The holy trilogy of AD&D 1e core books is now complete in official PDF releases - please welcome the Dungeon Master's Guide to your virtual collection.
It's $9.99 in a PDF that replicates the remastered reprint edition, including the new cover. As I've said with the other two releases, I much prefer the original covers. Still, I've heard good reports about the previous two PDF releases (Player's Handbook and Monster Manual) and it would be nice to have a clean PDF copy for my tablet.
I really hate that they put the bastardized covers on them (it's especially heinous in the case of Trampier's gorgeous and evocative PHB cover) but it's great to be able to get these legally in PDF.
ReplyDeleteYeah the premium covers aren't all that exciting (though that said I still prefer the mid-eighties reprint cover releases, even though the original release covers are the ones that smack me in the face with nostalgia), but having these nice, easy to use PDFs on hand is great.
ReplyDeleteI'm going to go ahead and allow that the reprint covers from the mid-eighties were all nice pieces of work and in any event retained the most crucial element: the contents. However, I do feel the Tramp PHB cover was the best of the six and, of all D&D cover art, best captured the intended spirit of Original D&D (exploration, planning, cooperation, killing, and looting). Certainly all of the countless covers that were just Some Guy Posing Heroically fell far short of that standard.
DeleteEh, I got these for free long ago. With the original covers.
ReplyDeleteI agree about the covers. By cropping them this way, they completely obliterate the fact that the art replicated the gameplay, as the poster above mentions. The game was about teamwork, achievement against great odds and at great risk and with potentially great rewards. All these elements were present in the 1E covers and all those elements are gone in the premium reprints. I just don't understand how an art director would have missed that crucial element to the importance of cover art in particular to evoke what the book contains. In any event, as others, I'm thrilled to have a legal avenue to obtain this content in digital form. While I had the PDFs of scans years ago, it always bothered me that I had not paid for that convenience, and now I can. And at $9.99 it's so reasonable it eliminates the excuses.
ReplyDeleteMy thoughts exactly.
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