Kingofpain89 wrote:Did neither of you see this from the same seller???


** expired/removed eBay auction **


Anyone want to take a guess on the end price of this one?

bombadil wrote:Yeah, that surprised me too.

faro wrote:
To have the supplement without the core book... thus far, anyhow.
Would be an interesting background if the seller managed that, given the publication history.

faro wrote:Two copies of the 1e rules this year; one of which had a mini-poster, postcard(!) and errata sheet.

The Collector's Trove wrote:Howdy All,




Actually, it was the Cthulhu fanbase that thought this was something much more than it actually was.

I had this original, typed, partial ms. from Steve, along with 1000's of other sheets all jumbled together. When I asked Steve what this was he told me about American Gothic and how the manuscript contained many of the original concepts of the game, many developed hand-in-hand with Sandy Peterson. He also told me it was pre-Call of Cthulhu. All of that is accurate. However, that is not the whole story.

The manuscript is actually an installment of his ongoing mini-fanzine, The Cupric Text (a nod to Steve's City of of the Revenaunt campaign), that ran in The Wild Hunt (IIRC).

The ms. sold for about $40 and was water under the bridge for the D&D collecting community. Then a few days after, the Call of Cthulhu fanbase discovered the ended auction and were bemoaning the fact that they had missed out on something they thought was "important". They talked it up quite a bit and even tendered some buy-out offers to Invincible Overlord in the hundreds of dollars range.

Then it came to light what the original ms. really was: a fanzine article by Steve containing some concepts of American Gothic. Still, the ms. is pre-Call of Cthulhu and it does contain developmental concepts from American Gothic. The critical missing bit of information is that it is an original ms. for Steve's The Cupric Text, mini-fanzine.

It turned out that the 1st page of the ms. was accidentally mixed into another collection of mss. Thus, the discovery of my oversight. The error was mine and I failed to connect the dots on this particular item. Had I pressed Steve further, or had a collection of The Wild Hunt, I may have come to a more accurate identification.

When I offered to buy it back from Invincible Overlord he politely declined and said he would hang on to it, feeling the purchase price was equal to it's value. Simply adding "from Mini-fanzine, The Cupric Text 1977" to the Letter of Authentication would clarify the matter.

You'll note that the Authentication Letter has my contact information on it so that these sorts of things can be verified. To date no one has contacted me about this item, although I have sent a note to the seller.


Futures Bright,

Paul