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White and Hackstein

Tracy White and Leslie Hackstein are the most well-known authors of the ElemenstorLance Series of novels, and are often credited with having come up with the concept of tying together pre-generated characters, story lines that span a great volume game modules, and adult novels that were a direct tie-in with the role playing and card games in order to both create a rich and lore-laden role playing experience and also piles of cash for the parent company. Realmworlds Publishing's official stance on this story is that it is (and I quote): "Crap."

Realmworlds Publishing goes to great lengths to own not only the intellectual property, but also as much of an individual's identity as possible. As such, most of what is known about White and Hackstein consists of "Fan Lore", usually assembled from "face to face" encounters with the two authors. This is extremely unlikely, as it is well known that Realmworlds Publishing often hires actors to portray its employees at conventions, and that many of its authors (including White and Hackstein) are contractually forbidden from making public appearances, statements, or having personal information on the web.

Fan Lore commonly holds that White and Hackstein were both struggling fans of the ELotH: TES - Pen and Paper RPG, and submitted game modules to Realmworlds Publishing and Black Fox Games hoping to scrape up a few extra dollars. Instead, they ended up getting job offers, and creating a rich tapestry of Lore in the ElemenstorLance series that would feed the growing number of game modules, cards, and other merchandise relating to ELotH.

One thing that Fan Lore greatly disagrees about is the gender of the two authors. It is widely accepted that they are a man and a woman, but due to the androgynous nature of their names, there is much disagreement on who was who. A small contingent of ELotH:TES fans maintains that they were of the same sex, and lived out a forbidden homoerotic love through the lives of their RPG characters... sort of a nerdier version of "Broke Back Mountain". However, there is further disagreement even in this splinter group about whether they were men or women, and even then... these tend to be the same people who churn out reams of low quality "El-Slash" and are thus disregarded by the majority of the fan community.

White and Hackstein's most well-known novels told the stories of the Four Underdogs in a narrative form that bore a greater resemblance to the Elemenstor Radio Dramas than to The Wizbits. Though these novels weren't the archetypal ElemenstorLance formula of "creating something out of nothing" due to the fact that they used established characters, they are still lauded by a certain faction of the fan base as bringing more "dignity" to these four heroes whose deeds made an indelible mark on the imaginary history of Battal. Indeed, this may be the genius behind this first series, which seems to have intended to create characters that will "grow up" as the fan matures, thus containing merchandise that will be accessible to the fan in early childhood, adolescence, and even into adulthood.

Potential Sightings