Was Greyhawk printed Feb 75?
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Post Posted: Fri Feb 27, 2015 7:16 am 
 

Over on the Rulebooks and Sets page The Acaeum suggests that Greyhawk was first printed in Feb 1975.

But The Strategic Review Vol 1 No 2 was issued in "Summer" 1975 (presumably being a Wisconsin summer spanning Jun/Jul/Aug).  On page 3 EGG writes:

... "the first booklet to be added to the D & D series -- SUPPLEMENT I, GREYHAWK, which should be available about the time this publication is, or shortly thereafter."

Which seems to imply that Greyhawk didn't appear until the Jun/Jul/Aug timeframe.  Thoughts?

  

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Post Posted: Fri Feb 27, 2015 12:09 pm 
 

1975 was a long year as noted before, on more than one occasion.

Blackmoor was "late" as well, and as for that 5th print white box... :)


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Post Posted: Fri Feb 27, 2015 11:15 pm 
 

Thanks Faro.

So the Jan 1975 date given for 1st print GH seems unlikely; a post 7th April 1975 being more likely.

Does anyone have a better date than "Summer 75" for SR 1.2?  GH might have been out closer to that time.

  

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Post Posted: Sun Mar 01, 2015 4:33 pm 
 

waysoftheearth wrote in Was Greyhawk printed Feb 75?:Thanks Faro.

So the Jan 1975 date given for 1st print GH seems unlikely; a post 7th April 1975 being more likely.

Does anyone have a better date than "Summer 75" for SR 1.2?  GH might have been out closer to that time.

A Jan 1975 note to GPGPN from Gygax says that Supplement #1, Greyhawk, is planned for "the not too distant future."

A 13 Feb 1975 letter from Bill Hoyer mentions a coversation with Gygax about the forthcoming Greyhawk pamphlet, claiming that it will be "out in about 3 weeks."

Signal #75 (1 Mar 1975) notes that "Dungeons & Dragons will have the first D&D supplement out in a few weeks."

A 6 Mar 1975 personal letter from Gygax states that Greyhawk will be "finished next week" and that TSR intended to start mailing a flyer about it then.

A 7 Mar 1975 letter from Gygax to GPGPN says that "we have finally managed to get Chainmail 3rd Ed. ($5); D&D Supplement I, Greyhawk ($5), Panzer Warfare ($4); and a re-issue of Tractics ($10). There are all sorts of pending projects, and Strategic Review #2 is at the printers, so the 1 April date should be met with relative ease."

A circa 20 Mar 1975 letter from Gygax to Bill Owen clearly states that Greyhawk is "now available" for $5.

Then...

The April 1975 issue of Europa (6-8) notes receipt of SR 1.2. The 1 May 1975 issue of Signal (#78) also notes receipt of SR 1.2 (it also mentions Panzer Warfare, by the by, and Star Probe had already been covered in an earlier issue). Note that due to Mansfield traveling to Europe, Signal was disrupted in April (there was no 1 Apr edition), so we have a bit of a blind spot there. Wargamer's Information #5 (June 1975) also sees SR 1.2.

The April 1975 issue of the American Wargamer has a piece by Kevin Slimak indicating his receipt of Greyhawk, with a mini-review. "The new rules/monstres/magic items met with mixed reactions, but all in all were well received." The April 1975 issue of Europa claims that Greyhawk is "on its way to Europe" and that they won't have it until stock until June, along with the new Panzer Warfare, Chainmail and Tractics. It is not until the 15 May 1975 Signal (#79) that it notes receipt of Greyhawk (Gary also has a letter in that issue talking up EPT), but remember the April blind spot for Signal. The June GPGPN actually discusses playing with the new D&D supplement.

So...

SR 1.2 was supposed to have an 1 April release date, and it seems pretty close to that mark. It probably arrived at most subscribers by 1 May.

Greyhawk was available for order in March, though depending on where you were, it may have taken some time to get into your hands. For notice of receipt of Greyhawk to appear in April zines, typically it would have to be out in March. For these reasons, I've gone with March; PatW says "early March," as Gygax claimed in letters it was available as of the 7th.

And yes, this is why the trademark assignment dates submitted by TSR after the fact should be ignored.


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Post Posted: Sun Mar 01, 2015 5:08 pm 
 

All sounds good to me; I changed the reference on that page to reflect a March 75 printing date.

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Post Posted: Mon Mar 02, 2015 8:57 am 
 

Blackmoor's still needing a nudge back to the end of the year, too.

Printing date vs. date-in-hand vs. date sold to public is always going to be fun and games, and I'm always tempted to take "now available" (give us your money) comments with a pinch of salt when they're made in the midst of general delays and desperation to get product out. The 1st Greyhawk still has some anomalies to iron out which have never satisfactorily been explained... still waiting for correlation from copies from others in EGG's close circles to turn up to explain why Jim Ward's differs from all others seen, for one; whether that was just because samples were sent out first, or otherwise.


