Just last night I got the shocking news from Kevin’s wife Peggy that he has passed away due to a heart attack. I’ve been in a state of shock ever since. I know that anyone here who had played with “The Reverend” would want to know, and Peggy said it was ok to pass on the news.
I never met Kevin face to face, and a telephone conversation was very rare. Other than the occasional changing of planes at Hobby Airport, I’ve only been to Houston one time in my life. It crossed my mind to try looking Kevin up and having lunch with him, but I didn’t. Damn, I sure wish I would’ve now.
My experience is that we gamers pretty much stick to the gaming task at hand in our emails, and rarely talk about the Real Life (RL). Other than being an MEPBM rock star, I knew very little about RKG. Or did I? I know Robert was his first name, as he once commented that Robert was the name his credit card company knew him by. I know he was originally from NY, attended grad school at the U of Michigan, and ran a lab in Houston, TX. I know that despite having lived in Texas for who knows how many years, his voice still sounded like a New Yorker to me, which I tried really hard not to hold against him. <g> …not that being a Texan is any better to my Okie way of thinking. <bg> I know he was of Irish descent, as he tells the story of being a product of a mixed marriage, one parent coming from an Irish family of NYC policemen, and the other an Irish family of NYC firemen. I know that he was a voracious reader and a movie buff, throwing out movie lines all the time. I know he was into fantasy football, basketball, and baseball. I know he was a good bowler, and competed in a weekly league for many years. I know he was the most brilliant gamer I’ve ever had the opportunity to work with.
I have an email folder where I stashed particularly interesting or insightful writings of The Rev over the years. I can’t begin to guess how many thousands of emails we’ve shared, on yahoo groups and direct, but upon reviewing the 50 or so in that treasure trove, I came up with some interesting stuff. I want to share some of it with the MEPBM community.
Here is a typical introductory email to a new team (pre-yahoo groups, back when he & I both were just a string-of-numbers@compuserve.com from Feb 1998:
"Gentlemen,
As I’ve not played with all of you, and none of you have seen me
play the Cloud Lord position, some discussion of how I plan on playing it
is in order. Much of this is based on experience in 265 as the Cloud Lord
and being on the receiving end in other games. Observations of CL play
also help, particularly in 251, which showed me what doesn’t work well.
Primary targeting:
I am a Revisionist in style. Early in ME history, the prime
targets were army commanders. With the advent of better FP countermeasures
and typical GSI fiddling, preferred targetting shifted to capital
characters and the like. This latter style targetted economics &
infrastructure, and is exceedingly effective in single player games.
However, in team games this doesn’t work so well - economic crises are
hurdled through teammate help and positions don’t drop because they lost a
few characters."
The above is the first approximately 10% of that email, but gives you a good idea of his writing style and thought processes. [Btw, when I presented this email to him about a decade later, he proceeded to dissect his previous positions point by point where his thinking had changed.]
Here’s the opening to another early email from that game, directed to our WK, showing his sense of humor.
"[name redacted],
I’m guessing you’ve not played any of the NW positions in a team
game before. The dynamic is usually completely different than in a singles
match. The Dwarves and the Noldo are no longer aloof, and, more seriously,
you have a Coordinated Arthedain & Cardolan Alliance operating from Turn 1.
Yes that’s right, you’re in deep CACA."
In 2003, he discussed the LOTR movie, after my P.S. at the end of an unrelated email:
> P.S. What did you think of Return of the King? And if you haven’t
> seen it
> yet, SHAME ON YOU! <g>
"I haven’t really, but it’s a matter of coordinating with the extended family.
In the past, we’ve typically picked a broad appeal movie and have the the
entire-family-younger-than-50 go see it. Howeve, since some of the family is
coming to Houston, and the rest staying in NY, plans are in flux. I will see it
over Christmas, but…
I bet I won’t be entirely happy. While I enjoyed the Two Towers as a movie,
it’s deviation from Tolkien was disappointing. I had no trouble with cutting
stuff, like the first movie, but the stuff Jackson was doing in TT was not
cuttting, it was rewriting - and frankly he’s not that good at it. They wasted
time with the stupid Warg attack and failed to reach the most dramatic of all
cliffhangers - where Frodo has been “killed” by Shelob, and Sam is forced to
move on. And I won’t even begin to discuss the absurdity of Elves at Helm’s
Deep (arriving before Eomer and the Eastmark no less).
From what I’ve heard so far, I think I’m going to be annoyed by aspects of the
Return of the King. The Oliphaunts won’t bother me (they are not elephants in
the book), nor will details about the siege of Minas Tirith (the Orcs did break
into the city, and although Tolkien did not describe the street fighting, one
can infer it occurred). However, the handling (or non-handling) of Saruman has
caught my attention; it makes me wonder how they’ll handle the devastation of
the Shire and it’s resolution at the end of the books. What I’ve heard makes
me suspect that Jackson has jettisoned some of the major themes and story arcs
in the books in an effort to simplify it for the masses. That’s always a
stupid decision, albeit quite common.
In the end, I suspect I’ll end up ‘handling’ the Ring movies much the same as I
handled “The Last of the Mohicans”. The Book and the Movie are two separate
entities, with only a slight connection between the two.
Merry Christmas
Kevin"
In 2006 I asked him the following question, with his answer once again a display of his analytical thinking:
> Is your working hypothesis on overruns that strengths and
> constitutions are somehow compared? Or number of troops only? I’ve
> heard it both ways. I’m asking because I can split to put the MA in
> a separate cadre to block, unless you think an Eocav regiment or two
> would overrun them.
