ZYLARTHEN Bundle (Booklets plus Deluxe PDF) Now Available on DriveThruRPG

Campion and Clitherow has (finally) bundled the physical instantiations and combined PDF of its classic OD&D "neo-clone" Seven Voyages of Zylarthen.

The bundle includes the five physical booklets (the four original books plus the Book of Spells supplement) and the 337 page deluxe Electronic Edition, featuring an extensively bookmarked and hyperlinked PDF that includes all of the previous plus a printable Player Reference Sheets booklet.

The bundle is priced at $34.75 on DriveThruRPG. Previous purchasers of the PDF alone will find they can purchase the bundle for $29.75, or $5.00 off the total price for the individual booklets.

One of the reasons we're excited about this this is that we've noticed that most Zylarthen purchasers bought their booklets from Lulu but their PDF from DriveThru. Lulu prints great booklets, and I assume some people them during one of Lulu's periodic shipping sales. We wanted to create a way for DriveThruRPG people to get their own "permanent" advantage while creating a "one-stop" mechanism for new Zylarthen purchasers to get both the booklets and the PDF at a discount.

For those unfamiliar with Seven Voyages of Zylarthen, the motivation was not to "clean up" or add "house-rules" to the original edition of the world's most popular role-playing game in the manner of, say, a straight retro-clone. There's nothing wrong with either of those programs, but they had already been done by, among others, Delving Deeper and Swords & Wizardry White Box.

Rather, it was to identify the essential elements of the original game and, as it were, "turn them up to 11."

And much of this had to do with tone and setting. As we remarked in the Introduction, "the brilliance and charm of earliest version of the original game was its simplicity and elegance, combined with a certain asymmetrical quirkiness. It invoked many sources—King Arthur, the Crusades, Middle-earth, the Arabian Nights, pulp fantasy, fairy tales, even science fiction. Its breadth of tone was a virtue, offering to the players a multiplicity of delights."

Here are the gods and goddesses of myth, as well as the goblins and witches of Faery. And here also are the Martian races described by Burroughs, as well as the androids, cyborgs and robots of speculative fiction.

Here are treks through a fantastic wilderness or delvings into the deepest and most mysterious dungeons.

Zylarthen is a game you can feel comfortable playing with your children. It is also a game for adults who wish to recapture the sense of wonder they had on first being introduced to the role-playing hobby. We hope that it will appeal to role-playing history wonks as well as younger enthusiasts who wish to get become more acquainted with, as it were, the roots of the thing.

We hope you enjoy it!