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Word count on original 3 books
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goodmangames
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Post Posted: Sat Feb 24, 2007 7:46 pm 
 

Hi guys,

I'm working on a project and have a question that you might be able to help with. If anybody can answer this, it's the folks of the Acaeum. And the question is: What is the word count of the original 3 D&D booklets? (The booklets from the original boxed set.) If anyone knows, please share...

Thanks,
Joseph


Joseph Goodman
Goodman Games
www.goodman-games.com
  

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Post Posted: Sat Feb 24, 2007 10:43 pm 
 

Well, I can give you a guesstimate, based on my personal rule set for the game, which used the three books as a base.

What I had, including table of contents and an index, but not including the foreward and introduction, came out to approximately 100,000 words.  The original three books, plus the first three supplements as well as Chainmail, came out to about 60,000 words.  Since the supplements were much more meaty than the original books, I'd be conservatively estimating the word count at 25,000 words.

I don't have an exact figure though.


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deimos3428
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Post Posted: Sat Feb 24, 2007 11:26 pm 
 

goodmangames wrote:Hi guys,

I'm working on a project and have a question that you might be able to help with. If anybody can answer this, it's the folks of the Acaeum. And the question is: What is the word count of the original 3 D&D booklets? (The booklets from the original boxed set.) If anyone knows, please share...

Thanks,
Joseph

By nefarious means*, I've come up with the following:

Men & Magic = 13,379.
Monsters & Treasure = 15,797.
Underworld & Wilderness Adventures = 13,138.

That's for the 6th printing, and it's not exact but should be very close.  

* Ok, I found an illegally produced PDF, downloaded it, and copied the OCR text into a word processor to get the word count.  I don't feel bad about it because I own at least one copy of each of the white box printings.  No, I won't tell you the URL.  ;)
 YIM  

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Post Posted: Sun Feb 25, 2007 7:42 pm 
 

43,000 words?  My, I was WAY too conservative in my estimate.


The Gray Book: My homage to E.G.G.

Star Trek: Alpha Quadrant: The game Mongoose failed to make.
  
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