Mythical

Memory can be a powerful thing. Even at my advanced age, there are many things I can vividly recall about moments or events decades in the past. My memories are particularly strong about my earliest experiences playing RPGs, which shouldn't really come as a surprise, considering that I'm still involved in the hobby more than 40 years later. 

A good example of this concerns issue #62 of Dragon (June 1982), which long-time readers may recall is the first issue of the magazine I ever owned. I purchased it from Waldenbooks, one of two chain bookstores found at my local shopping mall, and carried it around with me almost everywhere. I read that issue until its glorious Larry Elmore cover fell off, in the process committing nearly everything about it to memory. 

I wrote a post about this a few years ago, in which I noted that the advertisements of that issue loom large in my memory, partly, I think, because I never saw the products being advertised on the shelves of any hobby shop or bookstore I visited. That was certainly the game with this advertisement:

Ysgarth is one of those RPGs I don't believe I've ever seen, despite the fact that I've known its name since 1982. It's one of those games that I often heard people talk about, but, even then, the impression they conveyed was almost of a mythical beast glimpsed only for a brief time in a dark and haunted forest rather than seen by the light of the sun. The same goes double for Abyss magazine, whose existence I knew only from advertisements like the one above. 
From what I understand, Ysgarth was an interesting but very complex fantasy roleplaying game. That complexity no doubt limited its appeal. Nevertheless, I find it strange that I never saw a copy of it in the wild during the '80s (or, for that matter, in the decades since). If anyone reading this has more direct experience of either Ysgarth or Abyss, I'd like to know your thoughts about it. For example, was it really as complex as legend would have it? Did you ever play it? Was it fun?