My best friend died Saturday, September 28. She was halfway between her 59th and 60th birthdays. She discovered role-playing in 2019 and swiftly became the center of many people’s experiences, for play itself and for learning what it actually is. She was the finest practitioner of this art, as an art, that I have ever met or hope to.
Helma was diagosed with metastatic cancer almost exactly a year ago, which had already formed threatening tumors in her chest and brain. Inhibitors blocked its growth and even reduced the tumors to almost nothing, but these do not work for long. We hoped she would be able to switch to immunological therapy, but upon the inhibitors’ failure in August, the cancer progressed so rapidly that no treatment could be applied.
During most of this time, she lived at my house with my family, and we became close to her daughters as well. It has been a full year of health management and also extra attention, from her, toward helping me develop what Adept Play should be.
For those of you who are familiar with my game Shine a Light, well, Michael walked among us, first among angels, purest and most nihilist agent of death.
She was otherwise an outstandingly healthy woman with at least another half-century of life in her. This existence we know killed her in an act of raw asssassination, without understandable purpose. My own world-view is indifferent to any such purpose (as apparently other people seem to think must exist), but I can conceive that if there were any, that this would be an act of sheer malice.
My grief, then, is also rage. Maybe I will see it differently given time.
I will host a memorial for the people here in town, at Spelens Hus. I wish so many of you could be here with us.
She preferred, instead of flowers or similar expressions, for donations to be made to Doctors Without Borders.
Many of you have also told me “if there’s anything I can do,” which I know is not trivial although it may seem empty or weak once it’s said. We can make it strong. For anyone: I ask that you find any single recording or account of play featuring Helma, or a post/comment by her, which moved you or helped you learn about role-playing. Present it here in the comments, with or without text accompaniment. I will edit the links into linked titles. If you are not sure how to acquire the link, message me at Discord and I will help you. Or just a few words in a comment about playing with her or being with her, if that’s what you prefer.
I have chosen these videos to call back, because she often said, “I’m not sure if I can do that,” and in each, she demonstrates how well and surely she could. For RuneQuest, it was playing at all, as well as being recorded for public view. For Primetime Adventures, it was GMing. For Lacuna, it was horror. For Advanced D&D, it was playing Chaotic Neutral. Uncertainty fell to courage and triumph every time.
May we all move forward in our uncertainty, as she did, to what we can be and achieve together.
31 responses to “In memoriam: Helma Lindow”
This was my first interaction with Helma outside of the course we did together. I was so moved because I felt very intimidated (I am a very insecure person) and she made me feel so welcome and warm by writing to me, after that we started talking, I will always be grateful to her for this.
The cynic in me always rears its head when speaking of the dead. As they are no longer there to contradict us, it is easy to imagine those who have passed as saints. Well, in Helma’s case, I don’t feel like we need to imagine – anyone who had the pleasure of playing with her would realise that hers was a brilliant and sharp mind, tempered only by kindness and respect for the experience of anyone who played with her. Ron has already posted a clip from Brytning, but looking back at it, Helma as Producer in that game is what really made what Adept Play is about click for me. I sincerely hope that she knew how respected and loved in our community she was, and that she was finally able to let go of any lingering doubts about whether she had the right to call herself “a good roleplayer.” I think we can all agree that if anyone could, it would be her.
I met Helma when she was playtesting my game Traverser and the group invited me to watch their online sessions. I would join the session with them at the beginning and then turn off my camera when they started to play, to try to make them feel less watched. Then sometimes after they were done I’d put my camera back on and we’d all stay and talk for a bit. I’d been struggling to write the game for publication for years. But session after session their play was so fun and emotional, and in our conversations I could tell how much they, including Helma, loved it, and I knew I had to get over my struggles. Over time I made changes to the game that they incorporated, and I got it mostly written. Their play and feedback, including Helma’s, was invaluable. I still have some things to do before I publish it, but I wish she’d gotten to see it when I do.
