I managed to get to Titan Games first on this one and picked it up. It's a nice copy - good cover (typical scuffing but no real damage), fine, clean interior with no marks. I just read through it.

Most of it is stuff that had already been done before and after (various spell innovations, over-complex combat rules that IMO add nothing to play, but then I know there are folks that like Aftermath and Phoenix Command, I'm just not one of them), but a couple things stood out.

1) Aesthetic control over classes and multiclassing. They had the 'core four', dwarves, elves, hobbits, paladins, rangers, illusionists, and a few chioce multiclasses each specifically enumerated - nothing else. To me this gets the 'feel' of one kind of D&D about right - a little more integrity than AD&D but a little more variety than basic. Anyway, just another indicator of how class choice can shape impressions of a setting. Leaving out assassins, half-orcs, half-elves but including paladins, rangers, and illusionists seems solid to me.

(Edit later - and yet, I realize that this was something similar to what they did in 2e, and there it struck me as lame! Probably because in 2e it was mixed with getting rid of demons, nerfing spells, and a bunch of other stuff that did and does really bug me.)

2) Their take on the Thief was very nice and something I'm not sure I'd really seen before. Instead of percentile skills, thieves get ability slots which they plug particular abilities into, and there are a LOT of choices at each level (like 20 - all the traditional and other cool ones besides). A 5th level thief might have (I'm making the numbers up, but it'll give you the idea) 5 1st level abilities, 3 2nd level abilities, and 1 3rd level ability. If you trade e.g. your second level Pick Lock 45% for a third level Pick Lock 60%, you re-open the second level slot for something else; but you have to have the lower level ability to take the higher level one, so no adding e.g. Find Trap 90% with your new high level ability unless you had taken it at the level previous. A little like D&D3's feats in that respect actually, but just for thieves. A lot of nifty things like estimating long distances precisely and detecting evil auras on objects too, in addition to the usual stuff. Anyway, I like it.

Over the summer I may sell a lot of this old third party stuff I have/have been buying lately, and I'll let people here know if I do, but it's been very interesting to research up on the period I started gaming in more detail. We used stuff from Wee Warriors, Judges Guild, Arduin, Dragon Tree, EPT, the Spellcaster's Bible, and the Necronomican in various games back in the day, but a lot of the things I'm seeing from Rider or Balboa or Little Soldier I just completely missed the first time around. They're fun to look at.

I have a chronology for this book now, thanks to some online help. A manuscript was published in 1975 called Warlock, by four guys in Pasadena, CA, who called it Warlock. They printed it for playtesting, and later that year submitted an abreviated version of the manuscript for publication in a wargames magazine. It was printed in August's issue of Spartan Magazine.

The intention at the time was to publish an alternative RPG to D&D which was just emerging. However, lack of direction and focus left Warlock in playtesting and editing for some 2 years, and in that time TSR established D&D's dominant postion in the market.

Not wanting their work to go to waste, and not wanting to denegrate what they believed to be a superior RPG system, the now formed Balboa Game Company published an expanded manuscripty as The Complete Warlock in 1978. They branded it 'a major D&D variant', landing them in court.

They had amassed so much playtest edits and material that they could follow up with expansions The Warlock Menagerie and Warlock's Tower, although the original intent was to publish a three book set much the same as Arduin, D&D and T&T were doing at the time.

I'd be interested to see a photo of that. I'd also really like a cover scan of The Warlock Menagerie if you can manage it (e-mail link on button below).

I wonder why they bundle Monkey God's Curse, and not Instant Bad Guys! The others all belong together though. It would make sence if they needed to shift stock when they were in trouble.

is Instant Bad Guys valuable?

It isn't the greatest supplement but it is the one that I had the hardest time finding (of the Balboa RPG items).  I think $40 from NK is a reasonable asking price (although their $150 for Complete Warlock is out to lunch).  I probably have an extra copy of this now too.

I don't recall a "Mike Riley" being one of the original authors so I'm guessing his PDF of the rules was never an official release.  His PDF may just be his updates for them rather than the original rules.

Cali--I actually used these rules for a time. The thief rules were cool (sure strike dagger ftw), and I liked the combat system (tentacle different than dagger, etc.), but I just found it a bit cumbersome to teach it, rare to get a book, and quit using it after college. Clark and Bannor/Flail/Speigle/Helman et al lived and died in Rappan Athuk using this combat system, but I eventually just went back to 1d6 damage for everything.

Bill