Your humble host has noticed that the coming reprint of the first edition Dungeon Masters Guide will have the same price as The Realms of Atlantasia: The Game Master’s Bible.* This may pose a predicament among discerning -- yet cash-strapped -- gamers with regard to which item to purchase. To help alleviate this concern, your humble host provides a checklist indexing the various features of each tome.
Feature
|
DMG
|
GMB
|
Hard cover
|
Yes
|
No
|
Interior art
|
Yes
|
No
|
Table of Contents
|
Yes
|
No
|
Index
|
Yes
|
No
|
Glossary
|
Yes
|
No
|
More than 500 pages
|
No
|
Yes
|
Complete game
|
No
|
No
|
"Eccentric" rules
|
Yes
|
Yes
|
Support material
|
Yes
|
No
|
Peppy, light-hearted website
|
No
|
Yes
|
Half-Elves
|
Yes
|
No
|
Copulating chaos dragons
|
No
|
Yes
|
Prostitutes
|
Yes
|
Yes
|
Saringetti (sic) encounter tables
|
No
|
Yes
|
Cherished by a generation of geeks
|
Yes
|
No
|
Accused of having satanic influences
|
Yes
|
**
|
Accused of reeking worse than a dead otyugh in summer
|
No
|
Yes
|
* Technically, the Atlantasia book is priced in Canadian dollars, but that’s close enough. I mean, it’s not silver chips versus gold chips or anything like that.
** Please see comment below.
** Please see comment below.
I'd like to be the first to help level the chart in favor of the GMB by officially accusing it of having Satanic influences. True to form in the manner of the accusers of D&D being satanic; I have never read or played any part of the GMB. I believe that if you were to allow your children to play this dragon copulating, horse starving, elf raping, dark magic using game that they are surely likely to be indoctrinated into the local satanic cult. (My branch is the Satanic local 405.) I now demand that you fix your chart since I have now accused the GMB of being satanic.
ReplyDeleteI've never heard of nor played The Realms of Atlantasia" and probably never will (well, never say never).
ReplyDeleteYet, I see this GMB is 500 pages long, has no Index or TOC and zero internal artwork? Are they crazy? The thing deserves to bomb and bomb badly until the publishers sort those aspects out. Even the self-published stuff in the 70's had some internal hand-drawn art and index - and they were only 48-128pp or so.
(anyway, great post... most interesting and amusing!)