Lost original D&D manuscript revealed

[Aldarron]

I'm obviously working at a considerable disadvantage having only seen a couple pages of the actual manuscript. How many people besides you and the original owner have read and studied the full manuscript? Do they all concur with your findings regarding it?

I don't honestly know how many people may have a copy. Probably not more than a handful, but I'm taking steps to make sure the PDF is properly curated and in the hands of institutions that could make it available for study.

[Falconer]

Dan—

Thanks for taking the time to respond to all our questions!

One thing that is never explained is on what basis you decided to refer to the item in question as Beyond This Point Be Dragons. Is there an unambiguous title page? Or is the phrase repeated throughout the manuscript? FWIW, I don’t have a “point” with this question; I am simply curious.

I’ll be honest: The part about your theory that really throws me for a loop is the idea that Arneson’s writing style is so much clearer than Gygax’s. My impression has always been the complete opposite. FFC is notoriously cryptic. You provide a single one-on-one comparison between known Arneson (FFC) and Gygax (OD&D) versions of the same passage, which reads, in part:

Minions that are directed to take up the Sword whose origins are different than that of the directing party and are not acting as free agents (i.e. they are under the player's power), will suffer damage at half the normal rates.

If a non-player character is directed to take up a sword the damage will be only one-half that stated above, for the party is not acting as a free agent.

Is there any doubt which is simpler, clearer, and has the more logical sentence structure?

Hence, if BTPBD is even clearer than OD&D, then that surely suggests that some serious editorial work was done by someone other than Arneson himself. (Cf. Snider retaining Arnesonian terminology in AiF.)

And let me just add that I don’t see how “It might be useful to point out that Gygax…had dropped out of high school…”. That entire passage seems neither useful nor likely to warm your audience — all of whom play Gygaxian D&D — to your theory.

[Benoist]

For convenience, I've attached a revised version of the entire paper on the ODD74 forum. (Don't seem to be able to do that here) http://odd74.proboards.com/index.cgi?bo ... 153&page=3

Nice, though I'd prefer you actually convinced the owner to release the entire scanned document itself.

[Benoist]

I don't honestly know how many people may have a copy. Probably not more than a handful, but I'm taking steps to make sure the PDF is properly curated and in the hands of institutions that could make it available for study.

Institutions?

[Finarvyn]

I don't honestly know how many people may have a copy. Probably not more than a handful, but I'm taking steps to make sure the PDF is properly curated and in the hands of institutions that could make it available for study.

Institutions?

Often, papers like this are turned over to institutions like universities for academic study. At least, I'm pretty sure that Tolkien's papers and Zelazny's papers were turned over to various colleges. I assume this is the kind of process Aldarron meant, unless there is a special RPG institution of which I'm not aware.

[grodog]

For convenience, I've attached a revised version of the entire paper on the ODD74 forum. (Don't seem to be able to do that here) http://odd74.proboards.com/index.cgi?bo ... 153&page=3

Nice, though I'd prefer you actually convinced the owner to release the entire scanned document itself.

Ding. We'll collectively care more, and likely provide deeper insight into the analysis of the document, than an academic institution can bring to bear.

[Zenopus Archives]

One thing that is never explained is on what basis you decided to refer to the item in question as Beyond This Point Be Dragons. Is there an unambiguous title page? Or is the phrase repeated throughout the manuscript? FWIW, I don’t have a “point” with this question; I am simply curious.

See here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/53171413@N ... 4632283163
This page is one of these:

What was posted over there by Morandir was a link to several photos of the document posted by the owner in 2010 (plus two more random pages mysteriously added last weekend):

http://www.flickr.com/photos/53171413@N ... 632283163/

One thing I noted is that one of the illustrations has a reference to a "Lord Arn":
(see pictures on page 3 of this thread)

[Falconer]

See here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/53171413@N ... 4632283163

It’s not exactly clear from that link that that is a title page.

[Aldarron]

Dan—

Thanks for taking the time to respond to all our questions!

One thing that is never explained is on what basis you decided to refer to the item in question as Beyond This Point Be Dragons. Is there an unambiguous title page? Or is the phrase repeated throughout the manuscript? FWIW, I don’t have a “point” with this question; I am simply curious.

