The Fantasy Masters' Codex

[tomc]

Originally Posted by Skarg

So am I the only one who put colored tabs on my ITL, AM and AW books?

Put... colored... tabs... on.... Brilliant!

[Skarg]

Hehe! :-)

I still have muscle-memory for these - I don't even have to think about it to open ITL to Talents or Creatures.

In case anyone doesn't know what I mean, here's a photo.

[DarkPumpkin]

Originally Posted by Skarg

So am I the only one who put colored tabs on my ITL, AM and AW books?

That's what I did too...

[Jim Kane]

LOL!!! I must be the Idiot-of-the-Century, it never dawned on me to put reference tabs on my rule books LOL!! "D'OH!!"

Seriously, I kept and keep all my rule books in plastic comic bags and stiff backer-board, just like I do for my comic book collection, so I could never bring myself to personally "deface" my TFT materials with such an obvious and beneficial solution.

But on the up-side, TFT Rule Book Whiplash DID provide me with a better developed bull-neck, then any of the guys on the High School Wresting Team. ;-)

JK

[Steve Jackson]

Yes to index, yes to table of contents.

[JLV]

Yay! and Hallelujah!

[ak_aramis]

Originally Posted by larsdangly

Yah, that thing was useless.

Hardly.

I ran most of my FTF games from the 1981 FMC, leaving my books put away (and safe from greasy hands)... It had just about everything except the fluff-text.

I used post-its for important section references.

[Helborn]

To defend Bill Gustafson who put the The Fantasy Master's Codex together. I was a member of his group (though I joined too late to get my name added to the book). He was very disappointed that Metagaming simply took his printout and published it. He expected it to be either type set or retyped and be published in the same typeface as the rest of TFT. He saw his work as being part of a regular if not annual update with errata, new rules, etc., not as a stand-alone product

[Skarg]

Originally Posted by Helborn

To defend Bill Gustafson who put the The Fantasy Master's Codex together. I was a member of his group (though I joined too late to get my name added to the book). He was very disappointed that Metagaming simply took his printout and published it. He expected it to be either type set or retyped and be published in the same typeface as the rest of TFT. He saw his work as being part of a regular if not annual update with errata, new rules, etc., not as a stand-alone product

Thanks for sharing that bit of TFT publishing history, Helborn!

So sad about them just printing the dot-matrix printout!

I know a GM who thought the Codex was extremely valuable. I thought it was a frustrating mix that had some really useful clarifications and answers and a smidgin of new content, some useful condensations of data, but then also many pages I had practically no use for.

We too were hoping there would be more of them.

[JLV]

I'm with Skarg on this one. There were some really useful bits in there. Unfortunately, there were also things that were just pointless, lots of typos (which was a real problem in a brief, one-sentence listing of something), and things that actively contradicted the rules as written. Which is why I never considered it authoritative in any way as a source for rules -- I preferred to go with Steve's rules as opposed to someone else's interpretation of those rules.

The Codex was also what introduced the term "reptilids" which I always found incredibly annoying, but that's just me.

Since it was published in late 1981, and Metagaming restructured in 1982 and then closed its doors in April of '83, there wasn't a lot of opportunity to publish more than one "annual," though I think it was clear their original intent was to do that.