others include some originals. 

Rowan and Andy are the "it couple" at Jackson High and "were born dating," according to Faye. Rowan is the local horse girl who spends more time with animals than people. Andy is the star player of the football team, the son of a wealthy businessman, and an all-around nice guy.

Rowan and Andy. Aren't they adorable?

I have to admit, I was writing their background and got really carried away, and now I kinda love them both. 

They met when Andy's father, who owns the stables where Rowan's dad works, thought his son needed discipline, so he spent the summers cleaning the stables. Rowan, who always hangs out at the stables to ride the horses (she can't afford to be a member), showed Andy how to do the work she and her dad did. After friction, not liking each other, and even fighting, Rowan saw that Andy, despite everything, wanted to do a good job in hopes his dad would notice, and Andy saw how natural Rowan was with all animals, especially the horses. They fell in love in typical, even clichéd, 1980s Rom-Com fashion, including a special scene where Rowan has to enter the horse she loves into a show to win, or he gets sold. She loses because a rival cheats, and the horse is sold. TWIST: Andy buys the horse with his college money and gives it to Rowan!  They realize they love each other. Spoiler. They get married right out of high school and adopt a dozen pets. 

I said I spent way too much time on them. The irony? They haven't even shown up in the game yet!

The first "episode" adventure was called "The Midnight Bell For Whom the Bell Tolls" about the big school bell that was hung in the tower and has not rung since 1936. It rang and every supernatural creature heard it. The Big Bad (they don't know this yet) is "The Bell Ringer." He is a harbinger of more bad guys. I have a faerie lord slumming it at the high school who up to no good. Faye has two "Aunties" who are really Urban Hags. I also have some creepy kids, some fake-Satanists, some real Devil-worshipers, a hidden graveyard, tunnels under the town, and an abandoned mall filled with zombies. So yeah, basically shit from my own childhood!

I hope I get to do more with this. Plus, I am enjoying all the "cameos" I am throwing in. They love the time and keep asking how things were in the 80s. The oddest thing? These 20-somethings LOVE "Hall and Oates."  I am trying to play Iron Maiden, and they want to hear "Maneater."

Ah well. Maybe you all will enjoy my 1985 and 1986 playlists.

OH! quick reminder.
Night Shift® is a registered trademark of Elf Lair, LLC. 2026

In Search Of...Ramal LaMarr

In Search Of… Ramal LaMarr

Every so often, I run into a name that feels less like a person and more like a half-remembered fever dream. Ramal LaMarr is one of those names.

I first encountered him the same way many gamers of a certain age did. Not through dance, and not through music stores, but through the pages of Dragon Magazine. Tucked away in the advertising margins of the mid-1980s, alongside mail orders for electronic dice, miniature ads, and fantasy figurines, was something unexpected.

A record advertisement.

Not a soundtrack.
Not a movie score.

Belly dance music.

Specifically, Omens, Oracles & Mysticisms of Dance and Empires of Dance by Ramal LaMarr.

At the time, it barely registered. Dragon was full of all sorts of strange things. But the name lingered. Years later, when I revisited Dragon #98 for my This Old Dragon series, the ad jumped out again, this time louder. It was no longer just a curiosity in the margins of a magazine. It felt like a clue.

Dragon Magazine

In Dragon Magazine #98 (June 1985), Ramal LaMarr’s albums were advertised explicitly as “MUSIC for Adventure Gaming!” The ad promoted two LPs: Omens, Oracles & Mysticisms of Dance and Empires of Dance. 

Both were available by mail order from Lotus Records, a small Milwaukee-based label. There was no game company logo or endorsement and no elaborate explanation. Just the quiet assumption that gamers would understand why this music belonged at the table.

And honestly, that assumption was probably correct.

The mid-1980s gaming scene was full of these cultural overlaps. Fantasy roleplaying, New Age mysticism, occult bookstores, exotica records, and mail-order catalogs all blended together in ways that feel very foreign now. If you wanted atmosphere for your game, you built it yourself. Candles, incense, weird records, whatever you could find.

Ramal LaMarr’s music promised atmosphere. I do not know a great deal about the genre, but I do know I plan to use this music when I finally run the Desert of Desolation trilogy, which appeared around the same time as these ads.  Tracks like "Cities of the Jinn," "Ritual Fire Music," and "Wand Dance of the Scarlet Sorceress" from Omens, Oracles & Mysticisms are practically custom-made for these adventures. Even one online catalog files Ramal LaMarr under "occult," so you know it has my attention.

