:’( I finished Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency and they had such a powerful setup for a third season! It’s a shame it got cancelled and I wanted to imagine what Farah, Todd, and Dirk’s new detective office would look like once they got settled in and busy on all sorts of universe-altering new cases.
mythicparty said: (squints) what’s the thing in the girl’s right hand next to the Monster Manual?
It’s the AD&D Fighting Wheel, a relatively rare item printed in the UK in 1981 and available through the RPGA. According to The Acaeum, only “No 1 Fighters, Paladins, Rangers, and Bards” was made, with perhaps only 1000 copies released.
It was sold in a square sleeve, like a record album sleeve.
This concept was significantly improved in the AD&D Combat Calculator, included in Dragon No 74, the same issue that first includes that miniature ad with the 4 players:
Cut it out of the magazine, cut out the slots in the top part, insert a brad through the center, then turn the wheel to display the correct “to hit” #s for any character class/level or monster HD. It included the optional modifiers for weapon type vs armor type, which most people did not attempt to use without this tool.
As for the other players in that ad: after the girl with the Fighting Wheel and Monster Manual, the next guy has the Players Handbook, the 3rd has module I3: Pharaoh and the DM screen, and the last seems to have a plain black skateboard and a small turquoise square the size of a pamphlet or a CD case. (CDs had just been introduced to the US and Europe that year. The color resembles some of TSR’s miniature blister packs, but the corners don’t look right.)
