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Bats... I believe there was an original edition done (very few copies) at the first Gen Con where Ars Magica 1st Ed showed...that would have been 1988. We at Lion Rampant did a revision of it for the release of the 2nd Edition at Gen Con in 1989. I think we made a few hundred...photocopied at the Carleton College copy center and hand-collated into plastic bags (closed with a gold "Best Fantasy RPG of 1988" sticker) to sell as a cheap add-on sale for Gen Con. We sold maybe a hundred or so at Gen Con? There was a big box of them at House Rampant, long after Mark, Nicole, etc. had moved down to Georgia (and ultimately formed White Wolf). I wish I'd taken it with me, but I suspect it wound up in the trash. It might still be stashed somewhere in the former House Rampant basement/attic/garage down in Northfield, though, or some other one of the passing-through roommates could have would up with it, which might have I don't believe the Bats JSK ever was sold to retail stores. It was not assigned a product number, either. I did find two sealed copies in my basement a while back, among a bunch of shrinkwrapped authors' copies and the like from my early-90s freelance writing and editing career. And a year or two ago Lisa Stevens sent me the digital files, which she had come across amongst her stuff. (Both versions, I think.) Maps were in some ancient file format -- SuperPaint 1.0 or something. I was at one point working on doing a 4th edition adaptation to sell as a PDF. But in working on it, I noticed that it, well, has all sorts of problems editorially, and I began to question whether the effort was worth it. And it's not a matter of simply making a PDF, because it was laid out in ancient software versions that won't simply make a PDF or even print to a PostScript file. (Remember when PageMaker had its own custom way of dealing with printers, no doubt because of the problems of highly limited memory in printers and computers? This was the day when our Macs had 512k of RAM...) Anyhow. It really has value as a super-rare collector's item, not so much as something you'd want to play as it stands. (It's kind of like my own D&D adventure, The Jade Hare, I wrote a few years later, which TSR was giving as a freebie with mail orders and now sells for silly amounts when one comes up for auction. It's not any genius writing that makes it valuable...just the oddity and rarity of it.) In a few years, no doubt the printed copies of Promises, Promises out there will be in the same category. (I think we printed 1000 of them, and while they were around we sent them out free to stores, conventions, etc. for demo games.) Still, maybe sometime the Bats will return to Mercille in some form or other... -John Nephew
President, Atlas Games
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