Wizards to Reprint 1e AD&D

Interesting!   I logged on to RPG Stack Exchange chat this morning and people were talking about this WotC release indicating that they’ll be reprinting and selling copies of the AD&D 1e books, on sale as of April 17.

That’s cool but surprising. The clarifications coming out of Seattle on the “multiple edition support” of D&D 5e have started to make it clear they won’t really support old versions per se, just let you craft your game to be kinda like them. Is it to judge interest in 1e/old school gaming? That’s hard – I mean, I still have my 1e books, and not to mention all the retroclones are mostly-free.

Now this reminds me of a more inspired idea Zak had which was to reprint all the 1e adventures in big coffee table books, which I would throw money at with no questions. (Adventure content is really more valuable than old rules content – something which WotC needs to wrap its head around; it’s why Paizo is beating them like red-headed stepchildren.)

Also, the money from this sale goes to the Gygax statue? I reckon that’s a good mix of being nice and sucking up to the community… It’s interesting that Hasbro signed off on that. It made me think this was fake until I could find the original on the Wizards site.

Well, let’s see what this means! I am I think understandably skeptical of any step from Wizards that seems beneficial and philanthropic, but I’m happy to be proven wrong.