The real draw is the 300 or so engravings. The vast majority of these, like the Monster Manual, depict animals and monsters fighting or devouring people. Elephants, tigers, saw fish, you name it, it’s in here, killing some poor fool. My very favorite is the entirely made up Yah-te-veo, a man-eating tentacle plant that I have definitely turned into a monster for my D&D campaign and yes, it nearly ate someone. When people aren’t available, the pictured animals are happy to eat each other. One gruesome melee has a collection of animals of the African Savannah literally at each others throats. Another favorite depicts some sort of giant tree crab killing a goat and hauling into the boughs for a meal. There’s also an illustration of a caveman fighting a plesiosaur, because of course there is. One violent tableau after another. It’s amazing.

Oh, and in the middle, it reprints Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner, complete with Dore’s engravings for some reason?

I’ve found very little biographical information on Buel, though I’ve admittedly not tried very hard. He was an Illinois-born journalist and a world traveler (he definitely visited Siberia, among other far-flung locales) though I can’t help but wonder if he actually saw any animals while abroad. His accounts and the book’s illustrations seem like a fever dream of the sort that might be cooked up by a person who has never left his house.

A word of thanks to Zac Bir. Not content to enjoy the digital version on Archive.org, I bought a tattered copy of Sea and Land which he painstakingly and beautifully rebound. Now at least this copy with be around to stupefy future generations. He’s compiled an amazing, detailed post about the process that you should check out! This thing has staples in it?!

The post Sea and Land (1887) appeared first on Vintage RPG.

* * *

Instagram? Old news. Join the Vintage RPG Newsletter! That’s where all the cool kids are now!

Stu’s book, Monsters, Aliens, and Holes in the Ground is for sale now! Buy it!

Patreon? Discord? Cool RPG things to buy? All the Vintage RPG links you need are right here in one place!

Like, Rate, Subscribe and Review the Vintage RPG Podcast!

Edited by the one and only R. Alex Murray.

Send questions, comments or corrections to info@vintagerpg.com.

Available on iTunes, Google Podcasts, iHeartRadio, Spotify, YouTube and your favorite podcast clients.

The Vintage RPG illustration is by Shafer Brown. Follow him on Twitter.

Tune in next week for the next episode. Until then, may the dice always roll in your favor!

The post Monster Dinosaur appeared first on Vintage RPG.

It seemed only fair to catalog some of these other tomes as well, starting with those that I’ve personally found useful and seem interconnected. I’m sure this list will continue to grow over time, but for now, I’ve tried to limit reference books and more scholarly studies, as well as the work of true believers. The particular sort of book I am chasing is intended to inform and entertain, I think.

I should also mention that while this cataloging project is partly driven by nostalgia to some degree (I read and loved many of these books as a kid, to the degree that decades later I still think about them), I’m also trying to solve a greater mystery, and have been for a while. There used to be many books of this sort, enough to support many careers and fill many shelves, but now there are not. I don’t entirely understand why. I refuse to believe that interest in books about monsters and UFOs just spontaneously evaporated, especially given the enduring success of TV series like The X-Files or Supernatural, which draw directly from the subject matter. The rise of the internet as the prime repository for encyclopedia-style knowledge seems like it should be a factor, though I am unclear on why this change would affect monster books and not, say, cook books. Another issue is how exploitive capitalism has led to an increasingly homogenized (and, incidentally, cook book-obsessed) publishing industry that generally takes less risks and has less interest in books that don’t have blockbuster potential (see also the bizarre move to discontinue production of mass market paperbacks). Whatever the explanation, whenever I write about one of these books, I’m inundated with people at once exclaiming their love for these books and their disappointment at their apparent extinction. Clearly an audience exists who will buy these books (or, at least, having written one, I am hopeful that one exists!).

Some part of me believes that if I can collect enough of these books and lay them all out in front of me, I’ll achieve a critical mass of pop knowledge of the paranormal and finally understand it all—the reason for its past popularity, its 21st century diminishment and maybe even, you know, the answers to some of these paranormal mysteries themselves. A fool’s errand, probably, but at least the cover art is really cool.

* * *

As with the other two bibliographies, orange indicates that I own the book, black indicates that I don’t (and implies that I would like to). If it is underlined, it’s linked to a post about it elsewhere on the site. Suggested additions to this list are welcome.

Series

There are earlier books on the Unknown that fit my criteria of informative entertainment, but I think Richard Cavendish’s Man, Myth and Magic series cracked the market open. Initially a set of weekly magazines tackling all manner of odd topics, from monsters to mesmerism, they sold well enough to warrant their republication as a set of hardcover books. Colin Wilson’s The Supernatural appeared just five years later, covered the same basic ground, and saw reprint in a number of different configurations. Time/Life’s Enchanted World series is my personal high-water mark for this sort of thing, mostly because it was written in an in-universe style (that is, as if all its topics were real) and that it was filled with incredible art. When Enchanted World wrapped up, Mysteries of the Unknown launched. It anticipated the shift in the aesthetics of the Unknown towards slickness and pseudoscience that would happen in the ’90s and no doubt benefited from the similarly styled The X-Files; it was Time/Life’s best-selling series. 

