City State of the Invincible Overlord Primer w/Gary Gygax & Jeff Leason Signatures

Take a step back in time, just for a moment, to an age when the game still had “Advanced” in the title, and the meteoric rise of Dungeons & Dragons was still a tenuous climb up a steep and unforgiving slope. TSR lacked many things at this time: funding, widespread distribution, and most of all, raw manpower to sate the rising demand for their product. But as always happens when there is a vacuum, something rushed in to fill that void. In this case, Judge’s Guild.

The City-State of the Invincible Overlord is one of the most acclaimed and recognized third party products from this age of the game. Its distribution fueled the ambitions of many a gamer in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The very concept of such a thorough and detailed treatment of a campaign setting was groundbreaking and left a legacy that made others tremble to duplicate.

Fast forward to the late 1980s. Judge’s Guild is no more and the game is now in its next edition. The rights for the setting have fallen into the hands of Mayfair games who knows an opportunity when they see one. They seek to revive this classic campaign from its ashes, but they know what they are up against: a skeptical customer base with fond memories of the past, a hiatus of half a decade from the original campaign’s last publication, and the need to freshen up the setting with new elements. Somehow they have to convince their buyers that they made the right choice, so they turned to the oldest trick in the advertising book…

Celebrity endorsement.

Obviously, there is only one truly outstanding celebrity for this market, then, much as it is now, the game’s most famous progenitor, Gary Gygax. This 4-page document was included with the revised City State box set and fully half of its content is a long letter from the game’s most auspicious creator adulating the revision and encouraging players to take it for a spin.

But that alone only makes these pamphlets a vague curiosity. There’s one in every copy of Mayfair’s version of the City State right? So why should you care? You should care because of a few hastily scribbled pen lines on the back of the booklet. We have been fortunate enough to come into a limited number of copies of these otherwise mundane pages which are autographed by Gary Gygax as well as City-State head writer Jeff Leason. Gary Gygax’s autograph is one of the single most sought after pieces of gaming memorabilia, and the more interesting the item it is on, the more desirable it becomes. Any time it is available for sale collector’s flock to the product.

So now you are faced with a tough question:

Are you ready to own a piece of gaming history?