Browsed by
Category: Vintage Treasures

A Return to The Village of Hommlet (4E Style)

A Return to The Village of Hommlet (4E Style)

Comments 15 comments

hommlet4eHow cool is this? Wizards of the Coast has released an updated version of Gary Gygax’s 1979 classic The Village of Hommlet, one of the most celebrated AD&D adventures and the first part of the notoriously difficult Temple of Elemental Evil mega-campaign, revised to run in the 4th Edition of Dungeons and Dragons. The new version was updated by Andy Collins and is suitable for fourth level characters.

Oh, wait. “Released” is too strong a word. The module was actually a free giveaway WotC mailed to RPGA  members as a DM Reward, and is not available for sale (unless you count eBay, where copies are currently selling for around $50.) Curses!

If you’re the creative sort, Familiar Ground is offering a free copy for one lucky winner, selected randomly from all those who leave a comment with a “gaming or RPG related joke or funny incident.” Deadline is Aug 31.

The original module is still played today by die-hard fans.  It’s been converted to a popular computer game, and the back-story behind it all is annually re-enacted as a tabletop miniatures game at Garycon.  Not bad for a module that’s been out of print for over two decades.

I have fond memories of the original.  And when I’m 80, I hope to have fond memories of tracking down this one.  Let the search begin.

More Haffner Goodness: Detour to Otherness

More Haffner Goodness: Detour to Otherness

Comments 7 comments

detour-to-otherness1Yesterday’s deliveries here at the Black Gate rooftop headquarters yielded — among the usual bills, magazines, and spare parts for the plutonium-powered signal beacon — a review copy of Detour to Otherness, by Henry Kuttner & C.L. Moore.

Hallelujah!  I’ve been looking forward to Detour since I first saw the dust jacket at Steve Haffner’s table at the Windy City Pulp & Paper show in April. It collects twenty-four stories of science fantasy and terror by the legendary husband and wife team, with a new intro by Robert Silverberg and an afterword by Frederik Pohl.

Of course, I probably won’t get to keep it.  Not unless I can distract Howard Andrew Jones, who will almost certainly gleefully take it back to Indiana to write a review (Hey Howard! Look at this!!)

Detour to Otherness shows the usual care and craftsmanship of all of Haffner’s titles. The core of the book is the 1961 Bypass to Otherness, the famous paperback collection of many of Kuttner and Moore’s finest stories, drawing from Kuttner’s popular  “Gallegher Galloway” series, featuring a quirky scientist who invents technical marvels only while drunk, his comedic  “Hogbens” stories of otherworldly hillbillies, and the “Baldy” tales about mutant telepaths. It was followed by Return to Otherness in 1962, containing eight more stories. Both paperbacks are valuable collector’s items today. Detour to Otherness assembles both Bypass to Otherness and Return to Otherness, plus eight additional stories “selected for their scarcity, quality, and sheer entertainment value.”

Kuttner’s “Gallegher Galloway” stories were collected by Paizo in Robots Have no Tails (reviewed for us by James Enge here), and Paul Di Filippo recently reviewed Moore’s seminal collection Judgment Night for us here.  But both books are dwarfed by this thick new volume.  If you’re a fan of science fantasy, you’ll want to add this to your collection.  It’s available from Amazon.com, or directly from Haffner Press, for just $40 for an archival-quality hardcover packed with 568 pages of classic fiction.

The Collecting Game: The Windup Girl for $950?

The Collecting Game: The Windup Girl for $950?

Comments 2 comments

damnation-game1Collector prices are not always rational, as I think most collectors know. They can be fueled by hysteria. As many collectors have noticed, Clive Barker futures are very soft these days. Only the first British hardcovers of the Books of Blood and the British first of The Damnation Game have retained their value. There was a time, within a year or so of publication, when the advance galley of the American edition of Weaveworld could easily bring a hundred dollars. The last time I sold one, I bought it for $1.00 and got $10.00; but that was years ago. Nowadays you would be lucky to get five dollars for a copy. American firsts of Barker, or even galleys of same, are virtually worthless.

I will also mention with some trepidation that Harlan Ellison futures are weakening significantly, and I that have just concluded, on the basis of some research, that the bottom has fallen out of the Pogo market in the past few years. (I sold some Pogo first edition paperbacks for George Scithers maybe 5 years ago for $50-100.00. Now you can find the same ones on eBay for $5, and even the original comic books for $10 or so.)

Paolo Bacigalupi is clearly the hot writer of the hour, the hottest since William Gibson circa 1985. That means that investors are already latching onto him. Sorting the current Abebooks listings from the highest price on down, I find that the highest price for a first edition of The Windup Girl is $950.00, which is, I daresay, not bad for a book only published last year, even if it is a signed copy.

…

Read More Read More

The Art of Storytelling and The Temple of Elemental Evil

The Art of Storytelling and The Temple of Elemental Evil

Comments 9 comments

toee2Role-playing games have always interested me because, at heart, they’re about stories. They’re ways to tell stories that you don’t know in advance, ways to bring people together to create something unpredictable but still structured in a narrative form. Now, that said, the question is: how do you go about doing that? If you’re writing a module, an adventure, that referees are going to pick up off a store shelf (or download from a web site), what do you give them to help create that story with their players?

The traditional first edition Dungeons & Dragons answer to this was: you give them a dungeon. You give them a sandbox, an area to explore filled with monsters and treasure, and maybe a few adventure hooks. What will the players do with it? Who knows?