The orange-spined Crestwood House Monsters series dedicated to classic horror film monsters are near legendary (and very expensive on the collector’s market, thus I only own one). They were a staple of school and public library shelves and served as an important on-ramp for a new generation of monster kids. Less well known are Crestwood’s purple-spined Movie Monsters series and the two series of books on unexplained phenomena, Search for the Unknown and The Mystery Of.

Raintree’s Great Unsolved Mysteries series was a similar library staple. Small, in a variety of colors and sporting bold graphics, they were sort of the K-Mart brand of book on the unexplained, incorporating some suspiciously educational topics like killer bees and unusual sea life. They’re a bit frustrating to find, as they did not have a branded series title (though they are clearly a series, as indicated by the trade dress) and have been reissued several times.

1970 – Man, Myth & Magic, 24 volumes
1975-1976 – The Supernatural, 21 volumes
1977-1987 – Crestwood House Monsters, 16 volumes
1977-1989 – Great Unsolved Mysteries, 37 volumes?
1978-1981 – Search for the Unknown, 6 volumes
1984-1987 – The Enchanted World, 21 volumes
1985-1986 – Crestwood House Movie Monsters, 12 volumes
1987 – The Mystery Of, 8 volumes
1987-1991 – Monsters of Mythology, 23 volumes
1987-1992 – Mysteries of the Unknown, 33 volumes

David Larkin

David Larkin was an editor, primarily of art books which, in the ’70s, had distinctive white covers. His career is a bit difficult to track, but he seems to have started with surrealists, then expanded into illustrators from the Golden Age, like Arthur Rackham and Kay Neilsen. With Once Upon a Time (1976), he moved to modern fantasists, which in turn led to Gnomes, Faeries and Giants, narrative art books that draw from folklore but also embellish on it. They share the same approach as The Enchanted World and likely influenced that series to some degree.

The fourth book, Witches, is a pretender; while sharing publisher, format and the white cover treatment, Larkin was not involved in its production. It’s one of a number of white-bound narrative art books that seemingly attempted to capitalize on the success of Larkin’s series. They include The Flight of Dragons (1979), Kingdom of the Dwarfs (1980), William Stout’s Dinosaurs (1981), Knights (1982), Castles (1984), all of which are excellent. I don’t think they quite fit with the rest of this list, but it’s close, so they seemed to bear mentioning.

1977 – Gnomes
1978 – Faeries
1979 – Giants
1981 – Witches

Jeff Rovin

I tend to avoid Jeff Rovin’s work for a couple of reasons. As a kid, I had his Encyclopedia of Superheroes and the Encyclopedia of Super Villains, but I found them a bit on the dry side and plagued by weird choices. I got The Encyclopedia of Monsters a few years ago and it was more of the same. I also learned recently that he seems to have become a political crank (though, as a former editor of the Weekly World News, I can’t honestly judge how seriously to take that turn). Regardless, I picked up The Fantasy Almanac as a source for my monster book and it’s good enough that I would entertain picking up his ’70s genre film books.

1976 – A Pictorial History of Science Fiction Films
1977 – The Fabulous Fantasy Films
1977 – From the Land Beyond Beyond
1979 – The Fantasy Almanac
1985 – The Encyclopedia of Superheroes
1987 – The Encyclopedia of Super Villains
1990 – The Encyclopedia of Monsters
1995 – Aliens, Robots and Spaceships

Seymour Simon

An author who I very nearly included in “The Monster Hunters.” Alas, he’s got just three “unexplained” books to his name (though he went on to be a massively prolific science writer for younger readers) and with two being so film-centric, he didn’t make the cut. All three are entries in Lippincott’s Eerie Series.

1976 – Ghosts
1977 – Space Monsters
1979 – Creatures from Lost Worlds

Joseph Nigg

If Nigg was more prolific, I’d have included him in “The Monster Hunters.” He began his career in 1982 and has slowly cranking out books about myth and monsters ever since. He’s well-researched and engaging, but I find his topics a bit less fun and weird than other writers, perhaps because they have a more academic bent. The monsters he is attracted to are sort of what I consider “the big ones” and they exist on so many different valances that I often find discussion of them a bit dull. Dragons are a great example. Everyone loves dragons. I love dragons. But I’m only really interested in reading about specific aspects of dragons and the vast majority of dragon stuff, like heraldry and such, leaves me a bit cold. But then, I’m a bit of a specialized reader. Ultimately, I’m glad someone is writing these books, and that people read them. He’s done more, but the rest feel more scholarly than seems befitting this list.

