A Holy Grail of RPG Collecting?

It's not every day you buy something for $2.71 that's worth worth nearly a grand. For me, that day was yesterday. On a seemingly innocuous stop at an indie used bookstore on my way home from jury duty yesterday, I chanced upon this beauty... The Official Dungeons & Dragons Coloring Album... UNCOLORED!!! For those in know, that means the difference between $80 and $1,000. Once the store's $5 price was cut in half via my store credit, the addition of tax put the grand total at two dollars and seventy-one cents!!! (And I thought my $4 purchase of The Official Superhero Adventure Game was a good buy.)

I'm not going to go into too much detail about this baby because it's been talked about in these parts a lot recently by the likes of fathergeek and boingboing, centered mostly around the recent post by monsterbrains (who's scanned and posted the entire thing to his blog.)

The review that seems to sum it best for me, though, is from dungeonskull who states that it just might be "the best encapsulation of an 'old school' D&D adventure ever made." Well, let's see... 1) old EGG wrote it himself, 2) there's a quest for loot with no other heroic motive (like rescuing or saving); 3) it features a "well-rounded" adventuring party (fighting man, cleric, thief, magic-user, ranger, dwarf, elf... you get the idea); and 4) it's got classic D&D monsters like a bulette, a lich, a beholder, an umber hulk, a remhoraz, and Tiamat the dragon. Yup. That pretty much sums it up.

Now I know how Jared feels when he finds a safe in the back of a locker on Storage Wars.

A Look Back: Games Inside Books That Aren't Technically Game Books

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THE BOOK: The Book of Medieval Wargames
THE GAME(S): The Joust, The Tourney, The Melee, The Battle
YEAR PUBLISHED: 1984

The title of this book by Nicholas Slope is a little misleading if your a gamer as a bit more than half the books is just a history of knights, chivalry, heraldry and medieval warfare done in a sort of "light" version of a Time/Life Books kind of way. But, per the title, the most interesting part of the book are the four "board games" (Harper Collins's words) and I think both Harper Collins and the author realized that; the book actually includes a full-color, three-dimensional "pop-up" medieval joust diorama, chance and hazard counters, stand-up player counters, and player stat cards. IMO, the coolest mechanic is from "The Melee" game, in which each player chooses to defend either high, middle or low, and attack either high, middle, low, or attempt to disarm, then roll for their attacks. It's a very nice mechanic for resolving sword and shield combat. For example, if you choose to disarm and your target attempts to parry, you automatically disarm them.

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THE BOOK: The Complete Book of Wargames
THE GAME: Kassala
YEAR PUBLISHED: 1980

From the editors of Consumers Guide and Jon Freeman comes this tome (285 pages) featuring information and reviews for over 150 of the most popular wargames on the market in 1980, including data on publishers, prices, playing time, packaging, game scale, size, balance, key features, playability, rules, realism and degree of complexity. There is a chapter on RPGs (I'm planning a future post on this chapter) and a chapter titled "Computers ad the Future of Wargaming." The book includes Kassala, an introductory wargame portraying a battle between Christian Ethiopians and invading Moslems in 1541. Since these styles of wargame have a rather "limited", situational- and geographically-based ruleset, many enthusiasts will tell you this game still holds up. You just don't get actual cardboard counters or a color gameboard; you have to copy the black and white art for them out of the book.

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THE BOOK: The Complete Guide to the World of Lone Wolf & Grey Star: The Magnamund Companion
THE GAME: Dawn of the Darklords
YEAR PUBLISHED: 1988

Okay, in all fairness, anybody who knows Lone Wolf should really have expected this (a game inside the book, I mean.) After all, this is the "world companion" book to a series of gamebooks that used a simple action resolution mechanic as part of a "choose your own adventure" combat format. The solo adventure in the book is just a stripped down version of what was inside all of the actual "novels." For tabletop miniatures enthusiasts, the book also includes instruction on modeling Magnamund and building your own "fantasy buildings," skyriders and fantasy fleet.

BTW, Lone Star author Joe Dever has offered to allow some of his books to be downloaded free on the internet, so give a visit to Project Aon. (Aon is the universe where Magnamund and the other planets in the setting are located.)

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THE BOOK: Dicing with Dragons
THE GAME: Fantasy Quest solo adventure, FQ1: Eye of the Dragon
YEAR PUBLISHED: 1982, 1983, 1986

There are a bunch of different editions of the book (mine is the 1983 Plume paperback pictured at left), but I assume the game inside stayed the same. Check out The Fighting Fantasist's post for info on this one.

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A OSR Look Back at "Game Design Vol. I" by Nick Schuessler and Steve Jackson

...as a general rule, the more factors are explicit (that is, separately represented), the more charts and tables you will have, the more "accurate" your game will be, and the less "playable" it will become. If most factors are implicit, your design will be cleaner, play will be faster... and you will have more of a "game" and less of a "simulation."

Written in 1981, Schuessler and Jackson's Game Design Volume 1: Theory and Practice was compiled mostly from columns and articles that ran in The Space Gamer from 1980-81 and, as related by Jackson himself in the introduction, looks at game design from both the practical and theoretical sides.

As far as the balance between wargaming and role-playing, the bulk of the content is very wargame heavy, with the first 11 chapters covering, among other things, historical backgrounds, mapping and movement, terrain, combat and play sequence and components. Only the 3-pages of chapter 12 (out of the book's total 46 pages + ads in the 1st edition) are solely focused on RPG design. Truthfully, though, less than a decade into the life of RPGs as we know them, many of the role-playing games at the time were obviously founded in the industry's wargames roots, so no faults to mssrs. Schuessler and Jackson.

The real point I'm trying to get to here, though, is what's really contained in the italic lead in to this post, and the reason I think a lot of gamers have moved back to the simplicity of some of the earlier game systems. This is actually reiterated even in the tiny RPG chapter in statements like, "The more detail a character-generation system has, the less manageable and more realistic it will be." The other statement that really seems to hammer my point home is, "D&D, with a combat system so rudimentary as to laughable, has proven immensely popular." (I love that... "laughable.")

In 1981/2 when I was getting into D&D, I bought both the BX boxed sets, as well as the AD&D PH, DMG and MM. But when I DM'ed, I usually DM'ed BX for two reasons: 1) it was simpler for my friends and family to "get" (my sister loved playing elves as a class), and 2) it was simpler for me to run. Now, had I bought the AD&D GM screen and stopped needing to flip through the DM guide constantly, maybe this would have been different. I remember specifically running module U1 under BX, rather than 1E as was intended.

In looking back, I think part of the reason I started to fall away from D&D and started "falling into" games like Marvel Superheroes is because I felt like D&D was getting too "burdensome." I started to feel that way about almost every RPG coming out at the time. There were too many rules. And the books were getting thicker! And there were so many volumes and world books! (To this day, I have an aversion to almost every Palladium book I've ever seen for this very reason!) More importantly, it's why I've been so enamored by and overjoyed with the OSR.

In my day, we didn't have 400-page sourcebooks for every freakin' character sub-class... AND WE LIKED IT!

Book Review: Stan Lee's How to Draw Comics

So I saw this book recently at my local gaming/comic shop and thought I'd do a quick review, so here it is...

I give this book five fingers (all middle.)

I can sum up everything Stan Lee knows about drawing comics books in seven words - "Hire great artists. Keep all the cash." It's as simple as that.