The TSR Product List

So, I confess that in my slow sort-out of boxes filled with papers and miscellaneous contents I'm not just trying to get things better organized: I'm also looking for a few things that got swept up in the Sea of Stuff.  Like my copy of The Jade Hare or my beat-up old orange cover B3. Palace of the Silver Princess. Or somethings that ought to be in my slender folder of things by and relating to John Bellairs (like the photo of the two of us taken when he was Guest of Honor at the Marquette Tolkien conference in 1987). Or some cartoons by Dave Sutherland I mislaid long ago, Or my run of MYTHLORE, esp. the early issues. Or my list of all TSR rpg releases.


This past week (Tuesday) I hit a jackpot and found a copy not of the original list but of the published version, which appeared as part of the 1996 AD&D TRIVIATHILON. This was a D&D/AD&D trivia contest, held for some special reason nobody seems to remember, that folded out into a double-sided poster-sized sheet. On one side were one hundred questions about the D&D/AD&D game. Some of the questions were relatively straightforward (#39: How many metal coins in a pound? #15: What is the proper name for polar halflings?*). Some were more involved (#27: Lord Ragnar (fighter 16) has 12 hp after fighting six mummies. Deliah (cleric 18) casts every "cure wounds" spell she can. How many hit points could Regnar regain?). And some were downright tricky (#98, which relates to a piece of art I can't reproduce here). My favorite was  #38, which I cd never have guessed:

At a roadside inn, a weary human scout and a dwarf swordsman 

meet a resting halfling cutpurse and a gnome trickster. 

Under 1st edition rules, what do they all have in common?

I remember that everyone in the department donated bits of trivia, and that Steve Winter sorted through and picked out the best, put together the master list with the official list of answers, and was responsible for judging the results. I don't know how many people took up the challenge and sent in filled-out entries, but Steve tells me there was one perfect answer: 100 out of 100 right.


But for all that, it's the other side of the page that most concerns me, because I wrote it.

(continued on next post)









*I don't remember this one without going to look it up, and I edited the book it came from!