Stephan Michael Sechi

In 1982, Stephan Michael Sechi, Steven Cordovano and Vernie Taylor each put in $600 and formed the company Bard Games to produce their own Dungeons & Dragons supplements.[1]^: 172

Sechi and Cordovano's The Compleat Alchemist (1983) was the company's first product and presented a new character class: a magic-item maker.[1]^: 172 Sechi's The Compleat Adventurer (1983) offered a number of variant classes for thieves and fighters, while Sechi and Taylor's The Compleat Spell Caster (1983) presented many variant magic-user classes.[1]^: 172 Sechi oversaw Bard's next project, The Atlantis Trilogy for Bard Games, which took three years to complete but eventually the three books were published as The Arcanum (1984), The Lexicon (1985), and The Bestiary (1986).[1]^: 172

Due to personal and financial disagreements that arose in the wake of his completion of The Atlantis Trilogy, Sechi sold his shares in Bard Games to Cordovano and left.[1]^: 172 Over the next three months he began work on another trilogy of supplements that would form the basis of a new RPG; Cordovano decided that he did not want to run Bard Games and sold it back to Sechi, who now had a publishing house to produce his new game which he called Talislanta (1987) .[1]^: 172 The success of Talislanta allowed Sechi to collect his Atlantis setting material into a new sourcebook, Atlantis: The Lost World (1988) and shortly afterward could publish a second edition of the Talislanta game in the Talislanta Handbook & Campaign Guide (1989).[1]^: 173 When a buyer from Waldenbooks placed a huge order on Atlantis: The Lost World, Sechi was reluctant to fill it but eventually did; about a year later many of the books were returned, forcing Bard Games to refund about $20,000.[1]^: 173 Sechi repaid its debts to the book trade, paid off his partner, and then shut Bard Games down.[1]^: 173 Sechi retained control of Bard Games' properties, and licensed the rights to Wizards of the Coast, Death's Edge Games, Daedalus Entertainment, and Pharos Press.[1]^: 174

In 2005, Morrigan Press licensed Talislanta from Sechi and simultaneously bought the rights to two of the Atlantis books, The Lexicon and The Besitary.[1]^: 173 In 2010, Sechi placed the entire corpus of Talislanta books under a Creative Commons license.[1]^: 174

• "Stephan Michael Sechi :: Pen & Paper RPG Database". Archived from the original on May 19, 2007.