Later I did get to play with her a bit. I ran a session of my game A Viricorne Guide in which she was a player, and it was so much fun. She took such great emotional risks when she played with us. I would have loved to be in her regular circle of friends and play. I am very grateful for what we did have.
I met Helma playing Undiscovered while still in college. I was new to playing, really…I had GMed a few games and played some two player games, but I hadn’t been just a player ever before. I don’t think I knew what roleplaying could be.
Even though its years ago now, I distinctly remember Helma playing the hell out of her character, Ithasha, like I’d never seen before, and more importantly, that this character was not a “roleplaying game” character, this was something distinct with real individual properties. I tried to play the hell out of my character too, with mixed results.
Looking back I can credit the way she played to opening my mind up to the larger possibilities of roleplaying. At the time I was thinking a lot about emergent plot and failure, but before that game I wasn’t really thinking about the deep power of the player to do this thing and bring something outside of the expected.
On another note, especially during COVID and when I was in college I was a pretty avid viewer of games Ron would post. So although I only played with her once for an extended game, I think I’ve learned a lot and thoroughly enjoyed Helma’s play. Especially from the Runequest game Ron posted a clip of. And I was particularly envious of the way she GMed PTA. Its an high bar that still sticks with me. Whenever I GM a game, now, I think back to the way she GMed that game.
Here’s me meeting her for the first time, using my phone’s camera to play and super anxious, not knowing what kind of awesome things to expect.
Desert Duster fantasy
Our play group for Undiscovered: Helma, me, Sam, and Lorenzo.
I wish I had more opportunities to play and learn with Helma. I remember an exercise during the course I was fortunate to take with her where we were learning how to teach games to others in an effective and engaging way – Helma sounded hesitant for a moment at the start, but right away she picked out exactly the rules that were important to the situation and would enable her and her partner in the exercise to start having fun and moving forward. I’m sure this is just one of an uncountable number of stories that show why everyone has so many good memories of her. In games and in real life, let’s all try to follow her example.
I never met Helma in person, but I feel like I knew her on an almost elemental level. We played games together, and beyond the game table, our limited conversations were lovely, and perfectly human. She was a joy to talk to and interact with. She is what I consider a “Pure” person. Not because of any sense of morals, but because of her heart. When you met her, she was clean, no pretense, a decent human – purely Helma. I knew any interaction with her would be measured, friendly and without any malice or ulterior motive. Again, she was purely Helma.
You never realize what size hole a person will leave when they are gone. Some never make an impression, while others leave a mark on your heart that makes you want to be a better person just for them. Helma made a good impression on me and made me a better human. I’ll hold here in my heart, and try to be a better human for her.
I’ll take the liberty of sharing our Galactic Peace game, featuring Helma, Jerry, Renee, and me.
This is a terrible loss. Helma was brilliant, funny, and insightful among many other qualities. I admire her greatly.
I have a lot of fond memories of her from the courses and watching videos of her in play. Whether she was commenting on the state of mainstream hobby culture, or coming around to the idea of superheroes after seeing some bad-ass images of golden age female supers, or playing the nude elvish-speaking tinkerbell in Tunnels & Trolls.
I think in this moment it will comfort me to see her smiling, laughing, and being mischievous. And luckily, there is no shortage of her doing these things. Here’s a few playlists that come immediately to mind:
Tunnels & Trolls
Gamma World
Whimsical Ways
Very sad news and a great loss! We joined some of the classes and played some short sessions together, but watched/listened to a lot of the recordings on the site, so many that it feels like we’ve played and experienced a bunch of stuff together. The Dusters and Runequest games springs to mind, but also Whimsical Ways and Brytning! Her voice, enthusiasm and courage in both play itself and meeting new things will always be a big inspiration for me!
I regret so bitterly now that we never played in a game together. Here’s the start of a lovely Mountain Witch playthrough where her choices made a big impression on me.
