I'm glad you guys are snapping up those copies on Amazon.  

All four of the copies for under $15 are gone...so Acaeum guys must have moved in fast.  

There is still a copy for $29.95...which beats the copy at Powell's City of Books even with $3.99 shipping.

I would be interested in hearing if any of the other four copies arrive with problems.  I have not had a problem with an Amazon purchase yet.

Ah well. Along with 994 of the rest of us.
Still, they remain to be found.
You're damn lucky to have found a copy. Where'd you get it? eBay?
I'm giving serious consideration to buying and stock piling RAR. It's a great product.

I had a copy in shrink that I bought last summer.  I stared at it for a little while but wanted to know if it had the golden ticket as well so I cracked it open.

Golden ticket....almost am I tempted.  

Right.
There was an NG thread when they first came out where people listed their number and a similar one discussing the golden tickets. A Google search should throw it up.
Surprised you found a UK LGS with a RAR mint in shrink. Shows how thick these people really are.
How much did it cost you?

I've never been near a Mongoose since the really early years. They used to employ people who couldn't read or speak English to proof read, and I don't think it's ever changed since. The level of crap they produce is the one major reason I was amazed that Trigee were considering them. Mind you, I don't expect Trigee to do anything but ruin a perfectly good product range and financial base, and on that basis, Mongoose are the perfect vehicle for it. The perfect partnership.

Aside, have Mongoose ever published anything worth reading at all?
I've always considered them to be in the same league as AEG? Fighting to be the worlds worst.

It is truely a sad state of affairs when a publisher becomes notorios for publishing poor quality product, and cannot be arsed doing anything about it. I can only place AEG as the world's worst RPG publisher, above Mongoose, because AEG went one step further and tried to shift incredible back catalog of crap on RPGNow/RPGDrivethru, by producing some of the worst PDF home scanned images available in the owrkd, then reducing their quality as far as they could manage and offering them for sale.

If you truely want to know what the worst PDFs available are (and I'm taking worse than the early JG stuff offered six years ago here), then go and buy any of the scanned AEG abortions at RPGNow.

Mongoose come a close second, on account that they only produce crap products and fail to carry out any form of quality control, and presumable rely on the chinese to do their proofreading for them. But they have not resorted to asking their neighbour's kids to scan copies for sale as PDFs yet. So, well done to Mongoose for getting that part of their publishing business right.

One day they'll employ someone who's learned English at school, and maybe even someone who can work a DTP package, and then who knows where the company can go. Until then, they will remain second only to AEG as the worst RPG publisher on the planet.

I tend to rate D20 products on two scales:  The quality of the adventure (game value) and the collectibilty of the publication (monetary and prestige value).  Production values are a secondary consideration.

Part of the reason I like the D20 Era is because the OGL gave power to the people.  Armed with technology beyond our dreams in the 70's, everyone with time to type and a little cash tried publishing their big module/campaign/magazine.   The ones with at least some business sense managed to publish a second product..and a third...

It was classic D&D type stuff....a shared creative explosion.

That's what D&D itself was in the early 70's...a basement project by gifted amateurs with guts.  The production values were terrible, the art was laughable, the writers were eccentrics and the proofreading was shaky....and it was brilliant.

Inarguably, TSR itself got more "professional" as time went on.  But, I don't think anyone would argue that TSR's publications got better as time went on.  If anything, the trend was down, down, down, to the professional standard we find in the 2nd Edition publications.  Dungeoneer's Survival Guide was "professional."  So was Wilderness Survival Guide.  They also sucked...hard.  (Yes, I know those are AD&D not 2nd Edition.  They're just examples of a trend.)

I believe the D20 publications will be looked back on the way we think of pulp fiction of the 1920's and 30's.  If you know fantasy/sci fi/horror at all you can list a large number of writers now considered classic masters who started in the pulp boom.  Also, think of the classic artists who surfaced in that era.

That's one of the reasons I am collecting D20 now, rather than after it has time to molder in garages and get rare.  I think collectors who spurn the D20 stuff now will regret it later.

Of course, the D20 Era set a new standard for proofreading gaffes.  

Part of the charm of the D20 boom was that a lot of it was from enthusiastic amateurs rather than from corporate machines.

Overall, I'd say the amateurs out-created the pros, and not just in volume.  They beat the pros because they had a lot less to lose.  It's like every creative guy got the chance to play literary air guitar on stage and some of them did it really well.

One might look on the D20 products as examples of what historians will call the "early" computer era.  (Hell, maybe even "primitive" or "archaic.")  Spellcheckers replaced people, allowing humorous errors to stay in the text.  Cut and paste technology contributed some goober paragraphs.  

Add to that the wide range of paper quality, print quality, artwork, graphic design, binding and computer-generated maps.....oh boy!

But remember that the term "pulp" had to do with paper quality and production values as well as the mass-market nature of the writing.  Pulps were lurid.  Pulps were naughty.  Pulps varied widely in the quality and subject matter from story to story.  It was all much fun.

The D20 boom has its own brand of charm to match the 70's technology home-brew products (Midkemia, for instance) that made it into print to support AD&D.  A lot of stuff from the golden era of AD&D is cool because it sucks.

I remember a whole table of bargain AD&D non-TSR stuff for 99 cents each at J.K. Gill in Milwaukie, Oregon c. 1980.  Back then 99 cents was a substantial sum for me and most of the items were laughably bad.  If I could go back in time and blow all my teenage cash on that one table I could clean up on Ebay to the tune of several thousand dollars.

This is the J.K. Gill moment for D20.

FormCritic wrote:All four of the copies for under $15 are gone...so Acaeum guys must have moved in fast.  

There is still a copy for $29.95...which beats the copy at Powell's City of Books even with $3.99 shipping.

I would be interested in hearing if any of the other four copies arrive with problems.  I have not had a problem with an Amazon purchase yet.

I got my copy of R3 that I purchased from Amazon at $15, it was in NM condition, thanks alot for the heads-up.