1984 – The Book of Gryphons: A History of the Most Majestic of All Mythical Creatures
1984 – A Guide to the Imaginary Birds of the World
2002 – The Book of Dragons & Other Mythical Beasts

Genre Guides

Cohen and Aylesworth (and Rovin) wrote a lot about film, along with many others. It was a period, of course, prior to VCRs, so your options to see things were limited to revival theaters and the late show, for the most part. Same goes for genre art and fiction, you couldn’t easily look up what was available without guidebooks like these. To a degree, I could probably included stuff like the “visual guides” that cropped for some series, like Zelazny’s Amber novels, or Wayne Barlowe’s guides, but I have opted to not, for the moment. Also, I very much appreciate Grady Hendrix, Adam Rowe and Lawrence Ellsworth (AKA Lawrence Schick of White Plume Mountain fame), who have all revived the form in their own ways to essentially draw new attention to media that might otherwise slip from the collective consciousness.

I presume there are heaps of these sorts of books out there, but the list currently only reflects my personal pile of them.

1972 – Film Fantasy Scrapbook, by Ray Harryhausen
1973 – Great Monsters in the Movies, by Edward Edelsen
1973 – A Pictorial History of Horror Movies, by Denis Gifford
1974 – The Movie Treasury: Horror Movies, by Alan G. Frank
1981 – The Encyclopedia of Horror, by Richard Davis
1983 – Realms of Fantasy, by Malcolm Edwards and Robert Holdstock
1998 – Fantasy: The Definitive Illustrated Guide, edited by David Pringle
2017 – Paperbacks from Hell, by Grady Hendrix
2023 – Cinema of Swords: A Popular Guide to Movies about Knights, Pirates, Barbarians, and Vikings, by Lawrence Ellsworth
2023 – Worlds Beyond Time: Sci-Fi Art of the 1970s, by Adam Rowe

The Occult

When we get the occult, things get a bit tricky. There are, of course, scads of books on occult topics, from many perspectives, the majority of which are serious and rather complex.  For the most part, though, I am looking for the equivalent of a one-time guided tour as opposed to enrollment in a college, if that makes sense? Thomas G. Aylesworth’s book on palmistry doesn’t expect its readers to pick up the practice, only to learn a bit about it and be entertained. Honestly, most of these books are probably leagues more involved than that, but it also seemed wrong to leave them out. Simon’s book is probably the closest to the spirit I’m looking for, though Dictionary of Witchcraft is also pretty good – it’s a bastardized version of The Dictionnaire Infernal, and good fun. The Encyclopedia of Witchcraft and Demonology is honestly far too formal of a reference book, but I included it because Mike Mignola counts it as a key reference point for his Hellboy stories.

1959 – The Encyclopedia of Witchcraft and Demonology, by Rossell Hope Robbins
1964 – The Dark World of Witches, by Eric Maple
1965 – Dictionary of Witchcraft, by Collin de Plancy
1966 – The Complete Book of Witchcraft and Demonology, by Eric Maple
1967 – The Black Arts, by Richard Cavendish
1971 – The Occult, by Colin Wilson
1973 – Witchcraft: The Story of Man’s Search for Supernatural Power, by Eric Maple
2021 – Pandemonium: A Visual History of Demonology, by Ed Simon

Folklore

Similar to the occult, folklore is generally too big, too complex and too scholarly a topic for these sorts of pop history books to tackle and remain credible. Again, these don’t fit perfectly, but are also too good not to include. I’ve also added some regional American folklore books, as they also seem to be part of this web. Come to think of it, regional ghost books is another whole thing that should probably be on this list. Well, this is a work in progress!

1950 – English Legends, by Henry Bett
1952 – English Myths and Traditions, by Henry Bett
1966 – Legends of the Outer Banks and Tar Heel Tidewater, by Charles Harry Whedbee
1971 – Encyclopedia of Fairies: Hobgoblins, Brownies, Bogies, & Other Supernatural Creatures, by Katharine M. Briggs
1971 – The Flaming Ship of Ocracoke and Other Tales of the Outer Banks, by Charles Harry Whedbee
1973 – Folklore Myths and Legends of Britain, by Reader’s Digest
1973 – A Gazetteer of Scottish and Irish Ghosts, by Peter Underwood
1978 – Outer Banks Mysteries and Seaside Stories, by Charles Harry Whedbee
1981-1991 – Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, 3 volumes, by Alvin Schwartz and Stephen Gammell
1980 – Pine Barrens, Legends, Lore and Lies, by William McMahon
1983 – The Ghosts of Williamsburg and Nearby Environs, by L. B. Taylor
1983-1998 – New England Collectible Classics, 17 volumes, by Robert Ellis Cahill
1985 – Outer Banks Tales to Remember, by Charles Harry Whedbee
1985 – Legends of Long Beach Island, by David J. Seibold and Charles J. Adams III
1987 – Ghosts of Old England, by Terence Whitaker
1987 – Shipwrecks and Legends ‘Round Cape May, by David J. Seibold and Charles J. Adams III
1988 – Cape May Ghost Stories, by David J. Seibold and Charles J. Adams III
1988 – Ghosts: Washington’s Most Famous Ghost Stories, by John Alexander
1988 – Supernatural England, by Eric Maple
1989 – Blackbeard’s Cup and Stories of the Outer Banks, by Charles Harry Whedbee
1990 – Britain’s Haunted Heritage, by J. A. Brooks

