Anyway, this came in the mail today-
I never owned this back in the day, but it's a pretty nice book. I play AD&D and 1st and 2nd edition are pretty compatible, so I figured when it popped up on my ebay radar cheap I'd give it a shot. I am not disappointed, although I would have been if I'd paid cover price for it; $18.00 US, it's a 5th printing from January of 1994 and apparently once belonged to "Sir Joseph A. Heinmiller I", it's 128 pages of weapons and equipment with some, mostly recycled from other TSR products, art. I am not really sure why it needed to be a blue covered DMG reference though, rather than a brown covered PH reference, since equipment is in the PH.
You discovered the lost equipment manual of Sir Heinmiller the 1st! What a find.
ReplyDeleteI remember buying this one when it first came out. It was at the end of my AD&D days just before I switched to GURPS for a number of years. I like it. Still have it although mine does not have the pedigree of yours.
I think it was made Blue-cover because of the extra optional rules covered in the armor section as well as some of the "new" weapons.
ReplyDeleteAs someone who started with 2E, I can say that this was one of our mandatory books. If I was going to pick only two RPG books to stick in my backpack, they would be the PHB and the Arms & Equipment Guide. If I had more space, the Monstrous Manual would be next. Once Aurora's Whole Realms Catalogue came out, that was another book we always used during character creation. Even though we didn't play in the Realms. The fact that it was presented almost like a prop, as in our characters might actually find the Catalogue in play, was an added benefit. Oh, I guess the 1E Oriental Adventures book often came along too, for mostly the same reason. I liked my characters to have katanas.
ReplyDeleteWhat can I say, we liked lots of equipment crunch I guess.
Based on the amount of use I got out of it, the A&EG was probably one of my best RPG purchases, ever. So I have fond memories of it, even if it feels a bit superfluous to me now.
I think it came out as a blue book because at the time all the brown books were either about classes or races.
I tracked down and placed a bid on Aurora's Whole Realms Catalogue, hopefully I'll win and I can convice myself that it is at least tangentially related to my ongoing OA campaign...
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