My friend Michael Satran died almost two weeks and ago.

I’d known him for quite a while. We met in the early 90s, playing tabletop RPGs when another person introduced us. We became good friends.

The characters I write about here come from games he ran, either ones I played or ones I planned to play.  He helped build so many things. I had more ideas, but I’ll never share them with him.

He listened to me rant about so many things – the worst of my times at Citigroup, all the anger and frustration that job gave me, he listened to. During one of the lowest moments of my life, he let me crash on his couch for a couple of days, and fed me, and was there, despite the fact I don’t think I deserved the kindness.

We laughed together at a lot of things, and talked, and complained about how things were. We came up with different ideas, and some of them went into his superhero universe.

He offered me a place to stay when my wife and I moved back from Seattle, and then went silent. There was something wrong, something broken.

It was a glioblastoma – brain cancer. Inoperable. Nothing to be done. It was slow, and it took him away quickly. He lost the ability to speak, to concentrate, to do anything at all. And then finally, mercifully, it killed him.

I pray for his soul. He was an atheist, but I still will.

He wrote a bunch of books for Champions – Hero System, superhero tabletop gaming – and had his first novel published, as well. I linked to them on Amazon below.

His next big project was writing a book about his campaign world. I designed a logo for it, just an idea, and the one time I went to see him in the hospital where he was still there, it wasn’t ready yet. He never saw it completed. It was this:

Goodbye, Michael. Hold a place at the table for me, okay? I may be a little late.

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