The most expensive Jez Goodwin drawing you'll never own.

Zhu Bajie

Member
Clickbaity enough title? lol.

OK this is not my listing! A copy of ST1 Up The Garden Path has gone up for sale on eBay. It's probably the rarest Dungeons & Dragons module ever published. It was produced by TSR UK for the 1986 National Garden Festival.

And the front cover is an awesome picture of a centaur by Jez Goodwin. The style and design sense is clearly his, but it also carries his JG triangle monogram, which kind of confirms it. I'd have loved to see him sculpt this guy, but anyway...

s-l1600.jpg


The listing correctly states that the last time one of these sold it went for $2,500 USD. The current sale has an upper limit at £3,250 GBP.

This raises all sorts of questions for me. The reason for the price is obvious - there are D&D collectors out there with very deep pockets, and the item is ultra-rare, and imho, a handsome object, although the interior illustrations are a little bland.

Are there any Goodwin collectors out there who need this to complete their collection? Does anyone have a copy? At what point do elf-games and toy-soldiers become serious collectables? How much is too much? Is just seeing a dirty jpeg of an eBay auction (or a dodgy pdf scan, or a rip-off reprint - both exist btw) enough to have 'seen' the art or does a minty original offer a different experience? Why doesn't Warhammer have any 2-3K collectables?
 
Zhu Bajie":1i2zy3dh said:
Why doesn't Warhammer have any 2-3K collectables?

I'm guessing a smaller relative GW fanbase than D&D, for a start (and certainly one that's interested in older stuff), and the fact that D&D has a more 'mature' market. Basic D&D still has a huge number of players, whilst the people that play WFB1 regularly, for example, could probably fit in a medium minibus.

Yes, this is from '86, but really '85-'86 was only near the starting point for the exponential growth of GW, D&D had a good 12 years on it by that point. So a: there are more people buying this stuff, and b: from an older demographic, frequently with more disposable cash, especially now their kids have left home!

There's also the lack of anything *particularly* rare/desirable from GW to account for the lack of 2-3k values. Pretty much everything was published in fairly large amounts, be it figures or rulebooks, so you don't get the rarer ephemera like this, I can't really think of anything 'vintage' that was released in a fixed, limited amount. Unreleased stuff fetches good prices, but there's not enough of each individual item around to maintain a residual secondary market with 'set' values as such. There's also, the fact that, as an entity, GW has always placed value on new over old, so there's no mass market for older items except among anal completists and retro-hipster weirdos like us... :lol:
 

AndrewMay

Member
I recently watched a Nottingham based seller on eBay sell roughly £2-3k worth of items in a week. All unreleased goodies, Tyranid prototype went for £207 beaky plastics prototype went for £137 plus about 20 other items that I can't recall. There was recently that unique Bob Olley magus up for sale at £2k but I don't know if it sold.

That said I bought one of those Space Marine riding lizards for £15, seller had two. I saw a Piscean warrior and Dominator gor for onlt £40 ish each, was tempted but £80 in one hit was a bit much at the time.
 

inchmurrin

Member
As one of the "mature" people with disposable income I fully agree with diesel monkey's assessment particularly for Basic D & D or even more so some original D&D prior to the boxed basic set. There is a huge number of people into the game and lots of very short lived stuff was produced. And as my art industry friends tell me there is something special about an original it is the context that makes that particular pile of bricks valuable and the one behind my garage definitely not.
 
I think it has something to do with tabletop wargames being much more expensive in themselves and lots of very expensive new stuff like Forge World Horus Heresy stuff coming out.

I think there's always enough of awesome new expensive things to seriously thin out competition for older stuff.
 

dhifdjdrd

Member
I think its the fact that castings are by definition reproducible and prices for "serious" collectibles are driven by scarcity.
 
I don't really know what to think about the price, but I do like that drawing. I especially like the way the Centaur is connected with his surroundings through a common style of the whole drawing, especially visible in the way that the hair and the tree trunks echo each other. I also like how the thick lines make the tree trunks feel hard and heavy, while the thin lines make the leaves feel soft and light. Those are some of the qualities of the drawing which cannot be translated into 3D - even though I agree that it would've been a nice miniature :)
 

Zhu Bajie

Member
Yeah, it's a nice drawing. I particularly like the way the feathers on the spear dance. The centaur design just seems to embrace both a 1970s hippy aesthetic with 80s glam that really appeals to me. Actually didn't Jez do the Asgard Miniatures Centaurs?

Final value £4,802.86.
 
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