A Quick Look at ElfQuest Classic Deluxe

The old ElfQuest boxed set got the recent “revival” treatment by Chaosium’s excellent “Nostalgia Department” (aka the ever wonderful Chaosium president Rick Meints). After quite a successful Kickstarter campaign, the box was finally delivered this week to most backers. Since I’ve got nothing better to do this week-end, let’s take a quick look, and compare it to the old one!

From the picture above, the obvious difference is that it’s a much bigger box, at almost twice the depth. The box itself looks much sturdier too, as most boxed sets from 2020s Chaosium are. The colours may also be more vibrant, although it’s hard to say if they have simply faded on my venerable 1984 copy. Or maybe they used the 1989 second edition cover, which, based on what I see online, also seems to have more vibrant colours.

The first booklet in the new Deluxe edition starts with a classic “What’s in the Box” list which, although usually present in most of Chaosium’s boxed sets, wasn’t a thing in the original (unless I’m just missing it, but again looking at online pictures of the old boxed set, I can’t spot one).

There’s also some errata, and then a page that made me chuckle, titled “Simplifying ElfQuest Combat”. Being a big critic of RuneQuest‘s mechanics 50 years later, and a moderate critic of BRP in general since I discovered it in the mid-90s, it’s a bit ironic to me that Chaosium finally seems to be a bit self conscious about their rules. Just know that the first offered option is getting rid of Strike Ranks, and let’s just move on while I nod knowingly.

Next are the Reference Sheets and Example of Play. I wonder how innovative it was, at the time, to include an example of play not just for a particular rule, but for the game in general? This one feels very dynamic, too, thanks to the inclusion of many semi-relevant panels from the ElfQuest comics:

Another thing I noted immediately is how close the new layout is to the original. Making these remasters of 1970s and 1980s books usually requires redoing everything from scratch. Desktop publishing as we know it now only became a thing in the mid-80s, so the original books were usually assembled physically and by hand. Compare these new ElfQuest books with some older Chaosium remasters such as the RuneQuest Classic ones:

Pictured above are RuneQuest 2nd edition (remaster on the left, original on the right) and Griffin Mountain (original on top, remaster on the bottom). The remasters have much simpler layouts, often losing (especially in the case of Griffin Mountain) some the quirkiness of the originals. This made sense at the time, since the Chaosium Nostalgia Department was just getting started, and it wasn’t clear whether these reprints would sell or not.

Seeing the new ElfQuest reprints feature more layout work may indicate that the audience is there after all, and that the nostalgia budget is trending up. Rick Meints often mentioned that the point of these reprints is to let people experience classic products without having to pay for “collector” prices on eBay, so trying to reproduce the original layout (if possible) makes a lot of sense.

Speaking of the “classic experience”, we even get some of the original ads for the ElfQuest comic (see above), and even vintage-looking ads for Ral-Partha miniatures!

Next are the blank character sheets. Compared to the originals, someone had the bright idea to not staple them together. This means that you can take the pages out without ripping paper! There are also, as part of the many Kickstarter stretch goals, some extra sheets for pre-generated characters taken straight out of the ElfQuest comic.

You probably know that I love maps, and here of course get the same map as the original box, but also a second colour map for the whole World of the Two Moons (another Kickstarter stretch goal).

The two books, Elfbook and Worldbook, are still here, and the covers have been colourized. Frankly, I find the colour versions inferior to the original black and white. First, I’m probably too used to seeing ElfQuest in black and white, since I read the big omnibus comic, meaning I barely ever saw a colour cover. Second, these colours are… I don’t know, too much? Wendy Pini’s line art is great, but her colour art has always been hit or miss for me (possibly based on the colourist). Here the Elfbook cover is OK-ish, but I don’t like the Worldbook one… possibly because it’s tricky to colourize art that was designed to be black and white. Oh well.

Once again, the layout inside is very close to the original layout, but the new books have more pages and lots of content has moved around a bit. One reason is of course more Kickstarter stretch goals, such as the extra monsters and such.

But there are also changes in the art, for some reason. Some of the comic art from the original books is missing in the new ones, and new art has been added instead. This wouldn’t be a problem except that the new art as visible printing quality differences. For instance, the scene with the horses is gone. The new full-page art has some… “faded blacks” look to it. I’m not sure how to describe, and I’m not sure you can tell from the photos, but it’s noticeable.

Another thing to note is that the filled-out characters sheets had a handwritten typeface in the original. In the remaster they sadly only have a boring sans-serif typeface:

The rest of a box is more Kickstarter stretch goals: the ElfQuest sourcebooks that were released between 1985 and 1987, some full-page portraits for the pre-generated characters taken from the comics, some good-looking dice, some sturdy-quality cardboard standies, and flimsy three-panel gamemaster screen (similar to the equally flimsy one from the RuneQuest Kickstarter).

And that’s it for now! Now I need to finish the second ElfQuest omnibus… assuming I remember what was going on since last time I was reading it! Or maybe I should start again from the beginning?