Fantasy ... Taken to the Edge

One of the earliest advertisements for Planescape I remember seeing was this one, which appeared in issue #203 of Dragon (March 1994). Depicting the ruler(?) of Sigil, the Lady of Pain, it certainly piqued my interest. Even now, I think it's a pretty intriguing and evocative advertisement.

Our Toughest Challenge Ever

As if to prove my point, last week's Dark Sun posts have generated a lot of interest, not to mention comments, which I appreciate. Here's another ad for the setting, this time from issue #173 of Dragon (September 1991), the same issue as the Brom cover I previously highlighted.

Looking at this advertisement, I have several thoughts:

• It's important to remember TSR's D&D novels were very successful for the company, so it's no surprise that the release of the Dark Sun boxed set would also see the release of a novel at the same time, in this case Verdant Passage by Troy Denning. Though I never read any of them, there would eventually be thirteen novels published for Dark Sun during the TSR era.
• Speaking of TSR, is that not the logo at the bottom right the ugliest the company ever had?
• Once again, we see this ad emphasizes that Dark Sun is "the toughest AD&D game campaign ever published." I can't help but wonder what this is about. Was there a perception at the time that TSR's other settings, like Dragonlance or the Forgotten Realms, were "easy" or otherwise inadequate to the tastes of AD&D fans? My recollection, albeit from more than three decades ago, was that the 2e era was concerned far more with "story" and similar things, so I wouldn't have expected much clamor for a "challenging" setting. Perhaps that's the explanation? Could it have been that there some segment of the game's fans who felt the game had strayed too much from its roots and wanted a setting where death was ever-present? I wish I knew.

The Dawn of a New World

Here's another teaser advertisement for Dark Sun, from Dragon #172 (August 1991) – a month before the formal release of the game. What stands out to me about this ad is that it calls the setting AD&D's "toughest challenge ever" or some variation thereof. This makes me wonder more about the genesis of the setting within TSR and what segment of the game's audience the company was hoping to attract.

A Drama of Unparalleled Heroics Unfolds

The second teaser advertisement for Dark Sun, this one appearing in issue #171 of Dragon (July 1991).

Coming This Fall ....

From issue #170 of Dragon (June 1991), the first of several teaser advertisements for the Dark Sun campaign setting.

Brotherly Love Bulletin

From issue #66 of Dragon (October 1982) comes this full-page advertisement for Gangbusters. I haven't played the game in decades, but it was a favorite of mine for a couple of years after its original release back in 1982. Though I haven't (yet) done so, I occasionally get the hankering to pull it off the shelf and play it again. It's a fun little RPG with a lot to recommend it. 

Mind Over Matter

From issue #165 of Dragon (January 1991):

"Orcs, goblins & trolls prefer Grenadier figures ..."

Another memorable Grenadier Models advertisement, this one appearing at the back of issue #64 of Dragon (August 1982).

Now Available from Your Favorite Game Dealer

Since I'll be looking more closely at Boot Hill over the next couple of weeks, I thought it might be useful to share this advertisement for the game, which appeared in issue #28 of Dragon (August 1979). 

With luck, you can read the two paragraphs above, because they make no mention of campaign play and indeed suggest that Boot Hill is anything more than a roleplaying game as the term had come to be understood at the time. Even though my friends and I never did much with the game beyond run gunfights and similar mayhem, we nevertheless considered it an RPG little different from others available at the time (except perhaps that its rules were thinner). I doubt we were alone in this.

Authentic Dungeon Masters Prefer ...

During the period between 1979 and 1982 when Grenadier Models held the license to produce official Advanced Dungeons & Dragons miniatures, the company ran lots of advertisements in the pages of Dragon magazine and elsewhere. Because they frequently made use of people dressed up in fantasy garb, I've always found them quite memorable (and silly – but in a good kind of way). Here's one I came across from issue #61 (May 1982) while preparing my earlier post from today.

Capture Action Packed Fantasy Adventure

In light of yesterday's post about Revolt on Antares, this advertisement from issue #58 of Dragon (February 1982) seemed like it would be of interest.

I owned and enjoyed all these games in my youth. After Revolt on Antares, I think Saga was probably my favorite, though Vampyre was also fun. Does anyone make games like this today? I don't mean reprints of older games, like Ogre, but new, original minigames with simple components that can be played in an hour or so? If so, I'd love to hear about them.