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Post Posted: Mon Mar 02, 2015 1:15 pm 
 

Agreed that these releases are not like, say, movie releases, where one day the product is not available and the next day it's everywhere. I do know of at least one person who complained that Greyhawk was supposed to be released by mid-March but he hadn't gotten it by close to April, apparently after pre-ordering. Your access to new releases varied considerably over space and time, and I'm not at all surprised by any anomalies circulating in Lake Geneva.

And yes, hadn't looked at Blackmoor. It surely was not available in September 1975. I could do a similar parade of surrounding dates from letters and notices (especially the SR 1.5 claim that Blackmoor was then "in the hands of the printers") leading up to players receiving it. PatW says "shortly before the New Year" and that means nominally before the stroke of midnight December 31st. By this point, we can go by people's acknowledgement of receiving it in Alarums - and no one had it in time to submit anything on Blackmoor for the Jan 10 collation of Alarums #7, so all the reviews and reactions waited until February. The American Wargamer announced that Games People Play is carrying it as of January (and that shop had a good relationship with TSR). It seems very unlikely that it was meaningfully received by anyone before 1976, but, it's close enough that I wouldn't weigh in against the copyright date.

If we're nudging Blackmoor... should we fix the print runs for OD&D?

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Post Posted: Mon Mar 02, 2015 3:05 pm 
 

Talking of local anomalies, Blackmoor certainly didn't seem to be in a hurry to get back from the printers to Dave A.'s group.
Barker, on the other hand, seems to have been largely exempt from such anomalies. Flavor of the month/year...?

increment wrote in Was Greyhawk printed Feb 75?:It seems very unlikely that it was meaningfully received by anyone before 1976, but, it's close enough that I wouldn't weigh in against the copyright date.

Mhmm; I was meaning that we still had 9/75 on the tabulation chart at the foot of the summary page here, though. If Scott might be so kind to give that a nudge perhaps...

increment wrote in Was Greyhawk printed Feb 75?:If we're nudging Blackmoor... should we fix the print runs for OD&D?

Hey, my Blackmoor post was 2005 and if that can wait so long, surely the print runs/dates can, too? (What's your estimate for how many 4ths TSR could actually afford to have printed / actually saw the demand for vs. the sales on the woodgrains, for one; presuming you don't have actual figures on-hand, yet. ;))
En route, add the extra run of the supplements without the stocklist pricking which, of course, reinforces the reversal of the currently-stated - but not sure why - OCE 6ths/7ths, perhaps.
Etc...

All good stuff. :)

Cheers,
David.


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Post Posted: Mon Mar 02, 2015 3:13 pm 
 

I don't mind adjusting the printing dates for the first print of the supplements.  But doing this for subsequent prints would be needlessly confusing and contradictory to the published printing date in the booklets (and of limited utility).

I'm open to adjusting the dates on any of the Original D&D Set prints.

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Post Posted: Mon Mar 02, 2015 8:47 pm 
 

Right, so, December 1975 for first print Blackmoor, in deference to the copyright year. Release dates were fuzzy enough that we can say December while acknowledging that probably no one saw a copy until January.

PatW's tally of OD&D printings is

1st:  1,000
2nd: 1,000
3rd: 2,000
4th: 5,000

For 1st-3rd printings, I think Gygax's account in Dragons #11 and #22 is consistent with what I see in contemporary letters, so it is followed above. For example, an April 1975 letter from him states that "it took 11 months to sell 1,000 initial D&D, but only 4 to sell the second 1,000," which is essentially what he says in Dragon #11, that "one thousand copies of the game were printed, and it took some eleventh months to sell those first sets of D&D.... The next thousand run sold out in a tad under six months." In the 25th anniversary booklet, Gygax asserted the 2nd printing was 2,000, but there's no reason to think he was better informed about this matter 20+ years later than he was at the time.

And yes, I do have a Dec 1975 letter where Gygax states directly that the fourth print was 5,000. But even if I didn't, as Faro suggests, TSR spent most of 1975 in arrears to the printers (as of mid-July, about $6k in debt to them) and larger print runs would be hard to believe anyway. Throughout 1975, we see print runs like EPT (2,000), Dungeon! (3,000), and a jump from a third printing of 2,000 to a fourth of 25,000 just wouldn't make sense.


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Post Posted: Tue Mar 03, 2015 3:13 pm 
 

*g* Apologies, Jon, I missed that 5,000 quote and thanks for the source: I'd been more checking to see that you'd picked up various research angles and other new lines rather than specific snippets like that on the browse-through.

Good to have a specific figure to work with rather than be stuck with my old estimate (albeit rounded up, later, for the 4th/5th split if the total had been 25k for the two).
I presume EGG's focused on books, not boxes, as there are still plenty questions such as the swap to the later boxes, more usually seen with the 5ths, which always seemed more like a matter of the printers sending through the consignment "in parts" rather than dropping 5k copies on their doorstep (even more fun later with the OCEs, of course). Plus the early 4ths, however those got out, etc.

