Wednesday, February 19, 2020

Saying Goodbye to My Friend Clint Staples

Recently attended the funeral of my good friend Clint Staples, who died of a sudden massive heart attack on February 11 and whose loss means more to me than I can easily or adequately express or probably even yet realize. Spoke a few words at the ceremony not far from his home in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada — along with his friends Rick Neal and Thomas Horn and wife Penny — in an attempt to convey how important he was to me and how I felt about our relationship. 

“I was blessed to have been able to work with Clint, and increasingly so, over the past several years. I am both honored and very sad to be here today and am also present on behalf of his friends Brenda Cass, Amanda Kahl, William T. Thrasher, and Ford Fitch, all of whom would have been here themselves if they could have.

Suffice it to say that Clint was one of my closest friends, and one of the most profound indicators of that is not so much that in 2017 we decided to drive more than 1,500 miles together from San Antonio to Winnipeg, but that the following year we were eager to make that long journey together again. We had other trips planned, including a drive along the length of the Mississippi and a mission to a Medieval church in Spain, and would have never run out of places to go or things to do.

It is a tribute to how important Clint was to me and my associates, how much we valued his good counsel, that anytime we started a new project we automatically considered what his role in it would be. He was integral to everything we were doing with our Skirmisher Publishing LLC on literally a daily basis and as of just last week we had shifted most of our efforts over to supporting his "Ragnarok: The Great Winter" roleplaying game, probably the biggest and most ambitious game development project I have ever been involved with.

Clint was also served as a board member of the Gnosis Project, a charitable organization dedicated to helping spread knowledge that we recently founded and for which his love of history was invaluable.

My friends and I called Clint our Paladin, because in so many ways he was the best and most dependable of all of us. We will fight on without him in body knowing that he is still with us in spirit and that even from beyond this world he has played his part in our victories.” 




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