Japanese Rules Cyclopedia!

You gotta love the internet (sometimes). Look at that:

Some monsters, all in color, not the sparse black
and white selection from the American version...

Obviously there was a japanese version of the D&D Rules Cyclopedia (I didn't know that...). I think it looks amazing and gives the game quite a different tone (which is not surprising, but nice to look at). Record of Lodoss War seems to be a direct connection..

Here is another example:

A star map. They definitly went in a different
direction with that stuff.

A gallery with more pictures can be found here.

The source is mystara.thorf.co.uk (same pictures as the gallery, but with more/complete texts). It seems to be inactive for some time now, but it might be worth a look or two. Anyway, this is a gem. I'd be very interested to know if they changed some of the rules and if so, how they did it.