Sunday, August 26, 2018

Triviathlon

So, over on the Facebooks, I have been asking questions. Not my questions, but rather question from 1996 about AD&D Second Edition.

This was the Trivathlon, a full-sized poster that may have been shipped with DRAGON subscriptions (though I'm not sure) and/or were distributed to hobby stores.On one side was a full list of all the D&D products to date, put together by John Rateliff (also known around here as Sacnoth). The other side had a contest - a hundred trivia questions about AD&D in the 1996 era, along with the rules for "The Arcane Challenge" First prize was a choice of a free trip to the Spanish Gen Con Game Fair in Barcelona or the Euro Gen Con Game Fair in England. Second prize was a trip to the US Gen Con in Milwaukee, and third prize was a limited edition pewter Great Red Dragon.

Anyway, John has been cleaning out his basement and came across a copy of the product list/poster/contest. His memories about it are here and here. The same weekend, at our regular gaming group, Steven Winter (who used to blog at the Howling Tower) brought in HIS copy of the Triviathlon, partially filled out. I snagged Steve's copy and spent the past month or so amusing myself posting a bunch of questions every day. Sometimes I got the right answer. Sometimes I got smart-alecky remarks. It was fun.According to Steve, there was ONE person at the time who got all the answers right.

However, TSR never published the answer key, or so we thought. But someone (and I will  gladly credit them here - I've lost that message in the past month. EDIT: It was Ed Tucciarone! Thanks Ed!) sent me a link to a user group on Google, which had copied the answers from a response by the TSR Online Coordinator at the time. The Coordinator from that time would be Sean Reynolds, but Stan!, another member of our regular group, checked with Sean and he remembers nothing of the contest either.

However, an answer key does exist, and can be found HERE. So if you've been following the whole craziness of the Triviathlon, here's where you can find out if you're right or not. Or if THESE answers were wrong.

Me? I'm going to go have a bit of a lie-down. I've done enough Facebookery for a while.

More later,