I interacted with Helma mostly online, and I regretfully didn’t get to know her as closely as I now realize I should’ve. Despite this, I was affected by many of her interactions with Adept Play, which many people here have referenced, and those contributions rippled out manifold to many other people myself included, and in the effect she had on Ron’s work as well, which I’ve been told was inestimable. As she started participating more slowly as the disease advanced, it could be felt already that something was missing. It’s my opinion that we haven’t fully measured the extent of her contribution to our participation in this activity, and I’m grateful we have so much of her recorded, although it will never replace the person.
I’m always at a loss whenever things like this happen. Nothing I say can make it better or explain why it came to pass like this.
Our interactions were mostly virtual, and yet I remember her as one of the most human people I have met, if that makes any sense. It has become normalized that in online interactions we act almost impersonally, as a username and a picture, with little introduction. When I attended Situation & Story on Discord, Helma immediately expressed the need for us to get to know each other as people to be able to share a class, just as if we’d been attending it in our physical bodies. She expressed a natural discomfort at something that, in hindsight, shouldn’t be normal.
There it is: she made all of the virtual feel more personal and less detached, and I’ll be trying hard to follow her example on this.
Happening upon these news has sincerely shocked me.
I never had the pleasure of playing with Helma, but she had such a significant presence at Adept Play, both on the server as well as through gameplay videos, that my mind finds it difficult to accept that she’s gone. The gaming videos she shined the light of her presence on are too many for me chose from, so I will just end by saying that the Adept Play community has lost one of its brightest beacons.
God Damn It.
Something I’m noticing lately is that the more people age the fewer questions they ask–especially when they don’t know something. My interactions with Helma, and watching her interactions with others, has always been a kick in the ass in this regard. No fear in not knowing, and, more importantly, no fear in displaying the desire *to* know.
Often this had the side effect of bursting a stupid hobby-culture ol’ boys’ club, as when she’d ask what this or that gamer acronym meant, accompanied by her signature dragon emoji or perhaps a fire-breathing dragon emoji. No, she might have been saying, this is not your hobby store stand-around where you get to simply drop jargon to be included, no gamer circle jerk where waving a book around means anything. She wasn’t going to stand for it.
What are you talking about?
What does it mean?
Have you played it?
*Tell us.*
Hans asked me to share this cartoon Helma drew about herself encountering role-playing texts.
I met Helma at Närcon 2023 and came to know her over the following months as i started joing games at spelens hus.
She helped ground my GMing skills when i ran Cy_borg and was a joy to play along in Electric Bastionlands, Cosmic Patrol and Inspectres.
A game with her always brought perspective on the hows and whys and im grateful for the short time i knew her. It was a good time playing and speaking with her. She will not be forgotten.
Electric Bastionland exists as audio only
Inspectres
Here’s a photo from playing Mörk Borg the same week as Electric Bastionland, when Alan was visiting. l to r: Emil, me, Helma, Johann, Alan.
I do not have a singular memory of Helma, but just an awareness of her presence at Adept Play. In the few instances we engaged in play, I enjoyed it for my part.
Helma showed up for two sessions of Hantverksklubben, our online experimental GM-less freeform group. She was a bit quiet during the pre-game discussion, which is both her style and also very natural when coming into a new social context with people who have already been doing the thing for some time. But then she really delivered during the game!
It was a beautiful story of two female friends, one growing up to have quite a simple party lifestyle while the other combats depression and alcoholism. There were only three of us playing, so we were all very involved in all the scenes, and it is one of my favorite sessions from Hantverksklubben. We explored a lot of interesting techniques, and Helma picked them up with her usual “I’m not sure if I’m doing this right” attitude, followed by doing it EXACTLY right.
Hantwerksklubben 19: Fighting against oneself
A great scene was when Sigrid, one of the main characters, played by Helma, was talking to her father, about how she wouldn’t let him control her life anymore, while Rickard was writing “prompts” in the chat for Helma to play on, like thought passing through Sigrid’s head. That’s not an easy thing to do, having a dramatic conversation while at the same time getting inputs from the side. And it was magical and ironic.
