Saturday, December 5, 2009

How to Completely Mismanage an Old-School Property

Let's say you have the rights to a beloved old-school rpg property. Say it's one that was hugely influential, and (albeit illegally) one of the first "third-party" D&D properties.

Lots of folks involved with old school D&D love this property, and use whatever material they can find from the seventies publications in their games. Recently, old school D&D has a huge rise in profile in the gaming community and there is a flood a new old school products for use with the older editions and their simulacra.

Why not release the beloved, old school property as an 800-page completely new rpg (presumably largely incompatible with old-school D&D) instead of compiling and cleaning up the exiting D&D-compatible material that people have been using for three decades and still use today and publishing it as a product for that community.

Also, I hate the logo.

2 comments:

  1. Actually, you're in luck. Empcho is selling a hard-bound compilation of the first three Arduin Grimoire books from the 1970s. The font is nice and readable (unlike the microscopic print of the originals), and the three books are shuffled together (so all the character classes from all three books are together, all the spells are together, all the monsters are together, etc.). It's a pretty cool book:

    http://empcho.bizhosting.com/agtrilogy.html

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  2. My snark is rescinded! Thanks for letting me know about this Geoffrey, I'll definitely have to pick this up, despite the terrible logo.

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