Following the Music Outside the Dungeon

Step outside the pages of Dragon Magazine, and Ramal LaMarr stops being a gaming curiosity and becomes something else entirely.

His music was composed for belly dance performance, not fantasy gaming. His best-known album, Omens, Oracles & Mysticisms of Dance, was released in 1983, followed a year later by Empires of Dance, both on Lotus Records. There is a third album, Pleasure Gardens Of Dance (1987), which sounds a little different, and another in 1989, Exotica.  Neither of these later albums was advertised in Dragon Magazine. At least, not that I have seen. He would also appear on a compilation album, Dance Of Mystery, in 2015 with his song Dance Of Mystery.

The sound is unmistakably of its time. Synthesizers sit alongside electric guitar and bass, while traditional percussion instruments, such as African drums and the tabla, anchor the rhythm. Throw in some kanoon and mbira, and LaMarr goes from curiosity to multi-instrumentalist. The result is music that feels ritualistic, sensual, and deeply rooted in the early-1980s studio aesthetic.

This was not archival folk music attempting to reproduce traditional Middle Eastern styles. It was modern studio work designed to evoke an imagined ancient world. Mystery, sensuality, and atmosphere were clearly part of the goal.

The album's own liner notes describe the music as conveying "authentic rhythms and moods of the East with a wonderful quality that transcends time and geographical boundaries," promising to "inspire visions of mystic times past and dreams for future aspirations." 

Which, again, explains why it made perfect sense to advertise it to Dungeon Masters.

Over time, the albums slipped out of print. Copies became harder to find. What had once been a niche record slowly turned into a collector’s item. Belly dancers still search for the LPs. Vinyl collectors trade stories and digital transfers. Online threads periodically appear asking the same question.

Where did Ramal LaMarr go? 

Ramal LaMarr After Dragon Magazine

This is where the trail begins to fade.

There are no confirmed biographical details about Ramal LaMarr’s real name, musical training, nationality, or early life. No interviews have surfaced. No promotional biographies. Even Discogs, usually a good archive of production details, preserves only the album credits and publishing information.

One name does appear repeatedly: Chandrani.

She is referenced in track titles, most notably Raks Chandrani. Community recollections claim that Ramal and Chandrani lived in Germantown, WI, and that she was deeply involved in the dance world. One commenter even claims she later died of cancer. It is verified that on his albums, she played the Zills, or finger cymbals. It has been confirmed she was his wife and featured on the covers of his albums. I guess I really should say their albums. While Ramal played almost every instrument, she feels like a full contributor to the sound of these albums.

Germantown, Wisconsin, is outside my Illinois "Corridor" of gaming influence; it does sit in what many have been calling the Gaming Fertile Crescent. An area between Lake Geneva and the Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota. But that is for another "In Search Of..."

These stories may be true, but they remain anecdotal. They belong more to the oral history of a small artistic community than to verifiable archival sources.

What we can say with confidence is that Ramal LaMarr recorded at least two albums, published through Lotus Records and its imprint Daughter of the Jinn Music, and that his work circulated widely enough to leave a long echo even after the records themselves disappeared.

One YouTube commenter suggested that Ramal was still alive as recently as five years ago, though attempts to contact his former label, Lotus Records, have yielded nothing.

Another possibility is that Lotus Records was not a traditional label at all. Many niche musicians in the early 1980s released records through private-press imprints, often little more than names created to manufacture and distribute their own albums. If that is the case here, then Lotus Records may simply have been Ramal LaMarr himself.

Anyone online who claims to have known Ramal and Chandrani describes them the same way: lovely, generous people.

What Happened Next?

That is the question that keeps coming up.

There is no reliable public information about Ramal LaMarr’s life after the mid-1980s. No additional albums have surfaced. No modern performances or teaching listings can be clearly connected to him. No official website exists, and there is no widely documented obituary.

In other words, Ramal LaMarr joins a long list of creators who burned brightly in a niche cultural space and then quietly stepped away. 

Why This Still Matters

Ramal LaMarr fascinates me because he represents a moment that no longer quite exists.

A time when a belly dance LP could be advertised in a role-playing game magazine without explanation. When a small regional label could produce something that quietly embedded itself in multiple subcultures. When mystery was not part of the marketing plan. It was simply the way things worked.

I discovered Ramal LaMarr in the pages of Dragon Magazine, but he clearly did not belong there alone. His music belonged to dancers, gamers, collectors, and anyone looking for sounds that felt a little different and a little magical.

