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Looking Back To The 80s With The "Realism" of KABAL!
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<blockquote data-quote="CarlZog" data-source="post: 7715395" data-attributes="member: 11716"><p>I bought a copy of this from the designer at GenCon South in 1982. I never played it. I sold it at another con in the late '80s to fuel my shift to historical minis.</p><p></p><p></p><p>The author of this post is correct that there was a phase in the early '80s in which attention to the minutiae of combat details was equated with "realism". KABAL may have been among the more egregious examples, but Arms Law and Spell Law (later to become Rolemaster) was part of that too. I was entranced by it all at the time. TSR's Bio-One hit location booklet is still be sitting in my copy of Top Secret, waiting to incorporate even more visceral detail into that game!</p><p></p><p></p><p>As for the odd layout and graphic design of KABAL, the cursive type and the parchment paper were designed to give it the allure of something arcane.</p><p></p><p> The light blue type color, however, had a more practical purpose -- piracy prevention. That color was invisible to most photocopiers at the time, preventing people from making cheap copies of the books to distribute. TSR's Tractics used the same color.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="CarlZog, post: 7715395, member: 11716"] I bought a copy of this from the designer at GenCon South in 1982. I never played it. I sold it at another con in the late '80s to fuel my shift to historical minis. The author of this post is correct that there was a phase in the early '80s in which attention to the minutiae of combat details was equated with "realism". KABAL may have been among the more egregious examples, but Arms Law and Spell Law (later to become Rolemaster) was part of that too. I was entranced by it all at the time. TSR's Bio-One hit location booklet is still be sitting in my copy of Top Secret, waiting to incorporate even more visceral detail into that game! As for the odd layout and graphic design of KABAL, the cursive type and the parchment paper were designed to give it the allure of something arcane. The light blue type color, however, had a more practical purpose -- piracy prevention. That color was invisible to most photocopiers at the time, preventing people from making cheap copies of the books to distribute. TSR's Tractics used the same color. [/QUOTE]
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Looking Back To The 80s With The "Realism" of KABAL!
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