Huh, my bad, I should have made that clearer. The name is present only on the title page/first page of the document - the one with the wizard facing the two mountains. the next page after that is the listing of the tables that I analyzed in the paper.

The basic breakdown is:

Tables pp 1-17
Glossary of Terms pp 18-33
Before Setting out for Fame and Fortune PP 1-8
The Underworld pp9=25
The Rewards of Success pp26-29+ (There was at least one more page but my copy ends here)

Excluding the tables, each of these chapters is broken in to sections so for example the Glossary has a spell section, a monster section, and a magic item section. Judging from the page numbering it looks like the intention was for two books - a reference book and a rule book.

I’ll be honest: The part about your theory that really throws me for a loop is the idea that Arneson’s writing style is so much clearer than Gygax’s. My impression has always been the complete opposite. FFC is notoriously cryptic. You provide a single one-on-one comparison between known Arneson (FFC) and Gygax (OD&D) versions of the same passage, which reads, in part:

Minions that are directed to take up the Sword whose origins are different than that of the directing party and are not acting as free agents (i.e. they are under the player's power), will suffer damage at half the normal rates.

If a non-player character is directed to take up a sword the damage will be only one-half that stated above, for the party is not acting as a free agent.

Is there any doubt which is simpler, clearer, and has the more logical sentence structure?

Hence, if BTPBD is even clearer than OD&D, then that surely suggests that some serious editorial work was done by someone other than Arneson himself. (Cf. Snider retaining Arnesonian terminology in AiF.)

Couple thoughts. First, my bad again if I left the impression that clarity was a distinguishing factor of Arneson's writing. Clarity of understanding is a result of many things and I shouldn't claim to guess what others find easy to understand vs. hard to understand. The point I was trying to make regarding Arneson's style is its colloquialness, it's style of taking the reader into the writers confidence and so on. Whereas Gygax has a very different approach. I absolutely agree that the OD&D magic swords section is a much better arrangement and improvement over the FFC version. Things generally do improve when edited and reworked.

As for the FFC being notoriously cryptic, I don't quite follow the logic. The FFC is an eclectic set of notes from the formative period of the game. The "cryptic" parts result from the unexplained rules that have no D&D analogs, some of which Arneson couldn't remember the meaning of himself. Of course, there are also large portions of the FFC that aren't obscure or difficult to follow. Since by its very nature it was never a single document, it is not surprising that there should not be any particular rhyme or reason to the way Judges guild choose to organize the various portions.

BTPBD is indeed much better organized than 3lbb's and many of the amibiguities we talk about in the 3lbb's are clarified - such as how long "upkeep" cost apply to or what it costs to hire a 3rd level fighter. To suggest that Arneson couldn't have done such a thing because he allowed JG to publish a random collection of campaign notes, would only make sense if we had nothing else to go on about the man. But of course we do have lots. We know he worked as an editor on the domesday books, we know he produced his own newsletter, we know he worked as an editor on Different Worlds magazine, we know at the end of his life he was a university instructor. We have copies of his other games, adventures, and 2 RPG's he penned (one with co-author Snider). So I don't see a logical basis for the claim that BTPBD could not possibly have been organized by Arneson as if he were somehow mentally incapable.

And let me just add that I don’t see how “It might be useful to point out that Gygax…had dropped out of high school…”. That entire passage seems neither useful nor likely to warm your audience — all of whom play Gygaxian D&D — to your theory.

I thought it was important to point out because of the natural tendency people have to assume language style automatically indicates superior/inferior inteligence or education. Specifically in this case a biased reader might assume Arneson was an ignorant chump and Gygax a learned scholar and thus be dissmissive of Arneson from the start. So the info was presented in the spirit of "rething what you think you might know". I'm a scientist, and as such not especially concerned with what emotional reaction fans of either Gary Gygax or Dave Arneson may have to these simple facts regarding their education or thier style of writing and speaking. It is what it is.