Gamma World Figures

One of my biggest complaints about first edition Gamma World was that its rulebook included very few illustrations of its mutant creatures. Sure, there were verbal descriptions of most of them, but many of those descriptions were vague or equivocal, which made it difficult to describe them in the course of play. That's why I was so keen to see Grenadier's line of GW miniatures: I hoped they'd give me a better sense of what all these weird mutants looked like.

Unfortunately for me, I never saw most of the "over 150 figures plus accessories" promised in the advertisement above. I did find the large "Denizens" boxed set, which I happily purchased, partly because it had such evocative box art, featuring a trio of tribesmen facing off against a Yexil.

I don't know for certain, but I suspect the artist is Ray Rubin, who was one of the cofounders of Grenadier Models. He did a lot of box art for the company's miniatures, including those produced for its official AD&D line. This one looks similar, so it's probably his work.

As I said, I never saw most of the Grenadier Gamma World miniatures in the wild, so to speak. There is, however, a terrific website that includes photographs of most of them. When I first came across the site, I goggled at what I saw, because many of them are exactly the kind of thing I so wanted back in the day. Instead, I had to wait until the release of Gamma World's second edition in 1983 to see at last what all the game's mutant monsters actually looked like (lovingly drawn by Larry Elmore at, in my opinion, his best).

Tired of "Travelling?"

From issue #56 of Dragon (December 1981) comes this advertisement for Star Rovers, a science fiction RPG from Archive Miniatures & Game Systems. Nowadays, the game is mostly notable for the fact that Dave Hargrave of Arduin fame was one of its designers. I never saw it back in the day, so I can't comment on its contents or quality. However, the ad below suggests it was interesting ...

The Adventure is Yours

Throughout 1982 and into 1983, I regularly saw this full-page advertisement for the Moldvay/Cook/Marsh Dungeons & Dragons boxed sets in the pages of Dragon.

The ad is interesting to me for a couple of reasons. First, the image at the bottom left, showing five people sitting at a table playing D&D (with the cover of Keep on the Borderlands clearly standing up in front of the DM) seems to depict the same group of people who appear in a TV commercial from around the same time. That suggests that this print ad was part of a larger, multi-prong effort to introduce "the world's most talked about role-playing adventure" to a wider potential audience. 

Second, the ad features artwork in a style quite distinct from that of any artist I associate with D&D of that era. Since there's no obvious artist's signature, identifying its origin is difficult. It's possible that this question has already been resolved. If so, I'd love to know the identity of the artist. Beyond that, it's also noteworthy, I think, that the illustration depicts three characters (who appear to be a thief, a magic-user, and perhaps an elf) walking/riding at night through the streets of a fantasy setting rather than something more obvious, like a party fighting a dragon or some other monster. Perhaps the marketing people felt this was redundant in light of the inset pictures of the two boxed sets, one of which shows that very scene.

I have no idea how effective this advertisement was in its intended purpose, but I've always liked it.

Look the Part You Play

Another interesting advertisement from Dragon, this time from issue #67 (November 1982):

Electronic Super Dice Kit

Speaking of issue #62 of Dragon (June 1982), here's another advertisement from that same issue that stuck in my memory.

Now, electronic dice rollers were very trendy at the time, as evidenced by the existence of Dragonbone. They're yet another example of a transitional technology that is quickly superseded but that, for a time, manages to find a place in the market. For about a decade, starting in the mid-1970s, there were electronic versions of all sorts of things, spurred on by the decrease in the prices of integrated circuits, microprocessors, and transistors. Given that, I'm not at all surprised by the appearance of dice rollers like this.

What strikes me as unique about this advertisement is that, unlike Dragonbone, this was a kit to build your own "ultimate gaming aid" rather than a finished consumer product. I recall seeing "build your own radio" kits for sale in the Sears catalog and, of course, at Radio Shack, so it's not as if something of this sort was completely unheard of. However, at $19.98 (close to $65 in today's debased currency), this is very expensive for a do-it-yourself dice roller. Dragonbone was "only" $5 more, which makes me wonder if they had many sales. My guess is probably not, but there's no way to prove or disprove it now.

Regardless, the ad is yet another data point for the past is a foreign country file.

Mythical

Memory can be a powerful thing. Even at my advanced age, there are many things I can vividly recall about moments or events decades in the past. My memories are particularly strong about my earliest experiences playing RPGs, which shouldn't really come as a surprise, considering that I'm still involved in the hobby more than 40 years later. 