Mythology

Same again. The field of books covering mythology is vast. There are scads of young reader-focused titles out there that I could include, but I’m opting to just list two that I know have been a gateway for the subject for many, many people, and the one that was mine. I feel that, in this particular context, art is more the driving force than words, so I’ve also included the Alan Lee illustrated adaptation of Homer and the World Mythology series, which includes volumes illustrated by Giovanni Caselli and John Sibbick. The Matthews books are seemingly the only two entries in a similar series of Usborne illustrated guides.

1962 – Book of Greek Myths, by Edgar and Ingri D’Aulaire
1967 – Norse Gods and Giants, by Edgar and Ingri D’Aulaire
1977-1991 – The World Mythology Series, 13 volumes
1985 – Greek Gods & Heroes, by Alice Low and Arvis Stewart
1985 – Greek Myths and Legends, by Rodney Matthews
1986 – Norse Myths and Legends, by Rodney Matthews
1993 – Black Ships Before Troy, by Rosemary Sutcliff and Alan Lee
1995 – The Wanderings of Odysseus, by Rosemary Sutcliff and Alan Lee
1997 – Greek Myths, by Jacqueline Morley and Giovanni Caselli

Cryptozoology

The term “crytpid” was coined in 1983 and from that point on, I find books about them to be of diminishing returns. For the most part, for me, it marks a moment when the topic grows simultaneously more serious and crankish, an admixture of pseudoscientific desperation and new age hokum. I much prefer earlier material, which seems more quaint or sillier or more in awe of the realistic, natural world. 

1887 – Sea and Land, by J. W. Buel
1959 – Exotic Zoology, by Willy Ley
1968 – This Baffling World, by John Godwin
1976 – The Golden Book of the Mysterious, by Jane Werner Watson and Alan Lee
1978 – Sea Serpents, Sailors and Sceptics, by Graham M. McEwan
1979 – Monsters, Mysteries and Man, by Michael Newton

Usborne and Hamlyn

If there was one group of books that justifies the existence of this list, it’s Usborne’s. These six books warped the minds of so many people. My posts about them got some of my highest engagement on Instagram that I ever enjoyed, and that was well after Instragram started to suck. They’re defined by a lot of (often lurid) art and factoid-style prose; you can read one in less than an hour. Most have seen several editions with different cover treatments. They were also licensed out to other publishers in different territories, so you might be familiar with the book as issued by something other than Usborne. Also, I’ve just now discovered that Eric Maple has a number of additional UK titles I would be keenly interested in acquiring…

As for Hamlyn, don’t let this list fool you into thinking this is a specific series of Unexplained-themed books. Really Hamlyn published a great big pile of “Books of” on a wide array of topics, of which only these involved monsters and such. They mix historical art and photographs with new illustrations and are fairly text heavy, at least compared to the Usborne books.

1976 – The Hamlyn Book of Horror, by Daniel Farson
1977 – All About Ghosts, by Christopher Maynard
1977 – All About Monsters, by Carey Miller
1977 – All About UFOs, by Ted Wilding-White
Collected as Mysteries of the Unknown: Monsters, Ghosts & UFOs in 1979
1978 – The Hamlyn Book of Ghosts in Fact and Fiction, by Daniel Farson
1979 – Vampires, Werewolves and Demons, by Lynn Myring
1979 – Haunted Houses, Ghosts and Spectres, by Eric Maple and Lynn Myring
1979 – Mysterious Powers and Strange Forces, by Eliot Humberstone
Collected as The Usborne Guide to the Supernatural World in 1979
1983 – The Hamlyn Book of Mysteries, by Bernard Brett
1984 – The Hamlyn Book of Horror and S.F. Movie Lists, by Roy Pickard
1984 – The Hamlyn Book of Monsters, by Daniel Farson
1997 – The Hamlyn Book of the Supernatural, by Karen Farrington

All the Rest

Some folks only write one book about monsters. Sometimes folks only write one book about monsters and it’s a banger. That’s the case here, for the most part (at least in my estimation).