[T. Foster]

Closing the loop on this topic seven years later, it looks like the mystery behind the origin of this document has finally been solved:

https://playingattheworld.blogspot.com/ ... ontax.html

http://www.boggswood.blogspot.com/2017/ ... stery.html

So it turns out that a guy named Chuck Monson from Duluth used to drive down to the Twin Cities to play in Arneson's Blackmoor games. At some point, Arneson allowed him to take a photocopy of some of his notes (i.e. Gygax's "Guidon D&D" playtest draft, a couple dozen copies of which were circulated c. mid-1973, and one of which has recently surfaced and is on display at GenCon at this very moment) back up to Duluth so he could run games there. Which they did, using those rules and apparently making some of their own additions and changes.

Eventually, around the time D&D was released by TSR, one of the members of that group, a guy named Mark Bufkin, decided to retype the manuscript they were using, changing all the dice to 6-siders and incorporating a few of his own changes and additions - sort of like a modern OSR retro-cloner. This was a surely labor of love for Mark (which more than a few of us can probably relate to), but it was clearly an illegal bootleg and (tellingly, unsurprisingly, and further cementing its legacy as the ancestor of the OSR ) Monson reports that as far as he knows nobody ever actually played using these rules, or possibly even read them. He hadn't read them when he took a copy to show to M.A.R. Barker, who remarked that it looked like a copy of D&D (to Monson's embarrassment) and it went into a pile in Barker's garage, never to be thought of again until some "Arnesonian" bloggers c. 2012 decided it must be the secret Lost Arnesonian Rosetta Stone that represents the "real" D&D (as compared to Gygax's inferior/compromised version, published by TSR).

There's still a minor curiosity factor in this document, because it's based on the pre-publication draft of D&D so it's missing some of the things we take for granted (like the Dex stat and Sleep spell) and because it represents some group's (or perhaps just one person's?) house-rules and additions from a very early phase - probably the earliest printed example we're ever likely to have of such a thing, since it apparently dates from mid 1974 at the latest. But that's all it is. Mark Bufkin wasn't part of Arneson's group and didn't have any special, secret insights - he was just Some Guy who had a 3rd-generation copy of the D&D pre-publication draft and a shaky grasp of copyright and intellectual property law, who apparently decided it was worth the effort to retype the whole thing in his own image rather than give TSR $10.

Which, as it turns out, is almost exactly what I speculated its origin to be up at the top of this thread (and what Gary Gygax declared it to be when he was shown it), except that I guessed the bootlegger was working from a copy of the actual D&D books instead of a pre-publication version, which later turned out to be incorrect. My guess was that it probably dated from around 1976 or 77, when apparently it's actually from 1974 (or maybe even late 1973 - which lends credence to the story of why TSR were in such a hurry to get D&D published, because they knew that copies of the playtest drafts were already circulating).

It's nice to finally get closure on this (and especially to have my first impressions belatedly proven right ).

[EOTB]

It's the D&D version of Al Capone's Vault.

"Welp, there's nothing really here folks but we did find a beautiful example of a 1920s glass bottle."

Since we know that gamer-variants of D&D were common from the first day people got their hands on it and hacked the rules, what makes this one any more special than dozens of other mixes of published rules and house rules?

[Falconer]

True that it is not in fact a D&D manuscript, and the D&D manuscript it was based on has now surfaced (right?). But, until recently, it was our closest thing we had to the manuscript.

[Falconer]

And by we, I mean its gatekeepers; unless it has in fact been released to the public?

[T. Foster]

And by we, I mean its gatekeepers; unless it has in fact been released to the public?

My understanding is that the guys working on the "Secrets of Blackmoor" documentary are (or at least were at one point) willing to send pdf copies to anyone who emailed them asking for one.

[T. Foster]

True that it is not in fact a D&D manuscript, and the D&D manuscript it was based on has now surfaced (right?). But, until recently, it was our closest thing we had to the manuscript.

Indeed, I can appreciate how this document seemed a lot more interesting when it first surfaced in 2012 and was an apparent window into a then-missing pre-publication version of D&D (which raised all manner of questions and intriguing possibilities) than it does now, when the full pre-publication manuscript has been found and it's obvious that this document is just a combined bootleg ripoff and idiosyncratic personal variant of that manuscript.

If anything, it shows how little the hobby has fundamentally changed in the last 43 years. Just like Rob Kuntz's early dungeon maps on the El Raja Key Archive look almost exactly like the dungeon maps I drew as a kid, this document is pretty much the same as every OSR retro-clone game