A good example of this concerns issue #62 of Dragon (June 1982), which long-time readers may recall is the first issue of the magazine I ever owned. I purchased it from Waldenbooks, one of two chain bookstores found at my local shopping mall, and carried it around with me almost everywhere. I read that issue until its glorious Larry Elmore cover fell off, in the process committing nearly everything about it to memory. 

I wrote a post about this a few years ago, in which I noted that the advertisements of that issue loom large in my memory, partly, I think, because I never saw the products being advertised on the shelves of any hobby shop or bookstore I visited. That was certainly the game with this advertisement:

Ysgarth is one of those RPGs I don't believe I've ever seen, despite the fact that I've known its name since 1982. It's one of those games that I often heard people talk about, but, even then, the impression they conveyed was almost of a mythical beast glimpsed only for a brief time in a dark and haunted forest rather than seen by the light of the sun. The same goes double for Abyss magazine, whose existence I knew only from advertisements like the one above. 

From what I understand, Ysgarth was an interesting but very complex fantasy roleplaying game. That complexity no doubt limited its appeal. Nevertheless, I find it strange that I never saw a copy of it in the wild during the '80s (or, for that matter, in the decades since). If anyone reading this has more direct experience of either Ysgarth or Abyss, I'd like to know your thoughts about it. For example, was it really as complex as legend would have it? Did you ever play it? Was it fun?

Ever Want to Be a Vampire?

As a kid, something I really enjoyed about reading Dragon magazine was looking over its advertisements. Most issues had a couple of dozen (or more), often from companies I'd never heard of offering products I'd never seen. In too many cases, the ads were vague to the point of being cryptic. Consider this one that I saw in issue #80 (December 1983):

What exactly is this advertisement for? Is Wizards World a roleplaying game or something else entirely? At the time, I had no way of knowing, since I wasn't willing to risk $10 (over $30 in today's inflated currency) on a whim. I wouldn't find out the truth until nearly three decades later, when Goblinoid Games acquired the rights to Wizards' World, making it available in both print and electronic forms. 

Wizards' World is nothing special. It's similar to many other independent RPGs produced at the time in being amateurish and derivative but nevertheless made with great enthusiasm. Still, I'm glad to have solved this particular mystery. Do any readers recall any other similarly enigmatic advertisements? If so, I'd be interested in knowing what they were.

Now Under Construction

Because I did a Retrospective post on Kara-Tur: The Eastern Realms last week, I was reminded of how excited I was by the announcement that the long-awaited Asian expansion to AD&D, Oriental Adventures. OA was a long percolating project about which Gary Gygax had talked for years beforehand, in part because he felt the monk class didn't belong in "standard" AD&D, given its inspiration in the legends of the Far East. Despite this, there didn't seem to be any evidence that such a project was likely to happen anytime soon and I largely put it out of mind.

Then, without warning, in issue #102 of Dragon (October 1985), this advertisement appeared:

Now, we'd finally get official game rules for samurai and ninja and martial arts and everything else we fans of Kurosawa and Kung Fu Theatre had long thought should be brought into AD&D. To say that Oriental Adventures was greatly anticipated, at least among my friends and myself, is something of an understatement and this ad, featuring a washed out, black and white version of Jeff Easley's cover painting, is a big part of the reason why. Though my feelings about OA are now a bit more mixed, I still have many fond memories of it – and the long October I spent waiting for November 1985 to roll around so that I could finally lay my hands on it.

Witch Hunt

Does anyone else remember this game? And, by "remember," I mean remember its advertisements from Dragon magazine?

I've looked into it and apparently, unlike other games I also saw advertised around the same time, Witch Hunt was actually released in 1983, along with an adventure module for it the following year. I've never seen it, but that's not unique to Witch Hunt. There are quite a lot of RPGs from the 1980s that whose existence I know only through advertisements. 

At the moment, the barriers to creating and selling a new roleplaying game on some niche subject are lower than they've ever been. Back in 1983, putting together and selling even a slapdash RPG involved a significant outlay of time, effort, and money. That's why there were so comparatively few in number and nearly everyone I knew in my youth all played games selected from a fairly small constellation of games. It's also why I find myself strangely fascinated by the few weird little games like Witch Hunt that somehow made it to print and sale. Clearly, it didn't do very well or else we'd all likely remember it from more than its advertising, but I nevertheless have respect for its creators for having been willing to take a chance on bringing their dream project to fruition.