Steve Lortz (Stephen L. Lortz) died on April 24, 2017. I have SO much to say about him, but for now, we have some of his beloved anthropomorphic ducks, and the following from Dementia:
“If there is ANY justice in the universe, Steve is playing Dark Worlds with Tom and Kurt about now.”
Yeah.
Part Two
Sometime in the autumn of 1976 I was wandering through the Raven’s Haven, the gathering area within the student union of Anderson College. I walked past a booth near the middle of the east wall, and my eyes were drawn by a pair of beautifully painted 25mm medieval knights in the center of the table. The booth was occupied by a stocky fellow with a full brown beard, an even stockier fellow with enormous red muttonchop sideburns, and a skinny fellow who reminded me of Maynard G.Krebs. I expressed interesst, and the conversation began.
The game on the table was called, “Knights of the Round Table” by Phil Edgren out of The Little Soldier. We talked about it a bit, and then the redhead waxed rhapsodic about another game called Dungeons & Dragons. Contact information was exchanged, and I made arrangements to join them for gaming the following week. (As it happened, a couple of hours later I ran into Maynard again, and we ended up talking for several hours; I didn’t learn that he was the same person I had seen earlier until years later, but that is another story.)
One fifteen minute conversation, and my life changed irrevocably. Not because of the content, but because of the people. “Maynard” resolved into Bob Buehler, who would perform my marriage ceremony eight years later, and remains one of my best friends. The redhead was Kurt Lortz, whose friendship was a light in the distance until his death in 2006. And the third fellow, the one with the full beard, was Kurt’s brother Steve, who died yesterday (April 24).
I spent a lot of time talking to Steve during the next several months, while I was at Anderson, and we remained in contact over the years. In early 1979 I flew out to San Francisco to attend Dundracon 4 and hang out with Steve and his co-workers at The Chaosium, a gaming company. We spent a lot of time wandering around the bay area and talking.
We stayed in touch, vaguely. After Kurt died, I made a significant effort to vist Steve at least once a year, and managed to do so through about 2010, when life got in the way, again. But by then there was Facebook and the lines of communication stayed open.
Steve didn’t so much influence the content of my thought as the shape of it. He was something of a compulsive systematizer, as well as a compulsive teacher, and I was always a willing sponge. We talked about gaming and drawing and math and epistemology and metaphysics. He was one of the VERY few people who actually managed to get inside my head, and I will miss him terribly.
Part 3 – Cragspider the Conqueror
One of the best gaming experineces I ever had took place during the winter of ’76-’77, most likely during January of 1977, when I participated in (and eventually won) a five player game of “White Bear & Red Moon”. If you aren’t a game geek, and in particular a Glorantha geek, the rest of this won’t mean much. Just sayin’.
For those who don’t know, WB&RM is a hex grid fantasy war game that came out in 1975, largely because creator Greg Stafford hadn’t encountered RPGs yet. The idea of playing an individual hero in a war game was pretty much in the air at the time, and while Arneson and Gygax got there first, they weren’t the only runners in the race. WB&RM is evidence of that. The game was intended for two players, with a three player option; at its most basic it was a battalion-level medieval war game. But then you added giants and dragons and heroes and REALLY powerful magic, and it became something else altogether.
Our game was the brainchild of our host, Steve Lortz.He had two copies of the first edition of the game, and he selectively combined the countersets (with a few special handmade counters thrown into the mix) to make a five player game. The standard game featured the Lunar Empire in the northwest, and the Kingdom of Sartar in the southeast. The factory three player game added the Kingdom of Tarsh in the center of board. Steve added “The Conferation of the Four Hooves” in the southwest, and “The Outcasts of the Abandoned Lands” in the northeast. Guess where *I* planted my flag?
The multitude of independant forces in the orignal game were all assigned to one faction or another, reinforced with duplicate counters as seemed appropriate. Tarsh was bolstered with the Dragonewts and Delecti the Necromancer and his zombies (and the first edition zombie rules were SICK); I think a King of Tarsh token was created (though Delecti may have been declared king instead), and the Inhuman King was promoted to superhero. The Four Hooves consisted of the Black Horse Troop, the Grazelanders, and the Beast Men. The Feathered Horse Queen ruled, and Ironhoof (I think) was made a superhero. The Outcasts got Cragspider as queen, Androgeus as superhero, the Dwarf, the giants, the Tusk Riders, and the Walktapi (who spent most the of the game fighting each other, and multiplying thereby).
Steve did a bit of advance role-play by producing a typewritten policy statement to the extent that the Lunar Empire would make no aggressive move, but would annihilate anyone that moved against it, written in wonderfully pompous and florid prose. The game began at about 6:00 PM.
The Hoofers set up on the Lunar border; everyone else hunkered down to see what would develop. The outlying Dragonewt cities died quickly, since no one wanted them in their back yards; the Inhuman King sacriced the troops in the Dragon’s Eye to Delecti every turn (creating a HUGE zombie army very quickly); the walktapi tore each other apart (or was it a mating dance?) in the Dwarf Run. The Hoofers crossed the Lunar border, and Steve (as the Lunar Emperor) waved his position paper in the other players face, theatened annihilation… and the other player retreated and marched his troops south and east to attack Sartar. A genuine battle eventually took place along the Sartar border, and the Tarshites eventually went walkatpus hunting. Steve and his Lunars stayed behind their borders and watched, thought the Tarshites sent enough forays that way to keep the Crimson Bat fed.
