“Random thought: how much did my interest in LBW and AD&D cross-pollinate? Meaning: did I read LBW like the DMH and PH? Or did I read PH like the LBW? I would just pour over either of those as a kid.” (GW)
The subtitle for the 1978 release of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons was: Compiled Information For Players and Dungeon Masters. I think at that time, and probably still today, many players of games would be surprised the rules for a game could fill a 120 page book, and that said book would include over 100 tables and charts, among other delectables.
When I first got my hands on a copy of the AD&D, I studied it for hours. I’d hand write character sheets (no photocopier at home and this was the era long before pdfs), then begin using the rules set to create characters based on class, race, background, etc.
I think a widely shared experience among gamers of my generation was the way we’d pour over the early Dungeons & Dragons manuals. These were not like regular books read cover-to-cover like a novel. No, the manual was a territory for imaginative exploration.
The rules for D&D were unique, they were (in a way) hyper-texts. By necessity you marked pages and turned back and forth between the manuals, making forays into the Dungeon Master’s Guide for a wider list of equipment and other game features, navigating over the Monster Manual to explore the (frequently lethal) fauna to be encountered in game.
My friend’s experience matches my own, I treated the hymnal at our church in a manner similar to AD&D, although the hymnal was hyper-textual in terms of procedure rather than play: you had to page through the different parts of the liturgy.
The hymnal of my youth, Lutheran Book of Worship (also published in 1978!), was a green volume that had about as many charts and indexes as the AD&D manual. For example it contained all the “Collects,” the prayers for each Sunday of the liturgical season, which could then be placed in the bulletin the appropriate Sunday of the church year. You had three options for the liturgy, just over 500 hymns, and then in the back of the hymnal, indexes that allowed a certain amount of mixing and matching of tunes and texts.
Also an intriguing page right before all the Psalms with over a dozen psalm tones that could be paired with psalms if a congregation chanted them.
During Sunday worship, I’d often work my way through the hymnal puzzling over how the entire service (as presented in the bulletin) had been constructed. Sometimes the clergy (or the organist) would have made an intriguing move, matching a more familiar hymn tune to an unfamiliar text, therefore asking us to read the text of a hymn while accompanied by a tune that wasn’t printed on the page. All the information to know how that worked was printed in tiny text at the bottom of the page.
It wasn’t until seminary that I learned there was an entire volume designed for worship leaders that accompanied the LBW, called the “companion” to the LBW. I felt just a little bit robbed, because as someone who had always studied the Dungeon Master’s Guide, I liked knowing the bigger story, the rules for how it all worked, and there it all was, charts and diagrams for when to raise and lower your hands at the altar, crudely drawn images of paraments, and inexplicably length explanations for the general order of service (again, a lot like the manual for AD&D).