5/28/2023 0 Comments Elder sign omens gogEven Mongoose's Conan only has a handful of published adventures-but the game has a tone of supplemental books. Traveller had a handful of adventures-supported further through JG and other third party publishers. Thinking back, the games I played were games that had a lot of adventures: AD&D, FASA Star Trek, Victory Games James Bond, WEG D6 Star Wars. I remember falling in love with Fading Suns but I never pulled the trigger because the adventures were scarce. How many games have you seen where there's some core books but few-maybe just one or two-adventures. I've read that TSR was one of the few companies to make it work. That may have changed with the rise of pdfs, I'm not sure. I'm no expert, but from what I understand, the thinking that only core rulebooks and supplementary books sell well is a widely held "-ism" in the industry. at TSR thought there would not be a market for supplements and modules, given that after buying the rule books, what else can you buy? Jmoo wrote: ↑ Wed 6:19 amVery interesting to note that Gygax et al. I still have a few and one of them, "Wizards" which was an anthology series had a module starring Ahaz and Skeeve from the (Another Fine) Myth Series! We did however, buy the Role Aids products, which seemed a bit higher quality and with anthology sized adventures were an easier draw for our hard earned dollars. I still have our continent map we made to kick start the process. We actually thought "this must just be guys like us writing up their own stuff!" and even thought of self publishing our own. Our local store got a decent number of JG materials in, but as EOTB and WaterBob noted, we too didn't really buy JG stuff, likely due to the quality. As noted I have a soft spot for the art (though maybe as I thought I could draw as good as that back then!) and there were some OK products. TSR may or may not have been mean to JG, but its quite likely that JGs status quo bias would have sunk it anyway. JG didn't seem to recognize that the vacuum in the early supplement market was more forgiving of pushing out slapdash mixed with gold than a mature market would be. It should also be noted that the market was mostly rejecting JG stuff all on its own by the early 1980s. And it seems they did see the error of their early decision and rescind the license. But of course hindsight is 20/20, especially through a 40+ year lenses of history. They can be "forgiven" for not seeing that far into future of a brand new gaming style. at TSR thought there would not be a market for supplements and modules, given that after buying the rule books, what else can you buy? Not a great business model, but they did come from a homebrew style of tabletop wargaming so that might explain some of their thinking, which on first thought seems somewhat logical (don't let the players buy it! But then they would sell two or three to the same group ). Very interesting to note that Gygax et al. But it seems likely that they also felt it had been a strategic mistake to let these guys have a share of their cake. TSR pulled the plug in the early 1980s and rescinded the license, ostensibly because JG products still had low production values while TSR's stuff was increasingly professional. It was really Judges Guild that showed there was a big untapped market that TSR was ignoring. TSR had no plans to publish campaign material and more than a few modules at the time because Gygax thought, wrongly, that there was no market for stuff only the GM would want to use, but which would not be very useful to the GM because players could buy it too and "cheat". The deal was agreed on condition their stuff was vetted by TSR in return for allowing them to put the D&D logo on it. Judges Guild's Bill Owen and Bob Bledsaw first approached TSR to try to interest them in some wargaming rules they had written, and at the same time sneakily, as if it was an afterthought, asked for permission to do some D&D material. I wonder if that had + or - impact on TSR sales. Interesting how D&D started out with these “secondary companies” publishing accessories using their name. I have always appreciated that minimalistic art style. Some of it was really good, though at the time we didn’t buy much of these. I recall the Judges Guild and Role Aids material way back in the day. Just received a Judges Guild lot containing:
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