Adiken's miniatures and the fall of a gaming company

At last month's gaming auction, I picked up a bag of loose fantasy figures—mostly orc-lookin' dudes and some adventurers. I just finished painting five of the orcs above (although in my campaign, they'll be hobgoblins, because I never cared for the Asian-themed old-school hobgoblins, and these guys seem vicious, and I already have enough orc figures).

Anyway, these miniatures were marked "Adiken 2003" on the bottom. I wasn't familiar with the company, and that seemed odd given that they were produced just 7 years ago. It's hard for a gaming company to rise and fall in the age of the Internet and not have anyone know about it. Upon cursory examination, all that existed about Adiken was a cryptic Wikipedia stub.

So I did a little digging—and found a fascinating account of the frenetic rise and fall of the company, as chronicled by Paul DeStefano, a member of the Board Game Geek online community. Paul was a freelancer who landed what sounded like the job of a lifetime working for Adiken a few years ago. The company had massive financial backing, a team of talent, and the mechanical capabilities to make the game (a dungeon crawl board game called Nin-Gonost, which those minis are for) into a big hit.

Paul wrote:

[T]hey are so floored by the work I have done that they give me complete creative control of the project. Whatever I want, I get.

Stories I write get painted into beautiful paintings by famous D&D artist Jeff Easley. I swear I am brought to tears.

Shortly thereafter, it all fell apart. The company's financier lost his father, and it appears he also lost his will to head up the company. Paul was left with crates of miniatures sitting in his garage, but no finished product to sell them for.

It was a riveting, tragic account of the company's short life. As someone who's done work for RPG companies—and has gotten paid promptly—I was heartbroken to read that Paul was apparently never paid for his work on Nin-Gonost.

Anyway. I thought this was a really fascinating bit of reading that ties into the new miniatures I just finished painting up. Perhaps Paul will take some heart in knowing that Adiken's miniatures will once again stalk the dim halls of my dungeons.

Photos from Gencon 2008

I forgot my actual camera, but it turns out that my new Sony Ericsson camera phone takes halfway decent photos. Here are a handful of scenes from Gencon 2008.














This was nifty -- Mayfair and Days of Wonder (and a few other companies I may have missed?) had set up a board game room where you could "check out" a game and play it on a nearby table, then return it and try a new one.














Here's the game room itself. Through the doors on the far wall was a much larger room, about the size of a gymnasium, with lots of game space.














Every table in this room was a different D&D game.














Scanthan and Ben on Saturday night playing Cuylas. A few minutes later we wrapped up our game and these two gents embarked on a night of hijinx in Indianapolis. They dropped in on the steampunk-themed Gencon dance and tried (unsuccessfully) to crash the uber-pretentious White Wolf party.














Tower of Gygax! The DM handed out two copies of each character, then proceeded to run a rotating cast of characters through a super old-school dungeon named for the iconic father of D&D. We used the first edition rules, and it was a blast. My gnome illusionist died after he looted the wrong body and a cascade of molten gold washed over him.

The shape of things to come

Back in 1995, I really didn’t have much of an idea what roleplaying actually was. I was 13 and had recently purchased my first Magic: The Gathering deck; I was utterly smitten by the brightly colored illustrations and the sparse, detail-soaked lines of flavor text on each card. Magic was a smashing success for me and my friends, but D&D was a nebulous concept — I knew older players enjoyed this game, and that (like Magic) it drew on Tolkien-inspired fantasy tropes. But as far as the mechanics and rules went, I knew only that it involved creating a character with stats describing how well he would perform in a given scenario, then rolling dice when those scenarios came up in the game (this, I hazarded, was the province of the gamemaster, a term that quickly joined my lexicon as I endeavored to learn more about RPGs).

Still, I was bound and determined to venture further down the path. This was pre-Internet, mind you, but I was lucky enough to have a subscription to InQuest, which at the time was a rock-solid gaming mag that fanned the flames of Magic’s explosive popularity. I had no RPGs of my own, so I decided to create one based on Deathlands, a a post-apocalyptic pulp series I’d been reading voraciously. In retrospect, my bumbling attempt at creating a game was comical. Lacking solid knowledge of what RPGs actually were, I went ahead and crafted a hybrid roleplaying board game, where the players explored an intricately detailed map of the post-nuke United States, trading merchandise (Food, Ammo, Generators, etc) and dealing with roving bands of raiders. Most of the mechanics involved moving your little miniature down a road, entering a city and then rolling on a table to see what happened. I’m not sure exactly where a character’s stats factored in — again, I was operating with very little hard knowledge of RPG mechanics.

But it was fun, especially because I put a lot of effort into solitaire play so I could tool around in my trading caravan even when my friends weren’t visiting. Again, a lot of that was just me rolling dice and consulting random tables, but still — in my mind, I was roleplaying. It was cool!

I wish I still had that game, even just the crude map I sketched out, but it’s all lost to the sands of time. No matter: six months after my Deathlands foray, I stumbled across West End Games’ Star Wars Roleplaying Game, 2nd Edition, Revised & Expanded. And the rest, as they say, is history.

EDITED Oct 27, 2010 to add a photo dump from my recent post-apocalyptic miniatures painting. Recognize anybody?