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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Orius" data-source="post: 1633866" data-attributes="member: 8863">I believe the Cyclopedia was a compliation an revision of those rules, and it included some campaign background for Mystara.  I'm not really sure, since I've only seen one of the basic red books (I think that's what it was) once, and I haven't seen or touched a Cyclopedia in 10 years. Ok, that I have.  The black box was an introductory set to D&D intended for new players and DMs to learn the game and was more or less an introduction to the Cyclopedia.  It had a DM screen with a pocket that held 48 Dragon Cards, which explained the basic mechanics of the game.  The cards were meant to be read by the DM, and it was a sort of tutorial on the game.  You followed the text on each card which was set up like those old Choose Your Own adventure books I read when I was a kid.  The cards also explained the rules a little.  There was also an intro adventure for the players, which followed more or less the adventure on the DM cards, and the DM was meant to run the parts of the adventure after reading the cards and learning the rules.The box also included a poster map and fold up paper counters for the intro adventure.  Finally, there was a 64 page rule book which had rules for the fighter, cleric, magic-user, thief,  dwarf, elf and halfling characters to 5th level, a basic equipment list, spells up to 2nd level cleric spells and 3rd level magic-user spells, a bunch of monster stats, and treasure tables with some basic magic items.Oh, yeah, almost forgot.  There was a set of polyhedral dice too. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />  I don't know.If I'm not mistaken, the '99 set was based on the Quick Play rules written by Jeff Grubb and first featured in Dragon #251.  The Quick Play rules also had two intro adventures, Eye of the Wyvern, and Wrath of the Minotaur (or something like that).  I don't have the adventure, but I do have a copy of Dragon #251, and the Quick Play rules weren't classic D&D, but rather a stripped-down version of AD&D 2e meant to be easily digestable by new players.</blockquote>

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