Archworld (or How OD&D Was Made)...

Yesterday, we talked out manual type as the poor-man's typesetting, and while we rarely post any kind of next-day follow-up, we had to today.  I talked a little about local game designers who typed up their rules, photocopied and stapled them, and sold them in Ziploc baggies at the local hobby shop.  However, there's also a tradition of semi-professional companies exploiting manual typewriters in place of Letraset Dry-Erase font sheets and/or professional typesetting services, because it's both easier and cheaper to pull off...

But I've used Letraset in the printing lab at school and found it to be a tedious pain in the ass compared just typing a page.  I mean, if you already know how to type, it's a hell of a lot faster than rubbing out individual characters, especially for something as ambitious as the original D&D rulebooks.  Letraset for covers, maybe.  But not the insides.  And securing any commercial typesetting requires capital that goes beyond the merely amateur, which points to the fusion of amateur and professional elements in the early hobby.

The early gaming industry was a
fusion of amateur and professional elements...

But first, a primer on offset printing and how OD&D was physically made...

First, all text and illustrations are laid out on a board to be photographed using a big graphic arts camera (probably a Robertson back then).  The negatives of each page would then be used to "burn" metal printing plates (photosensitive bromides) that would be mounted on whatever press was used.  Now, here's the interesting part.  The plates were secured on a roller that ran through an ink trough, where the ink stuck only to its burnt image, and then through water that flushed clean any unprinted area.  Finally, paper was fed through the printer, with (properly oriented images) offset from the inked images to the paper.

A small offset press and an
example of photosensitive printing plates...

Black and white requires only a single plate, whereas four-color printing employs separate and overlapping plates for cyan, magenta, yellow, and black.  If you've ever looked over a box of Cheez-Its or something else, you'll see a bar with all four colors used as a tool to help the printer align the colors.  But OD&D was simple black and white... 

Even then, we aren't done.  A sizeable run had to be quality controlled and subjected to the bindery process.  Books are collated, stapled, and trimmed along the edges for a clean and professional appearance.  This is actually was kind of fun, and this equipment remains in use today even as photocopiers and printers dominate the inheritors of this craft.

But is this amateur?  I mean, there's money and professionalism at work here.  Yes, OD&D's artwork was delightfully (and some say horribly) amateur.  But everything else speaks to a melding of amateur and professional elements.  Other emerging companies took the same route, but split things up differently, with the Arduin and Archworld games providing two prominent examples (and for those in the know, Archworld was the spiritual inspiration for our own Pits & Perils, both in terms of visuals and mechanical approach...

Illustrations, manual type, and Letraset were
doubtless combined for Archworld's delightful interior...

Archworld was a wargame by Mike and Sheila Gilbert.  She wrote and he drew, and both developed the rules, which also draws parallels to our own games.  This delightful wargame with role-playing elements is something I'd kill to get a License to revive and would actually throw myself into securing the capital to make a good product possible.  But it was released by Fantasy Games Unlimited who, apparently, received their homebrew markups and sent them off for printing.  And these markups, complete with Mike's art, were manually typed and completely (and delightfully) self-made at home.  Talk about an amateur pedigree!

I'm really not sure why FGU lacked a consistent aesthetic, but it undoubtedly gave the authors freedom to do their own thing at home.  Especially since one of them was a damned fine artist and the other an equally fine writer and editor.  And in the earliest days of this budding hobby, things were never too far removed from their homebrew origin...

That's it.  We promise.  Vacation beckons (and I just kicked a flu).  See you next month!