Some random notes. The Kettlekamp book has over a dozen printings, which kept it available to school kids well into the ’80s. Everyone should own a copy of The Glass Harmonica and Things That Never Were. Berenstain’s book remains one of the priciest of its sort on the second-hand market. My copy of The Jersey Devil, acquired when I was about ten, has “From the Occult Library of S. Horvath” scrawled across the bottom of the first page in black Sharpie. I’ve always been like this.

1967 – The Glass Harmonica, by Barbara Ninde Byfield (later The Book of Weird)
1969 – A Fantastic Bestiary: Beasts and Monsters in Myth and Folklore, by Ernst and Johanna Lehner (later Big Book of Dragons, Monsters, and Other Mythical Creatures)
1969 – Haunted Houses, by Larry Kettlekamp
1974 – Monsters Who’s Who, by Dulan Barber
1976 – Monsters, by Bernard Brett (later A Young Person’s Guide to Monsters)
1976 – The Jersey Devil, by James F. McCloy and Ray Miller, Jr.
1978 – Monsters, by Eric Maple
1979 – Dragons, by Peter Hogarth and Val Clery
1982 – The Creature Catalog, by Michael Berenstain
1985 – The Encyclopedia of Things That Never Were, by Michael F. Paige and Robert Ingpen (also known as Out of This World)

21^st Century Monsters (and Others)

All is not lost in this dreary, tech-obsessed century of ours. There are revivals, in line with the books of old, and they’re actually pretty great! Johan Egerkrans evokes David Larkin’s narrative art books, Adam Allsuch Boardman works in the mode of the Usborne series and though a single volume, Supernatural Creatures seems inspired by the Time/Life series.

2013 – Vaesen: Spirits and Monsters of Scandinavian Folklore, by Johan Egerkrans
2017 – Alla Tiders Dinosaurier, by Johan Egerkrans
2017 – Flygödlor och Havsmonster, by Johan Egerkrans
2017 – Norse Gods, by Johan Egerkrans
2018 – The Undead, by Johan Egerkrans
2019 – T-Rex och Andra Tyrannosaurier, by Johan Egerkrans
2020 – An Illustrated History of UFOs, by Adam Allsuch Boardman
2022 – An Illustrated History of Ghosts, by Adam Allsuch Boardman
2022 – Dragons, by Johan Egerkrans
2024 – An Illustrated History of Urban Legends, by Adam Allsuch Boardman
2024 – Monsters in America, by K. C. Kelley and Tavo Montanez
2024 – Supernatural Creatures: Mythical and Sacred Creatures from Around the World, by DK Publishing

The post Travelers by Night appeared first on Vintage RPG.

The basic idea is that the Tapani sector is a semi-autonomous Imperial holding administrated by ancient noble houses who all hate each other. They have house stormtroopers and some of them duel with lightsabers despite not being Jedi (I really like that). If I had to liken it to something historical, I’d probably refer to the rivalries of the Italian city-states of the Renaissance period and the way the Vatican and the Holy Roman Emperor complicated matters. I would not be surprised if someone informed me this historical period was on Frank Herbert’s mind to some extent when he was writing Dune. Or on Marc Millar’s when he laid out the noble houses of Traveller’s empire. Same again for the brains behind Empire of the Fading Suns.

Does the black and white world of Star Wars work with this sudden shift to the intrigues of gray? I tend to think Star Wars is more plastic than folks are generally willing to entertain. I think you can run Lords of the Expanse and wind up with some excellent Star Wars flavored game memories. In 2025, though, I fear that such an endeavor would naturally mix not Dune, nor Traveller, nor Fading Suns vibes, but rather Game of Thrones. I can’t handle that at all. But maybe you could?

The post Lords of the Expanse (1997) appeared first on Vintage RPG.

So, continuing on a bit from yesterday’s post, these are sort of odd examples of interactive fiction. They’re text dense. Like to the point of being novel-like. They’re also clearly aimed at older readers — this one has a surprising amount of violence and an extremely awkward medical scene involving nudity. The result is a more well-developed story at the cost of a pretty linear set of choices.

I think it worked better for Han Solo. This one, there is a problem with the tone that I am struggling to put my finger on. Han’s a scoundrel and scoundrels are kind of easy to get right. Luke…is a pain in the ass. He works in the films because he is part of a team, but here he’s the leader, the lone familiar character, and he’s characterized as having the answers while also clearly not having all the answers. It’s weird. There’s also this omnipresent hectoring vibe about the why and how people are fighting the Empire that grates on my nerves. The fail endings are boring, too, mostly resulting in Luke being thrown in jail and the reader being assured he’d break out eventually. For whatever reason, Luke isn’t allowed to be freewheeling like Han, and that makes this book more of a slog.

