Binders full of bad ideas

This full page, glossy ad appeared on the inside cover of Dragon #55 in 1981. Apparently, someone at TSR (probably not E. Gary Gygax) decided on a new product line to synergize with the raft of rules books already produced by the company.

And that product was: Three ring binders.

This is around the time that the Moldvay/Cook basic rulebooks appear which were produced with holes for binders. I have noted that I did not meet many people who tore apart their rulebooks to put them in binders, but obviously some marketing genius at TSR had a vision.

I know, you are probably kicking yourself for not thinking of this product sooner. Note that this issue is from November, so you can rule out April foolery.

I can't be sure if any of these actually were sold. I did not see any on eBay, nor does a google image search return anything like the binder pictured here.

Could that picture of the product be any smaller? Couldn't the shirtless guy be holding it? What do you suppose is in that chest anyway? He sure has a dumb grin on his face. He looks like a surfer.

What was I talking about? Oh, right: binders.

$5 (plus $1.25 S&H) will get you one binder with 28 sheets of graph paper. Using google's shop function, I can find binders for a little more than $1 today (with crazy S&H fees).

What test marketing did they do for this? Was salmon really the color to lead with?

The moral of this story, kids, is no product idea is too stupid not be tried by someone in a successful company (which TSR most certainly was in 1981).

Maybe I need to revamp this RPG-themed binder idea as a kickstarter.

Every gamer's dream

From Dragon #82, published February, 1984 comes this ad for the seventh annual winter fantasy convention from TSR.

That kid creeps me out. The kid's fantasy creeps me out. Frosty the Snowman vs. sad knight Pinocchio? The whole ad could easily be for NAMBLA.

I need a shower and some whiskey.

A complete line of components

From Dragon #50, June 1981, comes this wonderful glimpse into the gaming industry.

It is an ad for a game manufacturer, which is to say, they offer publishing services specifically for RPGs and board games.

What do they provide? Dice? Check. Spinners? Of course! Die cut counters? All day, everyday. Maps? Dude, they have game technicians ready to review your needs.

For such a company to exist and advertise, it implies a demand. This was a time just before "TV games" invaded every home. Even then, people had time and money for leisure. The game market was on fire, like some sort of analog dotcom boom. A lot of little startups, like Patch Press, were trying to get a piece of that sweet, sweet hobby pie.

Everyone want to have a cash hoard, to have "Gygax money."

Actually, I see something like this happening now with the OSR community. Just look at the success of recent projects like Adventurer Conquerer King, The B/X Companion and the Dwimmermount kickstarter. The "Patch Press" of today are companies like Lulu, DriveThru RPG and Dragonsfoot.

I don't expect the hobby to generate a lot of wealth this time around, but the cost of production is so much lower than ever before. Some one or two people will make a tidy sum.

Life (and hobbies) will find a way.

Silk screened in brilliant gold

A momentous issue, Dragon #50 appeared in June 1981. Because of the weird publishing schedule of the first several issues, this was Dragon's fifth anniversary. As you can imagine, there are many editorials reflecting on the success of the magazine and the state of the hobby. The future was so bright then, they probably needed to wear to some of protective eye gear.

What's interesting about this ad, which appears toward the back of the issue, is it again reminds me powerfully of the pre-Internet era. This is an ad for a t-shirt. There is one design, some tricked out dragon. You get two choices: shirt size and color (blue or black). That's it! The vendor also probably bought a bunch of t-shirts already to meet the anticipated demand.

Do you kids even recognize the abbreviation in the corner, s.a.s.e? That's Self-Addressed Stamped Envelope. These days, we just expect to see the catalogs of vendors instantly online for free.

Heck, if a site takes longer than 15 seconds to load, I am gone, baby.

However, customers were a lot more patient then. In those days, vendors would have to send you printed colateral. And that costs money! I think that by asking customers to send their own stamped and addressed envelope, vendors were connecting with people who are really interested in their product.

Dare I say that this was a primative spam prevention mechanism in the postal days?

I would love to know the success rate of these early advertisers.

Your ad here

From The Dragon, #35, March 1980, is this form for the short-lived Dragon want ads.

In the Before Times, people with common interests would advertise for all kinds of goods and services in printed publications, like Dragon. That Dragon's circulation was big enough to sustain this service goes aways to showing how big the hobby was at that time.

In an article from the same issue, Gygax mentions that TSR was pulling in between $2-4 million that year and that Dungeons and Dragons was the most popular game that year including monopoly and scrabble. Also the circulation of Dragon was around 50,000.

Is your mind blown yet?

