Keith "Doc" Herber first discovered role playing games in 1978, when a friend wrote a newspaper story about the strange new hobby. Intrigued by what he heard, he purchased an early edition of Dungeons & Dragons and, with a few friends, managed to figure out how to play it, and began running a weekly D&D campaign that lasted nearly four years.
1981 saw the release of Chaosium's Call of Cthulhu game. A long time fan of Lovecraft, Doc had read Lovecraft's collected works in 1963, at the age of fourteen, revisiting the author ten years later with the release of the Ballantine paperback HPL collection. Nonetheless, he passed on Call of Cthulhu the first time around. All RPGs of the time were of the heroic variety, driven by players gaining power, wealth, and fame, a paradigm Doc felt didn't suit the Lovecraft genre. On a second visit to the hobby shop, he decided to take a chance and picked up a copy of the original, boxed, version. A test run of the now-classic "The Haunting", conducted on a rainy afternoon with his son, Erik, nine years old at the time, opened his eyes to the possibilities CoC offered.
"It was the first rpg that emphasized story and characterization over confrontation and combat," Doc explains. "It seemed to have a lot of potential to be something different."
Call of Cthulhu scenarios were in short supply in those days, and Doc was forced to home brew his own, many of them later appearing in The Fungi from Yuggoth, first published in 1984, and re-released years later as Day of the Beast. He followed up Fungi with the collection Trail of Tsathoggua, and the campaign Spawn of Azathoth, as well as contributing to a number of other Chaosium publications for the game including Cthulhu Now and the Dreamlands supplement.
After a few years away from the game, he was commissioned in 1989 to write Arkham Unveiled, which would eventually become the first book in the well-known Lovecraft Country series. By the end of that year he'd been hired to work at Chaosium and, along with his wife, Sharon, made the move from Ann Arbor, Michigan to San Francisco. During a four-year run with Chaosium he wrote and/or published a number of titles, including Mansions of Madness, Return to Dunwich, Kingsport: City in the Mists, The Stars are Right, Escape from Innsmouth, Tales of the Miskatonic Valley, Adventures in Arkham Country, Rogue Mistress (for Stormbringer) and the original Investigators Companion and Keepers Compendium.
Leaving Chaosium in early 1994, he free lanced for White Wolf's Vampire game, publishing the Tremere sourcebook and a pair of Vampire novels, Dark Prince, and Prince of the City. Moving to Chicago, he worked first at a video game developer, High Voltage, then took a job as editor and film critic at Cinescape magazine. During this time he also partnered up with DarkTales Publications, a small press horror publisher. Doc came on board as Art Director and graphic designer, later taking over the reins as Editor-in-Chief.
In May, 2008, he received a license from Chaosium to produce Call of Cthulhu supplements--his first love--and along with partner Tom Lynch, formed Miskatonic River Press. Their first Call of Cthulhu publication, New Tales of the Miskatonic Valley, was released in January, 2009, followed by the contemporary Kevin Ross campaign Our Ladies of Sorrow. Future plans include the anthology The Outer Gods, Thrice Damned Dunbriar for CoC Dark Ages, and a Gaslight campaign to be edited by Kevin Ross. They have also re-released the acclaimed Dead But Dreaming fiction anthology originally published by DarkTales.
Keith passed away the 13th of March 2009
Otro de los grandes del rol que nos abandona :-((