Thank you Ron for putting this thread online.
I have no words for the moment. I can’t count or find all the instances including things Helma said or did during a game that inspired me to be a better player.
I remember how Helma began slowly to become someone important in our life, Laura and me.
My first memory is this clip.
It’s not really highlighting her best moments, but at that point I was hooked in following that campaign. I knew Helma had already played a few games before (two, if I remember well), and it was her first “traditional”, “classic”, “treasure & monster” fantasy RPG. The moment she reacts to the sacrifice reminded me “this is what engagement is”, “this is why we play”. Everything is built during this game for those kind of moment without a GM controlling the experience to shape the emotions of the players. Helma’s reaction is the expression of her embodying what playing is at that particular moment.
I can’t find the videos, but in the same campaign, Helma makes decisions of what Skava says and Skava does after a sequence of failure. Skava is tired, injured, and her expression is really strong. I told her later, I can’t remember where or when, that ot me it was a Masterclass of reincorporating the outcome of a failure. She answered it was obvious to her that Skava would react like that. This Runequest campaign was seminal to me to the things I would looked in a game and how people play. My comments of that time shows my awe at that period.
I have to talk about our Traverser game. I knew I wanted to play with Helma after having watched parts of the runequest game. I knew Laura wanted to play with more women. I knew Helma felt the same. I knew they wanted to play together, and Paul just sent them a draft of Traverser. The topic of the game was absolutely appropriate for the meeting: who would you be in a better world? In a game that is not focused on fights, but on how you connect to each other.
We played 25 sessions, at first between Helma, Laura and me, then a part with Aleksandra. I cannot describe every occurences and events of that game. Helma’s character was Amara. And Amara was damaged by her past. I made mistake in how I gmed the game right in the first session, but nothing that couldn’t be an opportunity to learn better. In short, a love relationship slowly built between Amara and Morgan, a gm character in the game. None of us had anticipated this. The game mechanics, helped, of course. When you confide in someone, that can results in failing to express yourself and generate a bad reaction from your interlocutor. When you’re able to be express yourself through art (dance, poetry, any mean of expression), someone can become intimate with you. The game endorses reincorporation a lot, because of how the resolution procedure work: you have to force yourself to really understand how he think about his character, the decision he would make.
Amara made mistakes. We failed at key moments during the building of this relationship between Amara and Morgan. And Helma made sometimes strong decisions to endorse, be faithful to those outcomes. Amara made irreversible decisions towards Morgan, to the point that their relationship broke up and was irrecoverable. See how Helma gasps in the runequest clip I’ve posted. I remember intense moment of irrevocable consequences during our traverser, with that level of intensity.
Then Helma made new decisions. In Traverser, a character can travel to another reality, where she can meet alternate version of the NPC they encountered in other realities. And slowly, Helma led Amara to build a new relationship with that alternate version of Morgan. It was not easy. Amara didn’t want to ignore the other version, or consider this one as a “clone”/copy of the previous one. She was authentic with her. She explained everything. She confide about her mistakes. We used resolution mechanics, listen to each other, and slowly build, during maybe 10 new sessions, that new relations ship. I want to share Aleksandra’s account of the last scene (with her own commentaries):
Amara is leaving? nice dog – Fuzzy, Morgan’s dog
She lives in an old castle in the clouds ,far from everything, invites Amara over
They go to the castle together and Amara is meeting with Noah, Morgan’s son
They all put offerings in a shrine for Bethy, she’s dead here.
Is Amara still in love with Morgan ? 😛
Amara confides to Morgan about being with love with Morgan from another Terrene. It’s confusing, but Amara is invited to stay
Morgan: “maybe you can tell me more about myself” – cute!