Ramal Lamarr and Ronald E. Pillat, the Man Behind the Music

Research is a funny thing. As of right now, I have been working on this post for a little over a year. Digging up old details, reading local newspapers for mentions. But it was not until I decided to look up copyright details for "Daughter of Jinn Music."  That opened up a lot of information for me.

It seems as recently as 2011, a copyright application was filed for "Lands of Pleasure and Delight et al." Tucked away in the application was the best clue I have uncovered in a long time. 

Ramal LaMarr, pseud. of Ronald Pillat (author of pseudonymous work); Domicile: United States; Citizenship: United States. Authorship: Sound recording, performance, production, music and lyrics.

There is an address associated with the filing and it is in Germantown, WI. But that house now seems to be gone and new one has been built in its place with new owners (so please don't try to contact them).

So who is, or more to the point was, Ronald E. Pillat?

There are more copyright claims for all of the Ramal LaMarr albums, including notes indicating that Ramal LaMarr was the pseudonym for Pillat. 

Sadly, this is almost where the trail ends. It seems that Ronald E. Pillat, born May 24, 1951, passed away on  August 13, 2021.  This Ronald E. Pillat did live in the right area (North Prairie, Wisconsin) and was the age I would have suspected.  The 1951 date also tracks with information found in the pulbic records for the copyright for Omens, Oracles & Mysticisms of Dance.

I am disappointed, to be honest. I posted first about Ramal LaMarr in 2017. Had I done this research, I could have reached out to Ronald Pillat for more information.  I am happy, though I can finally put a name to Ramal LaMarr. I hope that others find this half as interesting as I did.

I am playing Omens, Oracles & Mysticisms of Dance while working on this. Is it D&D music?  It doesn't matter if I think it is or not, its connection to Dragon Magazine is enough. And if my own research has anything to say about it, enough gamers my age remember the ads fondly and that too is enough. But, if you really want my opinion? Yes. It is. I want to play this while running a desert-themed adventure.  Maybe even something for my Wasted Lands: The Dying Age campaign. Certanily there will be a Bard in my games named Ramal at some point.

Thank you Ramal LaMarr for such a wonderful research idea and your funky ads in Dragon Magazine. Thank you and Chandrani for your passion and wonderful album covers. And thank you, Ronald E. Pillat, for bringing all of this to life. I only wish I had had the chance to tell you all this myself.

Links

Copyright details for Ramal LaMarr / Ronald E. Pillat (1951 - )

Discogs: Ramal LaMarr artist page

• Omens, Oracles & Mysticisms of Dance
• Empires Of Dance
• Pleasure Gardens of Dance
• Exotica

YouTube Links

• Ramal LaMarr - Omens, Oracles & Mysticisms of Dance - Side One 
• Ramal LaMarr - Omens, Oracles & Mysticisms of Dance - Side Two
• Ramal LaMarr - Pleasure Gardens of Dance - Side One
• Ramal LaMarr - Pleasure Gardens of Dance - Side Two 
• Ramal LaMarr ‎ - "Princess of the Nile" from Empires of Dance
• Ramal LaMarr - "Golden Daughters of RA" from Empires of Dance
• Ramal LaMarr - "The Ancient Queendoms of Sheba" from Empires of Dance

DJ Farraginous blog, “Ramal LaMarr - Omens, Oracles & Mysticisms of Dance.”
https://djfarraginous.wordpress.com/2017/08/20/ramal-lamarr-omens-oracles-mysticisms-of-dance/

Hanttula Exotica archive: Omens, Oracles & Mysticisms of Dance
https://www.hanttula.com/exotica/omens-oracles-mysticisms-of-dance/

Instagram post of Omens, Oracles, and Mysticisms of Dance 
https://www.instagram.com/p/DMURiJyO6q4/?img_index=1

Reddit: “Ramal Lamarr - Where is he today?”
https://www.reddit.com/r/Bellydance/comments/smfdpi/ramal_lamarr_where_is_he_today/

Reddit: “Looking for out of print LPs by Ramal LaMarr”
https://www.reddit.com/r/Bellydance/comments/kezozh/looking_for_out_of_print_lps_by_ramal_lamarr/

This Old Dragon: Issue #60

 Time to crack open another old Dragon. This is another one sent in by Eric Harshbarger. While the cover has fallen off of this one and there is a slight musty smell, it is in rather good condition. We head back to April 1982. Joan Jett and the Blackhearts dominate the airwaves with "I Love Rock & Roll."  The teen sex comedy "Porky's" is in the theatres. And on tables and shelves everywhere is This Old Dragon #60.

