#lynn abbey

[balu8]

Tim Sale: Thieves World

[etakeh]

Me: of course I won't spend my money foolishly!

Also me: yes please one custom Vulgar Unicorn sign with shimmery letters and maybe some glow in the dark thank you.

They don't have a website but they have this

Yes moose and squirrel.

Ps thanks to @staff for more characters in alt text!!

[jackalgirl]

I know it’s not TOW, but Closed Circle is a self-publishing group consisting of C.J. Cherryh, Lynn Abbey, and Jane Fancher.  The books here are ebooks that the authors have for sale, DRM-free, including two short stories from the Foreigner series I’ve been obsessing about lately (one is about Tabini, the night before he’s due to reach his majority and the decision he and Ilisidi have to make about a transition of power -- or none, and the other is Bren Cameron’s first day on the job).

The site is not the newest in coding and is a little odd to navigate (your mileage may vary) but I didn’t have any problem buying the two short stories (and I highly recommend them).

[vintagerpg]

Back alleys and dark deeds await in Thieves' World! In the latest episode of the Vintage RPG Podcast this week, we look at Robert Lynn Asprin and Lynn Abbey's gritty, shared-world fantasy anthology series, the Tim Sale graphic novel adaptations and the magical moment in roleplaying history when Chaosium convinced the designers behind all the major RPGs (including Traveller!?) to collaborate on their Thieves' World box set. It was a glorious moment, and all to brief. 

[balu8]

Tim Sale

Thieves' Word

Adaptation by Robert Asprin; Lynn Abbey and Tim Sale

[vintagerpg]

(Repost from June 5, 2017; revised with more pix) Thieves’ World began as, and largely remained, a series of anthologies and novels. They differ from most fantasy of the late 70s and early 80s in that they are by multiple writers working in a shared world under the guidance of creators and editors Robert Lynn Asprin and Lynn Abbey. They were a big deal at the time and it was a bit of a coup when Chaosium released a Thieves World box set for use with pretty much every system available in 1981

The world consists mostly of Sanctuary, a frontier city recently conquered by the Ranken Empire, then later conquered again by the Beysibs. The stories follow a large cast of characters, mostly unpleasant ones, as they live, love, plot and pilfer their way through their seedy existences. Unlike a lot of fantasy worlds, the way the multiple authors weave their stories and characters in and out of each other’s work lets the city of Sanctuary breathe in a unique way. After Fritz Leiber’s Lankhmar, Sanctuary’s gritty vibe of an occupied city could probably be my favorite literary fantasy setting (maybe because it seems like a bit of a Lankhmar knock-off). 

I am not sure how I feel about the cover art (partly because my idea of Thieves World is so fixed from the Tim Sale graphic novels). The middle four are by Walter Velez, whose work I generally love, but his depictions don’t like up with my conception of the world. Two clean. And the dark haired person reads as a woman to me instead of Hanse Shadowspawn, who that apparently is according to comments from the first time I posted this. Gary Ruddell did the rest of the covers and while the grit level is right, the first two seem too barbarian movie influenced to me. I really like the cover of Book 7, though. 

[vintagerpg]

In 1981, Chaosium released a box set based on Thieves’ World. Let’s take a moment to appreciate how crazy this was.

First off, Thieves’ World itself was kind of crazy. Anthologies, particularly fantasy ones, didn’t sell well in 1979 (or now, really). The genre itself, though growing in popularity, was still mostly fixated on high fantasy in the style of Tolkien – dark, urban fantasy of the sort in Thieves’ World was unusual. And yet, some of the biggest names in science fiction and fantasy climbed on board and the good ship Thieves’ World, in its first incarnation, stayed afloat for a decade and with a good reputation to boot.

Now comes the box set. Chaosium brought its usual attention to detail to Sanctuary, fleshing it out in the spirit of the stories, cramming the books full of maps. The encounter tables are nothing short of amazing – all fifteen pages of them. They’re designed to simulate the constant churn of events in a metropolitan area, even while players are trying to do other things. I’ve never encountered anything like them – for larger neighborhoods, they account for time of day and relative street size. Just flipping through them gives you a sense of how bustling Sanctuary would feel in a game.

And yet, that’s not even the real miracle of the box set. That’s revealed when you check out the stats for all your favorite Thieves’ World characters. What system is this for, anyway? Turns out: all of them. Somehow, Chaosium got the makers of eight major games to allow them to adapt Thieves’ World to their system so, in addition to RuneQuest, we have stats for Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, Adventures in Fantasy, Chivalry & Sorcery, Dragonquest, Dungeons & Dragons, Fantasy Trip, Traveller (!?) and Tunnels & Trolls . Not only that, in several cases, they got the original designers of the game to do the work!

If you tried to start a project like this five years later, let alone today, I wager you’d have been laughed out of town.

[vintagerpg]

In 1982, Mayfair (the eventual publishers of the nefarious Catan) put out a Thieves’ World board game called Sanctuary. It is actually all right, for an old school, heavily dice-based game. The premise is obvious: wander around the city stealing stuff and try to not get killed. The mechanics are simple enough and the pace fast enough that I don’t see it having the chance to turn into a tedious slog.

The board is fantastic, a big color map of Sanctuary, one of my favorite vintage boards. The card art is primitive, funny and just a little bit patronizing when it comes to integrating material from the stories. Good stuff, overall.

Around the same time, FASA released five modules set in Thieves’ World (all of which, weirdly, have the same cover art). Until Green Ronin briefly revisited the setting in 2005, that’s pretty much the extent of Thieves’ World’s impact on RPGs.

All that, and I STILL DON’T KNOW WHO THOSE THREE PEOPLE IN GREEN ARE. Come on, one of you HAS to know.