The post Jedi’s Honor (1990) appeared first on Vintage RPG.

Anyway, Scoundrel’s Luck (1990) puts you in the decision-making part of Han Solo’s brain, as parsed by Troy Denning (who I strongly associate with Dark Sun, which made this a little odd). Han’s initially preoccupied with spending his reward from the end of the first movie while relaxing on Ord Mantell. That name should be familiar to close watchers of Empire Strikes Back when, early on, Han says, “Well the bounty hunter we ran into in Ord Mantell changed my mind.” Guess what this story is about! There are plenty of double-crosses and such, but the most memorable thread is rescuing a kidnapped Leia from the bounty hunter improbably named Alfreda (she’s an alien, but we know she’s a bounty hunter because she’s wearing Boba Fett armor). 

This scenario is one of at least three depictions of the bounty hunter from Ord Mantell. The earliest was Skorr, who appeared in the newspaper comic strip in the early ’80s. Another is the reptilian Cypher who appears in Rebel Mission to Ord Mantell (1983), an audio drama on vinyl. There are probably more I don’t know about. I don’t have a ton of bandwidth for Star Wars lore anymore, but the many bounty hunters of Ord Mantell tickles my brain in just the right way. I love how a throw-away line like that has inspired so many responses. It’s also illustrative of how early the need to fill in all the narrative gaps from the movies presented itself in the secondary material. I often forget that isn’t a modern plague.

Francis Mao illustrates the book. He’s got a heavily lined, cartoonish style. I don’t think his Han is all that great, but I do like everything else he delivers. Oh, also, the bad endings! They’re cliffhangers, which is neat. Normally in a gamebook, the character dies a grisly death, but here, in movie serial fashion, we get stuff like “What would Han do next?” with an explanation that whatever it is, it’s a new adventure and this one is over. It’s not perfect, but I like the attempt at something different.

The post Scoundrel’s Luck (1990) appeared first on Vintage RPG.

I feel that most of this stuff aims to make the game toothier. The core Star Wars experience is pretty smooth and cinematic. I don’t really want more complexity and fiddly systems, I want to go, go, go. But other people do, I guess. Personal combat, starship combat and Force powers all get an (optional) injection of complexity here. It’s not D&D, but I still don’t really want it.

More useful are the rules for Droid creation and the clarification on how the Dark Side corruption works, which I recall was frustratingly ambiguous in the core rules when I played the first time in the late ’80s.

One thing really jumped out at me, though. Uncertainty dice! The example given is a skill test for charting a jump through hyperspace with incomplete data. The idea is that in addition the regular skill roll (x-number of dice totaled against a challenge rating to succeed) the player and the GM both roll a number of additional dice (from two to four). Each side adds up the result, with the GM secretly subtracting their total from the players. The result is applied as a bonus or penalty to the roll. But because the player doesn’t know the result, they have to make their decision based on narrative data, not mechanical data. Do they pull out of the jump early, do they stay the course? It’s a liiitle awkward, but I like the way it can refocus the drama of the game in key situations.

The primary draw for the product in 1989 was probably the heaps of production art used to illustrate the book, including a nice set of color pages. I’ve always liked this cover art, too, in part because I think it is somewhat rarer than a lot of the other film posters. Even if it is the mushiest of them. The same art appears on the Live Action Adventures book, a book I have zero interest in (LARP? I would never) but kept around for a while just because of the cover.

The post The Star Wars Rules Companion (1989) appeared first on Vintage RPG.

This is the Star Wars Campaign Pack (1988), which, surprise, was meant to introduce campaign play. It probably sold primarily because it included the gamemaster screen, but it’s still a pretty cool way to put out a campaign frame, I think. In the booklet is all the basic info a GM needs for a campaign focused on a unit of rebel commandos based on the ship Long Shot. There’s material detailing the ship (including a gigantic fold-out floorplan), the sector the unit operates in, some key NPCs, a framework defining typical missions and a sample adventure to get things started.

It’s nothing crazy — sticking a bunch of people on a ship together is the basic Star Wars experience — but it’s nice to have it taken care of from the start without being super rigid, as later WEG Star Wars campaign material sometimes trends.

The cover here is also a panel in the screen, which was a thing that always annoyed me. So the players have to look at the sales copy from the back cover? Meh. It’s not the end of the world, I guess, but I do think it’s funny that they airbrushed Leia’s dancer costume. I guess it was too risqué for something that was going to be standing up on middle America’s dining room tables?    

The post Star Wars Campaign Pack (1988) appeared first on Vintage RPG.

