Bard Games

History

Bard Games was a house campaign that went into business. In the early 1980s Stephan Michael Sechi, Steven Cordovano and Vernie Taylor were playing a heavily customized Dungeons & Dragons, thick with new classes and spells. Sechi, a working musician, had come to the hobby only after a younger cousin talked him into a game while he was busy playing in a band, and within about a year of running his own he wanted to publish. In 1982 each partner put up $600, and they called the company Bard Games.

The plan was modest: sell their additions as generic supplements that any referee could drop into AD&D or another fantasy game. The first release was The Compleat Alchemist, by Cordovano and Sechi, which offered a class devoted to brewing potions and making magic items. It appeared in a preliminary edition in 1982 and the familiar version in 1983, followed that year by Sechi's The Compleat Adventurer (variants of fighters and thieves) and The Compleat Spell Caster with Taylor. Sechi later credited The Compleat Strategist, the New York game store, with buying the first Bard Games book, and the line reportedly also reached the Waldenbooks mall chain.

That success paid for something larger. Over about three years Sechi oversaw The Atlantean Trilogy: The Arcanum (1984), a complete game system that folded in the Compleat material; The Lexicon (1985), an atlas of an antediluvian Earth of Atlantis, Mu and Lemuria; and The Bestiary (1986), illustrated by comics artist Bill Sienkiewicz. Historian Shannon Appelcline notes that the rules were clearly derived from D&D but added character skills and point-based creation, and that the trilogy "would really put Bard on the map."

It also split the partners. After personal and financial disagreements, Sechi sold his shares to Cordovano and left in 1986. He lived cheaply, by his own account in an inexpensive apartment with a $150 Volkswagen, and in about three months wrote the core of a new game. By the time he finished, Cordovano no longer wanted to run Bard, and sold it back to him. With a new partner, his friend Joel Kaye, Sechi published Talislanta in 1987: The Chronicles of Talislanta, The Talislantan Handbook and A Naturalist's Guide to Talislanta. The late-1980s books give the company's address as a post office box in Greenwich, Connecticut, and credit local Greenwich printers and typesetters.

Talislanta sold well enough that Sechi gathered the Atlantis setting into Atlantis: The Lost World (1988) and released a second edition as the Talislanta Handbook & Campaign Guide (1989), which he later said sold more than 12,000 copies in about two years. Then Bard overreached. The Cyclopedia Talislanta supplements, apart from the first, sold poorly and were over-ordered by the book trade. A Waldenbooks buyer placed a huge order for Atlantis: The Lost World that Sechi had doubts about; about a year later the books came back, and Bard had to refund roughly $20,000. The Talislanta Worldbook appeared in 1990, and shortly afterward Sechi paid the company's debts, repaid his partner and closed Bard Games, keeping the rights.

Notable work

Bard's catalog is small but distinctive. The Compleat books were among the earliest successful system-neutral supplements. The Arcanum's treatment of magic, alchemy and astrology was, in critic Rick Swan's judgment, "unsurpassed," and White Dwarf called the Bestiary "A Monster Manual done with taste." Talislanta went further: no elves, no orcs, a single d20 action table for everything, and a baroque world owing much to Jack Vance, whose Dying Earth inspired it and to whom The Chronicles was dedicated. Its look came from Sechi's own sketches and P. D. Breeding-Black's illustrations.

Legacy

Bard Games outlived itself through licenses. Wizards of the Coast, then a new company run by Peter Adkison, published Talislanta's third edition in 1992, revised by Jonathan Tweet, among its first roleplaying products. Death's Edge Games reissued The Arcanum in 1996; Shooting Iron and Morrigan Press carried Talislanta into the 2000s, and Morrigan and then Khepera Publishing continued Atlantis as Atlantis: The Second Age. In 2010 Sechi put almost the whole Talislanta library online as free PDFs under a Creative Commons license, and a crowdfunded "Epic" edition from Everything Epic followed in 2023–24.

The company's arc, from $1,800 and a kitchen-table campaign to a vanished publisher whose worlds are still in print, is the story of the 1980s roleplaying small press in miniature, and a reminder that a strong setting can outlast the business that printed it.