Now Under Construction

Because I did a Retrospective post on Kara-Tur: The Eastern Realms last week, I was reminded of how excited I was by the announcement that the long-awaited Asian expansion to AD&D, Oriental Adventures. OA was a long percolating project about which Gary Gygax had talked for years beforehand, in part because he felt the monk class didn't belong in "standard" AD&D, given its inspiration in the legends of the Far East. Despite this, there didn't seem to be any evidence that such a project was likely to happen anytime soon and I largely put it out of mind.

Then, without warning, in issue #102 of Dragon (October 1985), this advertisement appeared:

Now, we'd finally get official game rules for samurai and ninja and martial arts and everything else we fans of Kurosawa and Kung Fu Theatre had long thought should be brought into AD&D. To say that Oriental Adventures was greatly anticipated, at least among my friends and myself, is something of an understatement and this ad, featuring a washed out, black and white version of Jeff Easley's cover painting, is a big part of the reason why. Though my feelings about OA are now a bit more mixed, I still have many fond memories of it – and the long October I spent waiting for November 1985 to roll around so that I could finally lay my hands on it.