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.
