Official ICE Forums
Iron Crown Enterprises => ICE News and Discussion => Topic started by: NicholasHMCaldwell on October 02, 2021, 05:45:55 AM
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To all in the ICE family
It is with the greatest sadness that we must inform you that the incomparable Terry Amthor has died. We extend our most heartfelt condolences to his sister Tamara, his family and his friends.
The cause and circumstances of his death are still under investigation, so we cannot provide any details on this and will defer to his family on what they choose to disclose in due course.
Terry was a founder member of the original ICE and a co-creator of Rolemaster and Spacemaster, writing and contributing to many of its most iconic products, and to some of the most exceptional 1st edition Middle-earth modules. Most of all, he has shaped our imaginations with his masterful Shadow World epic fantasy setting. He continued to develop Kulthea through his own Eidolon Studio company, before joining forces with Guild Companion Publications to create new sourcebooks and adventures bringing ever more of Shadow World to life, and working as our layout guru for most of our other products.
Author, designer, world builder, and friend, Terry’s genius has enriched our lives for decades. His creations will continue to inspire us all for years to come.
Rest in peace, Terry.
Nicholas, Colin, John and Thom
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Oh no! Please give my condolences to his family!
We have lost a great one.
:-[
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Oh no. What a shock. I am so sorry for Terry and his family. He was always so welcoming in talking to us on the forums, and he's left such a huge legacy. What a hole his loss leaves in our gaming worlds. :-[ :-[ :-[ :'(
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May Eissa greet him well!
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That's terrible news :-(
Allan.
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:(
RIP, Dear Sir.
Condolences to friends and family.
:(
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I am very sad to hear this.
- David.
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My God, that is horrible. Being able to chat with him publicly and privately was such an honour for me. I was such a huge fan (as all of us are) and Shadow World gave me decades of enjoyment. Please pass on to his family our sincerest sympathies. I wish I had gotten his autograph when I had the opportunity.
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This is so sad. He created such a wonderful world to explore and it was wonderful to share adventures therein with him as the writer. It was a personal experience. I'm heart broken.
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R.I.P.
:(
This is sad news. His work shall live on in unnumbered RPG groups.
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A serious loss for us all. His many years of tireless contributions made the world of Rolemaster -- both within Shadow World and beyond -- a greater place.
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Shocking news. A great loss...
RIP Terry :(
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What a tragic loss for Mr Author’s friends and family, and for this community. My condolences to his friends and family who will read this. I read this announcement and it hit me surprisingly hard.
I rediscovered Shadow World during the lockdown. I purchased all the new and revised books on Drivethrurpg and I was impressed by the quality and depth of the new material. I hope that Shadow World will survive, and I hope that we, his fans, will get to see all the great unpublished projects that Mr. Amthor was working on. The art outlasts the artist.
Rest In Peace Mr. Amthor.
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Oh, my. Such a huge loss and sad day for Rolemaster and all of the franchise's players.
RIP, Terry, and condolences to your friends and family.
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Say it ain't so. His work and his worlds enriched my life in ways I cannot fully explain. Thank you for your great work.
Yet another bottle falls off the shelf.
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I guess God got hooked to RPGs thanks to Gary Gygax, so now he wants to try Rolemaster!
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My condolences to Terry's family, I always enjoyed my interactions with Terry over the decades. He will be missed.
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That's terrible news. :-[ That leaves a hole here, and I was planning on getting Shadow World. (PDFs of course). We've lost the best, and now someone will have to take up the ranks.
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Well...I finally joined the forums, and horrible news hit me like a slap in the face....
My unsolicited and completely true Eulogy to Terry Kevin Amthor:
I met Terry many years ago. I was much younger, but so was he. I was a fan boy before there were fan boys.... Meeting him meant more to me than when I met Dave Arneson, or Gary Gygax, or even Marc Miller.(I love Traveler almost as well) I am a fan of all those legends. Terry though, he was more. Probably because I fell particularly in love with Shadow World.