Dean Morrissey gives us our cover for this month. Editor Kim Mohan tells us a story about a December 1981 Dragon that was supposed to go to Washington DC and instead ended up in Vienna Austria. 

In a move that pre-sages the feature issues of the later 1980s, we have a huge feature on Elves, All About Elves. I should point out that much of this information now feels very familiar. But at the time, this was great world-building. While the debt to Tolkien is acknowledged, there is more here that is not Tolkien and that is great for AD&D (later editions).

Roger E. Morre is up first with The Elven Point of View. A lot of this material was reused for the Unearthed Arcana and can even be seen in the various Demi-human books of the AD&D 2nd Ed era. 

Moore is back, with Georgia Moore, on The Gods of the Elves. While we are still a few years away from the Forgotten Realms, this material has become part of the cornerstones of Greenwood's world. The gods presented here, Hanali Celanil, Erevan Ilesere, Aerdrie Faenya, Labelas Enoreth, and Solonor Thelandria, are still used to this day. 

Sage Advice covers elf-related questions.

Roger Moore, our MVP of Elves, is up again with The Half-Elven Point of View. Honestly, you can practically hear the birth cries of Tanis in this article. 

By page 16 we are done with the elves. Which makes it a shorter "feature" but it punches way above it's weight class in terms of content. 

On page 16 we get our monthly From the Sorcerer's Scroll by Gary Gygax. This one covers more Cantrips. Timely for me because I am reworking my witch cantrips for my Advanced Witches & Warlocks: Occult Adventures. And he has a lot of them. 

A two-page ad for Asgard miniatures. 

Ed Greenwood is up with Firearms, a coverage of early guns. There is a nice history and a table of various types of guns used with AD&D stats. Again, as with most of Ed's material, it is really useful. 

Aside. The paper of this magazine is so thick. Not at all like the later ones and certainly not at all like magazines today.

Wear Wolf is our fiction piece by Joel Rosenberg. A modern werewolf tale of the "wolf skin" sort.

Mike Holthaus has a quiz for us. How Much Do You Know About Science in a Fantasy World? Some basic science applications to situations in a fantasy setting. Like, if you fall 3,000 ft, do you have enough time to cast a Fly spell?

Our centerfold game is Flight of Boodles. Comes complete with a fold-out game board. 

Lest we forget, this is the April issue. I hate sounding like an old humorless grouch here, but I find most of the April issues to be very un-funny. This one at least is tolerable. 

Roger Moore (again!) is up with the Jester class. Though this one is presented as an actual class option and not a joke class. Well...sort of jokey, but still very playable. 

There is a parody of their usual "Giants in the Earth" series, again by Roger E. Moore, featuring some small characters that are supposed to be humorous. 

Phil Foglio has a nice spread in Artist of the Month. Not a feature I remember very well, but there is a cool bit of art here. 

A woman warrior saving a male one from a monster? Since when has D&D been so woke! Kidding of course. But there are certain segments of the fandom who freak out if this art were used today. I admit the color-by-numbers is a nice touch.

The Dragon's Bestiary features the Valley Giant (Jolly Green giant), Donald Duck, Tasmanian Devil, Marvin the Martian, a werebeaver, and the Bad New Bugbears. I am a little surprised no one sued. 

Interesting ad for the short-lived Gen Con East in Chester, PA.

Gary is up with some Top Secret RPG material for Outfitting the New Agent. 

Glenn Rahman has some playtest notes from his game, Trojan War.

Ah, now here is something fun. Stats and background on the Irish Pooka by Michael Fountain.

We get another point of view on Alignment from John Lees. This time, we delve a little bit into psychology and the ethics of the individuals. It also introduces the concept of alignment gradients, but not the mechanics behind them. 

The notorious Spawn of Fashan gets a review from Lawrence Schick, where he advises us not to take the game very seriously. He is pretty much saying it is a parody and bad on purpose. Later on he admitted it wasn't a parody, but he still thought it was funny. I tried to play it once in college, around 1989 or so. Yeah, it is terrible.

Comics pages give us Wormy and What's New with Phil and Dixie! I don't think there were more than this, though my cover is detached; I think this was all the pages.

So this was great stuff for 1982. The big feature on Elves has appeared in many AD&D books over the years. Ed Greenwood's piece on guns is good if you want to bring them into your AD&D games. And the jester class is one of the better ones I have seen.

