yeah i quite like the dark folk one. cant judge quite yet, cos i havent seen kobold hall, blasted lands or beastmaker mountain yet, so until i do, cant make a definite decision, but i guess dark folk at the moment.

Al

I just bought a Mayfair lot from Titan Games.  The copy of Dark Folk was a bit mangled, but I am looking forward to reading it.  I think the one about giants also looks promishing.

    Titan is OK if you are buying lot-sized items.  

    I like the uneven publishing values of the Role Aids line.  I also like a good trade lawsuit to spice up my game publication enjoyment.

    Most of the Role Aids products in my possession include nice maps (towns and cities included) and several adventures.  They are a good value to the active gamer.  They remind me a lot of the feel of the original Judges Guild items.

Mark

MShipley88 wrote:I KICK myself at my selective memories of how many classic publications I did not buy off the discount rack. The memory is selective because I forget how much money I did not have at the time.

Mark  

Oh man, don't get me started on my stories...

Okay, here's two. First, the worst ever... I decided to get out of D&D in my sophmore year of high school (Fall '84, to be exact), apparently because I thought I was going to get a "real social life" or something, and so *sold off all my games*. Three months later, I realized how stupid I had been, and went to my friends to play again. Some of them let me buy some of my stuff back, like my PHB, DMG, MM, and such... but the *complete Judges Guild collection* I'd had was gone, as some didn't want to sell it back, and others had sold or traded bits on. Yes, that was a *complete Judges Guild collection* in 1984. I got back my CSIO Revised and a couple other things, but it essentially took almost 20 years to rebuild that collection.

Second, not D&D related, mostly, was when I was running games at a convention in February 1994 (Gamicon in Iowa City, to be exact). I ran several D&D games, and the con com had some miscellaneous prizes, donated by manufacturers, to give to game masters. They gave me several decks and packs of cards for some game called "Magic: The Gathering," four starters and eight boosters, I think it was. Not caring much for some strange card game (it had not hit in Iowa City yet, and being in college concentrating on a masters degree I hadn't really been following things then) I gave the cards to the players in my game, as prizes for best role-player and such. I found out later that they were Beta cards; apparently the con-com had gotten them from Wizards back in November. I found out because the players, who were one of the core groups that started Magic big in Iowa City later brought me into their games, and mocked me for giving away the valuable cards... including a Black Lotus and a Mox. Of course, "valuable" in those days was a $50 Black Lotus and a $20 Mox...

Briarwood (the neutered CSIO) made me laugh...in the same way I laughed when I got a copy of Judges Guild's first Book of Treasure Maps in a lot...a copy that had been cut off at an extreme slant along its right edge....



   You gotta laugh when you see it because the alternative is to cry.



   Beats me what Mayfair was thinking. Were they trying to simply use the CSIO name to boost their own product?  



   Mark

What is it with game companies leaving parts of a city blank to allow players to "explore" or allow DM's to "add their own details?"



    The point of a city map is to SHOW what is there!



    I could draw my own city...so why would I DRAW YOURS?



Mark

dathon wrote:

MShipley88 wrote:What is it with game companies leaving parts of a city blank to allow players to "explore" or allow DM's to "add their own details?"



 The point of a city map is to SHOW what is there!



 I could draw my own city...so why would I DRAW YOURS?



Mark

Yep, that's a great point, and the same one I've been making about the first Undermountain boxed set for years. Drawing up a bunch of dungeon maps is the easy part, populating them in a logical, coherent and creative way is far more difficult. That's what I hope to get when I buy an RPG product, not a bunch of maps and best wishes of luck populating the empty spaces from the publisher.  :roll:

    ...And Dathon KNEW I was going to post right after this one!!!  :twisted:  :twisted:

    Just kidding we have been going round on this product for years (I think it's one of the top ten RPG products ever published; Dathon thinks it's one of the bottom ten)

    But see I'm the opposite, I really hate having to draw up maps of dungeons or cities or villages; I prefer to use existing maps and do the "hard" work of populating.  All my self drawn dungeon maps tend to look like crap on grid paper.  My villages and cities look worse.

    Going back to the theme of this thread, I did like a few of the Mayfair products becuase they did always seem to have nice maps I could use....off the top of my head, I think they had a module Ice Elves I copped the map for this for one of my own adventures; ditto on Evil Ruins.  I think Lich Lords was the one with the five liches that ruled a country, I used the general maps and theme of this one for my own lich ruled kingdom.

   Mayfair were never the highest quality stuff but were definitely usable.



Mike B.

I love the RA stuff! Very well written and great cover art. I always appreciated the detail and the fact that the early stuff was very durable.

I've still got a box of their products boxed up somewhere. I've got to dig it out and catalogue it (just moved).

I have been taking snipes at some Role Aids items.  I recently got Throne of Evil and Monsters of Myth and Legend II for cheap.  I have been trying to find a reasonably priced copy of Throne of Evil since the late 80's.  

I sometimes wake up and remember to kick myself for not purchasing an original print of Demons at Goodwill for $0.25 back in the early 90's, but the topic scared me  8O  at the time.    

Mark  

mordrin wrote:I was always scornful of non-TSR product in my youth.  Now I'm more willing to consider other sources.  But the only Mayfair module I ever got a hold of and read was FEZ II(?).  Timetraveling anachronistic crap, so I never got another.

   Well, as a Judges Guild collector, it is hard for me to criticize the overall quality of Mayfair's Role Aids line.

    The thing is...and this is the thing...a lot, lot, lot, lot of TSR products were either useless, worthless or both useless and worthless...bigtime.

    I find it hard to get excited about most TSR modules because they so often fall short of the promises on the cover.

    So...and this is what I mean...the suckage of some Mayfair products was and is matched by the eternal suckmonsteritudity of some TSR products.  But with Mayfair you at least have something different to love or hate.

   Probably the most brutal suck-a-tudinal Mayfair module is The Keep.  (Time travel, movie tie-in, worthless maps, Nazis, no real adventure, almost nothing to fight, you name it...) It is also one of my favorites from Mayfair.  Go figure...I liked the movie back when and I really like the book.

    Then again, one man's sucktastic wasteland is another man's happy hunting/killing ground.  Giants is kinda cool.  So is Dark Folk.

    Some of the Mayfair products do not suck because of the sheer amount of adventure crammed into any given book....such as Dwarves, Elves, Dragons and Wizards.