And our notes from the last scene:
“while Amara sits and sings with the whales Morgan comes up to her, kisses her and basically the same scene as when they walked along the beach on the other Terrene plays out again”
This game stresses out two things for me. First, Helma’s capacity not only to play at the level of “amplified play”, but to create the social conditions of helping the group to go there. She always looked at older gamer for how to play, when she was definitely the best to facilitate this turning point for a group. Something she was really good to bring that “mood” in a group, was her ability to reincorporate the failure in the way she played her character. In other words, to reassess the actions and world-view or situational-view of her character according to the outcome of the resolution (or of an intersecting authority). It’s through the way she did that with failure that I see it more clearly, but those are just particular case of her ability to do it all the time. Also, the way she played Amara was a strong reflection of one of her qualities: an strong, honest and irrevocable authenticity.
Second, it’s the best experience I can build my representation of what “engagement” is in our medium, and of why we play. No person who has felt that is able to understand the conditions that can lead to that situation. As Ron often repeat, engagement is when you are changed by the game.
The level of engagement that this Traverser game created has built the strong bound between Helma and me, and I’m sure between Helma and Laura (who I think will speak for herself). At that point, we needed to meet together. And we met. And those meeting offered opportunities for us to have intimate conversation about life. That’s when Helma and realized some very strong affinities or intimate life event or experience that we shared through our life.
This bounding continued with every game we played together – but I’m pretty sure Laura will want to talk herself about the viricorn guide game, a game where Helma played Skava again, yes, her Runequest character.
The bound we built in our life cannot be separated to the engagement we experienced during the game. That itself is the best expression of what the medium is. I never experienced it at the level of what we built with Helma – and in the same time, it became my “new normal” now, at least in expectations of the game.
I remember when she told me, drinking a coffee in small french café at L’Isle-sur-La-Sorgue in Provence, how she was moved by how you, Ron you spent hours to talk with her before your first games. I don’t want what happened or the content of your conversations. But she confide how those hours of conversations to put her socially at ease allowed her to throw herself in new games.
When we met Helma in Brussels, we started a Sorcerer game. I made new mistakes by gming and we stopped that game after 5 sessions – because I realized that the game was going around in circles due to my failures at doing important gm tasks for that game. But again, I have a strong memory of her 2 consecutive failures of summoning a demon. The way her character reacted to those failures were moving (especially after realizing that the goat’s sacrifice from the educational farm for children was useless). It was never a player frustration – she treated this as a vessel for engagement.
I said I have no words, and I can’t stop writing. I have no words about how I feel for the moment, but I could write books about what I learned. Every game I saw a player made me understand key things that improved my way to play and to interact with other players. And her humility always led her to swear that she was not good at things she demonstrated high quality.
It’s moving to read all the comments here.
We lost a dear friend, and one of the best player I met.
Helma and Laura
When I look back on my relationship with this art, there Helma is. She was one of the first people I played with at Adept Play. Helma, Manu and I played a session of Trollbabe. Her Trollbabe helped a baby dragon out of trouble. We had the opportunity to play together again, this time Whimsical Ways with Ron. Helma played a curious robot named Thirteen who stood fiercely, daringly by her friend, my love-troubled cat-person Theoxxa. In 2022, I realized I had a long way to go in roleplaying. I was struggling to speak in play, leaning on monomaniacal charicatures of player-characters with a single obsession because I was terrified of not knowing what my character would do (Theoxxa among them). I asked three trusted people for feedback on my play and their thoughts about how they themselves had improved in roleplaying. Of course Helma was one. Her generous responses, which she made time to share between reorganizations at her workplace, visits from her children, and sessions of 9 Worlds, opened my practice profoundly. I have Helma to thank for finding at last what I had been looking for and finding and losing again in roleplaying. When I look back on the furious play I had in the years after — Champions Now, Runequest, Villains & Vigilantes, the game of Rolemaster I’m in now — there Helma is. She feels so present in my life, roleplaying and otherwise, though when I go back through our messages they’re mostly small – wishes for a happy New Year, enjoying each other’s recorded play and, now and then this last year, various notes that all meant, “I haven’t forgotten you.” I can’t do justice to the strength of her presence — her humility, curiosity and courage which I remember now in the listening-tilt of her head, her ready smile when we played. Helma was one of the few people I hope, unreservedly, to grow up like. In our conversation from 2022, she told me, “Anyway, the whole example is only the most extreme result of me trying to constantly move the lines I instinctively draw when playing but may not talk about until play gets really close. Some lines are more of a wall, those will never get moved, but the ones I want to work on I do work on. Getting better all the time. Being good at, I’ve come to the conclusion that I leave that to others to judge, I seem to be biased against me in that respect. Otherwise I think we are constantly learning from each other the moment we are in a group that has played with each other for a while, when people learn more about each other as persons and support each other in play, listening, sensing what’s going on, making sure everybody is alright, getting into a flow and coming out of the evening feeling … well … high is probably the best word to describe it. It’s giving and taking in an often unconscious way and it leads to everybody constantly evolving. I can’t imagine playing in a group that doesn’t function this way.”