Thanks once again to Eric Harshbarger for sending me this issue!

In Search Of...The SIU Connection and the Illinois RPG Pipeline

“I am a Saluki, you fools. I am a Saluki, and I will destroy you.” 

- Bob Odenkirk, SIUC Grad 1984

Growing up in the Midwest in the 1980s was interesting. I was far away from both Chicago and St. Louis, the two largest cities, which I didn't get to very often, and stayed relatively stuck in my smallish town.  We had our own run-ins with the Satanic Panic, and generally speaking, I couldn't wait to get out, thinking that if I moved away, I could at least find better access to cool RPGs.

How little I actually knew back then.

I later learned that I actually lived near what I have started calling the Illinois RPG pipeline. Games would flow down from Lake Geneva via Chicago to universities in Champaign-Urbana (U of I), Bloomington-Normal (Illinois State), and Carbondale (Southern Illinois University, SIUC). Mostly via I57. Of course, SIUC was the Alma Mater of Tim Kask and, later, yours truly. 

Given the availability of material, I also assume that there was a pipeline that went through Springfield, IL as well. That route would have been Lake Geneva to Chicago, down I55 through Bloomington to Springfield, and then on to St. Louis and again, Carbondale. 

From the early 1970s through the 1990s, these contiguous corridors stretching from Lake Geneva through Chicago and central Illinois to Carbondale functioned as a sustained creative and distribution spine for tabletop role-playing games, linking publishers, university clubs, conventions, retailers, and designers into what can reasonably be called the Illinois RPG Pipeline.

The Illinois RPG Pipeline was not just a metaphorical flow of ideas, but a physical corridor of products and ideas.

Gen Con in particular was not just an event. It was the first distribution node. Designers, retailers, and university gamers attended in person and brought the product home. Its position in late summer was ideal for purchasing content and then packing it up to take back to school in a few weeks. 

What I once thought was isolation in southern Illinois was in fact proximity to one of the most important role-playing game corridors in the country: a 400-mile pipeline that carried ideas, designers, products, and play culture from Lake Geneva through Chicago and central Illinois to SIU, shaping the growth of tabletop gaming for decades.

Talking with Tim at Gary Con 2025, I learned even more. 

Tim Kask from Little Egypt

Before he was TSR’s first full-time employee and editor of The Dragon, Tim Kask was a married student at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale. From there, he cold-called Gary Gygax, having found the Lake Geneva address in the back of Chainmail. Chainmail was popular with the Strategic Games Society then, as it was when I got there a decade later.  Kask got invited up, dropping his wife and daughter off in the Quad Cities, and the rest is history. Kask’s own reminiscences place that contact in late ’73/early ’74, while he was at SIUC. During this time, Kask would talk with Gygax about what a "mess" the rules were and how he taught the SGS how to play, but needed to figure them out himself first. This is key: the rules, given their state, lent themselves to being taught in play rather than being read to play. This became a viral campaign long before that term was coined and is still one of D&D's greatest strengths; people who watch it being played want to play more.

This area of the state in known as "Little Egypt." SIUC's school mascot is a Saluki, an Egyptian running dog. The school's daily newspaper is called "The Daily Egyptian." This dates back to the 1830s, when severe weather caused crop failures in Northern Illinois. The Southern Illinois area (today anything south of I-70) became very attractive to settlers due to the fertile land and rivers (the lower Mississippi and Ohio) that rarely froze. The richness of the soil there is so deeply ingrained that 150 years later, when I was there, people still talked about it.

Kask and I talked a lot about SIUC. Salukis never forget their erstwhile home. Tim lived in married housing while his brother lived in the dorms called "Triads," and he would go and visit him and play D&D. I also lived in the Triads. He was in Boomer Hall, and I was in Wright Hall, separated by about 13-14 years. Sadly, Boomer, Wright, and Allen halls, the Triads, were all demolished in 2012. I guess sometimes you can't go home again. 

But that time was influential in shaping how D&D grew beyond those three little rulebooks. 

Kask refereed the "Qualishar campaign," described in local coverage as the first Dungeons & Dragons campaign played at SIU and likely one of the first outside Lake Geneva. That’s a huge claim, but it’s coming from a contemporary profile built around Kask’s Carbondale years. Note the spelling drift you’ll see in fan histories: Qualishar in news pieces vs. Kwalishar in later forum posts and anecdotes.

