"Foster's Miscellany, Volume 1" now available for sale

As mentioned in my last post, I decided to compile the various little house rule and addition tidbits that have accumulated over the last two years since The Heroic Legendarium manuscript was completed into a 20 page pdf which is now officially available at DriveThruRPG as PWYW, under the title Foster's Miscellany, Volume I. No print option because it's only 20 pages (and only 16 of them are actual content), and probably nothing new to anybody who's been reading and downloading content from this blog, but hopefully still worth a look for anyone who liked the Heroic Legendarium (or hasn't bought it yet but would like a cheap preview - about half of the new book is Play Aids that combine HL data alongside the original canon data (class and race info, equipment lists, weapon stats) for convenience at the table.

Since it's PWYW I went ahead and made the preview the entire thing, so you can see what you'll be getting if you purchase it. 

The big adventure-campaign book is still coming eventually (progress has been slow the last month or so but I haven't given up, I swear!) but I figured this was a nice little interim thing which will hopefully be of at least a bit of interest to some folks and will also (hopefully) suffice to get me off of DriveThruRPG's "second class citizen" list where they consign publishers who've only released one title. It also allowed me an opportunity to make a little tribute on to dedication page my dad, who passed away last week, following my mom by just over 13 months (and was an easier way to keep my mind occupied than trying to be creative).

Anyway, I hope y'all will take a look and maybe find at least one or two things that you'll find worth using in your 1E/OSRIC games.

Some new house rules & additions

As a way of procrastinating from doing more work on the adventure-campaign book I've been working on seemingly forever I decided to collect my miscellaneous "OSRIC" house rules and additions that weren't included in The Heroic Legendarium, either because I only came up with them after the contents of that book had been finalized or because for whatever reason I forgot to include them there. A lot of this stuff is pretty simple and minor, to the point that it didn't necessarily need to be formalized in writing, but a couple of them are more substantial and impactful. 

While I'm not so naive as to believe anyone besides me would want to actually use all of these rules and rulings in their games (surely anyone running a 1st edition game at this point has already resolved all of these issues to their satisfaction many years ago), maybe some folks will find something they like here, and - as always - I've already done the work of writing it all up so why not share it, right? So, that said:

Google Drive download link

Enjoy!

Update: In a fit of inspiration, I decided to combine this document with the other house rules and play aids I've published here over the last couple years (since the HL text was finalized) into a smallish (20 page) pdf and put it up on DriveThruRPG as PWYW. I'm still a second-class citizen there so it hasn't gone live yet, but should within the next couple days (and when it does I'll probably make another post about it with a link). The Necropolis conversion notes aren't included (both because they're incomplete and because I'm not sure it would actually be legal to upload them for sale there - I know people sell 5E conversion guides for old 1E modules but am not sure what the rules are for that and don't want to take any chances and risk a repeat of last year's Lulu fiasco) but everything else is. Most of you reading this have probably already downloaded anything that you're interested in, but it might still be convenient to have it all in a single file, plus it will at least theoretically reach the people who (shockingly!) don't read this blog.

D&D Historical Sales Data

Recently game historians Paul Stormberg (at Dragonsfoot) and Ben Riggs (on Facebook) have been sharing a trove of historical sales data from TSR for various D&D and AD&D products. As a nerd, I'm a sucker for this sort of stuff, but was frustrated by the fragmentary and piecemeal nature of it so I decided to copy & paste their numbers into a combined spreadsheet of my own. Once I had collected all of their data and organized it as I wanted it (chronologically by release date, more or less) I also felt the urge to insert placeholders for all of the major items (hardback books and boxed sets) that they did not provide numbers for, which became a massive rabbit-hole because I'd forgotten how many boxed sets TSR released for 2E AD&D (and I have no confidence that I didn't miss some, especially since I had stopped buying any of them by about the end of 1990 - the last two items on the list I ever actually owned were the first Ruins of Undermountain set and the Monstrous Manual - the latter came out a couple years after I'd stopped playing 2E, but I bought it anyway as a reference to replace the terrible looseleaf binders that had preceded it). 

With these numbers conveniently combined, I noticed a couple interesting (to me) bits of trivia. While everybody knows that the D&D Basic Set was TSR's all-time best-selling product, with total sales of over 3 million units, if you separate out the different versions of that set (1977 Holmes, 1981 Moldvay, and 1983 Mentzer), the best-selling single product is actually the 1st edition AD&D Players Handbook (with total sales of more than 1.5 million).

In all, TSR had five items that sold over a million units each:

1. AD&D Players Handbook, 1st edition (1.57 million)
2. AD&D Dungeon Masters Guide, 1st edition (1.33 million)
3. D&D Basic Set - Moldvay edit (1.26 million)
4. AD&D Monster Manual, 1st edition (1.16 million)
5. D&D Basic Set - Mentzer edit (1.1 million)

Additionally, another 6 products sold over 500,000 units apiece:

1. AD&D Player's Handbook, 2nd edition (776K)
2. D&D Basic Set - Holmes edit (639K)
3. D&D Expert Set - Cook/Marsh edit (619K)
4. AD&D Dungeon Master's Guide, 2nd edition (543K)
5. AD&D Monster Manual II (541K)
6. D&D Companion Set (537K)

The D&D Companion Set is a weird anomaly on this list, with a sales trajectory in its first 3 years (1984-86) pretty similar to other products, followed by an inexplicably huge jump in its 4th year (1987) to above what it sold in year one (and more than any other product sold that year, except for the brand-new Dragonlance Adventures AD&D hardback), with sales remaining similarly high for the last 3 years of its product life. I have no way to explain that strange late-in-cycle popularity for this set. I almost wonder if the numbers for those years might be off by a factor of 10 (that TSR's records show 132,000 sales when it was actually 13,200, and the same for the following years), which would be more in line with the trends seen for other products released around the same time (and would put its total sales around 250K - still very respectable). If anybody has an explanation for why these numbers are correct and this several-year-old boxed set was somehow outselling both the core AD&D books and the D&D Basic Set by a wide margin for several years, I'd love to hear it. Possibly AD&D fans were buying it because it included rules for topics (domain management, mass combat, top-end monsters) that weren't really covered in AD&D, but if so, why did they wait until 1987 to start doing so? I was active in the scene in those years (reading Dragon magazine, attending GenCon) and I certainly don't remember the D&D Companion Set being particularly popular or talked-about, and although I had a copy (purchased in 1984) I don't remember anyone else from my gaming circle buying it, and certainly not in 1987-90.

Anyway, this is deep in-the-weeds nerd trivia for sure, but since I spent a couple hours yesterday pulling it all together, I figured I'd make it available for anyone else who might also be interested. Enjoy! 

Google Sheets link