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What's the best and worst D&D book you own from any edition?
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<blockquote data-quote="Blue Orange" data-source="post: 8210992" data-attributes="member: 7025997"><p>I've always wondered how much of the charm of the 1e DMG, particularly in retrospect through the rose-colored glasses of early adolescence, was precisely due to its bizarre disorganization. Reading it and trying to make sense of the contradictory rules felt like being a wizard puzzling through an occult tome of eldritch secrets, what with the tables for minutiae (there was a random condiments table!), and of course Gygax's grandiloquent, archaic, and sesquipedalian prose. The whole thing was full of complicated digressions, rarely-used tables, and long disquisitions on every possible permutation of something simple (has the magic item list ever been so long?).</p><p></p><p>There was also the vaguely disreputable feel of a lot of it--in addition to the now-famous random harlot table, there were rules for summoning and random generation of demons (and this was back in the 70s and 80s when Satanism was something people had real moral panics about), tables for torture chamber items and sexual perversions, and the notorious cheesecake pictures, including one near the back of a succubus. Every major magic item type had a booby-trapped version. It was like reading a book written by that dangerous (?) guy in high school who wore a black leather jacket and listened to heavy metal music (this was what rebellious older kids did in Gen X, for the younguns), if he had had the vocabulary of a professor of medieval studies. It was a nerd's idea of rebellion, if rebellion involved reading about stuff you weren't supposed to instead of taking drugs and committing petty crime.</p><p></p><p>What, you think I'm <em>picking</em> on the book? I used to take it with me when getting dragged to try out clothes by my parents and pore over it trying to figure out why some monster had a 3% chance of appearing in a swamp while another had a 4%. I generated 12 monsters from Appendix D (yes, I can still list half of them besides Appendix N) in grade school and turned them into a personal set of demons with a hierarchy and everything. I stuck bits from the dungeon dressing tables into school essays as metaphors (don't ask). I thought the gal in Darlene Pekul's Aubrey Beardsley homage was cute.</p><p></p><p>But if the golden age of science fiction is thirteen, well, maybe that's the golden age of RPG books as well.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Blue Orange, post: 8210992, member: 7025997"] I've always wondered how much of the charm of the 1e DMG, particularly in retrospect through the rose-colored glasses of early adolescence, was precisely due to its bizarre disorganization. Reading it and trying to make sense of the contradictory rules felt like being a wizard puzzling through an occult tome of eldritch secrets, what with the tables for minutiae (there was a random condiments table!), and of course Gygax's grandiloquent, archaic, and sesquipedalian prose. The whole thing was full of complicated digressions, rarely-used tables, and long disquisitions on every possible permutation of something simple (has the magic item list ever been so long?). There was also the vaguely disreputable feel of a lot of it--in addition to the now-famous random harlot table, there were rules for summoning and random generation of demons (and this was back in the 70s and 80s when Satanism was something people had real moral panics about), tables for torture chamber items and sexual perversions, and the notorious cheesecake pictures, including one near the back of a succubus. Every major magic item type had a booby-trapped version. It was like reading a book written by that dangerous (?) guy in high school who wore a black leather jacket and listened to heavy metal music (this was what rebellious older kids did in Gen X, for the younguns), if he had had the vocabulary of a professor of medieval studies. It was a nerd's idea of rebellion, if rebellion involved reading about stuff you weren't supposed to instead of taking drugs and committing petty crime. What, you think I'm [I]picking[/I] on the book? I used to take it with me when getting dragged to try out clothes by my parents and pore over it trying to figure out why some monster had a 3% chance of appearing in a swamp while another had a 4%. I generated 12 monsters from Appendix D (yes, I can still list half of them besides Appendix N) in grade school and turned them into a personal set of demons with a hierarchy and everything. I stuck bits from the dungeon dressing tables into school essays as metaphors (don't ask). I thought the gal in Darlene Pekul's Aubrey Beardsley homage was cute. But if the golden age of science fiction is thirteen, well, maybe that's the golden age of RPG books as well. [/QUOTE]
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What's the best and worst D&D book you own from any edition?
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