As this was going on, Steve’s sainted mother brought out a meal every two hours or so. That was kind of amazing.
I practiced some kind of weird persuasion on the Hoofer player; I used the black dragon to fly my biggest giant into a ruin in the Grazelands, and convinced the Hoofers to leave him un-molested. I have no idea what I said; given that I was bound by a real-world vow of truth at the time, it must have been interesting. I also convinced him to launch the Hound of Darkness across the zombie hoard, where Keener Than (in my control) could catch him. Each pass reduced the zombies by 50%, and eventually we killed Delecti (and *I* ended up in possession of the Hound…).
Once Delecti was dead, I made my move. Cragspider hit the Dragon’s Eye with the Pillar of Fire, and Tusk Riders rushed in to defend the ashes. Trolls marched into Boldhome, which had been left unguarded, and that wandering giant strolled into the similarly unguarded Queen’s Post. Suddenly three players had two turns each to dislodge my troops from their respective capitals or surrender any units not stacked with their superheroes. The Sartar player shocked everyone by surrendering outright. The Tarshites and the Hoofers blustered a bit, looked at the time (about 6:00 AM) and conceded that I had won the game without surrendering their positions. Steve laughed a lot. We packed up, and went home to bed.
It’s all impossibly non-canonical, for many, many reasons. But still, in some obscure corner of the multiverse, there was at least one moment when Cragspider the Firewitch was the undisputed Queen of Dragon Pass, and her commanding general began an affinity with trolls and orcs and gnolls and, well, monsters that is still going strong 38 years later.
Part Four – Five Lortzian Games
At Steve Lortz’s memorial, mention was made of his involvement in gaming, but the speakers for the most part didn’t understand just how central gaming was to his heart. It is worth mentioning that, on his last day on the street, the last thing he did before he collapsed was buy miniature figures. Here is a short description of his three published games, and of two that never quite got into print.
“Perilous Encounters” (Chaosium, 1978) – This was a straight up fantasy miniatures game, using only D6 and intended to play fast and easy. It became the Chaosium’s unofficial house miniature game, and they offered a “Dragon Pass Conventions” supplement for the price of a SASE that filled in everything for the more peculiar creatures in Chaosium’s world of Glorantha.
“Panzer Pranks” (Chaosium, 1980) – This was a hex grid based WWII tank game, intended as a parody of every other game of the type. There was a “swamp” scenario that usually ended with every single piece on the board sinking into the muck; there was an optional rule that allowed every piece on a side to transfer all of its movement points to a single piece (producing the occasional hypersonic tank), and a scenario involving a magic Coca-cola machine that made the US forces invincible as long as they were close enough.
“Quactica” (Skirmisher, 2008) – This was something of a second edition of Perilous Encounters, with a change of focus. Where PE was intended to present a generic fantasy world, Quactica presented a world full of anthropomorphic animals, particularly Steve’s beloved ducks. There was talk of a Quactica RPG to follow, but it never materialized.
“Dark Worlds” (unpublished) – Sometime in 1978 or 1979, Steve’s brother Kurt had the idea to base a role-playing game on the works of HP Lovecraft. Steve had ties to the Chaosium, and the Lortzes pitched the game there. Chaosium acquired the gaming rights to Lovecraft’s works, and Kurt, with Steve and a group of friends, went to work on developing the game. Kurt built a game system from the ground up. When Kurt presented the game to Chaosium, they looked it over, and then asked Kurt to please convert the game to their established “Basic Role Playing” system. They also wanted Kurt to jigger the rules to make firearms less effective. Kurt gave it some thought, and refused. Chaosium then recruited Sandy Petersen, who turned the Lovecraft material into a game called, “Call of Cthulhu,” which became a huge hit. There are interesting contrasts beween the two games, the basic mechanical changes notwithstanding. “CoC” models the fundamental despair of Lovecraft’s work, with every player character descending slowly and inevitably into insanity. “DW”, on the other hand, puts the players in the position of being the only truly sane characters in the game. Unspeakable evil is encroaching, and the players are the only ones who know it, or are capable of believing it. “DW” still feels a great deal like Lovecraft, but it also occasionally allows the players to actually WIN. It’s interesting to speculate how different things might have been if Kurt had been able to work out a compromise with Chaosium. I have never believed that despair and inevitable loss was a necessary part of the appeal of “CoC”.
“Arr! Scurvy Dogs” (unpublished) – This was a skirmish level pirate game developed with and for the gaming club that Steve ran when he was a teacher at Summit Academy in Indianapolis. Each player controlled eight or nine single character figures to accomplish specific ends. The basic game had three players: pirates, colonial military, and islanders. Each group had special abilities and unique victory conditions. It could be played with up to six players, with two conflicting pirate groups, two conflicting military groups, and two conflicting islander groups. Steve came up with many different scenarios over the years, and it generated a LOT of good stories; I got to play it once, at GenCon in 2008. Steve had a big case with all of the terrain and pre-painted figures for everything. He never actually wrote the rules down, for some reason, just the character sheets, and the necessary player materials. He seemed reluctant to let it get out of his hands, for some reason, which was a shame, because it was a GREAT game.