Saurians!

Okay, so I've been gamely making the effort to follow the French-language gaming blog Anniceris.  My rusty French is just good enough to read along but it's definitely a struggle in places.  The most recent post really brought back huge memories from my early gaming years.  Anniceris did a post reviewing the Saurians source book for Chivalry & Sorcery (C&S).  As I've mentioned before C&S was the first RPG I every played.  The solid historical feel of the game combined with fantasy elements drawn faithfully from literature and mythology was the perfect starting place for me.  I often think that if I'd started with the crappy, amateurish original D&D I might not have continued with RPGs at all.

But anyway, Saurians was the first full single-setting supplement for C&S.  They published a sort of expansion source book called Swords & Sorcery which bundled the viking, celtic, and mongol cultures into one.  That was okay and it extended the basic western European setting but it wasn't too exciting.  (Several years later Lee Gold came out with the absolutely amazing stand-alone Japanese setting book called Land of the Rising Sun.)   But then the Saurians book came out.  This was a totally new self-contained setting with just two reptilian races living in a prehistoric land populated with dinosaurs and early megafauna.  The main race was generic-looking dinosaur-people (the HssTaathi) with an extremely detailed society, custom mage and cleric types, castes, and a cool political system.  The other race, of crocodile-people (the Kulun'Ssaatha), was less detailed.

I totally loved this book for the freshness of the concepts in the race and how every aspect of their society and physiognomy were carefully worked out.  It's one of the earliest game books of this type and still a favorite of mine.