(^* Heroic Worlds is available by mail from Crazy Egor's)

CTV: Harold, I'd like to congratulate TSR Hobbies on 20 years of D&D. Despite some rocky times, it's a significant achievement.

HJ: Thank you.

CTV: From a collector's standpoint, TSR Hobbies is frequently the focus of fan interest. Aside from being the first, they are currently the largest manufacturer of adventure games. As in most of the adventure game industry, print runs are small compared to mass market products. Key items are kept available by continuous reprinting. Fortunately, there are some ways of identifying first printings.

How can you identify the first printing of some of the earlier hard bounds, notably the TSR hardbound source books, Player's Handbook and Dungeon Master's Guide?

HJ: The original art is the easiest identifier. The art was done by David Southerland and David Trampier. You can also identify it by the TSR logo which is a wizard. When it moves from the little wizard to a wizard's head, you know you have a later edition. And you can also identify it by opening it up and looking at the contrary page, because it will give the newest contrary date every time there is a significant change, or addition to a product.

CTV: Is there a difference in the end papers of the book also?

HJ: That is correct. The early editions actually use color end papers. Red was the standard color of the first books and then later we used gold.

CTV: Roughly, what was the average print run of those early books?

HJ: It changed as we went along and continued to double sales from year to year. When we put out Monster Manual, which was the first in the AD&D set, we probably hd 50,000 copies total in the first year. I think the initial print run was 20,000. When we did the Dungeon Master's Guide (which was the third book) at the time which I joined the company, we actually had two prints runs of 40,000 in two weeks of each other, so it's a little bigger now.

CTV: So, what is the average print run for a hard bound today?

HJ: About 125,000 to start with.

CTV: The very earliest Dungeons & Dragons, how can you identify that?

HJ: The very first Dungeons & Dragons set was done by hand and it shows a wood-grained brown box on which a label has been hand-stuck. It also will probably bear the "KG" logo for TSR.

CTV: Is there anything on the inside that would help one identify it, too?
HJ: [laughs]. You got me.

CTV: I know on the Men & Magic book the man is mounted instead of afoot?

HJ: That's correct.

CTV: And the first printing doesn't say anything, while the second printing indicates second printing, with the same brown box.

HJ: Yes.

CTV: How many of that first product were made?

HJ: There was 1,000. That was the second printing that TSR has ever published. TSR was formed to print Dungeons & Dragons.

CTV: What was the first product TSR ever published?

HJ: It was Cavaliers and Roundheads.

CTV: Which was?

HJ: It's a miniature game for the English Civil War.

CTV: Neat. There's a couple of modules that have been produced over the years that were actually reprints of previous items. They seem to have a far higher demand and scarcity than the items that made them up. GDQ1-7, Queen of the Spiders comes to mind... A1-4, I3-5... these are all compilations. Are they generally produced in lower numbers?

HJ: Yes, they are. We call them Classic Edition, to reduce the number of titles out there that have to be stocked and shelved. And so, we're selling them to an after-market, so it's about 2/3 of the original print run.

CTV: Are they usually revised extensively?

HJ: There is a number of changes made and there usually is a significant portion added to them so there is some revising done, yes.

CTV: TSR has always has a unique series of four-digit stock numbers to differentiate between their products. The early books, current boxed games, and early boxed games were always 1000; the 2000 series is 1st edition hard bounds, indicating 1st edition D&D; the 2100 series, the current 2nd edition of D&D books; the 3000 series indicates SPI brand name games; the 3500 series is Buck Rogers; the 5000 series was your miniature line; the 6500 series is the Indiana Jones role playing games; 6700 and 7600 is the Top Secret spy role playing games; 6800 and 6900 were the Marvel Super Heroes role playing games; the 7000 series was the Star Frontiers and Gamma World; 8000 series is what you use for books, novels and art books; and last, but not least, the 9000 series which is is series which lists actively up until today to 9300, is all the D&D modules and accessories.

HJ: That's correct. Plus, the original 1000 series has been reactivated as our boxed set series.

CTV: In my research, I've noticed some gaps in the 9000 series stock numbers. There are some gaps in the other ones, but mostly in the 9000. Not every number was issued as regularly distributed product. Yet, some of these numbers have surfaced as convention tournaments and RPGA (Role Playing Gamers Association) modules. Does every number represent a published products even if distribution was severly limited?

