Wednesday, March 2, 2022

Monsters, Monsters, and More Monsters!

7 comments:

  1. "...men of various classes, elves, dwarves, halflings, devils and demons, and a horde of fearsome creatures."

    Amused that they didn't mention dragons. But hey, we all play the game to fight against the Halfling Menace, right? :)

    The "...original artwork of no less than three illustrators..." thing is cute too. The last zine I bought had six people listed in the art credits. Different times.

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    1. And they could have said "no less than four illustrators"; I guess they thought no one would get excited about Jean Wells's artwork.

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    2. Depending on when this ad copy was written, TSR may have been deliberately erasing her contributions. They treated her very poorly after the B3 kerfuffle (despite none of it being her doing) and she left shortly thereafter, and not on the best of terms.

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    3. The AD&D Monster Manual was published in 1977, years before B3 was written. :)

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    4. Sure - but when was the ad copy that we're looking at written? If it was before 81 or 82, then they were just ignoring her contribution because they didn't care, which is pretty lousy in itself. If it was after that, B3 is in play and she'd been blamed for artwork she had no control over, which is even worse.

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  2. $9.95 is $46.00 in today's money. I guess it makes those 300 page full color, full bleed modern books look good....

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    1. Bit of apples and oranges, though. Printing tech has changed a lot, and both color interiors and hardcover have become less expensive options than they were in the 80s. I've had local publishers tell me that with "large" print runs (over 1K copies - which is biggish for many RPGs) the cost difference between hardcover and softcover is so small there's no reason not to go hardcover.

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