Old D&D artwork

Tillek · Posted: Thu Aug 19, 2010 2:45 am Post subject: Old D&D artwork

I have an item I am trying to identify, and am hoping the artwork will lead me to the person who created it. It seems to be a playtest or pre-production copy of the original D&D. I have shown it to one of the original players with Dave Arneson and Gary Gygax, and he seemed to feel it was either one, but could not confirm it.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/53171413@N06/sets/72157624632283163/

eta: corrected linking

scribe · Posted: Fri Aug 20, 2010 2:36 am Post subject:

I have not seen it, but it looks like the real deal in feel of both typeface and some aspects of the artistic hand. Other bits tell me it was someone else's attempt at rules variation. There were quite a few that looked similar to that stuff in the later 70's
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Tillek · Posted: Sat Sep 04, 2010 3:30 pm Post subject:

The quest has been solved.

I have shown the complete manuscript to a couple people. One a Dave Arneson expert who has been studying Dave's work for years, and another a player in his original Blackmoor campaigns. Both agree that the artwork and rules are Dave's. Now to fit it into D&D history.

The story is that Dave came up with 16 pages and gave them to Gary, who expanded them to 50 pages and sent this out as a play test copy. Dave got that copy and made his own revisions to it. Before he could get it back to Gary, Gary took all the stuff he had and published the 3 book set. The Manuscript I have is the Dave Arneson Revision to the play test rules.

scribe · Posted: Tue Sep 07, 2010 12:48 am Post subject:

That seems to be a very significant item, indeed! Keep us posted on what happens with it!!
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