Making progress on catching-up with the videos today now!

I've used the Parchment Backgrounds before, so this didn't really show me a lot that was new, but it's always good to see such things being used for real. I imagine now we could use the Color Key Effect to create things like the gaps in the parchment textures, but the video did show the ability of the extant template to hide features like symbols that Color Key won't operate with, so was valuable from that perspective aside from anything else.

Not sure about the new-look "spooky Ralf", though a quick check of this week's video suggests this has now become the thing, and I guess it helps see a little of what the mini video camera screen sometimes hides on these streams. Plus it gives food for comments in the chat!

According to the PF blog posting, yes it is.

Might have been useful to have set it up in its own docket in the downloads page though, as I can see that CC3+ one getting pretty crowded quickly if these are going to release at one a month regularly.

And it might have been a bit more intuitive to find it in the list, especially if you already have a lot of PF products listed there. I have NO idea how many files are supposed to be under each item there now, so can never spot when anything new turns up there unless I know exactly where to check.

As someone who started out with those three beige booklets in the white box, Original D&D as I've long considered it, I have to take issue with the "beta version" view!!! When it was published, there were NO OTHER RPGs of any sort. Nobody even knew then (mid-late 1970s) what RPGs WERE! And I speak as someone who spent a lot of time explaining to others back then what I thought it meant ?

To these three were added four more supplementary RPG booklets, Greyhawk, Blackmoor, Eldritch Wizardry and Gods, Demi-Gods and Heroes. After these, the Basic Set was released while TSR were working on AD&D, as a sort-of stopgap, as the three main AD&D rulebooks took a couple of years to all appear (1977 to 1979 according to Wikipedia, which tallies with my recollection; the Basic Set was published in 1977 apparently - see this page).

I don't think this Basic Set was the same as the later (1981) Basic and Expert Sets, however. I don't know personally, as I went down the AD&D route, because that was closer to the version of the rules the expanded white box set + supplements provided at the time, and by the early 1980s, I was moving-off into other systems, including my own D&D variant anyway. Back in the late '70s, the idea was the Basic Set would guide beginners into AD&D; I was never sure how well that worked, as only one person I knew back then tried it, and found it a little limited.

That desaturated, almost "dried blood" look for the built-up areas might have interesting possibilities for those wanting to map in the expanded Ravenloft setting recently published for D&D too...

Thanks very much everyone - especially Monsen for adding it to the Atlas so swiftly! Glad you liked it!