Vacation Reading

One  of the things I took along on vacation to read, was the first 50 issues of Dragon Magazine from the CD-ROM archive I got a few years ago (a decade? Who knows?)  It was fun figuring out where I joined in the fun   (somewhere in 77-78, when I was in 7th grade, I had the first edition of the first version of Basic D&D--the one with the Blue Cover edited by Eric Holmes),  It looks like AD&D first edition was not out yet, although the Monster Manual was soon on the way.  So, if I had actually met anyone who was playing at the time, and they weren't playing basic, they would have been playing Original D&D, in the three soft-back brown booklets.

I was actually familiar with many of the articles I came across in the Dragon.  The 'Best of the Dragon volume 1" was something I got when I was still in high school, and was a huge influence on how I DMed.  It was really cool looking at many of those articles again.

One very interesting thing was just how thin-skinned Gary Gygax was.   There was one editorial he wrote, absolutely furious with plagiarists (quite rightly so).  But then he goes on a huge tear about Amateur Press Association publications.  These things (APA's), were set-ups where any old jerk would write an article, a story. or whatever, then send it to a particular APA and pay a fee.  The coordinator would compile all the articles together, get them printed, send one copy to everyone who had submitted and also would sell copies to interested readers.   There were several APA's that published Role-playing materials back then.  APA's in general, I believe, have been more or less made redundant by the Internet, although I believe that one of them from the old days still exists "Alarums and Excursions", and one could argue that "Fight On!" magazine, which publishes new "Old School" material through PDF and Print-On-Demand is more or less an APA. 

Anyway,  Gary spewed forth an unremitting stream of bile against APA's in this editorial.  He basically called anyone who published anything in any of them a wanna-be, a loser, a vainglorious puss who couldn't get published for real.   It was really pretty strong,   I suppose it's good that Gary was in the wilderness when the Internet came to town.   My gosh, they just let anyone say anything on that thing.

I guess I knew Gary was a bit thing skinned.   My only contact with him was on an internet message board, where I posted something about not liking how D&D 3rd edition handled Spears.   I know old Gygax was a big spear and polearm guy (several articles by him in early Dragons), but he basically tore me a new one.  I was surprised, since he didn't have anything to do with D&D 3rd edition, and I hadn't directed the comment in any way toward him.   I knew he occasionally posted on that board, but wasn't expecting he'd notice.