Both the introduction and the afterword to the Moldvay Basic rulebook contain intriguing references to "the D&D Companion Supplement":
Afterword to the Moldvay Basic (1981) rulebook
The Cook/Marsh Expert rulebook likewise mentions a forthcoming D&D Companion Supplement, which was never released.
Game designer Paul Reiche III was originally assigned to work on the rules:
I was initially hired as a "game developer," editing and fleshing out the work of other designers. About 4 months later, I became a game designer and was assigned defining rules for high-level D&D games whose characters were 15-30th level. My work was never published intact (in truth, it was a little crazy), but bits and pieces did come out in the Master and Companion rules sets.
While the "BECMI" line is rightly beloved, the feel and tone of "B/X" is quite different, and many have wondered what a Companion Supplement might have looked like.
Certainly, more character classes, more spells, information on the "domain" game, new monsters, new treasures, artifacts, and information on different planes were to be included.
Over the next several weeks, I'll be going section by section through my own vision of what the D&D Companion Supplement might have been. Let me know what you think!
I've seen a variety of posts discussing the now-mythical Companion, and a lot seem to focus on what it could have contained. Gygax, however, mentioned in an interview in Polyhedron #2 (Autumn 1981) exactly what it was meant to go in it:
ReplyDelete"What's happening with the Dungeons & Dragons games? They are going to be expanded by the D&D Companion Set, which is a pickup of the three supplements to the original game - Greyhawk, Blackmoor, and Eldritch Wizardry - revised, expanded, edited, and improved, to be 99 and 44/100 per cent pure."
I don't think I've ever seen this statement mentioned, which seems odd to me. It seems that if the Companion was ever released you'd have something very akin to AD&D again. Just as AD&D was the OD&D series compiled and expanded, it sounds like the plan for the Companion was to do that all over, but in some sort of unspecified Basic sense instead. The trick is in figuring out what the expansions to that material might have been, and what the comment about purity at the end there meant. One of the reasons why it might never appeared is that it was ultimately felt to be redundant, leading BECMI to take its own expansion path that bypassed a lot of OD&D material instead of, say, disease and psionics and hit locations.
In any case, looking forward to reading your take on it.
Wow - I totally missed that quote! I think I would have remembered it, had I read it (and I've flipped through all the early Polyhedron newszines).
DeleteBut yes, I'm basing my take on the Companion supplement on OD&D. You'll see that I'm going to be leveraging the Greyhawk supplement quite a bit, as well as lots from Blackmoor and Eldritch Wizardry (so perhaps I'm on the right track!)
Wow, that is an amazing find! Essentially, it sounds like exactly what Dan Proctor did with the Advanced Edition Companion to Labyrinth Lord... I've always described it as BX with all the cool stuff from the LBB supplements...
DeleteSo essentially, Advanced Labyrinth Lord is as close to Gary's version of BXC that we can get...