Sunday, August 12, 2012

Rules to the Game of Dungeon (1974)


One of the perennial questions about the history of role-playing games is this: which came second, Tunnels & Trolls or Empire of the Petal Throne? Deciding between the two is largely a question of semantics, of whether you count various small-run amateur publications as releases or not. Fortunately, historians don't need to choose between the two, because Craig VanGrasstek's Rules to the Game of Dungeon (1974) beat them both handily. Weighing in at eighteen pages, and released late in the summer of 1974, Rules to the Game of Dungeon seems certain to be the second published role-playing game.


The great irony of VanGrasstek's Dungeon is that he was unaware of Dungeons & Dragons when he produced it, due to an almost incredible chain of events. In February of 1974, a Minneapolis science-fiction fan named Louis Fallert (better known as Blue Petal) began running a game called "Castle Keep" which he based on his experiences playing in dungeon adventures with the MMSA (Fallert wrote a blurb about this for Alarums & Excursions #3). While it seems  that Fallert himself was vaguely aware of Dungeons & Dragons, he presented "Castle Keep" to local science-fiction fans in such a way that many took it to be a game of his own invention. Much as Gygax adventured in Blackmoor with Arneson and then largely implemented his own rules from his experience, so did Fallert build a system for dungeoneering that followed his own subjective impressions as a player.

These "Castle Keep" games became quite popular in Minneapolis in 1974, as contemporary issues of the local fanzine Minneapa document, and many local fans developed their own dungeons, largely unaware of the existence of Dungeons & Dragons. Craig VanGrasstek played in the first incarnation of "Castle Keep," and later ran a dungeon; as the Foreword to his rules observes, there were nine total dungeons based on "Castle Keep" in Minneapolis by the summer. VanGrasstek recognized that there was little standardization among the rules of these dungeons, but he nonetheless hoped to write up an account of the game that would let people outside Minneapolis share in the fun. He therefore created fifty copies for distribution at the World Science Fiction Convention at the end of August 1974, and circulated his rules through Minneapa.

Once he started publicizing his rules, others were quick to point out the existence of Dungeons & Dragons, and thus Rules of the Game of Dungeon quickly fell into obscurity. The Minneapolis Dungeon tradition it preserves did however influence a generation of dungeoneers who began playing in 1974. Glenn Blacow, later a very prominent early player and dungeon master in Boston, first learned the game from the Minneapolis Dungeon before he ever saw a true copy of Dungeons & Dragons.

Fallert clearly was not trying to rip off TSR, and neither was VanGrasstek - neither profited from this venture. Both were simply sharing a pastime they enjoyed, in a manner that is well in keeping with the practices of science-fiction fandom. VanGrasstek only inadverantly released a game that competed with Dungeons & Dragons; it would not be until 1975 that other authors would intentionally try to market simpler and cheaper alternatives. In fact, it is likely that by preserving the game as he did, VanGrasstek did historians a great favor. There are certain elements of his Rules that resemble accounts of the original Blackmoor system, and it seems likely that Fallert informally preserved some Twin Cities practices for play that did not end up in the final drafts of Dungeons & Dragons. Thanks to VanGrasstek, we have a unique window into strongly reagant-based magic systems, mitigiation-based armor and much less formal dicing mechanics.

17 comments:

  1. I'm loving these glimpses into the dawn of the hobby, thank you Jon. And thank you too for being willing to show the evidence with the scans you provide.

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  2. Fascinating. I was completely unaware of Grasstek's rules. Thanks again for bringing this out. The "Castle Keep" games are another of those early developments about which not enough has been said. Ken Fletcher, the artist for Adventure Games and friend of Dave Arneson, is credited as an original Blackmoor player, but actually played in one of these "spin-off" campaigns. It wasn't until he began to work for Dave at adventure games that he played RPG's at Dave's table.

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  3. This is great. It's still being played from time to time in Twin Cities science fiction fandom, and has come to be referred to as "Minneapolis Dungeon." Some of the people who have been involved in Minneapolis Dungeon include: Ken Fletcher, Steven Brust, Louis Fallert (aka Blue Petal), Richard Tatge, and many others.

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  4. In my book, I do cover the immediate persistence of the various "Castle Keep" descendants. Word of them circulated through national science-fiction fandom at the same time that Dungeons & Dragons began to spread, causing some small confusion in LASFS and other places. When pushed, though, one observer did remember Tatge in particular referring to D&D manuals during play as early as the summer of 1974. I hope the tradition continues for a long time to come!

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  5. Jon: have you done any social network analysis to track the spread of D&D from group to group, city to city, state to state, country to country? Your comment about Glenn Blacow and Boston got me thinking that such an endeavor might be more possible than it would seem, by leveraging the fanzines and overlapping communities of interest (LASFS/A&E and D&D players, to use an example from the other coast, for example).

    Allan.

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  6. I would say that the analysis of D&D's spread is the subject of the first half of the fifth chapter of my book - who first got the game, where it was advertised, who played it at what conventions and who reviewed it in what zines. The pictures I give of 1974 factors in a lot more than just "Castle Keep" descendants. Along the way, I chronicle the spread of terms like "dungeon master" and "role-playing game" for good measure. Now that much said, I only cover the communities with sufficient documentation, and Los Angeles probably gets the biggest slice of it overall. But I try to put it asides about how the game first arrived at a lot of different places, from Boston to Boulder.

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  7. Fascinating. Anyone know of a place to buy or download a copy? The internet seems blissfully unaware of this thing.

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  8. Interesting. Dave Arneson listed Blue Petal as one of his original Blackmoor Players, though with the addendum "Pre-Blackmoor"...

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  9. Fallert had an association with the U of M MHC and the MMSA that may have predated Blackmoor (he helped out with the Club's Public Relations Committee as far back as 1971), but he seems to have found the game quite novel in February of 1974.

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  10. incredibly interesting.Never heard about this.

    Need i sell my soul to the devil, in order to get a copy or is there a way?

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  11. Glenn Blacow -- ah, a blast from the past. May he rest in peace still.

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  12. Heh! I never heard of Dungeon. Good on Grasstek if he was already doing his own thing in 1974.

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  13. Do anyone know of any way to get one’s hands on a digital copy of the rules set? And are there any other things than these rules that would be needed to play the game?

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    1. http://playingattheworld.blogspot.com/2014/08/1974-dungeon-variant-now-for-download.html

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  14. This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

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  15. Absolutely fascinating. After all thèse Many years of RPIn'it seems this hobby is mature enough to feed its own archeology cases.

    Y'all we've grown up. Cheers 8')

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  16. Absolutely fascinating. After all thèse Many years of RPIn'it seems this hobby is mature enough to feed its own archeology cases.

    Y'all we've grown up. Cheers 8')

    ReplyDelete