DangerousPuhson
My my my, we just loooove to hear ourselves don't we?
First off, I don't throw around the word "tome" lightly, and this is a big fucking tome. 576 pages, and every page is about as thick as a light cardstock. Comes with 4 bookmarking ribbons stitched into the spine. Beastly thing, I get a hernia just by looking at it.
This is, by and large, a collection of document scans, framed by editorial pieces to give a bit of context and history. It is divided into 4 parts - Precursors (stuff pre-D&D), The '73 draft of the game, the published version of OD&D, and some extra articles and supplemental stuff of the era. I'll cut to the chase - if you own a copy of the OD&D brown or white box (as I do), then you possesses about 40% of the content of this book already. However it is still highly comprehensive and pretty educational, and having hard copies of stuff is never not a good thing.
Beyond the usual prefaces and forwards, chronologically-speaking the book opens with an excerpt of "Grayte Wourmes" from a scanned copy of Thangordrim Vol. 1 No. 2, which was apparently a typewritten "fanzine" for a variant game of play-by-mail Diplomacy. The "article" would barely pass for a blog post these days, but I suppose it was the earliest dribblings of Gary's draconic fantasy bend, so it should be viewed for posterity if nothing else.
Then you get my favorite part: the original maps of the Great Kingdom (3 iterations at that!) - I love that stuff, very insightful. You can see all the details really crisply, right down to the erased pencil lines (all the documents are amazingly well-scanned).
Then the book jumps through some stuff it considers "Precursors" to the game - articles about armor and polearms, Chainmail stuff including a pretty cool battle report, some Braunstein newsletter stuff, etc. It inevitably gets into Blackmoor for the latter half of the Precursor chapter, along with all the juicy bits of Outdoor Survival (albeit with a map smaller than you'd like for use).
The second part consists of the iterative documents that make up the 1973 first draft of D&D, including correspondences and editing passes and whatnot. Super clean scan of the OG, pencil-drawn "Sample Level" map on page 129; very cool. It's weird seeing everything *except* the maps in blue ink as a default. THe lastr document in the chapter is a kind of goofy little page by Gygax about the dungeon "Clean-Up Crew", where he outlines oozes and puddings and stuff... even doodles them in profile.
The third part is the original OD&D box set, scanned and re-printed in it's entirety (including the blank rear covers of the booklets). It has a bit of a preamble about the history, and people hand assembling stuff, etc. blah blah Lake Geneva blah blah 4th commercial print run... you've heard all this before, I'm sure. If you don't own a copy of the OD&D booklets, the scans in this book are a passable (albeit weighty) substitute.
Section four holds handwritten tables, typewritten articles/newsletters (particularly of the Strategic Review), OG character sheets, bits of The Dragon, and a copy of the Greyhawk, Blackmoor, and Eldritch Wizardry supplement booklets. It ends on a mostly-blank, unpublished mock-up cover for "Gods, Demi-gods and Heroes", with a full-page Afterword.
Overall, I think the book is really only for those with a need to collect curios. It's expensive, and weighs a lot, and might just be too comprehensive to be used at the table as a game supplement... but if you are the kind of D&D enthusiast who enjoys museums, and collecting antiques, and keeping a robust library, then this will no doubt appeal.
This is, by and large, a collection of document scans, framed by editorial pieces to give a bit of context and history. It is divided into 4 parts - Precursors (stuff pre-D&D), The '73 draft of the game, the published version of OD&D, and some extra articles and supplemental stuff of the era. I'll cut to the chase - if you own a copy of the OD&D brown or white box (as I do), then you possesses about 40% of the content of this book already. However it is still highly comprehensive and pretty educational, and having hard copies of stuff is never not a good thing.
Beyond the usual prefaces and forwards, chronologically-speaking the book opens with an excerpt of "Grayte Wourmes" from a scanned copy of Thangordrim Vol. 1 No. 2, which was apparently a typewritten "fanzine" for a variant game of play-by-mail Diplomacy. The "article" would barely pass for a blog post these days, but I suppose it was the earliest dribblings of Gary's draconic fantasy bend, so it should be viewed for posterity if nothing else.
Then you get my favorite part: the original maps of the Great Kingdom (3 iterations at that!) - I love that stuff, very insightful. You can see all the details really crisply, right down to the erased pencil lines (all the documents are amazingly well-scanned).
Then the book jumps through some stuff it considers "Precursors" to the game - articles about armor and polearms, Chainmail stuff including a pretty cool battle report, some Braunstein newsletter stuff, etc. It inevitably gets into Blackmoor for the latter half of the Precursor chapter, along with all the juicy bits of Outdoor Survival (albeit with a map smaller than you'd like for use).
The second part consists of the iterative documents that make up the 1973 first draft of D&D, including correspondences and editing passes and whatnot. Super clean scan of the OG, pencil-drawn "Sample Level" map on page 129; very cool. It's weird seeing everything *except* the maps in blue ink as a default. THe lastr document in the chapter is a kind of goofy little page by Gygax about the dungeon "Clean-Up Crew", where he outlines oozes and puddings and stuff... even doodles them in profile.
The third part is the original OD&D box set, scanned and re-printed in it's entirety (including the blank rear covers of the booklets). It has a bit of a preamble about the history, and people hand assembling stuff, etc. blah blah Lake Geneva blah blah 4th commercial print run... you've heard all this before, I'm sure. If you don't own a copy of the OD&D booklets, the scans in this book are a passable (albeit weighty) substitute.
Section four holds handwritten tables, typewritten articles/newsletters (particularly of the Strategic Review), OG character sheets, bits of The Dragon, and a copy of the Greyhawk, Blackmoor, and Eldritch Wizardry supplement booklets. It ends on a mostly-blank, unpublished mock-up cover for "Gods, Demi-gods and Heroes", with a full-page Afterword.
Overall, I think the book is really only for those with a need to collect curios. It's expensive, and weighs a lot, and might just be too comprehensive to be used at the table as a game supplement... but if you are the kind of D&D enthusiast who enjoys museums, and collecting antiques, and keeping a robust library, then this will no doubt appeal.
