Adventure Games from TSR (Part II)

Following yesterday's post, here are some more pages from the 1983 TSR UK catalog, courtesy of reader Martin Williams, starting with this one. There are several noteworthy details here. For example, the modules Blizzard Pass and Maze of the Riddling Minotaur are included in the list of AD&D adventure modules, possibly because of their code being "M" rather than "B" or "X." Meanwhile, The Temple of Elemental Evil is assigned the code T2A/B rather than the T1–4 it received upon its actual release in 1985. Further, Dungeonland and The Land Beyond the Magic Mirror are listed as modules GC 1 and GC2 respectively rather than EX 1 and EX2 (see also this post for another discussion of their changing module codes).

This next page is interesting because it includes the AD&D Fighting Wheel among the play aids available for sale, despite the fact that, so far as I know, it was never sold except to RPGA members. Good to see some of TSR's other games given a page to themselves. One can sometimes forget that TSR also published a wide range of boardgames intended for a wider audience, as this page demonstrates. At the bottom left, there's a note of "exciting news" regarding TSR's then-recent acquisition of the wargames publisher, SPI – an acquisition that ultimately proved to be an unhappy one for almost everyone concerned. There's also a striking bit of art by Rodney Matthews, depicting either a man in a very strange spacesuit or a robot of some kind. Finally, we get not just more Matthews art, but a page devoted to books and magazines, with a passing mention of TSR's minigames.  As someone much more familiar with the brown TSR "Gateway to Adventure" catalogs, I found the UK catalogs fascinating – especially for the original art included with it. Thanks again to Martin Williams for sharing this piece of history with me.