Midnight at the Well of Ludicrous Player Races
I found this box set for a non-insignificant price in a game store's used section; it'd been resealed so I could only go on the cover illustration and title (the back is blank white). Both are fantastic. I had hopes, I guess, for a Fantasy Games Unlimited-style trove of esoteric formulas and pinpoint-detailed character sheets, de rigueur for small-press RPGs at the time, but I got something both better and worse in different ways. Midnight at the Well of Souls is the first novel (1977) in an SF series by a guy named Jack L Chalker. I'm not familiar, but then I'm not much of a reader in that genre. Based solely on the cover art (the exact same as the novel's) I expected the game to be a swords & sorcery romp with centaurs and pyromancy but it's not that at all. Almost all of the system, released in 1986, was written by a fan of the series named Timothy A. Green - hence TAG Industries, the publisher - and he provides the most honest introduction I've