Kevin Siembieda | |
|---|---|
 Kevin Siembieda at Gen Con 2014 | |
| Born | Kevin Henry Siembieda April 2, 1956 |
| Education | College for Creative Studies |
| Occupations |
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| Years active | 1979–2008 |
| Notable work | Heroes Unlimited The Mechanoid Invasion Palladium Fantasy RPG Rifts |
| Spouse | Maryann Donald (1985–2004) |
Kevin Siembieda (born April 2, 1956) is an American artist, writer, designer and publisher of role-playing games.
Siembieda is a third-generation Polish American.[1] He attended the College for Creative Studies in Detroit from 1974 to 1977.[2]: 155 He wanted to work as a comic book artist, but found the industry difficult to break into and published a small-press comic (A+ Plus, 1977-1978) with his company, Megaton Publications.[2]: 155 In 1979 Siembieda discovered the Dungeons & Dragons Basic Rulebook and joined a role-playing group, the Wayne Street Weregamers, which met at Wayne State University in Detroit (where he befriended Erick Wujcik, who ran the group).[2]: 155 Siembieda ran a game for the group, the Palladium of Desires, a combination of AD&D and his house rules.[2]: 155 By 1980 the Weregamers became the Detroit Gaming Centre, with Siembieda its assistant director and Wujcik its director.[2]: 155 Siembieda tried to interest gaming companies in his RPG with little interest; only Judges Guild made him an offer, but he accepted an employment offer from them instead.[2]: 155–156 He worked as an artist for Judges Guild for four months before working as a freelance artist for other publishers and trying to sell his RPG to them.[2]: 156
Siembieda is the co-founder and president of Palladium Books.[3] He founded the company in April 1981 to publish his fantasy role-playing game, but had insufficient funds to publish any books; the mother of his friend Bill Loebs loaned Siembieda $1,500 to publish his first RPG book, The Mechanoid Invasion (1981).[2]: 156 By 1983 the company was successful enough for Siembieda to rent warehouse space and release his fantasy RPG, the Palladium Fantasy Role-Playing Game[2]: 157 with a loan of $10,000 from his friend Thom Bartold who had also loaned him funds to print the other two books in the Mechanoid Trilogy, Journey and Homeworld in 1982.[citation needed] These were not just loans, but investments, and Siembieda established a system of paying royalties not just to the writers and artists, but also to those who lent him the capital needed to print the books: his investors.[citation needed] The following year, he branched the Palladium system to the superhero genre with Heroes Unlimited.[2]: 157 A freelancer contacted Siembieda about producing a licensed role-playing game based on the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles comic book, so Siembieda obtained the rights, but was dissatisfied with the supplement the freelancer produced; Erick Wujcik redesigned the game in five weeks, and it was published in 1985 as Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles & Other Strangeness.[2]: 158 Siembieda next obtained the license to publish a game based on the Robotech anime series, so he designed the Robotech role-playing game and published in 1986.[2]: 158–159
Siembieda wrote the RPG Rifts (1990) as a trade paperback in a two-column format which he laid out by hand.[2]: 160 He supported Wujcik in founding his own company, Phage Press.[2]: 160 In 1992, Siembieda sued Wizards of the Coast over its first RPG book, The Primal Order; GAMA president Mike Pondsmith helped the parties reach a compromise in March 1993.[2]: 161 Siembieda also disagreed with White Wolf magazine and GDW over the coverage in their magazines regarding Palladium games.[2]: 161 He demanded that websites devoted to Rifts and Palladium be taken down, believing that they violated his intellectual property, but eventually softened his stance in 2004.[2]: 161 Siembieda fired Bill Coffin over editorial differences and dissatisfaction with the Rifts Coalition Wars that Siembieda and Coffin co-authored.[2]: 162 He announced on April 19, 2006 that Palladium Books was approaching bankruptcy, which he blamed on a former employee who was guilty of embezzlement.[2]: 162 Siembieda filed a lawsuit on May 7, 2010 against Trion Worlds for its MMORPG Rift: Planes of Telara, and a settlement was reached in October 2010.[2]: 163 Role-playing games Siembieda has created include Palladium Fantasy Role-Playing Game (1983), Heroes Unlimited (1984), Robotech (1986), and Rifts (1990).[4]
He is also an artist, and has occasionally illustrated Palladium Books products. Siembieda contributed art and cartography to several early Judges Guild products for the Dungeons & Dragons, RuneQuest and Traveller lines.[5]
Siembieda's Robotech RPG Tactics Kickstarter[6] is one of the largest failures in tabletop Kickstarter history.[7] The project failed to deliver on its goals and raised over $1.4M. Despite not making its goal and unable to deliver Wave 2, Palladium did not refund money given to the project.[8]
