Sunday, February 22, 2009

Anybody know J. McPhail?

Mentioning White Dwarf classifieds in Friday's post reminded me that I had this scanned-in ad I've been meaning to share:At the moment I can't recall which issue this classified comes from, but it was almost certainly from the eighties. I like to imagine that J. McPhail was wildly successful and that there's a filing cabinet at 17 The Wynd chock full o' character classes of all sorts. How cool would that be?

Play at home time! Assume J. McPhail got every class ever made for D&D. What character type do you think has the most homemade variants? Would it be 35 takes on the Barbarian or 57 different Necromancers or 128 crazy Ninja classes? For extra credit try to come up with the most ridiculous class that would grace the McPhail Collection.

13 comments:

  1. Anonymous9:27 AM

    1000 Prostitute classes, each more hilarious than the last.

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  2. Anonymous9:31 AM

    100 each of Battle-Mages, Battle-Priests, Battle-Thieves and Battle-Fighters.

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  3. Anonymous9:33 AM

    and a Battle-Diplomat.

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  4. Anonymous10:08 AM

    What a great ad!

    I don't know what's happened to me. When I was a kid, I loved lots of character classes. Now in my campaign I use only two.

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  5. Considering this was the early to mid 80s - I'd say the following class would be the craziest:

    The 10 variations of Cyberworld Amateur Journalist (aka bloggers) - due to the fantastic knowledge found in the Barrier Peaks, you too can meld your mind and body and become something else...

    (And since the captcha word is so classic, I name first level bloggers to be "knord"s. Second level is "futterse"s)

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  6. Ninja and Necromancer would be two of my guesses, and if you don't require them to share the exact same name then Psychic/Telepath/Psionic/Mindlord/Mentalist/Mindwitch/Jedi/etc. is probably up there too. Coming up with various alternative psionic systems seemed like it was a sub-hobby for some folks for a while (at least where I grew into the game, I guess).

    I can't even begin to predict what the craziest class conceived could be because every crazy one I try to come up with I think "that would be really cool." I think I just need to go play some Encounter Critical or something...

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  7. British Telecom has a J MAcPhail across the Firth of Forth in Edinburgh. Anybody in the UK wanna call him?

    I'm sure he collected numerous Anti-Paladins.

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  8. Ninja and Necromancer would be two of my guesses

    Note to self: Start work on Ninjamancer class.

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  9. Anonymous2:40 PM

    I bet he got a bunch of Beastmaster variants! :)

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  10. Anonymous2:53 PM

    Bizarre.
    That address is about 30 miles from me.
    Whilst I am curious, and opening a game/comic store nearby, I'm not crazy enough to actually call all McPhails/MacPhails in the Phone Book...
    I might ask around though to see if anyone knows who it could be seeing as I know most of the clubs in the area.

    Cheers,

    Dave

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  11. Leader/Striker/Defender/Controller.

    What?

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  12. Anonymous7:39 AM

    Members of the McPhail family are still at that address, so you could write and ask easily enough.

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  13. were-scorpadillo (Race==Class, right?)

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