I discovered my master copies (done on a typewriter and with art pasted in with rubber cement) of two of the three issues of The Grimoire: The Grimoire: A Magazine of Science Fiction and Fantasy Gaming I produced in the late 1970s. The second issue has some early Denis Loubet art. I've made PDFs of my copies and have made them available for a donation in any amount to a fund to help pay the bills associated with my wife's oral cancer (we have no insurance and were not eligible for any government help).  See this post on my blog for information and a donation link: Help Randall and Get Grimoire Fanzine PDFs

Here are descriptions of the two issues from my blog. Click the title links to go to the blog entries which have cover pictures.

The Grimoire #1 (Spring 1978) - A D&D Fanzine

After a lot of searching, I found my master copy of The Grimoire #1. In late 1977, I decided to produce my own gaming fanzine, The Grimoire: A Magazine of Science Fiction and Fantasy Gaming. As it would have to be reproduced by photocopy -- and photocopies were very expensive in San Antonio at the time -- it was typed on legal size paper which was cut in half so two pages could be printed for the price of one legal-sized photocopy.

Each page was hand-typed on a manual typewriter. It took forever to produce. It was finally ready to print in the Spring of 1978, so Volume 1, Number 1 of The Grimoire had a publication date of Spring 1978. The first issue was 30 half-legal-sized pages. It contained a wide variety of material for D&D and boardgames. It even had a couple of pieces of artwork drawn by a friend who I played Stellar Conquest with. These were pasted to the page with rubber cement.

The zine started off with a table of contents and my editorial. The editorial, naturally, talked about my plans for the fanzine.

Next up was a one page article "Divine Intervention in D&D" which presented a system similar to the one in Empire of the Petal Throne for determining whether a D&D character's cries for help were heard and answered by the character's deity. The system was obviously intended to be used with Gods, Demi-Gods, and Heroes as there were tables for gods with more than 175 hit points and for gods with 175 hit points or less. Sacrificing magic items really increased your chances of success.

This was followed by an article entitled "Terraforming and System Reshaping in Stellar Conquest. This 1.5 page article provided rules for very high technology in Metagaming's then popular game that would allow players to terraform planets and even create ringworlds. Yes, we actually used these rules.

After Stellar Conquest was the "Minidungeon Feature," The Tomb of Lord Advandey. In this small hill tomb housed the remains of Lord Advandey and -- according to legend -- his gem-encrusted rod of solid gold. A small dungeon but with a nasty surprise.

The minidungeon was followed by "New Independents for White Bear & Red Moon: The Oathbreakers." This was a tribe who had sworn allegiance to the Red Emperor, but refused to serve and were cursed to an undead existence.

Next was the major article for this issue, six and a half pages on "Demon Conjuration in D&D." This article gave a fairly complex demon summoning system for D&D based very loosely on medieval texts and heavily influenced by the SPI pocket game "Demons." Had this be published in a publication with better distribution, this article would have given the fundies a lot more ammo for their anti-D&D fears of the early 1980s.

One of my players wrote a BASIC program for generating hex paper. We published it. This was probably one of the earliest published computer GM aids.

A short article on "Spell Points for D&D" and a large illo filled up blank space on the two pages of program listing.

This was followed by a one page map of the area of the island of Arn in my Arn campaign and, much to my embarrassment, almost eight pages of truly awful background fiction setting the stage for first campaign Arn. "Voyage to R'lyeh" was supposed to be continued in future issues. Fortunately, people told me it was awful and issues two and three were free of my poor attempts at fiction. (And there was much rejoicing.)

A few short pieces rounded out the issue: Rules for a thief character for the TSR Dungeon! boardgame, a couple of scenarios for Metagaming's Warpwar, the start of a play-by-mail D&D game, a Lensman find-a-word, and some feedback questions.

About 30 copies were printed. Players in my campaign and authors got free copies, the rest were sold at Aggiecon and at Dibbles Hobby Shop in San Antonio. Cover price was $3.00 which just covered the cost of printing. I haven't seen a copy since 1980, I doubt many survive. I don't have a copy other than my typed master.

The Grimoire #2 (Summer 1979) - A D&D Fanzine

As I mentioned on Monday, after a lot of searching, I found my master copy of The Grimoire #1 and #2. The Grimoire: A Magazine of Science Fiction and Fantasy Gaming was my attempt at a gaming fanzine in the late 1970s. I produced 3 issues with a manual typewriter and rubber cement to paste in artwork -- primitive by today's standards, but fairly normal for the 1970s. The first issue was the Spring 1978 issue. Over a year passed before the second issue came out. A number of things changed over that year. I had decided to turn my Empire of Arn campaign into a complete set of variant D&D rules and was bitten by the "complexity bug" in the process. Fortunately, I got over both, but this issue reflects what was going on at the time.

