Recreating the OD&D Booklets
Now that I’m fiddling with OD&D regularly again, I figured that it was time to create some OD&D booklets from my PDFs. I bought the PDFs because I didn’t want to keep using my original brown box set for reference while working on Microlite74. However, PDFs aren’t very useful at the gaming table, so I decided to print myself some nice digest-sized copies for everyday use.
This was easy to do with Adobe Acrobat, I just selected the pages I wanted to print, set it up to do a booklet print to my duplexing laser printer and printed. In a few minutes, the interior pages of Men & Magic were in my hands. I then printed the front cover on cardstock (still in booklet mode), set my long reach stapler to 5.5 inches, put a couple of staples in the center of the combined cover and interior sheets, and folded at the staples for a nice digest-sized Men & Magic booklet that I can use without worrying about damaging it.
I repeated this procedure for Monsters & Treasure, The Underworld & Wilderness Adventures, Greyhawk, Blackmoor, and Eldritch Wizardry. As I seldom use Chainmail, Gods, Demi-Gods, and Heroes, or Swords & Spells, I did nor bother to print these out. I now have a complete set of the OD&D books I use in play. If anything happens to one or all of them, I can easily print others.
The booklets are now weighted down under some heavy books where they will remain until the curl my printer puts in cardstock goes away. I’ll try to remember to take and post a picture in a few days. The only thing I’ll miss from my originals are the Tolkien references (Ents, Balrogs, Hobbits, etc.) in the brown box LBBs.