Last week, I wrote about Sir Pellinore's Game, an obscure 1978 RPG, whose existence I'd been alerted to by a couple of my regular correspondents. Like many (most?) people, I'd never heard of Sir Pellinore's Game, let alone knew that it had three different editions over the course of its existence. Fortunately, Precis Intermedia has made the game available again, in both print and PDF form. I don't know how many people will actually play the game, but there's no question that it's an invaluable resource for learning about the history of the RPG hobby.
Now, I've been alerted to the fact that Precis Intermedia is preparing to make another obscure RPG from the 1970s available once: What Price Glory?! Written by John Dankert and James Lauffenberger, What Price Glory?! first appeared in the same year as Sir Pellinore's Game, 1978. Needless to say, this game is also unknown to me, so its imminent re-release is of great interest.
"Fun, playability and logic"
ReplyDeleteExtremely difficult to pull off in a RPG. Especially from the very early days of the hobby. Usually you are lucky to get 2 out of 3.
I love the electric typewriter pasteup layout. Very evocative.
ReplyDeletePrecis continues to dig up the old and the odd, something they're getting quite specialized in. Not just 70s self-published stuff either, they've rescued quite a few 90s games I recognize from oblivion as well. The WEG Masterbook system isn't all that well-known at this point outside of Torg, and even that mostly because the new edition stirred up a lot of buzz due to all the alterations it made to the original setting to make it less problematic to 2020s sensibilities (ie toning down the national and cultural stereotypes). Nice to see Shatterzone and Blood Shadows getting preserved as well - thye may not have been great games mechanically, but their settings were interesting and offered some unusual twists. Shatterzone also had a fairly large (for a small RPG) range of miniatures, which are still in production under different names to this day.
ReplyDeleteThanks James.
ReplyDeleteI recently bought this and would love to see you review it. I thought it very impressive, but I have better options in my library and no real time to build a table around this singular, granular oddity. Still very interesting to the designer, collector, historian. There's stuff worth stealing, here.
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