As with the Cohen list, what follows is cobbled together from research on the internet and sleuthing for details from my own copies. If you have additional information or clarification, I’m all ears! I’m particularly keen to find more biographical information; I’d like to include something along these lines as an appendix in my forthcoming monster book. As with the Cohen list, orange means I own it, black means I don’t, in case you have a copy you’d like to pass along.

Bernhardt J. Hurwood (1929 – 1987)

Hurwood’s body of work is…unusual. For starters, they all look similar, with garish, creepy cover paintings that are in line with horror paperbacks of the period. But under those covers is a range of experiences. Hurwood’s first book, Terror by Night, is a serious study of vampires and werewolves aimed at adult readers that doesn’t shrink from the associated violence and sexuality. Which is fine! But nothing really distinguishes it, or his other adult-aimed work, from the lighter fare geared towards young readers, or the horror story anthologies he edited. Further, nearly all his books collecting folklore, for young and old, read like fiction rather than reportage, and often paraphrase horror short stories by established authors. When I pick up a Hurwood book, I never quite know what I’m getting and, when I get there, it often feels more than passingly surreal. Oh, and several were reprinted with different titles and cover art, so what I am getting might be something I already got! So, fair warning when digging into the list below.

Hurwood wrote his own fiction as well (one vampire novel has the amusing tag line: “First there was Interview with the Vampire, now there is By Blood Alone”) and also non-fiction on both technology and topics of intimacy (Joys of Oral Love, 1975, anyone?). These threads came together (er, pun not intended) in his nine-book Man from T.O.M.C.A.T. series of soft porn spy spoofs. Like I said, an unusual body of work!

1963 – Terror by Night (1976 – The Vampire Papers)
1965 – Monsters Galore (fiction anthology)
1966 – Strange Lives
1967 – Strange Talents
1967 – Monsters and Nightmares
1968 – The First Occult Review Reader (edited by)
1968 – Vampires, Werewolves and Ghouls
1969 – The Monstrous Undead
1969 – The Second Occult Review Reader (edited by)
1971 – Ghosts, Ghouls and Other Horrors
1972 – Haunted Houses
1972 – Passport to the Supernatural
1972 – Vampires, Werewolves and Other Demons
1973 – Chilling Ghost Stories (fiction)
1973 – Eerie Tales of Terror & Dread
1975 – Strange Curses
1981 – Vampires

Georgess McHargue (1941 – 2011)

Of all these writers, Cohen included, I think I’d like to have met McHargue the most.

A poet, critic, author and editor, the vast majority of McHargue’s published work is fiction for children and young readers (including The Baker and the Basilisk on the list below). After she married an archaeologist, she primarily edited archeological reports. At various points in-between, she wrote some books about monsters.

That’s where her inner poet came out, I think. The Beasts of Never is my favorite, a beautiful, philosophical rumination on fantastic creatures. It earned her (and illustrator Frank Bozzo) a National Book Prize nomination. I think about some passages from that book whenever I think about monsters, which is rather often (surprising no one). Her other books are similarly thoughtful, though more painstakingly researched. Like Mummies, which has nothing really to do with the bandage-wrapped monsters, but rather focuses, in squirm-inducing detail, on the various processes of real-world mummification.    

I also like that her obituary notes that, “she stood firmly against all social injustice and repression of freedom everywhere.” I’d expect nothing less from a true monster lover, honestly.

1968 – The Beasts of Never
1970 – The Baker and the Basilisk
1972 – Facts, Frauds and Phantasms: A Survey of the Spiritualist Movement
1972 – The Impossible People: A History Natural and Unnatural of Beings Terrible and Wonderful
1972 – Mummies
1976 – Meet the Werewolf
1979 – Meet the Vampire
1984 – Meet the Witches

David C. Knight (1925 – 1984)

I know very little about Knight, beyond the fact that he was primarily a science writer. Over the course of that career, he found time to write a few books on paranormal topics. It’s the ones on ghosts that I am most familiar with. His retelling of the haunting of Borley Rectory in Best True Ghost Stories spooked the heck out of me as a kid. I got that book several years after its initial publication, well after the ’86 Mets won the World Series, which is probably why I always wondered if he was related to Ray Knight.

1969 – The ESP Reader (edited by)
1972 – Poltergeists: Hauntings and the Haunted
1975 – Those Mysterious UFOs: The Story of Unidentified Flying Objects
1978 – The Haunted Souvenir Warehouse
1979 – UFOs: A Pictorial History from Antiquity to the Present
1983 – The Moving Coffins: Ghosts and Hauntings Around the World
1984 – Best True Ghost Stories of the 20^th Century

Thomas G. Aylesworth (1927 – 1995)

Aylesworth spent much of his career as an editor at Doubleday (I wonder if he crossed paths there with Georgess McHargue) and wrote many books on science for both children and adults. This Vital Air, This Vital Water (1968) was an important early book on the looming climate crisis. He also wrote seventeen regional travel guides for the United States, co-authored with his wife Virginia.

