LBSREAM (Library Book Sales Rule Everything Around Me)

Used book sales are one of my favorite things in the world. I love picking up quality mystery and fantasy novels for small amounts of money, especially when it benefits an organization like a library. Plus, every once in a while, you find something truly remarkable. A library book sale was where I found unopened copies of the Mentzer Basic and Expert box sets, as well as my early works of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett and a laserdisc copy of My Name Is Trinity (for curiosity's sake).

I was visiting a library where I am interviewing for a position in the following week, checking out the selection and space, when I noticed that they have a section in the back shelves for a Friends of the Library Book Sale. I felt it was my duty to check out their selection and see if I could find any gems. Outside of my standard searches for cheap Elmore Leonard and Terry Pratchett, I found some old sci-fi paperbacks that demanded attention.


I read my father's copy of Creatures of Light and Darkness when I was a teenager, but Jack of Shadows was a Zelazny work I'd always heard about, but never seen. I was glad that I picked up both of them.


Even at used book stores, I could only find the later Myth collections by Robert Aspirin, so finding the first three books in one volume was really cool and really cheap.

Oh yeah. And this pretty cool thing.

It's bright 'cause it's so awesome.

Five dollars! Five dollars for every single BECMI boxset rule and expansion packed into 304 dense-as-hell pages!

Honestly, I kind of feel bad that I picked this up for the price that I did, given that Rules Cyclopediae end up on eBay and Amazon for over $40, minimum. But there's a lot of stuff to unpack in this thing and I hope you'll stay tuned while I do.

I have invented a maneuver...

When I haven't been doing schoolwork or playing in Scott's Tunnels and Trolls game, I've been playing some old favorite Legend of Zelda games. Not only do games like Link's Awakening, A Link to the Past and the other Zelda games have a great adventure framework, they've also gotten me thinking about how elements of these games could be integrated into Basic D&D.

Link can generally do a few things with his sword, mostly slashing and stabbing, but also the charged Spin Slash maneuver which attacks all enemies around him. In later editions of D&D, something like this would be covered by an Encounter or Daily power that you could use in a combat encounter. But as much as I like the Power framework, I don't just want to graft it wholesale onto the Basic rules. If I wanted to use them, I would honestly be better served by playing 4th Edition. So how do you make things like special maneuvers work for Basic fighters without 4th Edition style powers?

My idea has been to base it on weapons used. In the Basic and Expert books that I own, there's not much mechanical difference between using a staff or a sword other than the damage dealt. If wielding a warhammer gave you the ability to knock enemies prone or a spear giving you a bonus to AC when used two-handed, it could add a little bit of mechanical variation to things. Hell, it might encourage the use of weird weapons like bolas or whips if they had cool little bonus effects alongside the standard damage.

Is this how Weapon Mastery works in the Companion or Master set? I don't have either of those, but I've heard that they add a bit of proficiency boost to the Fighter.

Man, I hope that post comes back

And we're back to the world of the blogging. Unfortunately, my most recent post on the Mentzer box sets and my younger influences was also swallowed up by the catastrophe. I am a bit miffed, as I'd gotten some great comments on it, but I can hope that the post will return once the repairs to Blogger have been finished.

On the other hand, I've really been inspired by this whole campaign idea, coupled with a few other cool posts I've been reading (Telecanter's unbelievably cool Five Swords post and Zak's Sandbox ideas, which are now unfortunately missing). Thinking about this confluence of old influences and current ideas has been really fun for me. When I was reading old sword and sorcery pulps in an attempt to understand older D&D editions, it was a good experience but not exactly nostalgic for me. My roleplaying origins definitely lie with Lone Wolf and Legend of Zelda as opposed to Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, and that's neither a good nor a bad thing. It has more to do with what my generation really identifies as fantasy than levels of literary quality or inspirational source material. The fantasy of the 1990s was very heroic and probably more inspired by the Mentzer and AD&D 2nd Editions than the older, pulpier games. Is it any wonder that saving the kingdom or defeating the dragon is ingrained in many of us? Even when playing a roguish character, I'm all about doing what's right.

Expect more material in the near future. I'm on a roll here.

WW12YOMD?

This week, I finally bit the bullet and cracked open my Mentzer Red Box to check out the goodies inside. Though I did notice some of the rules differences between it and my older Moldvay box set (Thieves knocked down again! Why?), I really liked the organization and especially the introduction. It reminded me of the old Lone Wolf books that I used to borrow from my best friend Conor when I was in middle school. I'd always loved Choose Your Own Adventure books ever since I was small and the addition of combat and roleplaying elements to the standard "if you want to go east, turn to page 26" formula gave them a lot of re-read value.

In my online searches for Lone Wolf books, I came across a website called Project Aon, where you can read and play all of the Lone Wolf books for free, legally and with the expressed permission of Joe Dever, the original author. Naturally, I started into the first one, which got me thinking: what would it have been like if I'd gotten this box set when I was 12? My influences at the time were the Lone Wolf books, Magic: the Gathering cards, games like the Legend of Zelda: Link to the Past and emulated copies of Chrono Trigger and Shining Force. Reading the Mentzer Red Box made me want to revisit all of those old sources and see if I could put together a whimsical kind of D&D campaign with them in mind.

I'm still a heroic kind of guy at heart. Saving an imaginary village from rampaging ogres is definitely more satisfying for me than acquiring imaginary loot. So whatever this campaign would be like, it would have plenty of danger, monsters and potential good to be done on top of the normal loads of treasure and magic items. I think 12 year old me would be satisfied.

(Note: Looking through my old Magic cards, I had no idea that Liz Danforth and Tony DiTerlizzi did so many illustrations for them. It's cool thinking back on how the worlds of RPG and CCG art intersected before Magic really took off.)

But look on the bright side...

Last week, I went to my local library's Friends group book sale in search of some cheap mystery novels or YA books that I wanted to read. Imagine my surprise when I came across a pair of Mentzer-era D&D box sets, still sealed in shrink-wrap and basically perfect, apart from a triangular-shaped box dent on the back of the Basic set. Total cost: $2 each.

Thank you, old ladies from the Friends of the Library group. You didn't quite know what you had. Now should I open them or leave them in their pristine sealed condition for a rainy day?