Jeff Berry

Also known as Chirine Ba Kal, Jeff Berry (1956-) was one of the members of MAR Barker's Tékumel group in St. Paul Minnesota around the time when Dave Arneson was running his early Blackmoor games in the same area.

Jeff Berry in Tékumel Outfit

Jeff started gaming in the Twin City area in 1975 and first met Dave Arneson at the University of Minnesota wargame club. When Dave Arneson started his own company, Adventure Games, in the early 1980s, he hired Berry to be his "Tékumel guy." I have previously mentioned how another member of Professor Barker's group, Debora Naffziger also influenced the Blackmoor Setting. 

Yesterday, at the Hill Cantons blog, ckutalik has posted an interesting interview with Jeff, where he among other things talks about his gaming experiences with Dave Arneson:

"Dave was really one of the most creative people I'd ever met, and genuinely the most fun to play with. He was very nice, very genial, and would do his very best to rip your liver out and feed it to you with Tabasco sauce on it. "

Read the entire interview here. Jeff Berry also has his own Q&A thread over at the Comeback Inn Forum where he talks about Tékumel, Dave Arneson, Blackmoor and many other things. He has been a fantastic source of information about the early days of gaming.

Jeff Berry i 2009

Image source: Der Spiegel


-Havard