What is an unabridged version?

[Tim]

My teachers always told me there is no such thing as a stupid question. Still, I can't help but feel silly asking this because I suspect that answer is something really simple and obvious (and probably posted somewhere).

What is an unabridged version? I've seen this term used in several places on the Project Aon website.

I'll let you know if I slap my forehead at the answer.

[Ofecks]

All the Grand Master books printed in the US were abridged versions. I had to look the word up in the dictionary when I first got book 13.

Abridged means edited, condensed, in-a-nutshell, etc. The US GM books had tons of sections missing, and a lot of sloppy edits. Book 14 is nearly impossible to finish because of typos. The overall atmosphere of the missions are the same, but they're much more linear.

So unabridged means the complete original edition. If it wasn't for Project Aon, I'd have to spend a small fortune importing the UK GM books to read the real thing. That money is better spent on other things, like bills.

[outspaced]

Living in the UK, I've never seen one of the fabled 'abridged versions' but from what I gather they are edited mainly in this way: at certain points in a GM book Lone Wolf will be given an option to proceed via path 1 or path 2. The abridged versions remove all traces of path 2 and force Lone Wolf to proceed along path 1. For example, in The Plague-lords of Ruel, I understand that the whole section where you can approach Mogaruith via the mountains is absent from the abridged versions.

And as OmegaFlareX so rightly pointed out, in bodging--erm, editing the books in this way, it was necessary for then to re-number a lot of the sections. But they sometimes forgot to renumber the links between sections. Well done, Berkeley Books, stand up and take a bow. That there were a few incorrect links in the unabridged versions exacerbated these errors making the abridged books even more difficult to complete since you often had to guess which section you were supposed to go to next!

[Tim]

Thank you for all of this information! I guess my follow up question is why in the world they would do this? I know that Japanese games are often edited for the American audience (heaven forbid Final Fantasy 2 ever made it here in it's original "hard type" format).

Guessing which section to go to sounds a bit rough. Sounds similar to my experience with that Fighting Fantasy book Creature of Havoc. Of course, you don't really have to guess which section to go to in that book, but people who have read it will know what I mean.

[deiseach]

I suppose they cut corners to save costs. Paper is a cyclical industry, prices soar then plummet with alarming regularity. If book 13 came out when paper was at the peak of the cycle, it might have made sense to do this across a whole print run. Remember, the later New Order books had mono maps on plain paper. It robbed the book of a certain something but probably saved a fair bit in the short term

[Relenoir]

I actually went through the pain of the abridged versions years ago before I even knew about the different versions in the U.S. vs. the rest of the world. I can remember certain puzzles that didn't have any sense to their answers, a place in book 14 that I actually had to look at sections in the book until I found one that seemed like it was where I should be, and a few other what I referred to as "continuity errors". It made the reading process very disruptive. When I found out about the original versions, I realized this made sense, because all the U.S. Grand Master books had weird section totals, like 297, 285, 301, etc. for the final entry. I can offer this advice: If you are trying to get copies of the books from eBay, don't bother with any of the U.S. Berkley/Pacer editions of ANY of the books. The non-U.S. releases are all slightly larger in size, have nice color maps, and the G.M. series are complete.