For a long time, probably starting in the mid-80s at about the point where I started seriously playing D&D, this approach was in disrepute. A dungeon with a bunch of monsters isn’t a story, the argument ran. A story should have a structure, and ideally different moods, maybe even different settings. It should end in a different place than it began. You could see this philosophy settle in at TSR with the Dragonlance series of modules, taking firmer hold with second edition D&D.

Nowadays, though, at least a few people are beginning to swing back to the first approach. Structuring stories out ahead of time kills the spontaneity of the game, one might argue. Let the players and referee develop the story at the table, not by going through the motions worked out ahead of time by some designer. Don’t railroad the players; give them the situation, and see what they do on their own. (I’m vastly simplifying all these positions, and only presenting some of the arguments. I think I’m getting at the essence, though.)

I’ve come around to that last argument. I want to explain why, because I’ve recently wrapped up a First Edition game in which I was fascinated to see a story I never anticipated arise out of a module that features little in the way of pre-structured narrative: The Temple of Elemental Evil by Gary Gygax and Frank Mentzer (TSR, 1985).

…

Read More Read More

A New Copy of Dhalgren: Caution, BookCrossing

A New Copy of Dhalgren: Caution, BookCrossing

Comments 2 comments

dhalgrenI bought my first copy of Dhalgren in the late 70s. If memory serves, I accidently dropped it in the sink shortly thereafter.  It swelled up and got sorta lumpy, even after it dried.

A few years ago I decided it was time to get a replacement. Now, I received a review copy of the imposing new trade paperback edition from Vintage Press a while back, with a big blurry red skyscraper on the cover, but what I wanted was the original 1975  Bantam edition (at left), which captured my imagination 35 years ago. Before it sank beneath the suds in our kitchen sink while I was supposed to be washing dishes, anyway.

It takes a while to find a pristine, unread copy of a 35-year old paperback, even on eBay. But before too long I had one, tucked snugly away with my other Samuel R. Delany, and I packed the old one away in the basement.

Except, now I want to read it. No point looking for the one I’d buried in the basement months ago (you’d understand if you saw my basement) — and anyway, who wants to read a book that’s all lumpy? I could read the new one… but man, I paid handsomely to have a pristine copy. Dhalgren is 890 pages — not exactly easy to read when you’re trying not to bend the spine.

So I did what any rational person would do. Back to eBay to find another copy.

This is the kinda thing that drives Alice crazy (Miss “Explain to me why you need a fourth copy??”), but I was very happy when it arrived today. And then I found this hand-written note on the inside cover:

BCID: 361-4144887

Dear Stranger,

If you read this book, please visit bookcrossing.com and say so. This book is traveling from hand to hand – better to be read by many people than to gather dust on a shelf. BookCrossing tracks it so that we readers know where it goes and what others think of it. Just go to the website, enter the BCID above, and leave a brief journal entry (anonymous, if you prefer). Then leave it somewhere to be read again.

Thank you!

Apparently, this thing is legit. The website checks out and everything. I entered my BCID and discovered my new copy of Dhalgren had been read by someone named Vasha and then “released into the wild” in a cafe in Ithaca, New York on August 2, 2006.

It’s hard to describe the delight in Alice’s eyes when she saw this. “You should pass it along!” she exclaimed. “Put it on a park bench or something.”  Get it out of her house, she means. My wife’s sanity depends on defending as much square footage as she can from the encroaching book madness. In her fondest dreams, this process involves a flamethrower.

…

Read More Read More

Tarzan Swing-By: Tarzan and “The Foreign Legion”

Tarzan Swing-By: Tarzan and “The Foreign Legion”

Comments 8 comments

Tarzan and Foreign Legion 1st edI would like to step forward at this moment to address the audience before the curtain rises on our feature book review presentation so that I may make a personal observation about Edgar Rice Burroughs. Specifically, I would like to explain why I’ve written so many posts about his work in the last few weeks.

Burroughs needs no excuse for discussion in a magazine dedicated to heroic fantasy and planetary romance. Adventure literature as we know it springs from the influence of Burroughs in the early twentieth century. Although pulp magazines existed before Burroughs published Under the Moons of Mars (later titled A Princess of Mars) and Tarzan of the Apes, this double-punch in 1912 changed the style of this publishing medium for the remainder of its lifetime, and the influence continued into the paperback revolution and on into our era. Burroughs looms as one of the Titans of genre literature. But the true question is: Why am I re-reading so much of his work right now, in concentrated doses that I usually reserve for no author?

One answer is that I enjoy writing about Burroughs almost as much as I enjoy reading him. For an author who supposedly crafted straightforward entertainment, Edgar Rice Burroughs’s novels contain a remarkable breadth of ideas for debate and consideration. But a deeper reason for such current copious reading of Burroughs is that his work always gives me a unique uplift. In times of uncertainty and concern, I find that no author can temporarily re-energize me than ERB. Even a violent and embittered book, such as the one I’m about to discuss, provides an energy boost like a literary vodka with Red Bull. Burroughs knows how to make life seem wild, colorful, and far removed from the petty concerns of the everyday. It isn’t strictly “escapism,” a word I dislike, but a form of romantic empowerment. Burroughs’s daydreams on paper enhance our yearning for that which is beyond what we have to struggle with in day-to-day life.

End of psychological exegesis. The curtain now rises on today’s Tuesday Topic: one of Burroughs’s most unusual books, one that few people have read because — let’s face facts — how many but the most dedicated fans manage to reach Book #22 in any long-running series?

…

Read More Read More