SBRPG: 1.53c Source Files Located

Twenty years ago my brother George and I put out a role-playing game. This was the original SBRPG, and what this site was originally supposed to support. As the years went by, out publisher went out of business, and the game suffered more returns than sales, so we sort of gave up on it. I am guessing a small fiction publisher was not the right place to sell a game like this, so I can see why the return rate was so high.

The few that played it enjoyed it, and it endured in the hands of a very few over the years. For some, this was the last game they kept out of their collection until the 530-page softcover fell apart. For most, playing "the game the size of a phone book" was a thrilling prospect back in the days of D&D 3.5. We published this in 2005, a year after GURPS 4 was released, and about two years after the D&D 3.5E revision came out.

So the game became a footnote here and an urban legend. No PDFs ever existed of this game outside of myself and the publisher for printing. This was never made available via a PDF store, as there were none back then to sell it on. This has always been a print book, long out of print.

And SBRPG has mostly stayed quiet and abandoned for 20 years. This site has continued on as my general role-playing blog, but for the most part, the book, the rules updates, the bonus web content, and the plans for the future books have been something of an urban legend. I only had the original version 1.5 of the PDF, with none of the later fixes, or the reader feedback that we got via our old forums. 

Until today.

I found a DVD with the source files for the final 1.53c version, the PDF, the rules updates, the cover, and all the bonus content we ever made for the game today. These are old Aldus Page Maker files, but the PDF imports into Adobe InDesign just fine, with a few missing fonts I would need to find or replace. These are mostly fonts we kept around since the Corel Draw 3 CD-ROM days.

The rules updates are critical, since those came from players and actual play. The latest 1.53c version has a lot of fixes than the original proof-copy 1.5 PDF that I had. This is everything. The whole game as it existed at the end of support and the publisher going out of business.

Wow.

What a strange find.

I have no idea what I will do with all of this.