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| Gary Gygax as TSR Hobbies President |
I like reading again and again old game magazines (I like reading new ones too, but they very few!) because quite often I spot articles I did not read before or articles that I did read before but now, with the benefit of added insight and knowledge, acquire a more significant meaning. And so...
...I was reading Dragon 103 (November 1985), published when Gary Gygax gained again control of TSR, Inc. from his business partners and Lorraine Dille Williams was an (important) employee. TSR Inc., reeling from one of its worst crisis, had started releasing very successful products such as AD&D module T 1-4 The Temple of Elemental Evil, the extremely popular (saleswise) AD&D sourcebook Unearthed Arcana (home of Method V of character creation), the new Marvel Super Heroes role playing game (approved during the Blumes' management however) and the Classic D&D Companion and Master Sets. My eyes stopped on an article titled “The future of the game – How we tackle the task of a second edition AD&D game” written by Gary Gygax himself. AD&D second edition? Discussed (not simply hinted) as early as 1985?
By the way Dragon 103 published the first part of Unearthed Arcana errata too, showing the haste with this much demanded product was sent in print to help TSR's very strained finances. But back to what I will call Gary Gygax's Second Edition as described in the article which is 1 and ½ pages long.
First of all, “The future of the game – How we tackle the task of a second edition AD&D game” is not a blueprint of something (almost) ready to be released or a firm project to be built, but a set of ideas and guidelines for TSR designers (Gary Gygax at the forefront) to follow. With a projected release date of 1988 or 1989 (“it will certanly require two to three years to complete”) it's amazingly close to the release date of the actual AD&D second edition, 1989, whose work started in 1987 when Lorraine Dille Williams was TSR's new owner.
What was in Gary Gygax's mind? First, the core rulebooks would have been not three, but four, with Legends & Lore moved to Major Status and perhaps getting back its original name, Deities & Demigods, because Gary Gygax did not like the name change a bit: “Deities & Demigods (…) recently retitled as a sop, or bowing to pressure from those who don't buy our products anyway”. Of course, the three other rulebooks would have been as usual Player's Handbook, Dungeon Master's Guide and Monster Manual.
The Monster Manual is the first rulebook Gary Gygax writes about and it would have been the very first to be released, just like happened for AD&D first edition, while the real second edition (and all the new editions after) started with the Player's Handbook. This new Monster Manual would have been a selection of Monster Manual, Monster Manual 2 and Fiend Folio plus the “worthwhile new monsters found in modules, Dragon magazine, etc” and not in full colour (this is still 1985) but with “color plates added” and with part of the monsters “reillustrated”. Gary Gygax would have liked to present the monsters by region (“or plane, subterranean and similar categorical means”). Frank Mentzer (the only designer actually named in the article beside of course Gary Gygax himself) would have been in charge of this massive project and Gary Gygax hoped that the design work would have been completed in 1986 “but do not hold me to that as a sworn statement or promise”.
The next in line is, inevitably, the Player's Handbook which would have incorporated portions of the newly released Unearthed Arcana and Oriental Adventures sourcebooks (most probably the optional races and classes, the optional character creation methods and perhaps even the proficiencies). Monks would have been removed from the core rules, to stay just in oriental themed campaigns. Assassins would have been made optional or used just as NPCs. Bards would have rewritten entirely “to allow a player to start a bard character as a bard” and they would have gotten their very own subclass, the jester (!). Of course, there would have been more new subclasses for the 'main' character classes: cleric (allow me to present you the mystic that we will see published in the Classic D&D Master Set) and the magic user (the savant, along the illusionist) but it's very likely that more and more would have been added (remember that reference to “oriental themed campaigns”?).
The third book to be released would have been, of course, the Dungeon Master's Guide: details are scant, besides it would have included a new description of Elemental Planes, “gone will be the random encounter materials and monster XP lists”. One always controversial subject is psionics which many people considered and still consider out of touch in a D&Desque RPG. Gary Gygax seems to share this opinion, writing that “I'd like to remove the concept” especially if the new Monster Manual will not contain any monsters using psionic powers or abilities.
Fourth and last core rulebook released would have been the Legends & Lore which, often called a Monster Manual for Truly Big Monsters and little more in its original edition, would have been “revised, expanded and generally improved”. How? The book would have been divided in a player's section and a DM's section: the first one would have given details on what clerics and worshipers should know: “colour of robes, special interests or requirements, locations of places of worship, type of ceremony...”; the DM section, of course, would have covered subjects such as the powers of the deities in a detail “far greater than in (original N.d.A.) Legends & Lore” and of course statistics for deities. Perhaps mindful of criticism about describing divine beings with monster stats, Gary Gygax states that such stats must be considered as “a yardstick for deity comparison only” and reserved to DMs. The new Legends & Lore would have contained deity level spells too (we can only guess about their awesome power!) and a section about non human deities.
The four core rulebook would have been large, “far larger than now” and this could have been offputting for new players. As Gary Gygax states, hardcore games love big books, newbies abhor and fear them. Classic D&D seems not to be (at this moment) part of the equation, so he writes about a plan to prepare an 'abridged' version of the Player's Handbook, “perhaps with careful study and preparation it could be in the 128 pages range” with 'just' rules for creating and playing characters. But he speculates about the possible release of four 'specialist' books each covering a main class and all subclasses with all needed details (weapons, armor, spells, etc.) for gamers wanting 'more'.
There is no mention about any possible problems of compatibility with the existing, large and growing, body of AD&D 1st edition books but it seems safe to say that Gary Gygax's Second Edition would have been mainly a reorganization and not a 'true' second edition that he felt would have split TSR market and lost many buyers. In an interview with me, he recalled this anecdote: “Williams was warned by a knowledgeable employee that releasing a second edition of the game as she planned to do would lose a large part of the existing audience. This individual estimated the loss at about 50%”. A case of sour grapes? Fear of losing royalties due for sales of the AD&D 1st edition books? The fact that TSR kept printing Unearthed Arcana till one year after the release of AD&D second edition seems to show that Gary Gygax (and such unnamed employee) were at least partially right.
As we all know, Gary Gygax's Second Edition was never designed but some ideas floated in this article, for example the splatbooks about classes, would have been used in the actual AD&D second edition game. He would have left TSR at the end of 1985 after losing in court his suit about the sale of TSR's shares by the Blumes to Lorraine Dille Williams. As he told in an interview with me, “I was heartily sick of courts and TSR, so I just wanted to get away to the whole mess” but this was a poor decision: “In retrospect I should have a new, federal lawsuit over copyright and trademark issues” but lawyers are costly and his wanted a “huge sum” to appeal the decision.
SOURCES
“The future of the game” by Gary Gygax, Dragon 103 (TSR, november 1985)
“Interviews: Gary Gygax” by Ciro Alessandro Sacco, Hunters of Dragons (Wild Boar Edizioni, 2010)
“Founding Days: TSR” by Shannon Appelcline, Designers & Dragons Book 1 – 1970 – 1979 (Evil Hat, 2014)