Renaissance: the Rebirth... anyone heard of this?

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Gringnr

Gringnr

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So I found this in near mint condition at my local Half Price Books. It was 8 bucks. 20230326_180030.jpg
Cloth covered hardback with foil. Inside is a rather amateurish looking but complete percentile-based RPG.

As far as I can see, this isn't related to the Renaissance RPG by Cakebread & Walton.

There's no barcode. No publisher info. Author is.lisyed as Jason Pruett.

Is this an RPG vanity press product? It's so odd. Seems to be D&D-style high fantasy, but grown out of someone's home game. Introduction says something about Houston, and there are a few typos, making me think this was a one-man show.

20230326_181657.jpg

I'm always fascinated by obscure small-press stuff. This one reminds me of Adventure Quest, a game born out of D&D at Purdue University.
 
Gringnr said:
So I found this in near mint condition at my local Half Price Books. It was 8 bucks. View attachment 58286
Cloth covered hardback with foil. Inside is a rather amateurish looking but complete percentile-based RPG.

As far as I can see, this isn't related to the Renaissance RPG by Cakebread & Walton.

There's no barcode. No publisher info. Author is.lisyed as Jason Pruett.

Is this an RPG vanity press product? It's so odd. Seems to be D&D-style high fantasy, but grown out of someone's home game. Introduction says something about Houston, and there are a few typos, making me think this was a one-man show.

View attachment 58287

I'm always fascinated by obscure small-press stuff. This one reminds me of Adventure Quest, a game born out of D&D at Purdue University.
Click to expand...

is that sigil printed under the text on every page?
 
A Purdue prof said about my book "impressive" (which is cool because Armstrong Hall is also at Purdue); there is a big gaming scene here.
 
Hmm. Let me craft a response...

iu
 
Gringnr said:
IDGI ELI5
Click to expand...
What we have here is failure to communicate. You, I now suspect, were inquiring into the authorship of the game, whereas I interpreted your respose as being about the authorship of the Homer GIF, hence my response.
 
So I posted about this Renaissance game on a "Rare and obscure RPG" Facebook group (straight doxxing myself, come at me bitches), and one of the admins made the following comment:

from the writer..We had about 400 copies of Ren made back in the early 2000s (2007'ish I think). We didn't have any website sales, despite having a website at the time, because even then online shopping wasn't what it is today. However, while we did sell a few at cons, we still lost money more often than not. It was a lot of fun at the time but looking back I definitely would have marketed and sold differently.

I'm not sure how many books are out there (less than 100 I would guess) but I might have a few laying around still. After about the 4th or 5th time we moved and had to lug 300 books worth of boxes up and down stairs we decided to tear off the covers and recycle the paper it was printed on.

I kept one for myself that has my testers signatures in it. I haven't published anything else, but I have continued designing games and homebrew stuff. It's always been a side project though so nothing ever reached a polished, ready for publication state. The one closest to completion is an updated 2e version of Renaissance that ended up being so different that I just renamed the whole project. It's still percentile, but between the vast number of changes, and the fact that people were always confused by the name of the book because it's not specifically set in the Italian Renaissance, I felt like a different name was called for in the event it ever made it to publication.
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Pretty interesting
 
dragoner said:
A Purdue prof said about my book "impressive" (which is cool because Armstrong Hall is also at Purdue); there is a big gaming scene here.
Click to expand...
I went to Purdue back in the 90’s during my hide-my-nerdiness phase.

I am ashamed that my friends and I secretly mocked some guys in the dorm cafeteria line who were raving about how last night’s epic session resulted in their characters killing an 18th level wizard.

I hope those guys are all millionaires now with massive gaming rooms.
 
Johnny Utah said:
I went to Purdue back in the 90’s during my hide-my-nerdiness phase.

I am ashamed that my friends and I secretly mocked some guys in the dorm cafeteria line who were raving about how last night’s epic session resulted in their characters killing an 18th level wizard.

I hope those guys are all millionaires now with massive gaming rooms.
Click to expand...
Purdue has a whole secret history of gaming with Telengard. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telengard
 
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