Revisiting AD&D 1st Edition Players Handbook

Shush I am reading AD&D 1st Edition Player’s Handbook Here is my impressions 

My copy (6th Printing 1980) for a 41-year-old book is in very good condition, as bombproof as I remember it from my teens, and smells kinda funny (sort of musky)

The text is very small and gets even smaller on tables. The book while epic in scope is a nice and tidy 128 pages long. It is sparsely illustrated, mainly filler pieces and a hand full of full pagers. The front page Gnome on the dice is my favourite with the fighter on p23

You can hire Assasins to kill people! There’s a table on p29. This one of the wacky almost stream of consciousness rulings made for character classes and their subclasses (remember them).

Talking of rules, subsystems rule the day. There’s a sort of consistent pattern that emerges from the text, but there’s a lot of noise and we are very very far from the unified rulings of D20 let alone 5th Ed. In fact, the book cuts out with a proper set of rules for combat.

I have an official AD&D Fighting Wheel (that has all the data for weapons) SO FIGHT ME ! 😀