There is a good portion of the community moving to AD&D 2nd Edition as their old-school game. This is a solid choice, but for many reasons I would still base my games and creative work around For Gold & Glory rather than the AD&D 2nd Edition reprints.
The best reason is the open license. If you create material or adventures for FG&G, you can share and sell them. You are not allowed to do this for the AD&D 2nd Edition game. Just in supporting a community of creators and players, it is always better to form ranks with the open gaming movement. Do you have an adventure or campaign you have written? Have you created new character options, spells, or monsters? You can sell and share it here!
The PDF of For Gold & Glory is free, and there is a nice all-in-one hardcover option. A free PDF will help me immeasurably at getting new players into the game. There is nothing to buy! Let's play. I can also just give the PDF out for free, the license says I can just share this with my friends and pass it along.
REDISTRIBUTING For Gold & Glory™
This entire, unmodified book can be redistributed either as a free pdf or as an at-cost print on demand. If you offer a print option, you are forbidden from making any profit from the sale. - For Gold & Glory, page 367.
Few games let you do that. I want to hand this out to a friend to get them started? The license allows redistribution, as long as it is for free.
Yes, the AD&D 2e PDFs are 9.99 each, and you can get soft covers. Who knows how long these will be around, and the monster books are the best buys for the few monsters outside FG&G's generous selection. For the money, ability to share, and value, FG&G beats the reprints, hands-down.
The only thing the reprints have at the product-identity monsters and spells. Get the 2nd Edition Monster Manual if you want them. But again, the art, while nice to have, is all that comic-book style. Also note that demons and devils have been erased from this edition due to the Satanic Panic. You need to buy a few more books to have these, and they are the silly renamed versions.
You can always pull them in from any AD&D 1e or first-edition source, too, and this is where the excellent Adventures Dark and Deep Bestiary is highly useful. ADAD is an S-Tier game, but it is huge and has a lot of add-on content. I can see wanting to stick with a 2nd Edition subset of stuff to keep the game and world simple. This is going to be a go-to resource book, though.
The art in the FG&G book is far better than the reprints. I love the choices of classical art, and FG&G seems like a much more mature, serious, and impactful game than the often comical and garishly colored AD&D 2nd Edition books, and some of the pieces in the TSR books are so bad they hurt my eyes to look at. Some of the pieces in AD&D 2nd you can clearly see the artist went out of their way to avoid drawing faces. Some of the pieces are classic reprints, but they are very hit and miss. Compare that with the piece above, by a true classical artist, and FG&G stands shoulders above the amateur-looking TSR books.
The layout and clarity of the rules is also far better in FG&G. The fonts are better, the use of color is better, and the book is cleanly presented and easy to reference. It is a beautiful book, without any of the silly, kids-cartoon races of modern D&D, which I feel distract from the story and game.
The FG&G art is awesome in every way, evocative of a realistic medieval world, and it is not pushing talking houseplants or puppet PCs in my face. I am seriously starting to dislike the "goofball" new fantasy backgrounds, which are childish and lack seriousness. This is a game without Tieflings, as having the blood of Satan in you instantly turns you chaotic evil and makes you a monster. Dragonborn would be of the blood of dragons, and the allies of those serpent beasts - not player characters. It feels like a classic all-or-nothing here, without the constant cosplay and pretend-ism, and that is a welcome change.
You could have them in your game, but if you are playing second edition, you never really did. For nostalgia's sake, leave the special backgrounds to the Wizard's editions.
The AD&D 2nd Edition books are way overdone, too fancy for their own good, with strange font choices, giant curly title fonts that are hard to read, too much color on the page, and distracting, red and black, double-bordered tables with too light of a font typeset. Some of the longer paragraphs are unreadable due to the sans-serif nearly hairline-thin fonts.
I love the serious tone of FG&G, and it does not feel like a lightweight game. Your characters are these actual wizards, knights, rogues, and witches of old. The game looks and feels like a classical bible, and in every ways sets a more serious and grounded tone than modern games, which tend to be goofy and more like Cartoon Network than a tale feeling based upon a realistic world.
I love that wizard. He is so cool. That would be my character. He has a stars and moons robe with zodiac symbols all over it, and a suspicious look in his eye like, "Get away from me!" He should, he only has a d4 hit die.
Where AD&D 2nd Edition has that goofy cartoon style, FG&G feels grounded and realistic, and it has the clearly superior license. The second edition is what many remember fondly, and it is nice to have an OSR game in this space, especially one so generous.
FG&G is the better game, one that gives me a serious feeling and weighty presence to it. It is much like ACKS II in this respect, and that mature and grounded tone brings my games to another level.
Even though the rules are mostly the same, presentation matters a great deal here.
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