Side Note: Kask has also said his first PC was named Kwalish, which fans often connect (informally) to the item name Apparatus of Kwalish. Treat that as apocrypha-but-plausible; it’s sourced to Kask comments preserved in community threads, not a primary TSR memo or publication.

The Strategic Games Society and The Egyptian Campaign

The Strategic Games Society was the gaming group that formed back in the early 1970s at SIU Carbondale. They would meet in the Student Center (3rd floor if I remember right) and play war games. At the time, prior to 1974 their membership was only about a dozen. Tim Kask and his brother were members 14 and 15, according to his recollections. 

Back then, SGS at SIUC was a wargaming RSO (registered student organization) that bridged the pre-D&D and early-D&D eras. Exact rosters are hard to pin down in print, but the through-line is clear: SIU had an organized strategy gaming scene in the early 1970s, and by the mid-to-late 1970s that group was already intersecting with the brand-new role-playing hobby. There’s an active SGS presence today; they still meet in the Student Center.

The Egyptian Campaign (1987–2007)

If you gamed around Carbondale, you probably remember The Egyptian Campaign, the local convention that ran from 1987 to 2007, peaking at around ~750 attendees. It was anchored at the SIU Student Center and, for years, was the spring gaming date on the regional calendar. Even recent DE coverage of successor shows calls out Egyptian Campaign’s footprint and dates.

I went to it in April of 1988. I missed the preregistration and was unable to get into any games.  It happened around the time of Spring Fest and Carbondale's famous "Cardboard Boat Regatta," so I often missed it. 

What the SGS was doing through the late '70s and into the '80s, as D&D exploded, is harder to document; rosters and meeting records from that era haven't surfaced publicly, but the convention scene that emerged in 1987 didn't spring from nothing. Conventions do not appear ex nihilo. A 750-attendee show requires a pre-existing culture.  One thing is certain: there was quite a bit of D&D being played there.  A side effect of this? Cheap D&D books at 2nd hand book stores. I picked up a near-mint looking Deities & Demigods with the Cthulhu and Melniboné mythos for just $18. And it was not the only one. 

An Aside: The Trampier Thread

Then there’s the Carbondale connection we can't escape: David A. Trampier (DAT) the AD&D 1st edition artist and creator of Wormy. After vanishing from the hobby in the late ’80s, he resurfaced in a 2002 Daily Egyptian ride-along story… as a Carbondale cab driver. He later died in Carbondale in 2014, just weeks before he was slated to surface at a local con (yes, Egypt Wars). If you’ve ever wondered why Carbondale keeps coming up in old-school circles, that story alone would do it. 

Back in the early to mid-90s, I walked by that Yellow Cab depot all the time. There was this bar that all the TAs went to as soon as we were done teaching. There were more than a couple of occasions I left the bar, walked by the Yellow Cab, and got on the Amtrak to see my girlfriend in Chicago. The cabbies all sat outside and smoked. I can't verify this at all, but I know I walked by Tramp more than once.

The Pipeline

From the mid-’70s through the ’90s, a contiguous corridor of publishers, conventions, and university clubs, TSR and Gen Con in southern Wisconsin; Chicago-area publishers and retailers; UIUC’s Winter War; Judges Guild in Decatur; and SIU’s convention scene and retailers in Carbondale, created a reliable Midwest supply chain for RPGs. That infrastructure, plus TSR’s 1979 Random House book-trade deal and later Midwest distributors like Chessex/Alliance, made new D&D material easier and faster to find along this route than in regions that lacked equivalent clusters.

I have no sales figures. I have no hard data. What I do have is the recollections of many gamers and some other anecdotal evidence. But here is what I do know.

Mayfair Games (Chill, Role Aids line) was founded in Spring 1981 by Darwin Bromley, his brother Peter Bromley, and friends, and Darwin Bromley himself had practiced law in Chicago from 1975 to 1981 before starting the company. It was named for the Chicago neighborhood in which it started.  Darwin Bromley was involved with the Chicago Wargaming Association and its CWAcon convention, where the first Role Aids fantasy adventures were debuted and run. Chicago had its own organized wargaming association running its own convention. That's not just a waypoint, that's an active gaming culture node.

FASA (founded in 1980 in Chicago) pumped out Traveller material early on, then Star Trek, Doctor Who, BattleTech, and Shadowrun. Further concentrating RPG/miniature culture (and distribution reps) in Chicagoland. Founder Jordan Weisman was first bitten by the gaming bug in the mid-'70s when he began playing D&D at a summer camp. The game followed him all the way to the Merchant Marine Academy and the University of Illinois at Chicago, where it ultimately pulled him away from his degree and led him to found FASA in 1980.  Weisman and Babcock sold those first Traveller adventures to a local Chicago store before sending them to nationwide distributors. 