HJ: No, it represents an entry in a catalogue we have published; that we will be coming out with the product. The number is assigned, logged into the computer system, and registered nationally into a library system. So, we cannot reuse a number if the product is discounted before it even reaches the marketplace. And we've had a number of odd products like that, where we've had sales lined up and we cancelled the product before it was ever released.

CTV: There were a number of things, though, that came out that you could almost title "small press". They were put out for the RPGA, or only for conventions, and they had normal numbers, correct?

HJ: That's correct.

CTV: What's the best way to tell if you come across one of these? I'm assuming that the print runs would be so significantly lower that they'd be real rarities?

HJ: That is true. Usually if it's for the RPGA, for instance, you can usually tell by looking at the cover. They tended to be monochrome, usually black printed on green or red. We took some short cuts on the packaging and didn't use full color, and didn't use full size, like a 48 or 64 page booklet. Because it has a smaller run, we tried to keep the price down. That's usually the easiest way to tell. If it's RPGA, it will also bear the product control logo on the cover.

CTV: TSR U.K. was you companion company. I assume it was owned by TSR, correct?

HJ: Yes. It still exists.

CTV: Good. Their job was to produce all the TSR products in England. Were all their editions the same as yours, or would they be slightly different (other than having the TSR U.K. logo on them)?

HJ: Well, to begin with, they started out as a sister company and did some distribution for us, as well as being a creator of products. There were certainly products that were done specifically for the U.K. market. The only thing that was really different was that the Dragon magazine had this pound price on it. Normally, there was no difference between the two products except for some special run items that were just for the U.K.

CTV: I've seen a few of those, notably the Fighting Wheel and the ST1 module, which were done in very limited production.

HJ: The Fighting Wheel was done for the Role Playing Gamers Association and the ST1 was done for a tournament or convention.

CTV: The distribution must have been very low on that.

HJ: You're talking in the range of hundreds.

CTV: While we're on the subject of magazines, you mentioned that the U.K. division produced the Dragon magazine for you, but didn't they have their own magazine?

HJ:Yes, for awhile they published a 30-issue magazine called Imagine. It was primarily centered on D&D, but you could also find Star Frontiers articles and Marvel Superheroes.

CTV: It's interesting to note how the magazines, as well as the older modules, are significantly high in terms of demand and in some cases, scarcity, and at same time, you produce them in very high numbers.

HJ: That is true. We took an approach very much like a comic book, so at the end of the run of a magazine we double the size of the first volume, so that is we're normally printing 12,000 we print 24,000. But, after that, we just fo to subscription rate plus 10 to 30 percent more for the newsstand. I think what happened was that there are a lot more people playing games today who were not playing games in the Seventies and they want the heritage, they want to go back and they want to pick up these magazines. We were printing to our demand, so we were printing around 24,0000 copies of the magazine then. The first run was probably about 12,000 for Dragon #1 and nowadays we're around 112,000.

CTV: Dungeon magazine was another odyssey. That wasn't available early in the magazine's history from retailers, even though Dragon was always available from retailers.

HJ: That's correct. It was originally just a subscription-based product and you could only get it by subscribing to it for the first year-and-a-half and issue #1 is still available in limited copries, thoughout stores and so on, because of the double print. But, almost everything up to #21 is very scarce and very hard to find. Specifically issues #8-#10 were the time at which the U.K. market started to import Dungeon as well, and they gobbled up all the overprint, so there were none available (even from TSR) except for the subscribers.

CTV: Is there anything special about #6? That seems to be one that I had a lot of requests for.

HJ: Yeah, there could be and I'd have to look through the specific contents, but the Dungeon magazine is basically a periodical anthology of adventures and it's a supplement to buying individual adventures on the marketplace. What will happen is there will be a popular topic people will rush for at one time.

CTV: Speaking of popular topics, Dragon magazine #4 seems to be far rarer than any other early issue.

HJ: I think you're right and I think there are two reasons for that. First of all, #1 sees a lot of activity out there and it's not because there's many more #1's out there, but that they are circulated a lot more. They go from hand to hand because people know the vaule of a #1. But, #4 was at a point where we were coming upon our first year anniversary and again, we were doing some special things and introducing new columns from Gary [Gygax] and I think that brought a lot of attention.

