“What’s with the blue map?”
My friend Wes looked up at me as if I was speaking in German; somewhat comprehensible, but ultimately gibberish to him.
As my words sunk in, he responded, obviously not even questioning the strange map color. “They have to be some color. Blue’s as good as any I guess.”
It was 1982 and we were looking at the adventure
G1-2-3 Against the Giants, an amalgamation of the original three giant adventures (though we didn’t know that yet) and the first D&D “module” I got a close look at. Wes was wrong. It wasn’t just luck of the draw or some art director’s decision. There was a very calculated reason why the maps in old D&D adventures were blue, which we found out a few weeks later when we started to send modules to work with our fathers for photocopies.
Fast forward a few days later when I asked my dad if he go the copies done.
“Sorry, buddy,” my dad said. “For some reason I couldn’t get the maps to come out.” The reason was that in early copiers blues would register as either white or a very light gray (inversely reds showed as). TSR knew this, and that’s why they printed the maps in blue. It was a method to limit piracy. It was largely ineffective.
Looking back at it, it seems a tad ridiculous. I don’t think those maps getting loose could collapse the whole house of cards. Were all those maps of caverns, inexplicable dungeons, or trap-filled vaults was the main selling point? No. And I liked maps. Like many DMs I’m nerdy over them. Every national park I visited as a kid, I’d have to pick up the map and I loved to peruse my great uncle’s National Geographic collection, and I wasn’t only on the lookout for indigenous breasts.
Just a corner of the map from my duo-tone copy of S1 Tomb of Horrors. This printing is a later one. Earlier printings of this adventure featured a much lighter blue ink for the maps. Even for young boys with young eyes, these maps were hard to read.
At the same time it’s easy to put yourself in TSR’s shoes, though. RPG gamers are this strange mix of spendthrift and cheap as hell. I’ve always attributed that to the fact that most RPGs have more material than you can every really play or play with. I mean if I were to run, or just use the monsters, from everything that TSR or Wizards of the Coast produced in a 5 year period, it would probably take me at least 25 years to churn though it, assuming I ran weekly games. Eventually an RPG consumer realizes that at least half of what they buy is never going to see the light of play, so their solution is to want everything at bargain basement prices, which is unrealistic. In the 80s, as copiers were becoming more prevalent (one contributor to Out on a Limb in Dragon #3 calls it the “Xerox revolution”, a term I doubt he coined) game companies were probably scared to death that eventually one dude would set up shop a block from Gen Con and sell all the latest adventure for pennies on the dollar. I’m sure cloistered scribes felt the same kind of dread when Gutenberg set up shop. The fear is ultimately futile.
Blue maps sure as hell didn’t stop Wes and me. Soon our fathers learned that fiddling with the knobs on the photocopies would turn up the contrast just enough to get reasonably readable maps, and then we became intellectual property pirates long before such playful banter was thrown about. Of course we would rather have the real thing.
In fact, the very next month, Wes and I visited a real game shop in San Francisco. Both of us bought a product we already had a photocopy of. You see the photo copies had all of the information of the original, but none of the style. We were fans. We loved the game. It was important for us to have the real thing rather than cheap facsimiles.
Most of the time we had our dad make photocopies because it was hard to get games. You’re a kid in the 80s with a crappy allowance, no urge to peddle your meager lawn-mowing skills, and a good hour car drive away from the nearest game store. You pooled your resources and sent borrowed copies off to work with Pops…and then bought the real copy later. We were hungry for information and adventure, and when you are hungry, stealing becomes an option, even when the hunger is intellectual rather than physical.
People become intellectual pirates for one or two reasons. The first is that they really want something but either can’t afford it or get it readily anywhere else. The second is some people get off on the act of theft itself—it’s empowering. In the first instance, the person really likes what he is stealing, and the second the thing he enjoys is the stealing. Personally I see the first as an investment, and the second as the price of business (and it’s a fairly low price at that).
Does that mean companies should turn a blind eye to IP theft? Goodness no. Good measured responses are fine. In many ways that’s what these early blue maps where. Little speed bumps just in case you missed or misconstrued the legal text on the front cover. It really didn’t stop anyone; it was just reminder that you were doing something wrong.
Compare and contrast Wizards of the Coasts RPG PDF policy. For over a year now we have not been able to buy digital copies of D&D books from any edition (not counting Pathfinder, of course). Last year Wizards realized that there was piracy on the Internet and in an effort to punish the pirates, decided to take a huge chunk of D&D content off the web–almost all of it.
Dragon and
Dungeon magazines are still digital and you can buy many of the D&D novels in digital format (and both are all over file sharing sites), so the policy is wildly inconsistent. It also hasn’t stopped piracy; in fact it may have made it worse. As a test I decided to see how easy it would be to find a digital copy of
Player’s Handbook 3 off the web. It took me less than a minute to find a free digital. Forty seconds later it was ready for download. Those damn guys who love stealing don’t let much stop ‘em.
Here’s a page from a downloaded copy of the 1e Player’s Handbook. The strange thing is that the pirate actually signed his work. Now, this signature could be a decoy, but I’m willing to bet that our friend blacktalonz@hotmail.com is something akin to the Wynona Ryder of D&D books; thrilled by the challenge of “look what I can do and not get caught," rather than motivated by a hunger for material.
It used to be that content was king, but now product is king. With the internet, ideas are cheap and raw word too easily turned into pixels. These days good design, brilliant aesthetics, and great tools moves money from geek bank accounts to corporate tax shelters. And like it or not, the ability to get a digital copy to legitimate customers is an expected part of product offerings. Tablet computing and phones with more power than my first PC tower may just kill the physical book. An RPG company that doesn’t provide a legitimate way for customers to buy digital copies of their book is throwing away money and even customers.
Eventually TSR stopped making those blue maps. Customers wanted more colorful and useful maps. They wanted maps that helped them imagine the scene and presented tone. And bang bang, the blue map was dead. Today only nostalgia junkies looking to re-fire those neural pathways of their youth make or buy products with blue maps, forgetting the strange fear of progress that brought them to being in the first place. One day, I predict, the only physical books we will see around the table are fun little retro products or the occasional indy RPG. Sure, we may still be five years away from that, but it’s probably closer to two. I can only hope that Wizards realizes that eventually their ban on digital copies of rulebooks and adventures is the blue map of our day. A road bump, a reminder, but one that’s well past its usefulness.
The questions this week is hypothetical. Imagine you decided to illegally download a RPG product. What made you decide to do it? Would you still buy the legal copy? Why or why not?
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