Saturday, February 27, 2010

Swords & Wizardry White Box Arrives from Brave Halfling

I've really been looking forward to this - Brave Halfling/Mythmere Games' Swords & Wizardry White Box finally arrived today.

The very good:

The art looks great, I like it better black on white (the color looks a little 16 bit console-ish to me). The artwork on the side of the box is great too. It matches the original D&D white box in size perfectly. I love that there are four books, the dice are adequate (I like that they're different colors for beginners' sake), the pencil is cute if a little pointless (ha), the inclusion of graph paper and Primer are appreciated - in short, this is exactly what I would want to give to my nephews as an introduction to our favorite game. The rules are cleaned up, simple and clearly written. Anyone could be up and running with this in no time, really all it needs is a module (say, Chgowiz's Quick Start) to both make it nearly instantly playable and serve as a brief example of a classic adventure for someone totally new to the game and who's chosen or been tasked to DM for the first time. I'm sure others might disagree - but the B series of TSR modules were invaluable to me and my friends (kids at the time, admittedly) in terms of illustrating how to design our first adventure.

The slightly bad:

While generally the box looks great, some of the bottom box's paper is coming up on the inside and already needs to be glued back down. One of the 4 booklets was badly mis-stapled and will have to be redone. Opening it will cause the pages in the front of the book to pull up and not align with the second half, besides just being unattractive from the front. I'm disappointed that this was overlooked or approved as acceptable, but not surprised that there might be a QC issue in the first run.

This is the first boxed Old School rpg as far as I'm aware of, and I'm excited for Mythmere, Brave Halfling, and the community that helped bring this about. Truly a great day for O.S. gamers!

6 comments:

That Miss Veronica said...

That looks great. There's something free form and light about fantasy style role-playing I really like. It seems that S&s and LL really facilitate that ease of play. Good stuff.

Peace,
Christian

squidman said...

Damn! That is a sweet little box!

Unknown said...

Looks great! I'm jealous.

Jay said...

I fear that each boxed set may end up having at least one flaw - they came from my hand after all. So each one is unique? That's even better! :)

Aaron E. Steele said...

I want my whitebox!

Thanks for posting, its exciting to see them start to arrive!

Gothridge Manor said...

Waiting for my White Box. Glad to hear they are arriving.

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