Notes from My Re-read Part 2

I'm continuing this series of updates as I continue my re-read of the D&D materials I've already covered.  For one it's helping me establish the habit of posting again, and for another I'm just enjoying noticing things that perhaps did not stand out to me on my initial reading.

I've only gotten through one more product in my re-read after I closed the last post with the Holmes Basic Set, but it's a long one - the AD&D Monster Manual.  This time around I noticed in the introduction that Mike Carr talks about how D&D has spawned imitations, and of course urges readers to stick with the original and "best".  He includes this snarky quote about other roleplaying games:

...let the others be measured against the standard of quality we have striven for - a hardbound encyclopedia of monsters, for instance, as opposed to a low quality collection which is poorly assembled and bound.

I just find this a little hypocritical, given that that is where TSR itself naturally started.  If you've read Chainmail or the original boxed set then you know that they don't exactly stand out as paragons of quality.  Their revolutionary content had to succeed despite the poor writing and poor typesetting.  And while I can't comment on the physical quality, only reading PDFs myself, I feel rather sure that it fell on the "poorly assembled and bound" side of the spectrum, being produced by a fledgling company on a shoestring budget.  All in all it reeks of the obnoxiousness of someone who has improved their station in life but then looks down their nose at others still in the place they came from.

Not much else stood out to me in the book, probably due to its exceedingly dry nature, an issue I discussed in my last post regarding the Blackmoor supplement.  However, one thing I did note was that in the entry for Balors (previously type VI demons), it says that only six are known to exist!  This is a far cry from later materials, which make it clear that the Abyss is home to virtually limitless numbers of demons of all types.  I can only assume this is due to the influence of The Lord of the Rings, which I've noted in previous entries.  Balors are clearly knockoff balrogs, and while he went back and forth on the issue, at one point Tolkien had decided that there were no more than seven balrogs total, which is presumably informing this statement.  Not exactly something of monumental consequence, and as mentioned it would be retconned later, but sometimes little throwaway statements like this make for the more interesting tidbits in the evolving history of the game.

Something else you might or might not notice is that I've gone back and edited all my previous blog posts.  A lot of it is just cleanup - fixing the font and font size of entries, which is something I wasn't very fastidious about when starting, as well as correcting a few typos.  However, one major change I made that I will continue going forward is putting a picture of the cover of every product and magazine issue at the start of each post.  I have also added the metadata for products in the captions as well: the author(s), cover artist, and interior artist(s), where that information is provided (it would be a few years before TSR got around to professional publishing standards of consistently including a full list of credits on the title page).

This metadata on products is something I'm going to be paying more attention to and discussing in future blog posts.  While initially I was only interested in pure content for this reading project, over time I've decided that I want to keep track of authors and artists as well.  I'm interested to see who the heroes and zeroes of TSR's writing and art staff ended up being - which names will make me excited when I see them on the cover, and which will make me say, "Oh great, another product by X...", as well as being able to see (hopefully) the growth of these individuals as the years roll on.

As a perfect example take the Monster Manual discussed above.  Dave Sutherland did both the original cover art in 1977 as well as the updated cover art in 1983.  The difference could not be more striking:

That's a lot of artistic growth in only six years.

I don't feel I've missed very much by not discussing the metadata in posts I've already done, as there hasn't been a plethora of diversity.  Obviously Gary has written the lion's share of all the products, and familiar names like Dave Sutherland, Dave Trampier, and Tom Wham have shown up multiple times for the art.  But I'm excited to add this facet of product evolution to my writing going forward.

What's less exciting is that I've decided to add this information to my collector's spreadsheet, which means combing back through every product to fill it in.  It's not hard and really not even that tedious, but it is taking a share of my time right now.  My spreadsheet feels like it is starting to suffer from asymptotic completion, where no matter how much work I do, there's always something else I find I want to add or tweak, so that true completion seems to always be just out of reach.  I promise someday though it will be complete (or at least complete enough) and I will publish it here.

For now though I am continuing my re-read.  I'm realizing that it will take a bit of time to get through the Player's Handbook as well as all six G and D modules, but I'll keep at it and keep posting these updates as I have them.

Notes from My Re-read

So I'm about halfway done with my re-read right now, having just finished the Holmes Basic Rules.  In the interest of getting back into the habit of posting regularly I thought I'd do a brief update on some things I've gleaned during my re-read:

