3rd party publishers for 1st and 2nd AD&D?

[Treebore]

Yeah, I thought TacoJohn had said you played in his GenCon run of it.

 

[grodog]

Yeah, I thought TacoJohn had said you played in his GenCon run of it.

Nope, just in our playtest in June/July: the only game I got to play in at GenCon was the one James Mishler ran for our local Wichita team of 5 plus Erol Otus. He winged the whole thing, and it was great

 

[SSquirrel]

Another difference was general production value. With the advent of desktop publishing, even the most threadbare of publishers these days has higher production values than a lot of the old 3rd party stuff. Old JG products have (often) great content, but the production values ... well, stink.

Someone should really let Kevin Siembieda know about it sometime There's an old rpg.net thread that talks about the very dated way Kevin does his layout. Helps explain a lot of the negative production oddities in Palladium stuff.

 

[Melan]

Bah, my Palladium books are perfectly functional, have stood quite a lot of wear, and actually nice-looking in a minimalistic sort of way. Hell, my JG books are also perfectly readable (some ... questionable .... art notwithstanding).

 

[Man in the Funny Hat]

1What 3rd party support was there for AD&D1 and AD&D2? Official or unofficial?

I know Judge's Guild created material for 1st edition, and I have an adventure by Timothy Brown with the serial numbers filed of, which is compatible with 2nd edition. I also have a few books from Mayfair Games on my shelves.

What else from 3rd parties was produced?

/M

Not much. Much of the earliest 3rd party publications were really quite homemade - typed up, run off a copier and stapled together. Even if they were printed in a press the production quality remained minimal. Distribution was also minimal. Even D&D itself was hardly widely distributed, or at least not until, say, the 2E era when TSR had finally built up a decent distribution network. So 3rd party materials were frankly rare.

Remember though, that at some point in the '80's TSR got VERY obnoxious with its policies, frightening people away from even attempting to make available material for D&D if not actually hitting them with lawsuits and lawyers. TSR's upper managment at that time wanted absolute control of the entire pie. God forbid anyone but TSR should EVER profit in some way off of D&D.

It really put a damper on any desire to try to produce 3rd party D&D materials, and it also had TSR assuming the role of the evil overlord and killed a huge amount of goodwill from their own customers who didn't want to support such anti-gamerish policies and attitudes (gaming being a HIGHLY casual, friendly, and openly cooperative pastime because D&D is NOT a competitive undertaking but a cooperative one).

That lifted somewhat when WotC took over the game, but the 3rd party market for practical purposes didn't exist until the release of 3E though the critical, catalytic decision to actually make the rules open source was what really started anything like a REAL 3rd party publication market. New companies sprang up like weeds overnight.

 

[grodog]

Not much. Much of the earliest 3rd party publications were really quite homemade - typed up, run off a copier and stapled together. Even if they were printed in a press the production quality remained minimal. Distribution was also minimal.

I agree with all of the latter points, but disagree that there weren't many non-TSR D&D products published: there were oodles and oodles. In addition to the Afterglow2 site, check out the original Afterglow @ http://www.stud.uni-hamburg.de/users/afterglo/rpg/nontsr.html as well as Tome of Treasures @ http://www.tomeoftreasures.com as well as Lawrence Schick's Heroic Worlds @ http://www.bestwebbuys.com/Heroic_Worlds-ISBN_0879756535.html?isrc=b-search

Many, many, many non-TSR titles were published BITD. (And sorry for misunderstanding the original question: I thought the OP was asking about 3rd party support for AD&D today vs. BITD).

 

[Ruin Explorer]

A big difference then was availability.

I always thought a bigger difference was legality and TSR's extremely aggressive litigation department. It was just about ok to make something "AD&D compatible", but you had to nancy around a whole lot, renaming stats, not referring directly to AD&D and so on, if you wanted to actually get away with selling the thing.

I remember a fairly awesome add-on called "Scions" or something, which featured angel-blooded characters before Planescape, and I remember being bothered by the enormous amount of messing around that they had to do to "get away with it".

 

[patrickjarrell]

I remember a fairly awesome add-on called "Scions" or something, which featured angel-blooded characters before Planescape, and I remember being bothered by the enormous amount of messing around that they had to do to "get away with it".

That would probably be Sentinels, by Mayfair. Part of their demon series, if i remember right.