A Fiftieth Anniversary Year

 

The 50th anniversary year of Dungeons & Dragons is drawing to a close. A number of projects I'd been planning for this year finally came out, and I got involved in a whole bunch of other things I didn't see coming... so much so that I spent far more of this year doing things than talking about what I was doing. So I thought I might do a brief year in review.

Books

• Twelve years after its original publication, Playing at the World has returned under the MIT Press imprint in a second edition. Although only the first volume appeared in 2024, the second volume is slated for an April 8, 2025 release. Now with proper margins and typesetting, the revised edition across its two volumes spans over 1,000 pages. Also, both volumes have Erol Otus covers! Needless to say getting the second volume into shape consumed no small amount of my time this year.
• I also helped Wizards of the Coast produce its commemorative 50th anniversary facsimile reprint anthology The Making of Original Dungeons & Dragons. This had been a long time in the works and it was great to see it finally come out, and to get notices (with PatW 2eV1) in places like the Washington Post. Some people were mad about its front matter, though. 
• We also snuck in a 50th anniversary upgrade to the original D&D Art & Arcana, featuring new gatefolds with some cool material added!
• For fans of the Heroes' Feast franchise, there was a bit more of that, in the form of the Deck of Many Morsels. 
• I supplied one of the chapters for the new Fifty Years of Dungeons & Dragons anthology produced by MIT Press.
• Speaking of anthologies, the Routledge Handbook of RPG Studies got a substantial 2024 revision,  reworking and expanding sections I contributed to.
• (And I suppose the Lucca Comics & Games Gateway to Adventure exhibition catalog took a lot of time this year as well, but since it's not available to the public, it probably shouldn't count as a publication.)

Events

• A number of museum exhibitions honoring D&D's 50th took place this year, including the American Writer's Museum's "Level Up" in Chicago. I served on the content team for that exhibition and contributed a bit to the product on display.
• Gen Con went big for D&D's 50th this year - perhaps "over the top" would be a better description. We did a whole bunch of things:
• In the lead-up to the convention, we streamed six actual play sessions of the various editions of live. I ran the game for the first stream, dedicated to OD&D. (I also played in the 2nd Ed. stream run by Zeb Cook).
• At the convention itself, I moderated seven panels dedicated to the editions of D&D - with the last for the games' future - featuring the designers and protagonists in the development of the game over the years. 
• I wrote an eight-page insert for the convention program about the history of D&D at Gen Con. 
• Finally, we did a museum at Gen Con - not nearly as big as the 2017 museum for Gen Con's 50th, but myself, Bill Meinhardt, and Alex Kammer brought enough goodies to stuff a few display cases with product, drafts, and ephemera from a half century of D&D.
• I stopped in Rochester, NY, on the way back from Gen Con to drop off a few things I had shown at the Gen Con museum for the Strong's "50 Years of Storytelling" exhibition. Also included in the exhibition are 14 original D&D artworks from the Koder Collection. This is still ongoing for another week or so if you're in the neighborhood.
• Perhaps the most ambitious commemoration of D&D's 50th year took place at the Lucca Comics & Games. This encompassed many activities - including dedicating an actual underground passage to Gygax and Arneson -  as well as the exhibition of original D&D art from the Koder Collection that I co-curated. Plenty of footage from the event can be found at the Koder Collection Facebook page. There were also a number of panels, games, and so on, which were recorded and will presumably be available at some point.
• It was also my privilege to make appearances at San Diego ComicCon, GameHole, GaryCon (though I missed my GaryCon panel thanks to air travel fail) and many other conventions where D&D's 50th was on people's minds. 

Other Things

• I was interviewed for a lot of media pieces this year, including the Time Magazine Special Edition about D&D, and (more recently) the Economist's take. 
• The occasion of the anniversary also led to appearances in mainstream venues like the Bay Area's NPR station KQED to talk about D&D's 50th - though the year couldn't get any weirder than being on Jason Alexander's show "Really? No, Really?"
• I found the time to talk a little about what I was doing this year on podcasts like Wandering DMs and Shane Plays.
• I did a little bit of behind the scenes work to help make the D&D postage stamps happen (the USA ones, not the Royal Mail ones).

Inevitably, a lot of work also went into things that didn't quite manage to happen this year. But from my perspective, it was an action-packed anniversary for D&D. I hope every fan of D&D found a satisfying way to celebrate this milestone of the hobby!