beasterbrook wrote:this looks interesting..
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/280 ... g?ref=live

"Lost manuscript?  While they were collaborating to develop the original fantasy role playing game, co-authors Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson were separated by several hundred miles. Each worked on separate manuscripts and shared revisions by phone and post. After receiving a significant investment, Mr. Gygax fairly hastily prepared his last draft of the rules for publication and the world's first fantasy role playing game became available for purchase in three, incomplete and somewhat muddled, little brown booklets in January of 1974,. Mr. Arneson, meanwhile, had been carefully preparing his own revision, a revision now made moot by Gygax having already published. Arneson's manuscript was then lost and forgotten. However a somewhat tattered photocopy was found among the papers formerly in the possession of the late M. A. R. Barker.

The discovery of this lost manuscript presented a golden opportunity to make whole the original game in a way that was not before possible. What if, instead of publishing a manuscript of which Arneson was said to have "complained bitterly that the game wasn't right", Gygax had agreed to bring in an editor to take a look at all the material prepared by both men and put it all together in a better organized, edited and comprehensive fashion?

To the extent possible, that is what Champions of ZED is. Champions of ZED is the ONLY game to incorporate Dave Arneson's lost manuscript with the original three game booklets published in 1974,using the open game license
"

any confirmation on this??

Brette:)

Champions of ZED features Sandbox play literally from the ground up. Rules, based very closely on those of original authors Gygax and Arneson, provide a complete method for generating a campaign world from scratch and populating it with monsters, treasures and adventures.  It hearkens to a time when players built their fantasy worlds together, one hex at a time, when settings from far off publishing houses simply did not exist; when a handful of dice and creative minds crafted and conquered worlds of their own.

Features Include:

• Three options for resolving combat drawn on earlier wargames rules as recommended in the original game.

• Extensive guidelines for creating and playing Hexcrawl adventures the way the games founders did.

• Guidelines for creative, campaign specific character specialization.

• Clear rules where many other retro clones provide only vague nothings.

• The first and only game to draw on Arneson's lost manuscript and to include all of the rules intended by both co-authors, made clear and eminently playable.

• Experience points awarded for defeating opponents, capturing prizes and spending wealth.

• Smart guidelines for the use of wandering monsters and building adventures.

• The re-introduction of Chance Cards for random events in play.

• Extensive notes on the history and development of the early rules.

Zenopus wrote:I don't want to speak for him, but AFAIK the COZ is being approached like a retroclone. There won't be any actual text from the source material (other than permitted by the OGL), just game mechanics, which aren't copyrightable.

The present owner of the manuscript was helping him [M.A.R. Barker] clear the garage and asked if he could keep some of the papers intended for the trash, thus acquiring the manuscript.

When inquiries with Barker proved fruitless, the owner contacted Dave Arneson and sent him scans of a few of the pages.  The suspicion that Arneson might have been the anonymous author was based, among other things, on the heavy use of percentiles in the work, something Arneson was known to favor, having made percentile dice the operating feature of his Adventures in Fantasy game.  He [Arneson] responded that the manuscript looked like it could be one of his, from the time when he had been mailing revisions back and forth to Gary Gygax, his much more widely known D&D co-author.  However, Arneson said he would need to see the whole thing to be sure one way or the other and that he would have to get together with the owner next time he was back in Minnesota.  Unfortunately, that never happened and Mr. Arneson passed away in April of 2009.

While this seemed to be tentative confirmation of authorship, the whole thing was cast into serious doubt when the owner took the manuscript to a deeply involved Aceaumâ„¢ collector for his opinion.  The collector shared the scans and information with a few key TSR employees who passed the scans on to Gary Gygax.  Gygax replied "took a look, seems to be a rip-off of the D&D game that I've never seen before."

GeekDad wrote:His original gaming dice. His original Dungeons & Dragons and Blackmoor campaign manuscripts. His first printing, woodgrain boxed set play copy of D&D. Letters from Gary Gygax.

Mars wrote:I hope the family gets something out of this in the end - really don't know what they were thinking when they let the storage unit payments lapse.

Although at this point I'm not sure how much room there is left for the family to get anything out if it - way too many middle men taking a share.  Lets count them all:

1) Storage Facility
2) Local auction company
3) Dragon's Trove
4) Collector's Trove
5) Ebay

Badmike wrote:Err, the family had possession of everything, until they basically threw it away. To me it's exactly like the woman who threw away the million dollar lottery ticket and then sued to get the money back from the woman who dug the ticket our the trash (she won, but I believe on appeal the woman who found the ticket will eventually prevail).  The family deserves nothing. Besides, they still have the publishing rights and IP if they want to profit off of Dave.