Bill Hoyt - My Old Campaign
A downloadable book
In 1974, Bill Hoyt, part of the original Blackmoor Bunch, started playing Dungeons & Dragons, which he'd got at Gary Gygax's house. Soon after, he began his own campaign.
These are rare maps and campaign notes from the very beginning of D&D.
Note: This download is pretty hefty, because it contains large scans of the original campaign map, as well as a modern redrawing.
EDIT: With the assistance of OrdinalM, we have reduced the size of the original PDF greatly, without reducing the big campaign maps -- which need the detail!
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Development log
- Resized!41 days ago
Comments
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Thank you for the work!
If I may inquire, may this be put up on online archive sites like Web Archives, or should it remain limited to this download?
Thank you for asking! Bill wanted this to be as widely distributed as possible, so if you want to put it other places, go right ahead. Just please don't edit it.
Thanks for putting this up! really interesting
I was able to get it down to 38.4 meg in size by reducing it to 150dpi via Ghostscript btw - while the images do go down a little in quality they're still fine I think. I can link you my version and/or explain the process.
Thank you for doing this! I'd love to see how the world-map turned out.
Here's the smaller version https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/w1e35akhzlsklm4subxrr/MyOldCampaign_150dpi.pdf?rl... - I converted it using the "ebook" preset in Ghostscript (using the instructions from https://itsfoss.com/compress-pdf-linux/ but Ghostscript is a cross-platform program so one could do the same not on Linux).
eta: actually the redrawn world map on p6 didn't turn out that well :/ it seems to have thought it was quite a small image size so not given it very high resolution, I'll see if I can do anything about that.
Let me try something. I have an idea.
OK Great! I was able to take you re-sized PDF, and replace the world campaign maps with the high-resolution versions. Best of both worlds!
oh nice! Glad that worked!
OS Awesomeness, Thanks
You are welcome. We are so happy Bill shared this with the world
Super resource - great to see old stuff!
Thank you for sharing this piece of history!
History is exactly what this is. Bill wanted to share it with people who might enjoy seeing it.