Since that time I have been playing or running Shadow World games since the 1st edition...Geeze....30+/- years ago, and played and GM'ed, writing entire campaigns in Rolemaster, Spacemaster, Cyberspace, DarkSpace, and MERP games for longer. I never did do HARP, and I skipped GURPS. I had my crits! My fumbles! My Althans and my Tolkien inspired Elves....Heck, I even played in the Hero System for a while, Champions was great, So was Shadowrun, but I could replicate it in I.C.E. products, so I always came back to Rolemaster, and ultimately to Shadow World....time and time again.
My groups have stormed the Dragon Lord's keep, and died to Lorgalis (or joined him to thwart Ondoval!). They have conquered new realms on continents in Shadow World not yet detailed, but always sailed back to Emer or Jaiman.
TKA was/is a legend to those of us who have lived in his imagination for so long. I have entire volumes of materials I have written on my own through the years, and so many of them are based on the marvelous world of Kulthea.
Terry gifted us that fantasy. Sure I bought every new edition of any Shadow World title as it came out. I stayed with the Second Edition of Rolemaster, and Space Master, but I was eager for the vision of a new Shadow World title, or a remaster, or a new edition.
I was eager to alter my own game world based on his updates. It was crazy. It was fun. It is a passion. Damn, I will miss that. Through all this, it felt like I knew him much more than a random chance meeting at a 'Con so long ago.
When I worked with DHS/FEMA and was deployed to the very heart of a disaster, when finally I would lay my head down after working 20+ hours a day in Hurricane Katrina for instance, I would pull out my dog eared copy of the Master Atlas, and Jaiman and read/plot in them. Those two along with the Emer Addendum were always in my backpack. More than fifty deployments to as many disasters over the years. In my sleeping bag or in a hotel, I would read. I would imagine, hell I even dreamed.
I was a Loremaster with six fingers and violet eyes. I was in my world. My own Shadow World, inspired by Terry's dreams and visions. I did that from the beginning of my career, until I retired. It was and is a part of my life, a part which my wife will never fully understand, but she shakes her head and puts up with me and with Terry's volumes of books.... She is good like that...
To say I am, and have been a fan would be an understatement. I have had three wives, but I have only had one real RPG passion, and Terry, and the rest of you with I.C.E. made that possible. For me though, Terry was the king...
Rest in Peace Terry. I will carry on your dream for my own groups, and in my own dreams.. While I was never fortunate enough to call you my friend in life, you were always an inspiration.
You will be missed. :'(
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That's one eulogy that is going to be hard to top!
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Kepeät mullat, Terry, as we say in Finnish. Sit tibi terra levis.
Thank you for Shadow World, one of my favorite RPG settings of all time, and thank you for your contributions to Rolemaster, my favorite RPG system of all time.
My condolences to Terry's family and friends.
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Condolences to the friends and family of Terry Amthor.
The news of his passing made me reflect on the past 30+ years of playing Rolemaster and working with the material Terry Amthor put forward. If you had asked me a few weeks ago, who my biggest influences as a gamemaster and storyteller are, I would have said Monte Cook and after a moment of thought Terry Amthor. Today I know, that there was always Terry Amthor and as a distant second maybe Monte Cook (genius that he is). I spent an unproductive day at work today reminiscing how I became the GM I am today.
Before December 1989 (I was 14 then), I only knew the German rpg The Black Eye as a player. I loved it. I wanted more of the same. And I wanted something set in my favorite world: Middle Earth. Lucky for me the German edition of MERP had just hit the market and alongside the German starter box my parents that christmas presented me with the German editions of "Rivendell" and "Teeth of Mordor".
I was delighted. And about a day later I was confused. The books were not was I had expected. I was looking for a play by the numbers adventure, a narrative structure that would guide me (and through me the players as well) from opening scene to unexpected end. What I discovered was a book so rich with lore, details, people, places and ideas that at first glance I overlooked the adventure ideas tucked away neatly at the end of the books.
