New (Old) Monsters!

 Today, this arrived for me from DriveThruRPG , a softcover copy of the D&D Creature Catalog, first published in 1993 in this form, and now re-released as a print-on-demand volume.

It was intended as a companion volume to the Rules Cyclopedia, published in 1991, and both of them gathered together material scattered through a multitude of BECMI volumes into these two books.

The Creature Catalog presents a couple of hundred new (at the time) monsters, and it includes an index of all the critters for the system up to that point, detailing which could be found in which volume.

This reprint is based on scans of a printed book, rather than the original artwork. As a result, the tones in the greyscale images are noticeably compressed, and they tend to look rather muddy. The artwork is not, for the most part, particularly good, though I've seen much worse in other published RPG material. The images are good enough to do their job, which is to provide some reinforcement to the printed descriptions. The text is quite clear and legible, and the paper is acceptably white and opaque — it's not as luxuriously heavy as the original AD&D manuals, but then again you so seldom get that sort of quality in RPG material these days (or ever, really).

I have an original hardcover copy of the Cyclopedia, and although I've never actually played D&D using it, conceptually speaking it's my favourite edition of D&D ever. I like the idea of having the whole system collected into and playable from a single volume (which is one reason why I'm so fond of OSRIC, the AD&D retroclone) and I also really like the "change it if you don't like it" ethos of the system, which was quite the opposite of the rather restrictive and regimented AD&D. To be fair to AD&D, a big part of why it was published in the first place was to bring some consistency to D&D games throughout the world, and it did do that, though whether that was a good thing or not I leave to your own personal opinions.

Cyclopaedia

The D&D Rules Cyclopaedia is now available again, in soft or hard covers, this time as a Print-On-Demand book. The softcover is about $US25, and the hardcover is about $US30, plus postage and what-not. I'm very tempted to buy a copy, but it would be a frivolous waste of my money since I don't even get any use out of the original copy I have, and postage to NZ would likely double the cost.

I think this was possibly the best version of D&D ever released. It is complete in one volume, so there's just the one book to carry around.

Advancement for characters runs up to 36th level, though no character in any campaign I've ever run or played in has even come close to those exalted heights: my highest-level character ever is Sir Fnord the Pretty Gosh-Darned Neat (some very old character sheets here) at a majestic 13th level, and that's after nearly forty years of (increasingly infrequent) play.

It includes all the critters a DM really needs, though it never hurts to have more up one's sleeve just to mess with those annoying players who have memorized all the standard monsters capabilities and weaknesses. Fortunately, it's pathetically easy to use the multitudinous AD&D/OSRIC bestiaries that have been produced with it; they hardly need massaging at all.

The beauty of this version of the game is that it is an excellent combination of completeness and freedom. It provides the supportive framework that can allow one to go berserk with invention without having to mess with the muscles and bones of the system; it is far less restrictive than AD&D or later versions. However, it is thorough enough to fully support players and DMs who aren't (yet) comfortable enough to diverge far from the beaten path.

Regrettably, I hardly even knew that B/X D&D existed when I first started playing in Palmerston North in '81, and even if I had, I would probably have turned my nose up at it, because we played ADVANCED D&D, not that baby "Basic" stuff. I was an ignorant idiot.