"My working hypothesis, which has yet to run into contradictory data:
The primary factors controlling overrun probability are troop count and the
ability to move to in to the next hex. In order to even have a check for
overrun, the larger army must be able to enter (i.e. “pay for”) the next hex in
it’s path. Thus you cannot be overrun on your alignments fortifications. OK
that brings us to Troop count:
- From 1- 5x the amount of troops - no chance of overrun
- Greater than 10x - automatic overrun
- From 5x to 10x - overrun is possible, depending on some not clearly
defined factors (random roll for sure, possibly command rank of the larger
army).
I can say for near certainty it is not based on relative strength or
constitution. I routinely block with MA, and have never been overrun by armies
with orders of magnitude more combat ability.
Kevin"
From 2007, I found this text in an email from Ben Shushan, who I trust won’t mind me making public at this point. I had said:
“My current games with both gentlemen are of the 1650 12v12 variety. Kevin is on my permanent or “main” grudge team Veta Schola,
[snip]
Btw, you can’t have Dr. Given. He’s the mastermind of our team, and I don’t want him worrying his pretty little head on more than one game. <bg>”
With Ben’s reply:
One thing I just can’t pass up sharing … I’m glad I was seated when I read your “you can’t have him” comment about Kevin. I agree with the implied respect for his ability and value as a teammate.
Here’s a little back-story. …
As you’re no doubt aware, Kevin is his middle name. His first name is Robert. Seems back in the mists of time there were 2 “Givens’” playing MEPBM and there was some emphasis put on the first initial. He got to be known as RKG in what, for lack of a better term, I can only describe as a “grudge group.” It was about 18 or so guys, any 10-12 of whom played together in grudge games together pretty much exclusively for a number of years. Anyway, I started out pretty much as the FNG, but got along pretty well w/ RKG and got to know him a bit. I finally started referring to him (or calling him, as the case was) “The Rev” (which is actually weightier than just the initials). The nickname was partly a play on his name, and partly deference to his strategic acumen. He honestly thought I was being sarcastic (it’s that genuine humility that makes me like him so much), which usually would be a good bet. J I don’t know if that “handle” is still actually in use, or, if so, how widely – but tell him someone asked after “The Rev” and I would bet (heavily) that he’d know who it was. I thought maybe you’d appreciate that arcane tidbit, given your timely insight as to his personal and gaming value."
At one point, I had chosen a Gormenghast character naming scheme for one of my nations, not expecting anyone to notice, when I got this from Kevin:
> For the record, the swordfight (sic) between Swelter and Flay is my
> favorite swordfight in literature (although it just squeaks past
> Wesley-Montoya)
then me:
> There’s a swordfight coming up? Sweet. I’m about 50 pages into
> Titus Groan; just picked it up and started it the other day. I have the
> movie on DVD but refuse to watch it until I read the novels. Btw, it
> is cool when someone recognizes your naming scheme like that!
then RKG again:
“Well, it’s not exactly your classic swordfight… Titus Groan and Ghormenghast
are terrific, Titus Alone is not so good. Apparently Peake was suffering from
a brain tumor when writing the third book.”
In a later game I took a John Carter of Mars naming scheme, which got our entire group talking about SF/fantasy fiction in general. We talked about Doc Smith’s Lensmen series (RKG: “And I’ve yet to see any other dastardly enemy killed by dropping a planet on them from hyperspace.”), Weber’s Honor Harrington series (RKG: “You mean Horatio Hornblower in Space? I enjoy them too, but there’s a whole Napoleonic-era sailing ship genre that Weber just blatantly ported over. To be perfectly honest, I’m a sucker for “History in Space” stuff.”), Jordan’s Wheel of Time (RKG: “It’s like reading a Victorian novel, where the author was getting paid by the word. And the plots were too formulaic, at least in the first four or so.”), Donaldson’s Gap series (RKG: “They were terrific - I enjoyed them more than his Covenant series.”), Martin’s A Game of Thrones (RKG: "He’s pissing me off. First he splits the book after Storm into two - and
gives us the least interesting half first (“Feast of the Bitplayers”), and
now it looks like he might split the other half yet again. I’ve also read
some of the excerpts, and there’s going to be a fair amount of
Rashomon-style “same event from the other guys PoV” that may or may not
work.
I have to admit though, I love the way he meticulously crafts multi-faceted
fascinating characters…
… and then kills them.
Kevin "), then in a later email, more on George RR Martin, which when I read it this morning made me wince. These are the opening lines to a 500+ word email explaining his theory on Jon Snow’s parentage, which I won’t paste in its entirety as I would consider it a spoiler to those of you who haven’t read the books, maybe only watched the HBO miniseries. Anyway…
someone else wrote:
>>The worst part, we are at least five years, maybe ten from learning Snow’s
true identity, as he has two more books to write.<<
RKG’s reply:
“Two more after Dance. At this rate, the only way I’ll find out what
happens will be if my son contacts me through seances…”
Reading that comment has just brought all the heartache back in full force. After being in tears last night, I had found a lot of solace this morning by going back through the emails I had saved and thinking about the good things.
Kevin, I might not have known a whole lot about your RL, but I knew enough about your intellect, hobby interests, and sense of humor to know that the world is much worse off without you.