He returned to Nice for his education,
and graduated from the Lycee (high school)
in 1977. “I got passionately interested in
wargames when I was attending the Lycee,”
Bruce said, “primarily in Avalon Hill games
like Kriegspiel, Luftwaffe, Third Reich, and
Panzer Leader — the classics. There were,
of course, no French editions of these
games at the time, so we all had to learn
the American versions.

"I loved to travel," Bruce continued, "so 
when I graduated, I decided to study hotel 
management at the Ecole Hoteliere de 
Nice, where I earned my Brevet de Technicien 
d'Hotelierie. My first job was as a Concierge at the 
Embarcadero Center in San Francisco.  After 
that, I returned to France, and became Managing 
Coordinator of Catering for Air
France at Only Airport. 

"While I was living in San Francisco, I discovered 
the 'blue box' edition of the D&D 
Basic Set.  I was mildly interested, but I was 
still a wargamer at heart.  On my return to 
Paris, I was desperately looking for a group 
of gamers to play with, and accidentally 
encountered a D&D [group]

beginning of my long slide
into role-pjaying. . . .

“I started writing articles on D&D and
AD&D for a French gaming magazine, and
there learned that TSR was looking for a
translator to translate the games into
French. Well, I spoke and wrote both languages,
and I knew the games, so I wrote a
letter to Gary Gygax. By a coincidence, he
was just about to come to Paris on business,
and so we set up a meeting. I must
have done OK, because he offered me the
job.”

At first, Bruce did his translation work in
Nice. There, he met his future wife, Beatrice,
on a hiking trip with a group of D&D
players. “She wasn’t a player at first, but
she became one real fast,” Bruce said.

After a few months, TSR decided to move
the translating job to the home office in
Lake Geneva, and Bruce packed up to come
back to the U. S. “I moved from a mild Mediterranean
climate to a frigid Wisconsin
February,” Bruce said, “but oddly enough, I
liked it a lot, and immediately became an
inveterate snowmobiler.” Six months after
he moved to Lake Geneva, Beatrice joined
him, and they were married.

For two years, Bruce worked as a translator.
The French editions of D&D Basic and
Expert, B1 through B7, X1 through X5,
STAR FRONTIERS, and SF0 through SF4 are
all Bruce’s work. He also coordinated outside
translators who turned the games into
German, Italian, and Spanish.

Bruce then transferred to the Games Division
in July 1985 as an Acquisitions Editor,
working with Jon Pickens. At first, he
bought D&D and AD&D modules from various
outside designers, then expanded into
the full line. When Jon was promoted to Editor
of STRATEGY & TACTICS® Magazine,
Bruce became Games Acquisitions Coordinator,
and is now in charge of buying all
game products.

“Please don’t deluge me with manuscripts,”
he begged. “We have very strict requirements
and standards, and we
can’t review everything

that people want to send us.
If you want to design games or
modules for TSR, you must have been professionally
published somewhere else first.
Non-game material, fiction, articles, etc.,
can qualify. So can selling articles to
DRAGON Magazine and DUNGEON Adventures
Magazine. If you qualify, write for a
Submissions Package and our Disclosure
Forms first. If you send us something without
a Disclosure Form, it will be returned
unopened and unread. I wish we could take
the time to read and comment on everybody’s
work, but we can’t. We used to get
800 manuscripts a year, and that took up a
huge amount of time.”

In the meantime, Bruce has been doing
some game design, including CM7, Tree of
Life; M1, into the Maelstrom; and co-authorship
of DL12, Dragons of Faith.

“The rumors about me sadistically destroying
game designers with a battleaxe is
totally untrue,” he adds. “Well, mostly untrue.
. . .”