A trend among old school do-it-yourself RPG fans has been producing publications using the digest format of the original whitebox D&D books. I love gaming books this size - they fit great behind the DM screen and they are easy to conceal from onlookers and snoops! The new Brave Halfling edition of Swords and Wizardry: Whitebox in particular is brilliant because you can order (or print out) extra player copies of any of the booklets. Carcosa and James Raggi's various creations, among others, are also notable recent digest format pubs...
30+ years ago there was a very high level of enthusiasm for digest-sized gaming material, from rulebooks to supplements to zines. Look at these recent collectors' posts to a thread on The Acaeum. The incredible diversity of amazing looking zines and DIY rule supplements is especially striking. Before blogs and internet forums these zines were the primary mode of communication. I'd love to browse through some of these super rare and obscure old publications. "Monsters! Monsters! Monsters! Galore!" looks like a good one, but it's currently going for $395 at Noble Knight, so I probably won't be flipping through that one any time soon.
Wow, that's quite the collection! I'm a huge fan of the digest-sized books myself. I bought the PDF of X-plorers a while back and made myself a booklet that I use constantly. It's travel size! :)
ReplyDeleteI love digests. I used to devour the Autoduel Quarterly from Steve Jackson Games in the mid 80s. Good stuff!
ReplyDeleteAwesome!
ReplyDeleteThanks for posting those pix! I love the digest sized booklets. I've been heading that way with my own material.
ReplyDeleteAbsolutely beautiful...so much raw, enthusiastic, DIY creativity!
ReplyDeleteWow. You could wall-paper a room with all those. A small room.
ReplyDeleteI love the cover to the Handbook of Traps and Tricks. Such a seldom seen touch of class, to have a 1950's style cartoon illustration with whimsical dragon heads.
ReplyDeleteThose pics gave me a geekgasim!
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