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Midnight At The Well Of Souls — 6 Comments

    • Fixed that, and a bunch of others. When I moved to WordPress from Joomla about two years ago, a lot of links got broken, text got lost, etc. (Fortunately, I did a webcrawl of the site prior to this, so I have a backup I can use when I stumble on missing things. It sometimes astounds me how much actual content I’ve managed to dribble out over the years.)

  1. Timothy A Green passed away on April 23rd of 2013.
    http://obits.cleveland.com/obituaries/cleveland/obituary.aspx?pid=164546202

    I knew him for many years and he was a genuinely amazing person, the best D&D (and later Rolemaster) gamemaster I ever encountered and he’ll continue to be an inspiration to me. I knew that he had designed this game (with the approval of Chalker), but this was a few years before I first met him. We never played it in the many years I knew him, but I know from conversations that it was a honest attempt to create a game that was a tribute to the book series. Yes, the quality of the game materials is poor by some standards. I believe Tim designed this game on an Apple II or something, so the font choices and quality were not coming from some printing house. His available technology was minimal. Tim ran or co-owned a company called TAG industries out of Castalia, OH and they made miniatures for role playing games, dice bags, etc. As far as I know, Well of Souls was their only attempt at a game system. I believe the actual book “Midnight at the Well of Souls” was included in the game box and this was probably meant to serve as backround material for the players. Maybe you didn’t get one in your box.

    I have no problem with your review, except to remind you that this game wasn’t produced by a company with a lot of resources. It was just Tim, his wife Cindie and a couple others. Tim was the creative element to the process. I’m sure that he would have politely accepted your criticisms, but would have had responses that worked for him.

    • Thanks very much for your comments and the additional information. I started gaming in 1978, so I am quite familiar with how game production standards have evolved. (I didn’t get the book in my game; fortunately, I’d read the series several times. (Except the newer ones, after the original 5; tried to get into them, failed. So it goes.))

      I wasn’t aware of the other material TAG made; do you have any links to them, scans of old catalogs, etc? Digging up the “lost lore” of gaming is a passion of mine.

      • The best thing I can do is to point Tim’s wife to this site and comment thread. She will know a lot more of the history of TAG (Timothy A Green) Industries than I do. I’m even wondering if she might have some “Midnight” games (and who knows what else) still lying about. I’ll ask her.

        What I do know is that TAG was a family business created out Tim’s love for gaming, but it was mostly a part-time operation. From what I understand, they were most active during the 80’s. I remember that Tim used to like to talk about the processes for making the molds for the miniatures they made and the sculptors who designed them. On one occasion, I remember helping with threading the cords through the dice bags that I believe Tim’s mother had sewn together. I told you… family business!

        25+ years later, (and even after Tim’s passing) we continue to play Rolemaster (2nd Edition Rules) in our group. For many of those years, Tim was the gamemaster and I can tell you that he had no problem with my characters developing skills in diplomacy and streetwise! But I think his intent was that you needed to roleplay those attributes for the greatest enjoyment and effect. (and we did!)

  2. Pingback:Midnight at the Well of Souls RPG (1985): Obscure For a Reason – Wayne's Books

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