CTV: Well, it was also Empire of the Petal Throne issue, which at the time, was a very expensive game.

HJ: As I recall, it premiered at $25.00 and was shortly up to $30.00, at a time when most role playing games were selling for between $5.00 and $10.00. So, yes, it was considered a very "pricey" game. It had a lot of interesting innovative things including plasticized paper maps, or three full-color maps which we had never seen before, and a comb-bound book. It's well worth the price if you find a copy of that.

CTV: Exactly. There is a lot of demand for that in the market right now. Although it has been reprinted by other companies in the past, the early version with the plastic maps is not easy to come by. Back to modules, one in particular, the first printing, the one with the tan border, module B3, Palace of the Silver Princess, was recalled and destroyed. Would you like to talk about that?

HJ: [laughs] No, it happened during my time as director of games, so no thank you. I guess I'll say this about it - TSR has always been sympathetic to our retailers and our distributors. We published that product and we were on a deadline and the first version rushed out, probably not in the shape in it should have been, with possibly objectionable thing in. When we heard that from a number of distributors and retailers, regarding their objections, we thought it would be better to pull it back, and modify it. To identify it, the new one had a green border.

CTV: Well, let's just say that there were some illustrations that you decided were in poor taste.

HJ: Uh, yeah. [laughs]

CTV: So, it was formally distributed. How many do you think are out there roughly?

HJ: Well, originally we did what was called outer shipping which meant that the product was prepackaged by the printer and sent directly to the distributors and the shops, and did not come to out warehouse, so the full pre-order was shipped before we recalled it. I would suspect that maybe 10 percent did not return their order. Most of the rest did.

CTV: So, there may be only 2,000 out there.

HJ: Yes.

CTV: The same thing sort of happened to the first printing of the Dieties and Demigods source book with Michael Moorcock's Elric Mythos and H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos. What happened to those?

HJ: It was a different topic. Essentially what we did was that we had a letter from his [Moorcock's] agent that gave us permission to use those, and then we found we were in conflict with Chaoism [a game company] and the license with Michael himself. So, rather than fight it, we agreed to withdraw those from the actual book. So, the early editions, which we actually didn't recall but were in a small run, have been in demand. When we realized that there was going to be a problem, we immediately withdrew them.

CTV: The fact that they weren't recalled would explain why there are more on the market, but they are still very uncommon. How many of those do think were produced?

HJ: My guess is around 12 to 13 thousand.

CTV: Are there any other products that were recalled or destroyed after publication that we don't know about?

HJ: Not really. There were some damaged things that reduced print runs and made things hard. Early on, when we first printed Dungeon Master's Guide we were rushing to print the demand because it was high, and in the first printing there was a plate broken during the printing process. The press man ran back to the files, pulled the negative, burned another plate, and printed the 16-page signature and inserted it into the product. When it reached the shelves via outer-shipping, we found that there were a number of pages from the Monster Manual in the Dungeon Master's Guide. So, we had to recall the 40,000 of the initial print run and tear them apart. So, there may be some of them out there.

CTV: So the first print run of the Dungeon Master's Guide was essentially half of what it should have been?

HJ: That is correct. Then, the [follow-up] print run after that had a problem with the binders who had a wire come loose on their boxing machine. The wire scored half of every other book's front cover deeply, so we could not sell the book and we didn't discover this, again, until it was already in the store. We recalled it again, [but] there may be some out there with this scar across the front of them.

CTV: I know there's a couple of your older products that may have been questionable. What kind of problems did you have with the nudity on the front of The Eldritch Wizardry supplement and there was another one, The Warriors of Mars? ANd a second question which goes along with that - have you ever had anything banned?

HJ: No, we've never had anything banned. I suspect there may be a couple of groups out there that may have been checked, but nothing's been banned. We had some feedback, mostly from concerned mothers who would look at the Eldritch Wizardry which is actually a pastel, very fuzzy picture of a naked lady. But, not as significant as the response that we had to the Hindu god in Dieties and Demigods. The Hindu religion, in its current form, is active and we were working on a mythological basis and we had somebody who objected to Kali, and to treating Kali as a goddess of thugs. That's the way she's presented in mythology, but not the way she is in today's Hindu pantheon. And the other was that we had been contacted by the Hemophiliac Foundation. In Gamma World, we had a "thing" [player characteristic] called "genetic deficiencies." We essentially, had "bleeding" as a dificiency and actually changed the product as a result of talking to these people. Realize that we weren't being insensitive, but we just didn't realize that people would take offense to that.