His seventeen books on supernatural and adjacent topics are interesting because he essentially wrote several of them twice without really copying himself (I don’t own it, so I’m not sure if the final monster movie book is a reprint, or truly distinct; the werewolf and vampire books are entirely different, though). Perhaps because of his experience in publishing, many of his books, particularly the early ones like The Alchemists, have a graphical flare that his colleagues’ work lacks. Some of them feel downright cinematic. It’s weird.

1970 – Servants of the Devil
1971 – Werewolves and Other Monsters
1972 – Monsters from the Movies
1972 – Vampires and Other Ghosts
1973 – The Alchemists
1973 – Astrology and Foretelling the Future
1975 – ESP
1975 – Movie Monsters
1975 – Who’s Out There?: The Search for Extraterrestrial Life
1976 – Palmistry
1977 – The Story of Vampires
1978 – The Story of Werewolves
1979 – The Story of Witches
1980 – The Story of Dragons and Other Monsters
1981 – Animal Superstitions
1982 – Science Looks at Mysterious Monsters
1986 – Monster and Horror Movies

Nancy Garden (1938 – 2014)

Last but not least of the monster hunters is Nancy Garden. Even if she only wrote four books on supernatural topics, she was a badass and deserves inclusion here. Primarily, she was a writer of fiction for children and young adults (three novels – Prisoner of Vampires, 1985, My Sister, the Vampire, 1992, and My Brother, the Werewolf – even involve monsters). She’s best known for Annie on My Mind (1982), though, a queer novel of romance and coming out featuring a pair of high school girls. Predictably, it was an oft-banned book and even provoked book burnings (which I bet informed her later novel, The Year They Burned the Books, 1999). Her reaction, as I mentioned in the post on Vampires, was “I didn’t think people burned books any more. Only Nazis burn books.”

Her monster books are well researched and lightly progressive (Vampires begins with “Carmilla,” for instance). She’s capable of packing a shocking amount of information into relatively small spaces, so there may be only four books here, but they are mighty.

1973 – Vampires
1973 – Werewolves
1975 – Witches 
1976 – Devils and Demons

Series of Note

Finally, there are two series of books I think bear mentioning, both produced by Lippincott: The Weird and Horrible Library (1972 – 1976) and The Eerie Series (1975 – 1984). I know very little about either, aside of their existence. I feel that both were aimed specifically at school libraries and book sales, but that’s honestly just a guess. Most of the volumes saw print in several editions at later dates, many by other publishers, apparently under license. All the monster hunters, with the exception of Hurwood, participated in one or the other, McHargue and Aylesworth in both! It’s like the monster book versions of the Avengers and the Defenders.

The Weird and Horrible Library

1972 – Monsters from the Movies, by Thomas G. Aylesworth
1972 – Mummies, by Georgess McHargue
1972 – Poltergeists: Hauntings and the Haunted, by David C. Knight
1973 – Magicians, Wizards and Sorcerers, by Daniel Cohen
1973 – Vampires, by Nancy Garden
1973 – Werewolves, by Nancy Garden
1974 – Curses, Hexes and Spells, by Daniel Cohen
1974 – Seances & Spiritualists, by Christine Andreae
1975 – The Body Snatchers, by Daniel Cohen
1975 – Witches, by Nancy Garden
1976 – Devils and Demons, by Nancy Garden

The Eerie Series

1975 – Movie Monsters, by Thomas G. Aylesworth
1976 – Meet the Werewolf, by Georgess McHargue
1976 – Ghosts, by Seymour Simon
1977 – Space Monsters, by Seymour Simon
1979 – Creatures from Lost Worlds, by Seymour Simon
1979 – Meet the Vampire, by Georgess McHargue
1984 – Meet the Witches, by Georgess McHargue

After taking a quick editing pass on this, Clay Fleischer said, “All these people have names like Call of Cthulhu investigators.” Yes! It’s so true, I had to record it for posterity.

The post The Monster Hunters appeared first on Vintage RPG.

The graphic novels are where Eem came from, but the Dungeoneer Academy books for young readers are where the world is going. Literally! Last year’s crowdfunding campaign converts the setting, the Underlands, into game terms, and also includes a beginner box set for younger players. I’ve read two of the three novels to my son and they crystallized his initial, instinctive interest in the box and gave it a sense of structure. I think these are the first real fantasy books he’s experienced? At any rate, if you’ve got a kid who is interested in this sort of thing, the Dungeoneer Academy books will expand their horizons with fun, mostly light-hearted adventures (that include some positive messages about friendship and teamwork, as an added bonus).

The post Rickety Stitch and the Gelatinous Goo appeared first on Vintage RPG.