The Lost AD&D Books, Part I
During the period where Gary Gygax was being squeezed out of TSR, a great deal of material for Advanced Dungeons & Dragons was lost, and has never come to light, much of it being lost forever. This is an exploration of lost AD&D books.
The oldest of these is the first version of The Manual of the Planes, by Steve Marsh. Steve Marsh was going through his old stuff and was ready to dump a huge amount of old notes and whatnot, but the people online convinced him that there was value in these old papers, so he put them on ebay instead. Among those papers were the notes and diagrams for his version of the Manual of the Planes. I'm not sure why it didn't get printed, but no word of it has come forth from whomever bought it. (I hope they are at least treating it with care...) Further, Steve Marsh declined to reveal any details of it, in case the buyer wanted to publish the contents. All that is known for certain is that it seemed to have been fairly different from the Manual of the Planes we got, by Jeff Grubb, printed years after Steve Marsh's version was written. It did, however, likely contain the treatments of most of the inner planes by Roger E. Moore, which had appeared in Dragon Magazine, received Gary Gygax's stamp of approval, and were the basis for the writeups of those planes in the published Manual of the Planes.
Steve Marsh also sold a Harper character class, which he claimed was superior to the official bard. It sold for about 50 dollars, and like the Manual of the Planes notes, has not been heard from since. (He didn't release any details for the reasons stated above.)
More intriguing is the original version of Oriental Adventures. Gary Gygax had received the bones for the book from French writer Francois Froideval. Being pressed for time, he passed it to David "Zeb" Cook for editing. Mr. Cook instead rewrote the thing almost entirely, and though he greatly disliked it, Gary was able to do little more than a quick pass over it before it was released, as TSR was hurting for income. Gary says that Francois' version was greatly superior. Zeb says that Francois' version was about 40 pages of loose notes and that it was simply easier to just rewrite much of it instead of try and make sense of them, given the time line. At any rate, the location of this lost book is known: Gary Gygax returned Francois' notes to him about a decade ago. Why nothing has ever been done with this tantalizing tidbit is unknown to me, but it remains one of the most intriguing mysteries of Dungeons & Dragons.
Next: Gary Gygax's 2nd Edition AD&D.
The oldest of these is the first version of The Manual of the Planes, by Steve Marsh. Steve Marsh was going through his old stuff and was ready to dump a huge amount of old notes and whatnot, but the people online convinced him that there was value in these old papers, so he put them on ebay instead. Among those papers were the notes and diagrams for his version of the Manual of the Planes. I'm not sure why it didn't get printed, but no word of it has come forth from whomever bought it. (I hope they are at least treating it with care...) Further, Steve Marsh declined to reveal any details of it, in case the buyer wanted to publish the contents. All that is known for certain is that it seemed to have been fairly different from the Manual of the Planes we got, by Jeff Grubb, printed years after Steve Marsh's version was written. It did, however, likely contain the treatments of most of the inner planes by Roger E. Moore, which had appeared in Dragon Magazine, received Gary Gygax's stamp of approval, and were the basis for the writeups of those planes in the published Manual of the Planes.
Steve Marsh also sold a Harper character class, which he claimed was superior to the official bard. It sold for about 50 dollars, and like the Manual of the Planes notes, has not been heard from since. (He didn't release any details for the reasons stated above.)
More intriguing is the original version of Oriental Adventures. Gary Gygax had received the bones for the book from French writer Francois Froideval. Being pressed for time, he passed it to David "Zeb" Cook for editing. Mr. Cook instead rewrote the thing almost entirely, and though he greatly disliked it, Gary was able to do little more than a quick pass over it before it was released, as TSR was hurting for income. Gary says that Francois' version was greatly superior. Zeb says that Francois' version was about 40 pages of loose notes and that it was simply easier to just rewrite much of it instead of try and make sense of them, given the time line. At any rate, the location of this lost book is known: Gary Gygax returned Francois' notes to him about a decade ago. Why nothing has ever been done with this tantalizing tidbit is unknown to me, but it remains one of the most intriguing mysteries of Dungeons & Dragons.
Next: Gary Gygax's 2nd Edition AD&D.