What is the worst edited/proofread product you've seen?

[S'mon]

Just in case I'm misinterpreted, I'd happily go on record as saying that Conan OGL is one of my favourite RPG purposes and I think the book is really great. And as S'mon says, the errors (while common and obvious) no way impair your ability to play a great Conan-themed game.

Re Conan - along with the Spellb.ooks disaster and such, it also included sloppy SRD cut & pastes, so there are references to "riot armour" from d20 Modern, "half-orcs" from the d20 SRD, etc. It also leaves out Whirlwind Attack from the feats although this is a prerequisite for one of the combat maneuvers. AIR this was all due to a slapdash conversion from being d20-License to OGL when WoTC banned nipples from d20-TM games. The work Ian Sturrock did for the original d20 (pre-OGL conversion) version looks great to me, and AFAICS he should get no blame for the errors. The subsequently fired Mongoose proofreader clearly does deserve opprobrium, as does Mongoose's bosses for deciding to go ahead with an unworkable release schedule, but WoTC's stupid & annoying change of policy does deserve some blame. In fact we can trace the line to Valar publishing whose BoEF apparently instigated the WoTC policy change in the first place...

 

[Kanegrundar]

Mongoose's Conan and Ultimate Monsters were 2 of the worst edited products on the market that I've found.

Kane

 

[radferth]

I love Conan, too, but I think it may win the prize for "worst edited book that still sold a lot". Remember, in the first printing, Hyboreans are not just adaptable, but luck, too.

 

[Wulf Ratbane]

That reminds me of the find/replace screw-up in one of the volumes of the AD&D Encyclopedia Magica. Suddenly spells all over the place were doing various amounts of dawizard instead of damage.

If I may mention a non-d20, non-Mongoose product, I like to relay this story told to me by Lester Smith, where an editor got ahold of his work with the find-and-replace.

I don't recall the name of the game, but it was modern or future military, and frequently throughout the book there was reference to the "forward observer" or "FO."

Lester had interchangeably used Forward Observer or FO at his whim, but the editor decided he wanted to standardize it, so he replaced all instances of "FO" with the full version, "Forward Observer."

Which of course left a good portion of the book talking about the "Forward Observerrward Observer," not to mention all the other instances of "FO" that occur in everyday writing.



Never miss a chance to chat with Lester if you can catch him at a convention. One of the most friendly and entertaining scoundrels in the industry.

 

[barsoomcore]

My very first EN Mini-Games product (Gun-Fu)referred to the Damage Saving Throw DC twice: once claiming it was DC 10 and once claiming it was DC 15.

I'm so embarrassed.

 

[KaosDevice]

I'm suprised none of you all are harkening back to the days of yore. I remember even as a kid trying to plow through a couple of the early Arduin Grimoire and finding them almost incomprehensible due to typoes, weird placement of text and strange editing choices. I'd have to go back and look at them again to see if they are as bad as I remember.

 

[Mokona]

I consider any RPG supplement without an index to be poorly edited. Does that count?

 

[James Heard]

I think my vote would be for a game I think that was called Lords of Creation. It came out in the early 80s and was about as bizarre and poorly edited as anything you could possibly imagine. Everything by Palladium comes as a close second I guess.

 

[Staffan]

In fact we can trace the line to Valar publishing whose BoEF apparently instigated the WoTC policy change in the first place...

I distinctly remember that Anthony Valterra said something along the lines of "I knew this policy change was coming, and I was hoping to get the BOEF out before it did."

 

[conan the barbarian]

Heroes of Code from EN Publishing is absolutely attrocious. The author left out just about every a, an, and the needed in the entire .pdf. It's insane.