Original Dungeons & Dragons booklets reproductions

My first project for 2021 was a little more work intensive than I first expected it to be. 

I created facsimiles of the original D&D white box booklets, using the pdf files sold by WotC as a source for the pages. I had been curious about tracking down an original set of the white box rules, but even poor condition books run for $500 or more. This was a rather cheap way of reproducing the booklets.

I did this because I wanted to feel the actual booklets in my hands and read through the rules. The tactile nature of being able to flip through the pages of a book lends a different weight to the words than a pdf can supply. This will now give me some sense of what it might have been like to own the original booklets in the 1970s. 

I started collecting Classic Traveller books for the same reason, the pdfs just felt like raw information and didn't carry the same gravitas that holding a book does. The rules finally had weight, pardon the pun.

I only ran into one hiccup with the OD&D booklets. There was one picture that was completely black, and I was already running out of ink, as you can see in my first image the red is muted and a magenta color is more prominent on booklets 1 and 2 (printed in reverse order). For this picture I had to make some adjustments, so I tried muting the black and I didn't like how it looked. I experimented with a simple white ink fill tool expecting to get a horrid a white blob inside of a rough black outline of what the picture was, and I was pleasantly surprised to see that the tool worked as designed and left only an outline of the original image. I used this for the final printed page.

I believe it only took me about 4 hours of total time to put everything together and get it printed off, but with the ink on some pages faded and reddish instead of black I now want to buy some fresh ink and reprint second copies. Still, I shall be spending the next few days poring over these booklets as if they were brand new, to feel some echo of the excitement and curiosity that gamers felt when they were first published.