FASA brought William H. Keith, Jr. and his brother J. Andrew Keith into the company from freelancing for Game Designers' Workshop. The downstate node was feeding back into the upstate one.

Games Plus (Mount Prospect, IL) has been serving the region since 1982, one of the Midwest’s longest-running RPG FLGS anchors. I would order minis from them and have them shipped to me when I was living downstate. 

Moving south.

Champaign-Urbana (UIUC) as the mid-corridor node. Winter War launched in January 1974 and is still running, often cited as the Midwest’s longest consecutively running independent gaming convention.  This is where Marc Miller tested out some of his classic Traveller adventures. Game Desinger's Workshop actively playtested here as well. My first connection with the Call of Cthulhu game was the summer a friend's older brother brought it back from Urbana. 

Bloomington-Normal, IL was the home of Game Designer's Workshop (1973) and Illinois State University. The GDW collection at the McLean County Museum in Normal, IL shows central Illinois as a parallel wargame/RPG publishing hub feeding the same stores and cons. 

Marc Miller, creator of Traveller, attended Illinois State University (in Normal), where he joined the ISU Game Club, created by future game designers Rich Banner and Frank Chadwick.  ISU is as important to the development of Traveller as SIU was to Dungeons & Dragons. GDW did not advertise locally but instead focused on conventions and word of mouth. 

Decatur, IL as the south-central publisher node. Judges Guild began publishing in 1976 and became the premier third-party for D&D in the late ’70s–early ’80s; TSR’s formal license lasted into the early ’80s. 

Bob Bledsaw was born and raised in Decatur, Illinois, and in 1975 began running a D&D campaign after friends asked for help after four failed attempts to run the game themselves. On July 4, 1976, Bledsaw and partner Bill Owen traveled to Lake Geneva to visit TSR, where they met with Dave Arneson and received verbal approval to produce play aids for D&D. At the time, TSR's general feeling was that no one would be interested in supplemental materials.

By 1980, Judges Guild had scaled to a 14,000-square-foot facility in Decatur with a staff of 42. At that time this central Illinois town was home to one of the world's largest RPG publishers.

Springfield, IL, White Oaks Mall (Center of the State) had two book sellers (Waldenbooks, B Dalton's) that kept a regular high stock of D&D/RPG items from the early 1980s on. This was due to the Random-House distribution deal that put D&D and other games into malls all over. Many other stores also carried D&D and Wargame titles within the city. At one point, a city of just 100,000 people had five sources of D&D books. 

I have talked to gamers from all over. Some had to hunt for books, drive long distances, or rely on mail order. Here, I had choices of a couple of locations in my own small hometown, and I could drive the short distance to Springfield to have even more choices. 

Carbondale, IL, Castle Perilous. Coming full circle, Castle Perilous opened up in Carbondale in 1990 by SIU alum Scott Thorne.  Steve Chenault of Troll Lord Games played games here while searching for Trampier.  

Continuous convention calendar along the route. Gen Con (WI), Winter War (UIUC), and the Egyptian Campaign (SIU) created a reliable annual circuit for retailers, designers, and GMs to move product, run events, and cross-pollinate.

Time Line

1968–1978: Gen Con grows in southern WI (Lake Geneva to UW-Parkside).
1973: GDW founded (Bloomington-Normal, IL).
1974: Winter War launches at UIUC (Champaign-Urbana, IL)
1974: Tim Kask attends first GenCon, begins playtesting D&D at SIUC
1976: TSR opens Dungeon Hobby Shop at 723 Williams St. in Lake Geneva.
1976–83: Judges Guild (Decatur) is a primary third-party D&D publisher under TSR license, then beyond.
1979: Random House distribution deal with TSR begins (book-trade availability).
1980: FASA was founded in Chicago.
1981: Mayfair Games was founded in the Chicago area (Role Aids 1982).
1982: Games Plus opens (Mount Prospect, IL).
1984: Pacesetter was founded in Delavan, WI (near Lake Geneva, WI).
1987–2007: Egyptian Campaign runs in Carbondale, peaking ~750 attendees.
1990: Castle Perilous opens in Carbondale. Second only to Games Plus in size and sales. Still open today!
1987–98: Chessex (Fort Wayne, IN) expands Midwest distribution; Alliance forms through a 1998 merger.