CTV: I know that TSR has aggressively protected their trademarks and copyrights in the past. There are some things lile Balboas Warlock and Warlock Tower which I know were direct plagarism on some of your items. Although they are not good enough to be considered collector's items, is there anything out there that was done without permission that is worthwhile?

HJ: Well, I think there was something that I saw after it had been discontinued, but there was product on the market and did not know it existed, and that would be Games Workshop did two products that were done before AD&D called GW3...

CTV: ...yeah, and GW4.

HJ: I can't remember the titles, but they were out of England and they would have reached the States via mail-order...

CTV: I think they were oversized modules.

HJ: Right. And White Dwarf was distributing here so you could order them through the White Dwarf magazine, so there might have been some of those available. I thought they were interesting modules, they were things that we requested they have take off the market. Technically, as soon as we find out, we send cease-and-desist letters and we do protect our trademark. That doesn't mean that there aren't things out there from tournament adventures and so on, but they are not going to be the calibre of published products.

CTV: There are some other interesting tidbits that you've done over the years. One of them is called Leaves From the Inn of the Last Home. It was a very thick source book which is kind of a compilation usable not only by the game players, but maybe you thought interesting to the people who are reading all the Dragon Lance books which have been very popular in mass market bookstores. What happended with that? Why is it so rare?

HJ: That was, as you know, the Dragon Lance product and it was an experiment. We had a lot of background material [and] we'd created entire worlds over a year-and-a-half before we published the first Dragon Lance product. So, we felt it would be interesting to get that information out there, publish it. I think the reason it was rare [was because] when we're doing something for the first time, we tend to base our print run on pre-orders. With pre-orders on something new, you tend to be cautious and when you get cautious at low volumes, you're going to print small volumes. I think it's neither fish nor fowl - on the one hand, the people who are going to benefit from it the most are gamers, but it was marketed to the book market as a coffee collector book. There in interesting news on that; with the popularity of Dragon Lance, which has sold millions of books, it's in eight or nine different languages now. We actually will be doing a revised version of Leaves At The Inn of the Last Home that will be coming out in future years.

CTV: Good. Another module called H1 Bloodstone Pass, I believe was TSR's first "thin box" module. It came in a 1/2" card stock box in an effort to show the title when "spine out" went on bookstore shelves. I recall these modules were always "crushed." Did a lot get tossed as "un-saleable" on returns from book stores?

HJ: Yes. A lot of people would return them and say they were damaged. It was carton box with a top flap and bottom flap and they were very annoying to assemble. As a matter of fact, the entire TSR staff sat there assembling the first ones to get them out the door and that includes execs! [laughs] We never did have cartons again, you've seen the products done for the Marvel Super Heroes souce boxed sets [and] they are set-up boxes with the standard top and bottom.

CTV: That would probably explain why they are so uncommon now...

HJ: ...However, there was also a demand for H1 because it was a very good adventure and a lot of people knew it was a great adventure and wanted it, but at the same time, there was a shortage of supply. I think that's one reason why Dungeon Master's Guide became such a big hit. We had pre-orders for maybe a thousand and essentially the first [shipment] was recalled and withheld for a couple months while we were redoing it. The second print run was half-size because 50 percent of them couldn't be used, so the demand went up, plus the value went up with it.

CTV: Of course, that would probably explain why H2 and H3 are popular, too.

HJ: Yes, I think so. It's also that the "H" stands for "high level adventure" and we traditionally wrote for beginning level, or for intermediate level playing. High level said that you could take any level character, including a character with however much power he had, and be challenged by his adventures. There is a market out there that is really not being catered to because we have high level characters and so, these are some of the few products out there that will challenge.

CTV: In 1991, TSR entered the magical world of trading cards. The first half of the 1991 cards are considered extremely rare (all 300-plus cards). This may be so because of occurrences that might be considered an "oops" on TSR's part. Care to explain?