I only knew Helma briefly, entirely through conversations online, and most of those in private, which it doesn’t feel right to share in detail. But Let’s put up another TV show stands out for me, because she reached out to me for advice in prepping for playing Primetime Adventures as a GM, and I gave my thoughts, apologizing for their inadequacy… and then when she wrote about that game, I commented and received a glowing reply. I am very happy to have known Helma, if only so briefly and in such a limited way, and I’m glad to have been a friend to her. Words are inadequate.
Helma was always a kind, curious and humble presence on Adept Play and its Discord. Whenever I saw her dragon symbol in the chat, I knew there would be kindness and welcome.
Added by request
When Helma provided these cartoons to Discord, I responded with this:
And Greg was inspired to draw this:
I never had the pleasure of playing with Helma, and I only interacted with her directly in one or two instances on Discord and Adept Play. Despite this, I felt like I knew her from watching countless hours of her participating in workshops and playing games at Spelens Hus.
I noticed her humility, generosity, curiosity, and aptitude from the first. Her enthusiasm and joy for gaming were always evident, as was her appreciation for (and support of) her fellow players. I found her GMing Brytning incredibly inspiring and wish I could be as cool, warm, thoughtful, and creative GMing any game as she was her first time out.
In short, I’m thankful for Helma’s deep humanity and playful nature. As evidenced by the testimony of those of you lucky enough to have known her, she lives on in the example she set and in the community she helped build.
I played with Helma in a game of Undiscovered, and I had a chance to experience first hand her curiosity towards play and kindness towards players. Many words, practices and advice are spent in describing or suggesting how you should make other players comfortable and safe in play, but I think watching Helma play provided the best example you could have. She often said she wasn’t sure about doing it right, but thinking back at the many let’s play I watched her in she never hesitated to ask and tell in an honest, direct and sincere way. Never I felt she was placing expectations on anyone else, except that of providing something and someone to play with.
I remember watching our let’s play (and also many times watching the Mountain Witch let’s play) and in one of the earliest sessions her character was attending to mine as we just escaped a potentially fatal situation. And I remember thinking that while we were both talking in the slightly broken english of people who can handle themselves but are not speaking in their native language, she never had that small hesitation that suggests you’re thinking about what you should say now, what would sound good now, what is best to say now. And as a result, everything she said was immediately there, I could picture her character exactly as she described her and as she made her speak, with no filter or reconstruction needed. She was always better at this that I can ever hope to be.
I did not know Helma well, at all, but the pain of this news has kept me away from posting here. In part because loss has been the agonizing, inhumane and inhuman drum-machine back beat of life the last half-decade or so. In part because I am aware how wonderful she was on this site, and a little bit aware how the same was true for Ron personally. But ultimately I’ll point at Claudio’s comment, and the request Helma made to know people in class (that I also attended). I’m not sure if I’m always great at acting consistent with the fact that everyone here is a real, fully human being, but remembering Helma makes me want to keep trying.