This was a D&D/AD&D trivia contest, held for some special reason nobody seems to remember, that folded out into a double-sided poster-sized sheet. This past week (Tuesday) I hit a jackpot and found a copy not of the original list but of the published version, which appeared as part of the 1996 AD&D TRIVIATHILON. Or some cartoons by Dave Sutherland I mislaid long ago, Or my run of MYTHLORE, esp. Or somethings that ought to be in my slender folder of things by and relating to John Bellairs (like the photo of the two of us taken when he was Guest of Honor at the Marquette Tolkien conference in 1987). Like my copy of The Jade Hare or my beat-up old orange cover B3.
So, I confess that in my slow sort-out of boxes filled with papers and miscellaneous contents I'm not just trying to get things better organized: I'm also looking for a few things that got swept up in the Sea of Stuff. *which lists, in order, of all the books I've read all the way through since August 1981 (I just finished book #3454c). So, it's good to have a copy of this uncredited publication again after all these years.Ĭurrent reading: THE MESSIAH COMES TO MIDDLE-EARTH (Ryken) and DREAMS OF DISTANT SHORES (McKillip)
But it was still a pretty good piece of work, I think, and useful to those like me who wanted a quick listing that gave a sense, backed up by specific detail, of the sheer range of creativity that was TSR's AD&D. And all the material on all TSR's other rpgs -TOP SECRET, GAMMA WORLD, GANGBUSTERS, BOOT HILL, AMAZING ENGINE, ALTERNITY, and a handful other more obscure ones- all had to go a pity. #9058) -a change I regretted then and now. The most important was that I had to remove the author's name from each entry***** and add its stock number instead (e.g. I had to change some things at TSR's behest.
As described in my previous post, one side of this poster-sized sheet had 100 tricky questions that tested players' knowledge of the game.**** And the other side was my list. And at some point the idea came of publishing it as part of the TRIVIATHALON, released in 1996 to celebrate some occasion that none of the people involved can now remember. So the list grew, expanding to cover TSR's other roleplaying games as well, and all TSR novels, pick-a-path books, and miscellaneous items like the Finieous Treasury. Making the list revealed a lot of gaps -if I had C5 The Bane of Llewellyn it meant there was probably a C1 through C4 and might be a C6.***
X2) if any, title, author, date, and sometimes a brief note -e.g., that RM4 House of Strahd is an update of I6 Ravenloft.
Each entry gave the item's product code (e.g. So I started a list, starting with things I had (the AD&D rulebooks, both first edition and second edition, and a bunch of modules). Slade Henson's), that made me realize how much TSR had put out that I'd never heard of. I don't remember now whether I'd already started this before coming to work at TSR in 1991** but probably not: I think it was seeing the Games Library, and Mail-Order Hobby Shop, and on other editors' and designers' shelves (esp. My most successful and long-running list is undoubtedly my reading list.* But the runner up wd undoubtedly be my list of all rpgs products published by TSR. The two exchange letters that include an account of the extraterrestrial race chanting with human agents in worship of several beings, including Cthulhu and Nyarlathotep, the latter of whom "shall put on the semblance of men, the waxen mask and the robe that hides".It's no secret to anyone who reads this blog that I'm a maker of lists. He receives a letter from Henry Wentworth Akeley, a man living in an isolated farmhouse near Townshend, Vermont, who claims to have proof that will convince Wilmarth he must stop questioning the creatures' existence. He sides with the skeptics, blaming old legends about monsters living in uninhabited hills that abduct people venturing too close to their territory. When local newspapers report strange things seen floating in rivers during a historic Vermont flood, Wilmarth becomes embroiled in a controversy regarding the reality and significance of the sightings. Wilmarth, an instructor of literature at Miskatonic University in Arkham, Massachusetts. The story also introduces the Mi-go, an extraterrestrial race of fungoid creatures. Although it makes numerous references to the Cthulhu Mythos, the story is not a central part of the mythos, but reflects a shift in Lovecraft's writing at this time towards science fiction. Similar to The Colour Out of Space (1927), it is a blend of horror and science fiction. Written February-September 1930, it was first published in Weird Tales, August 1931. "The Whisperer in Darkness" is a 26,000-word novella by American writer H.