It dawned on me that this was the work of someone who had a slightly different idea of how an rpg adventure should be run. I decided to be delighted to have come across books, written by people who apparently loved middle earth just as much as me, but were vastly more versed in the lore. Within the next few months I got every German MERP book there was and then I looked for the English editions (remember: this was 1990).
I was bad as a gm, really bad for a really long time. But my players kept coming back. Week after week they would show up, as I was quite obviously offering something that they liked. It took me years to understand what that was. It was the gift Terry Amthor had bestowed upon me: I lived in middle earth at that time and he had provided me with the intimate knowledge of Rivendell, Tharbad, Mordor and other places. The players could go where ever they wanted and do what ever they wanted, I knew the place, knew the names, knew the lore and basically let them run wild on the vast canvas of Tolkien's creation. The men who had put me into the position to do this, were Coleman Charlton and Terry Amthor.
I thought that I was a bad gm, because no adventure ever ran the way I had planned it. It took me more than 20 years to understand, that this freedom and sense of wonder and exploration was exactly what kept the players coming back. Terry's books were always around, when I later on created my own worlds and the campaigns in them. I never played in SW, but used Loremasters, Navigators, Dragonlords, Eidolon, Lorgalis and many other ideas and concepts constantly in my campaigns.
Just last week I finished a six year RM campaign and in the very last scene, Dragonlord Vorig Kye made a last ditch attempt to persuade on of the characters to join his cause, hinting at a possible intimate relationship between the two, only to be rejected by the pc, because he had discovered over the last third of the campaign that he wasn't gay but asexual. For me, not an unusual scene in my sessions, and once again I have Terry to thank for that.
When he began to talk openly about his experiences as an openly gay man in the rpg industry in the 1990s I was still a closeted asexual that found his words resonating, but I could, at that time, not fathom what they resonated with. It took me eighteen more years to finally come out. But the idea of diverse rpg worlds with vastly differing takes on gender, sexuality, power, morals and relations has always stuck with me and made my campaigns so much better for it. The ease with which Terry weaved female and queer viewpoints, experiences and whole cultures into his creations, paved the way on which I could travel rather effortlessly.
In so many different aspects he was the titan on whose shoulders I could stand to enjoy the broadest of views. A magnificent vista of fantastic storytelling fueled by complex rules, all of it better for having been touched by Terry Amthor. I am endlessly thankful, grateful and feel humbled to have been led through decades of this wonderful hobby by someone so inspiring, so prolific and yet so humble and unassuming, that for years he would influence me, shape me, guide me along - yet remain a mere afterthought, even though no other rpg author has come even close to the influence he had on my own story.
Thank you for everything Terry, you will never be forgotten!
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That is very sad news. My condolences to his family and friends. I have great respect for the system he helped create. He was an inspiration.
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I finally found the energy to contribute to this post.
Like some (or most ?) of you I discovered Terry work with MERPG a little more than 30 years ago (gosh...).
Of course I switched to RM2 to be able to go further than the 20th lvl.
And then I was lucky to put my hand on the SW Atlas (the box, with this wonderful map of Kulthea)...and I was amazed by this universe.
Then It was too late for me, all my money was spent in SW & RM2 supplements.
I one hand I was regularly broke but on the other hand, being French, my written english level increased dramatically (but with some specificities...my english teachers never unterstood how my medieval-related vocabulary could be so developed compared to my every day life english).
RPG is a big part of my life, I met most of (all?) my best friends through RPG and I still play with them regularly.
Terry contribution to RPG in the most significant one for me...
So RIP Terry, thank you for everythink.
I will remember you while having great adventures in Kulthea...
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So sad. I am so sad. Many of his imaginations lead to worlds of Udava and Onaviu.
I've no other words for my sadness.
RMFR