So what kinds of things were being advertised in The Dragon?

• A service to paint your miniatures realistically
• An inexpensive electronic 1-100 "randomizer"
• Fly Flight, the fly swatting simulation (think paper and pencil not computer)

I suppose BBS, eBay and social media take the place of want ads these days, but still these are great to read.

Tell them you saw it in The Dragon

This ad comes from The Dragon, issue #35, published March 1980.

It's an ad for fantasy bookplates.

Let me back up. In the 80s, there were these things called "books," which were like e-books, but more papery. And each book contained only one manuscript. And this wasn't because of some harsh DRM scheme; the technology allowed for only one story per book. I think it was a RAM issue or something.

Anyway when you had a particularly nice hardcover book like the Player's Handbook, you might want to mark it to discourage other people from stealing it from you. I did this with crayons, but fancier people might employ a "bookplate," which was a nazzy label affixed to the inside cover of a book. Often you would see bookplates used by libraries to identify their property.

Oh, so there were these places full of books called "libraries" that you could enter FOR FREE and read any book there FOR FREE, just like a Borders or Barnes and Nobles but without the coffee. And unlike Borders or B&N, you could borrow the book FOR FREE. Can you imagine how primitive that was? Where was the free market in this scheme?

So this dude or lady made some bookplates and took an ad out in The Dragon, whose readers were likely to have hardcover books. You see the business opportunity already, don't you? It's call market research.

Now, there wouldn't be web sites for another 15 years or so. That means you couldn't just download the PDF version of the bookplate, printed it on your Star Trek lazer printer and tape it to your DMG. No, you had to write for the catalog. Write a letter! Like a damn monkey! And then, you'd have to wait days, maybe WEEKS for the thing to show up in the mail. Only then could you make your selection of bookplate and write ANOTHER letter BY HAND to get the actual thing you wanted in 4 to 6 WEEKS.

Can you see why there was recession after recession in the eighties?

You kids have no idea how good you have it now.

Tired of travelling all the time but getting nowhere?

This is the last thing I am ripping off from Dragon #58 (Feb. 1982).

The Travellers RPG, although popular, was not nearly as popular as DnD. So it is really fun to see this upstart company called Archive go right after this tiny fraction of a niche market. And do so with such venom.

Archive put out a few other game systems, none of which I played. That says more about my brand-loyalty than the quality of their games.

It's like a hate letter written to Grognardia from the past.

Can you elude the Sandmen?

This ad comes from fabulous Dragon #58, published Februrary 1982.

Do you remember when movies sought after role playing game ties to help advertise? No? It was a long, long time ago.

Although it has gained a cult following now, Logan's Run was not well received when it debuted. A Michael York vehicle, the movie attempted to be some commentary on dwindling resources, excessive government, sexual liberation and free will. Or something. All the sci-fi films of time were about this.

I think the main appeal of this film over Zardoz is that at no time during the narrative does Sean Conner appear in a shiny red diaper.

The International DM Search is ON!

These understated affairs come from The Dragon #16, from July 1978. Why yes, I did just buy this on eBay! Thanks for asking!

In the previous ad for a TSR employee, TSR busted out an illustrator. But I suppose things were a lot leaner in 1978. Didn't Carter tell the country to put on a sweater or something that year? In any case, those Americans not wallowing in a malaise and for whom this recent offshoot of war gaming was of interest might have found this ad on page 21 (the zine had but 35 pages then) intriguing.

What were these "fringe benefits" alluded to in the ad? What sort of design and editorial experience were they looking for? And if one had a solid grounding in Monopoly, was that sufficient "general knowledge" of games? I suppose we'll never know the answers to these questions. But I'm sure some now legend of D&D answered the call.

Perhaps having been badly burned before, this ad requests a resume AND a photo. I believe that this practice is totally illegal now, at least when the request comes from outside of the entertainment business.

I swear, this makes me what to initiate a kickstarter project to re-create TSR.

The second ad puts all DMs on high alert as TSR takes on the quest of finding all Dungeon Masters. That's right, if you've ever read through a module and told a group of your friends "your elf has been killed by the kobold Under-Lord," you could appear in The Dragon.

I guess this was a kind of "dating" site to match players and DMs? Seems weird, but times were desperate before (and after) the Internet. You kids don't know how lucky you are.

I have the later issue where the completed list of DMs appears. It's sort of like a blog roll, but with 3 parts crazy and one part sad.

And look, no pictures are requested for the DMs. Coincidence?

Finally a useful adventure program

Both of these ads appear in Dragon magazine #91, published November 1984. By this time, Dragon was a very polished affair and most of the truly goof ads were banished to the back of the magazine and shrunk to an 1/8 of the page.

