I just noticed them, and was quite astonished. Who is this Kurt? No average seller has this sort of things. Nor the rare seller, in most cases. I also made some purchases from him, however nothing that can be compared to the things he just auctioned.

First, the seller seems genuine, not a ripoff type. Very friendly and cooperative.

He's sent me quick pics of various maps. They all appear entirely authentic.

So I've told him (and I'll tell you) that both items appear authentic -- but I can't say whether they're the original tournament pieces or photocopies of original tournament pieces.

But odds are, they're entirely authentic. Even when you add in the Unknown Seller factor, they should both go for a good bit -- Doc's Island for the big number of course, being the whole module's worth.

DQR7P (part 5 of 6 offered here) should go for less, being one step along the whole road... otoh, DQR7P seems to be the rarer of the two. So we'll see.


If I thought I could get my previous selling price for a complete set of DQR7P tourney copies I might put up a set. (I THINK I still have one... not sure. I DO have the masters.) But the last full set went for $3000, and there seems to be a $1.5 ceiling on most manuscripts.

Well, y'all know where to find me if you wanna make me an offer.

F

MShipley88 wrote:Tournament modules...aren't they especially vulnerable to photocopying?  Weren't they photocopies to begin with?

Yes. We may see, in this case, whether provenance and seller's reputation are major factors (such as in my sales).

My R4 prepub was sheet-fed.

Deadlord39 wrote

My R4 prepub was sheet-fed.

Frank, does that put a 'print' difference on them then - 1st print are the computer sheetfeed printed ones, and the copies are 'later' prints? Or should we still count them all as the same print for the sake of simplicity.

(Even though the computer print out ones sound like the ones less likely to be faked)

Has anyone asked for the seller's name?

ExTSR wrote:

AdderMcOne wrote:does that put a 'print' difference on them then - 1st print are the computer sheetfeed printed ones, and the copies are 'later' prints? Or should we still count them all as the same print for the sake of simplicity. (Even though the computer print out ones sound like the ones less likely to be faked)

When TSR Hobbies upgraded their antique Burroughs computer (circa 1979) to the HP-3000 mainframe (early '80s), they also started with a dot-matrix low-quality output "line printer" for most stuff (with holes along the sides of the continuous-feed paper). Some of us quickly acquired office printers as well, mostly to ease the load on the big guy. The office style had font wheels, similar to typewriters ("character printers"), producing cleaner copy than dot-matrix. However, they took a lot longer to print, and the ribbons cost more, and we were encouraged to use them for important things only. (Pencil-counter anal types at the top. Hello, Kevin B.)

For the earliest RPGA tournaments we used the line printer output. Sometimes we had time to remove the feed strips from the sides and/or separate the pages, leaving 'fuzzy' edges (detached along the perforations). imho, items such perf'd edges are 99% certain to be genuine. (Some of you have bought such items from me, and I thank you again for your spirited bidding.)

However, as the RPGA grew, line-printer output of every copy needed became too demanding for the printer. There were, after all, other needs for it. We ran 'em at night in batches at first but even that was too demanding on the limited resources (everybody started batching their big jobs at night). Thus, the RPGA was ordered at some point to make just one or two printout copies and photocopy the rest. Most '80s tourneys are thus of this type, often with the feeder holes still visible along one side of the copy.

Becoming irritated at the poor quality (dot-matrix output photocopied by inferior machines set up to minimize ink usage, thanks again to the anal penny-pinchers), the RPGA also printed tournaments on their character printer (mid-'80s) to improve readability.

That help?

Actually, it's very interesting.

I remember reading that TSR had a computer that held of lot of their material on disks...huge floppy disks...and that the old machine broke, leaving them with no way of accessing the old computer disks.

Truth?

Tough for anyone who grew up in the late 80's and 90's that the 80's started with almost nothing in the way of computer technology.

Mark  

Dude, how old are you?

The home computer market was taking off in the 80's, but computers were in their infancy.  It is hard for guys who remember the end of the 80's to even start to comprehend how primitive things were at the start of the 80's.

In 1980 there were a multitude of bone-in-the-nose primitive computer brands, operating systems and word processing programs available.  They were not particularly compatible...often requiring huge amounts of editing to transfer from one system to the other.  It was not yet clear which of the multitude would prevail.

Anyone who grew up in the era of Word...and its victory as the universal word processing program...cannot remember that it all used to be a huge crapshoot.  Really.

Dear God...late into the 80's most schools were teaching "computer" by trying to get kids to type on the Apple II!  There was no such thing as a "hard drive" until deep into the 80's and my high school computer lab was in an 8" x 12" converted janitor's closet in 1981!  Almost no one in the private market was on any such thing as an "internet" until well into the 1990's.

Tons of businesses were still using punch cards!

TSR had switched over to WordPerfect 5.1 by the end of the 80's.  That program was a dog turd compared to the way Word for Windows works.  A hardened and icky dog turd!

For instance:  When they adopted WP5.1, TSR was at the mercy of programs like Professional Writer...a program for the English computer, Amstrad.  (I have good reason to suspect that Carl Sargent, for instance, composed on an Amstrad.)  WP5.1 was just barely capable of recovering Professional Writer files as ASCI files...most of it in barely recognizable form.  It was a huge task to repair and rebuild these files with a clunky, moronic toy like WP5.1!

You really have no idea how crappy these things were.  You also have to realize how recently most computer technology developed.  The computers of today are positively telepathic compared to the computers that TSR started with.  There is just no comparison between 1980 and 1990.  The gap is even larger when you compare 1990 to 2000! My God!

In fact (and here is a thought for discussion) one could consider the explosion of creativity sparked in the RPG marketplace to be one aspect of the abrupt rise of the infant computer culture.  They were born virtually together.

Mark  

I was in the first computer class my high school offered. We used TRS80 with cassestte storage. I do not remember that we even had a printer. I remember my dad spending a boatload of money on an Apple 2c with an Applejet printer for my mom and then buying the children a Vic20. I remember upgrading to my 8088 and was high tech with my dual floppies and a video card I eventually upgraded to 1 MB of video memory. I eventually passed on the IBM 286 and bought me a 2c+ with its 3.5" floppy only to see the Apple 2GS roll out and then it get dumped for the Mac line. Seeing I could only count on Apple for dropping support for whatever I bought a few years before I bought me myself one of the new 386 IBM clones with a whoppping 17 MB (or something close to that) HDD. After that its the same old, same old...486, P1, P2, P3, P4, AMD.

I hear people go on and on about Microsoft and how evil they are. I am not going to defend them too strongly but I remember the dark days of DR-DOS, MS-DOS, the HP OS, Windows 3.0 and others I can't even recall. The days of having to make sure your software would work with the OS you happened to have and trying to find drivers for that hardware for that OS and then finding new cool software or hardware you could not use because it did not run on the OS you had. A stadardized operating system is not really a bad thing. Eventually one will usurp Microsoft and that will be ok except for the transition period where I have to see if my software will run on the Microsoft OS, the Google OS or some flavor of Linux or whatever OS Apple has hijacked for its own.