The PLATO Bonus

There was another, parallel pipeline. Gary Whisenhunt and Ray Wood at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale wrote the first role-playing video game in the TUTOR programming language for the PLATO system between 1974 and 1975. Called dnd, it was named after Dungeons & Dragons and is notable for being the first interactive game to feature what would later be called "bosses." 

This makes Carbondale and SIUC part of the earliest lineage of digital RPGs. Dungeons & Dragons and computers go all the way back to their origins and are interlinked. While computers will be forever associated with "Silcon Valley," RPGs will forever be associated with the Midwest. 

The Midwest did not merely birth Dungeons & Dragons; Illinois sustained and propagated the hobby through a connected north-south corridor of publishers, universities, conventions, and retailers that formed a durable cultural infrastructure from Lake Geneva to Carbondale.

Selected Sources / Bibliography

Tim Kask Interview, Part I - Grognardia (2008) https://grognardia.blogspot.com/2008/09/interview-tim-kask-part-i.html Kask's account of his SIUC years, the Chainmail cold call, GenCon '74, and his hire at TSR.

Tim Kask Interview, Part II - Grognardia (2008) https://grognardia.blogspot.com/2008/09/interview-tim-kask-part-ii.html Kask on the development of Basic and Advanced D&D, viral spread of the game, and his role as "midwife" to AD&D.

Bill Owen on Bob Bledsaw - Goodman Games https://goodman-games.com/remembering-bob-bledsaw-sr/ Co-founder of Judges Guild's first-person account of the Decatur wargaming scene and the founding of the company. Essential primary source for the Decatur node.

Bill Owen's ICD/Judges Guild Precursor Blog https://wargamecampaign.wordpress.com/2017/06/10/icd-judges-guilds-precursors/ Owen's detailed account of the pre-Judges Guild wargaming club scene in Decatur and Springfield, including connections to other Illinois clubs.

Marc Miller Interview - The Escapist, "A Perpetual Traveller" https://v1.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/tabletop/columns/days-of-high-adventure/7023-A-Perpetual-Traveller-Marc-Miller Miller in his own words on returning to ISU on the GI Bill, founding the ISU Game Club, and how D&D instantly made sense to him because of prior political roleplaying at U of I.

Dragonsfoot Tim Kask Thread https://www.dragonsfoot.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=92246
Primary community source for Kask's SIUC recollections and the Kwalish/Apparatus connection outside of my own conversations with him.

"An SIU Gaming Club Played an Integral Part in the Development of Dungeons & Dragons" - The Southern https://thesouthern.com/news/local/an-siu-gaming-club-played-an-integral-part-in-the-development-of-dungeons-dragons/article_a2c8bcd5-0d4c-5df3-a4cf-1f3a4225286d.html Local news coverage of the Strategic Games Society and Kask's Qualishar campaign at SIUC.

"Club Part of Dungeons & Dragons Creation" - Jacksonville Journal Courier https://www.myjournalcourier.com/news/article/Club-part-of-Dungeons-amp-Dragons-creation-14341261.php Additional local coverage of SIUC's role in D&D history.

"Exchange Club Played Part in Dungeons & Dragons Creation" - Daily Herald https://www.dailyherald.com/20190818/news/exchange-club-played-part-in-dungeons-dragons-creation/ Third regional news source documenting the SIUC pipeline connection.

Winter War - About Us (official site) https://www.winterwar.org/about Confirms 1974 founding by the Conflict Simulation Society on the UIUC campus.

"A Winter War for Gamers" - Smile Politely https://www.smilepolitely.com/culture/a_winter_war_for_gamers/ Detailed history of the Conflict Simulation Society's founding in 1969 and the birth of Winter War. Confirms the UIUC origin and the 1974 launch.

"Annual Winter War Gamers' Convention Returns to Champaign" - Herald-Review https://herald-review.com/entertainment/local/annual-winter-war-gamers-convention-returns-to-champaign/article_5f22fea4-2a5b-11e0-9c99-001cc4c03286.html Confirms Winter War as one of the oldest continuously operating wargaming conventions in the world, 38 years without a break.

Books

Gary Gygax, Empire of Imagination by Michael Witwer (Bloomsbury, 2015).

Ben Riggs, Slaying the Dragon (St. Martin’s Press, 2022).

Jon Peterson, Playing at the World (Unreason Press, 2012).

Jon Peterson, The Elusive Shift (MIT Press, 2020).

Shannon Appelcline, Designers & Dragons: The ’70s (2015)