This issue had much better artwork, three very nice pieces of art by Denis Loubet. These were done when he was still in college and before he started to work professionally. This issue was also full size and cost 50% less. Kinkos had arrived in San Antonio and the cost of photocopies had taken a huge drop.

The Grimoire #2 also included material for the San Antonio Wargame club, a then new club that met in the basement of Jefferson Hobby Shop in downtown San Antonio. I'll just mention SAW material in passing.

The second issue of The Grimoire was 30 pages plus the cover page. The cover had a very nice illo of First Campaign Arn characters at their most powerful -- just before the campaign ended. Front and center was Stonn in his infamous invisible and highly magical plate armor which had the unfortunate side effect of turning the wearer's clothes invisible so it looked like the wearer was unarmored and naked in the dungeon. And yes, that's a phraint and a lich in the back row. You probably do not want to know.

The next two pages had the table of contents and my editorial. Ho Hum.

The first article was "More Spells for Magic-Users." Five pages of new spells from 1st to 15th level. Many were from my games, others were from some of the other campaigns running at the San Antonio Wargaming Club. Unfortunately, they were not credited in the article and I no longer remember which spells belonged to which campaign. There were about 80 new spells listed. I think my favorite is probably "One-Way Stone Wall" which worked like Wall of Stone but only existed on one side. You could cast it behind you in a corridor where it would block pursuing monsters -- but the party could see through it and shoot arrows at the monsters.

The next pages had more rules for Metagaming's Melee and Wizard microgames and an article on Pregnancy in D&D. Then came a couple of articles on Chaosium's White Bear & Red Moon boardgame: Flying Unit Rules for White Bear & Red Moon and Additional Magic Rules for White Bear & Red Moon.

These were followed by The Monsters of Arn: two types of Horny Hordes and the Flickering Doom. The Horny Hordes were nuisance humanoids (and very silly) but the Flickering Doom was a fairly nasty low hit die monster than caused discord in those around it. It was based on a creature in ST:TOS episode "Day of the Dove." Some of "The Treasures of Arn" were next. This included one of my favorite cursed items: the wand of deluded detection. It worked like the wand of detection it was supposed to be the first time a person used it, but from then on it would not detect items that were there but would falsely "detect" items that were not there.

The Treasures of Arn article was followed by a picture of Cheryn, Empress of Arn with her "Sword of Ending" -- the last of a set of five identical swords that were artifacts associated with the Empire of Arn.

Next up was "New Independents for White Bear & Red Moon: Fanla the Witch." This was another of my independent creations for WB&RM. Fanla was unique in that she could be played as an independent (with her power at its ebb point) or as another side played by an additional player (with her power at its peak).

Fanla was followed by "Weird Techno Weapons for D&D." These were basically magic wands in the form of guns that could only be used by Technos. Over three pages of new rules for Melee and Wizard followed, including a good number of new spells. An expanded version of the Spell Points article from the first issue was next, this time including spell point formulas for many of the early Arduin classes.

Page 20 has an article on adding Explorer and Dreadnought ships from SPI's Outreach game to SPI's Starforce game. "Spell Effectiveness in D&D" added a strange system for determining how effective a spell was cast. I'm the author of this article, but I can't remember even using this system. At the end of this article is the third piece of Loubet art, a cartoon titled "Those Damn Teleport Spells."

Next up was a expanded for Arn version of the first issues "Divine Intervention in D&D." It is probably useless for campaigns other than First or Second Campaign Arn.

The last article before the four page SAW section at the end of the zine was a humor piece titled "From the 666th Plane of the Abyss." It describes RPG designers as demon lords based solely on their writings about each other and other games in magazines of the time.

The SAW section closed out the second issue.

About 50 copies were printed. Players in my campaign and authors got free copies, the rest were sold to SAW members and at a convention in Austin. Cover price was $1.50. Like the first issue, I haven't seen a copy since 1980 or so and I doubt many survive. I don't have a copy other than my typed master.

PDF Copies Available for a Donation

Again PDF copies of both these zines (and a set of BECMI house rules I used used for a campaign at a game shop in the mid-1980s) are available for a donation of any size -- large or small.  See this post on my blog for information of my wife's cancer and a donation link: Help Randall and Get Grimoire Fanzine PDFs

As an added bonus, whoever donates the largest amount by the end of the month will get a special "one-of-a-kind" printed digest-sized copy of my Microlite74 rules which I'll create just for that generous person.