Oh and, hush, we'll be wanting to push back the 5th print again, won't we? :)


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Post Posted: Thu Mar 05, 2015 1:28 pm 
 

It was a very good 4th print estimate there Faro, no doubt.

I can't say I've paid a lot of attention to the various anomalies around the early D&D prints, the unexpected boxes, missing stickers, mismatched booklets, and so on. To echo something I think Mr. Kask has said here before, the ones that can't be explained by gamers mixing up components after the fact probably resulted from TSR's poor organization and haphazard order fulfillments - it's just really hard to turn either of those into meaningful sequencing.

Given that the 4th print was November, yes, I think December 1975 is a very implausible date for the 5th - but I can't say I've seen much to tell us when the 5th print started or how large it was, off the top of my head. I suspect that the 4th print took a considerable amount of time to sell. If I stumble over any hard data of the fifth, I'll post about it.

Taking another look at the supplements page, I would nudge Eldritch Wizardry from April to May 1 1976 - this is well attested both in the target release date (in SR 2.2) and then boasted about when the target date was met in Strat Prev #3.

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Post Posted: Thu Mar 05, 2015 3:44 pm 
 

*nods* Cheers, Jon! I didn't delve too deeply to cross-check the precise slippage (as far as was possible) when I left Eldritch's date in quotes on the 2005 thread, as GDH and S&S were late, too, and the danger was that other presumed-fixed monthly reference points, "promises", etc., were less likely to be reliable than usual(!) for primary evidence. And then we're back to the "printing date vs. date-in-hand vs. date sold to public" issue, of course, unless a printer's receipt happens to turn up... ;)
The starting point to work from for the 5th print OD&D box is mid-1976ish using those stocklist markers. (Also 6th & 7th OCEs the same way around as the supplements, again, as noted there).

On Tim's point, that's more to the woodgrains of course given the manner in which the boxes were filled. Even with those, a sample size of ~100 gives a reasonable degree of consistency for the mainstream development with the outliers perhaps overrepresented due to the manner in which list members have acquired those disproportionately from TSR staff. On the whole, boxes and components were not "randomly" mixed/compiled, anyhow. When we move onto the 4ths and 5ths, any Lake Geneva shuffling shouldn't be a major random factor - and indeed doesn't appear to be so - even if there wasn't any shrinkwrap to open.
Gamers, collectors and "investors", even, mixing up components requires a degree of caution, agreed. The number of mixed sets on offer on eBay is increasing, yes, but more often with regards to people adding supplements or a copy of Chainmail to "enhance" the overall sale. That's often way too obvious. :)


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Post Posted: Fri Mar 13, 2015 11:57 pm 
 

increment wrote in Was Greyhawk printed Feb 75?:The April 1975 issue of Europa (6-8) notes receipt of SR 1.2. The 1 May 1975 issue of Signal (#78) also notes receipt of SR 1.2 (it also mentions Panzer Warfare, by the by, and Star Probe had already been covered in an earlier issue). Note that due to Mansfield traveling to Europe, Signal was disrupted in April (there was no 1 Apr edition), so we have a bit of a blind spot there. Wargamer's Information #5 (June 1975) also sees SR 1.2.

[snip]

Greyhawk was available for order in March, though depending on where you were, it may have taken some time to get into your hands. For notice of receipt of Greyhawk to appear in April zines, typically it would have to be out in March. For these reasons, I've gone with March; PatW says "early March," as Gygax claimed in letters it was available as of the 7th.


Some additional data points:

Star Probe is listed as available in Space Gamer #1 (undated 1975, but the SF games survey results are printed as of 3 May 1975, and my copy is postmarked 18 June 1975, in case that helps with dating things at all, Jon).

Greyhawk is listed as available in Space Gamer #2 (which you mention in PatW), as is EPT (first copy sold at Origins 1975, per Bob Frantz, right David?).


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Post Posted: Tue May 19, 2015 1:22 am 
 

increment wrote in Was Greyhawk printed Feb 75?:Taking another look at the supplements page, I would nudge Eldritch Wizardry from April to May 1 1976 - this is well attested both in the target release date (in SR 2.2) and then boasted about when the target date was met in Strat Prev #3.


From 16 March 1976 letter from EGG to Andre Norton:

Finally, I am enclosing a copy of each of the supplements to D&D, as you did not mention having them.  Both of these booklets expand the game considerably, although I do not believe that either will help you to understand play more quickly.  A third one is currently in preparation.  "Eldritch Wizardry" will include the sub-class of clerics known as druids, psionic abilities and combat, demons, psionic-empowered monsters, artifacts and relics, and new charts for outdoor encounters.  Publication is slated for 1 May, and if you would be interested in receiving a copy please let me know.


So, that also aligns nicely with your previous research, Jon.


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