• When I first started this project I only had a 3rd edition copy of Chainmail, which came out well after the original OD&D boxed set.  As I was reading I naturally wondered whether some things from the boxed set had bled back into the Chainmail rules.  Well since then I've managed to find a 2nd edition copy of Chainmail, which came out before the boxed set, and which I read this time through instead.  In turns out that back-pollination from OD&D did occur in terms of wizard spells.  2nd edition has fewer spells than 3rd, and it also lacks the concept of spell "complexity", which is just spell level ported over from OD&D.  So all told a few spells as well as the spell level concept were reworked into the 3rd edition rules.
• As I was rereading the Blackmoor supplement I was struck by the description of the Sahuagin.  As opposed to just being a block of stats and a barebones description of how they fight in combat - which is the norm for monster entries of this era - it actually goes into significant detail about their society.  The result is that they feel quite fleshed out, which is rather refreshing for a product of this era.  D&D (in virtually every era) has always opted for quantity over quality when it came to giving us monsters.  We can see it already starting to gel here, but the AD&D Monster Manual would completely solidify the format of picture + stat block + very brief description, and I always wanted monster books to be so much more.  Don't just give me a brief rundown on the stats for the different types of giants, give me info on giant society.  How is it organized?  How do the various types relate to one another?  What does family structure look like?  Even with unintelligent animal-like monsters I want details like what does their lair or nest look like?  How do they fit into their local ecology?  Are they an apex predator or what hunts and eats them?  I'm sure the quantity over quality choice was made as part of an arms race with players who had memorized the stats for existing monsters (a problem which is explicitly mentioned in one of the products from my re-read, although I can't recall which one), but the detailed information I long for could have sparked the imagination of countless DMs, and in turn I believe help address the problem of player familiarity.
• I made a very brief mention of this in one of my past posts, but there are a couple of categories of products that came out in the time period I've already covered that I haven't included in this blog, those being the Geomorph accessories and the monster and treasure assortments.  The Geomorphs were basically individual sections of map that could be combined at the edges in multiple ways to allow DMs to generate large maps easily.  There were a couple for dungeons, one for caves and caverns, and one for a walled city.  The monster and treasure assortments were just that - just random lists of monsters and treasures for DMs to roll on.  While both products do have a page explaining how to use them, they're not exactly "readable" products and as such there wouldn't be much to say about them in a blog post, hence my decision to exclude them.
• The very last issue of The Strategic Review had an article recommending some music to play in the background while playing D&D.  I've certainly done this myself in a campaign I've run, but I was pleasantly surprised by the fact that the idea of doing it went all the way back to the very beginning.
• Dragon #3 had an entry for a samurai class, and while the class itself wasn't very interesting, it did introduce the concept of critical hits to the game for the very first time.  After doing some research though I was shocked to learn that D&D was not the first roleplaying game to include the idea.  That honor goes to Empire of the Petal Throne, which came out a full year before this issue (although they were not called "critical hits" yet).  But even more shocking is that EPT was not even the first game to introduce the concept.  According to Wikipedia, it first appears in a 19th century wargame!
• I'm quite shocked at the complete lack of marketing in the Dragon.  I don't mean there are no ads (there are plenty), but rather that TSR had no concept yet of using the magazine to preview upcoming products.  In none of the Dragon issues leading up to the Holmes set is there any mention of it - no sneak peaks, no brief excerpts, not even a "hey, we're working on this" mention in the editor's column.  Apparently they just threw the Holmes set out into the world with no fanfare whatsoever.  I checked ahead and there is a one page ad for it in the following issue (2 months later!), but it's just bizarre compared to how things are managed nowadays, where every TTRPG or video game has a carefully crafted hype machine leading up to its release.  Now to be fair the TSR staff at this time are largely just amateurs winging it - I doubt at this point they even had an official marketing department.  I seem to recall they did a little better with AD&D, but we'll see if I remember correctly as I read through the next year's worth of issues.

That's all for now.  My initial guess of the re-read taking a single month was perhaps a little naive, but I'm hoping another month will see me done with it.  I'll probably do another one of these posts when I do finish, and then at long last it will be time for new content!

I Live!

Yes, I am in fact still here.  After six years I finally decided it was time to resurrect this project, as I still very much want to see it through to completion.  It's just easy to lose momentum on a project of this size when life gets in the way.  When I made my last post in 2019 we were just about to move to a new house, which is obviously a major life disruption.  Our daughter was still a baby at that point, so it took a while for life to settle back down, which it finally did...just in time for 2020.  After surviving that dumpster fire of a year, life laid on the smackdown even harder in 2021, which was without a doubt the hardest, most traumatizing year of our lives.  After taking 2022 to recover, we then started the process of adoption, which can be rather all-consuming and occupied the last couple of years.  We finally completed that journey in July.

tl;dr - life has been hard the last few years.

When I have had free time the last several years I've mostly devoted it to my YouTube channel (right here, if you're interested).  But lately the siren song of D&D has been welling up from my memories, and I decided at last to dive back in.

Now I'll be upfront, it's going to be a bit before I start regularly posting again.  I feel I need to manage expectations for all those people who've been keeping me in their subscription feed for the last half-dozen years, anxiously waiting for me to return.  That's sarcasm of course, and this is mostly just for recording my own thoughts.  I'd like to think I'm not completely shouting into the void though.

Anyway, it's been so long that I feel I need to re-read the products I've already been through to reabsorb that late-70s D&D zeitgeist before I dive into new products.  It shouldn't take terribly long - I know what I can skim and skip to speed things up.  I'm also restarting my efforts to finish my collector's spreadsheet, and my actual collection of PDFs, which is also taking some of my time.  But hopefully I'll start making new posts here in the next month or so.

And if there actually is someone out there who has followed this blog after all this time, I don't know what else to say but thank you for your incredible patience.  For everyone else, I hope you'll join me on this journey as I pick it back up again.