A Little Chunk of Gaming History

So, I'm kicking around RPGNow this afternoon, and what should I find?

It seems that one of the stretch goals of the Deluxe T&T kickstarter was a re-issue of 1st edition T&T. It is only $1.95. It includes a new forward by Ken St. Andre. It is endlessly fascinating to me that our hobby grew to such lofty heights from such humble beginnings. This is a scan of the original deal, and it looks like it. It looks as if it went straight from Ken's typewriter to a high school mimeograph machine. It practically smells like an English test. It even looks like the pages were hand-numbered, either as an afterthought or due to technical limitations. I love this sort of thing. My hard drive is almost a museum of the hobby and this is a welcome "piece" in my collection. Get it here, if you want a glimpse into our collective past.

Runequest Essentials

It appears there is an embarrassment of riches at my gaming fingertips. I just finished posting about the D&D 5E Basic rules being released as a free pdf, when, lo! I see news of this (thanks to Akrasia).

RuneQuest Essentials

In a lot of movies and stories is an oft-heard line "We might have been brothers/friends in another life". Well, RQ may have been as D&D to me in another life. I wish I had the history with RQ that I do with D&D. Not replacing D&D, just alongside. Brother in arms, as it were.

On a side note, give a listen to this: 

Anyway, I've been mightily intrigued by RQ6 and everything Design Mechanism has been doing for it. It has been admiration from afar, though. The releases are getting a fair amount of love and appear to be of high quality, but I haven't taken the plunge. I have OpenQuest and Legend to scratch my infrequent RQ itch. RQ Essentials gives me a sterling opportunity to really get a look at what they're doing and how they're doing it: the writing style, editing, artwork, etc.

One of the things I love about RQ is the Bronze Age flavor that just oozes out of it. The new cover certainly keeps that alive, so now I get to really see what this is all about.

D-36 (or D-25 Depending on Your Reckoning)

So, here we are at 36 days and counting. And yet it isn't really 36 days. As it turns out, there are certain outlets that will be going live with the Starter Set on July 3rd. That isn't really an issue for me, here in the beautiful Tennessee Valley, as there are none of the uber-special stores convenient to me (at least that I know about). Of real interest to me, though, are the Basic Rules. I'm sure you all know by now that the basic core of the rules will be available free (more on that in a moment). What I learned only today is that the free Basic pdf will be released also on July 3rd, coinciding with the Starter Set pre-release. Hence, he D-25.

Free Basic

I'm ridiculously happy that they are doing this. There are two aspects of my gaming nature that suffer serious compatibility issues:

• I'm an open-source kind of guy and I like my games to embrace that philosophy
• I'm a D&D whore. Period. No matter what other games I look at, post about, or fawn over, D&D is my THING. With the exception of Moldvay/Cook B/X, I have snapped up every edition as soon as availability and finances allowed. It's who I am, it's what I do.

So, releasing the Basic rules free (at least as in beer, not much word about an OGL at this point) is a bold stride toward being able to resolve these opposing forces in my gaming psyche.

By the way, I also pre-ordered the PHB. Unfortunately, I am at my math limit for the weekend, so a countdown to that release is currently unavailable.