HJ: Again, we had an experiment. We had been encouraged to do trading cards because TSR has one of the greatest stable of fantasy artists in the industry. So, we have a lot of art that we own, from the all the covers to almost 15 years worth of product, over 15 years worth of product. So we were encouraged to do this, but there was a hesitancy regarding our ability to sell to the card market, because the card market tends to be a sports card market. Although there is a secondary non-sports card market; and we are going into the secondary market, and we were concerned. Again, because it was a first time product pre-orders were low. We, ourselves, were hesitant to take a risk and double the print run, based on pre-orders. And collector card, to keep their collectible value, can only be printed once. We could not go back to the press and say, "Oops, we need to print more."

CTV: Wasn't there another problem, with the majority of the distributors, who thought they were ordering wax boxes with 36 packs and instead, for every wax box they thought they ordered they got one pack?

HJ: Yes, you're correct. Again, it was a misunderstanding on TSR's part on how to present the information. Originally, you say here's a product, and you buy these products seperately, and what you would get, instead is you would get cartons with individual packs, which you could then sell, and so you weren't buying six copies of a module, you were buying cartons with multiple copies, and then you could sell out of it, and the cartons would come in a box with 4 or 6 in a box. So, there was a lot of confusion on how to present that, but I think we have this worked out now..

CTV: What happened was essentially the whole east coast then got almost no distribution.

HJ: Right.

CTV: The 1992 trading cards were almost considered a disaster from a retailer's standpoint. Sales in some parts of the country were horrible, at best, and we heard a lot of customer grumbling at the inability to complete full sets. Why is this?

HJ: Well, I think there are several things that happened that caused what would you term a failure, and it wasn't a failure, I mean, we have sold quite a few of them. What happened was everybody anticipated there would be a shortage of cards initially, mainly retailers and distributors, so they tended to order higher - expecting to get only a portion of their order. That was thing one. Thing two was communication between the marketplace and the potential customer, the collector customer. Originally, the first two sets in '91 sold very big because everyone thought that was all you could get. They did not understand there would be a complete factory set available later for the game afficianado, who's not doing it for collecting purposes, but just as a gaming tool. In the second year, it became obvious, so people who had originally rushed in and bought the original collectors cards sat back and waited for the factory set. I think another thing was that the art wasn't the same quality. We had uesd most of our good art, and a lot of the art that was used for the second set was generated originally just for the cards. I think we tried to do too much; we'll make some changes on that. We have new quality standards and new marketing plans.

CTV: I heard some very good things about the '93 cards, they look very, very good. What are some of the things you're changing this year to make them better for the collector and the game player?

HJ: Well, first we're going to feature some limited series, about a dozen different series, special series. They will be consecutively numbered, so you will know they're in a series, like the Adventures series, or the Traps series. We're talking about a special card, at one point we were talking holograms, but I don't think we'll do that, but may be an autographed series. So that will add to the collectibility of it. We're going to release the cards in a smaller set, there will be three releases this year versus two sets the previous year. The final set will be a little smaller. We're also withholding the special promotional cards we do throughout the year, for insertion in magazines and trade shows, to spur interest in card collecting. They will not normally be added to the factory set at the end of the year, so they will maintain their collectibility.

CTV: Good, excellent. One last thing on major product lines. I know TSR produced a huge line of miniatures at one time, under their own banner. They're not common at all, except for the Marvel line, there isn't really a demand for them. What happened?

HJ: Well, two things happened. Number one, again we got into a business that would have been better to license. As witness our success with the Rob Parker line. The overhead was very difficult; we did a lot of sales to a non-traditional miniature market, and we had some record breaking sales in certain categories. As you mentioned the Marvel was, at the time, reported to be one of the best selling boxed sets ever, with a manufacturing run of 15,000 units. We went back to production on it a couple of times after that. So, it did very well for us, but we were marketing these through bookstores and other channels, so you wouldn't see it through the traditional games channel, we didn't use the standard channels for distribution of lead figures, so that made them "rare."

CTV: Interesting. Well, that's about it. Any other goodies or tidbits of information you'd like to share with us?

HJ: Well, I guess if you're a collector, the thing to know is how to find games that are of value, and have continued escalating value throughout the years. We really haven't, as an industry, gotten into a finder service other than Crazy Egor's, there's a couple out there, but primarily we turn to game auctions, and those are featured at local conventions. Gen Con itself probably has one of the largest games auctions, we did about 15,000 lots last year. I think it's the best avenue for a collector to find something on speculation.

CTV: Thank you, and I appreciate your help and your time! Congratulations, once again, on twenty years.