Ads like the ones here.

In the fall of 1984, I had a T. I. 99/4a. The keyboard had great action. Too bad I didn't have a tape or disk drive for it. I might have started programming 10 years earlier. Without the Internet (or a modem), without a disk drive, the T.I. in my home was limited to a few expensive game cartridges which I played the heck out of.

Firstly, I am impressed that this ad appears to have been "typeset" on the T.I. That sure looks like a dot-matrix printout with a hand-drawn circle-Register symbol. Next, the feature list of this "software" is pretty laughable even now. Desktop publishing was just starting, particularly with the new Macintosh computers from Apple. Even though this ad looks cheesy and terrible now, at the time it looked modern and sci-fi -- like digital watches, Devo and Ronald Reagan's hair.

So what does this software do? Create "randome" (you know, like randomy, randomish, etc) names? Do you kids even know what computers were like before spell check? All of these features are essentially the same program: create a table of data and pick a random element from it. This is the sort of exercise I give to students when I teach programming. In modern computer languages, this is fairly trivial to execute.

The prelude to picking a random element out of a table is generating a random element. Dice rollers are trivial, just look at the one I wrote in javascript. However, creating a truly random number generator is difficult because computers are pretty deterministic things.

Enough with the comp sci.

Character generation is slightly more complicated (I've written at least two versions of this program in the last 3 years). There are specific "business rules" that apply to each kind of character in each kind of RPG system. It gets more complicated if you are going to select spells and equipment for them. More complexity is added when you allow random levels. You don't want to allow 9th level halflings, right?

So, to recap: this "Medival [sic] Creator" isn't Zork. It's not even a game. And it costs $15? In 1984? You could get dinner at McDonald's and see a movie for $15 in those days.

The next ad is for the Dragonbone, which surely must also be the name of an adult film by now. This device generates random numbers for you, which is just one of the features of the "Medival [sic] Creator." But it is "hardware" and so costs $15. The hardcover AD&D books were selling for $12 at the time (modules for $6). However, I seem to recall "nice" dice being sort of expensive in the day, so maybe this wasn't out of line.

Grognardia covered his thoughts on this dopey device, but unlike him, I always thought it was useless. Rolling dice is fun! It is the primary physical activity of RPGs. Why do you want to get rid of that?

What would have been nice is a program to track time and events during an adventure. Eventually, I would discover that this program is called a "spreadsheet" and, although available in 1984 in the form of Visicalc, was far beyond my price range at the time. And now, thanks to Google, spreadsheets are free.

I can't find it now, but I am sure I have seen an even earlier version of the Dragonbone ad than either this one or the one on Grognardia. When I dig it up, I'll post it.

I just realized another advantage of blogging about ads: no C&D orders.

Friendly working atmosphere, a reasonable hourly wage

This ad appeared on page 56 of Dragon #47, from March 1981.

How awesome is this ad? Well, EROL OTUS DID THE ILLUSTRATION. That's pretty much all I need to see. But even better, it's an ad for a position at TSR. From the looks of it, it looks like an editorial assistant gig. This is back in the day when being an editor was a job humans had and not just the name of a program.

However, you can perhaps see a bit of the corporate culture taking over at TSR. This ad is like some many of those I see for tech startups these days who have just gotten funding.

Tech startups could easily re-used Otus's graphic to represent software development.

Notice that Doug Blume is referenced. Where is he now?

Also note that Steve Winter saw this exact ad in this issue and applied to TSR. If I were in my 20s and saw this, I would have jumped on it too.

All Instrumental stereo albums

At the risk of stepping on Grognardia's style, I will be pointing out some of the ads from my collection of ancient Dragon magazines that I feel we all need to know about. Few of these ads will be directly enlightening to players of the game. Most will be a thrilling dark ride into the artifacts that have always surrounded this hobby. Artifacts I both adore and ridicule.

First up come this ad from Dragon #100, published August 1985. Dragon #100 was one of the last issues I received as part of my subscription. Somehow, I missed this ad at time.

It's bad enough that someone wrote, played and record "music for adventure gaming." Then again, I did buy a collection of apocalyptic classical music for Y2K. In any case, this harkens back to the days of Long Playing records (kids, use wikipedia).

Obviously, incidental music was what most of us were missing in our orc slaying.

Perhaps I will uncover an ad for a product that provides "authentic medieval smells of the cities, towns and villages for your next gaming session."

This ad pays the reader in laughs for each additional viewing.

Someone totally needs to write a module called "Empires of Dance."