With the release of its second volume, the second edition of Playing at the World is finally complete. The two books combined total well over 1,000 pages on the conceptual origins of role-playing games. The first edition had been out of print for some years, so if you've wanted to check it out, this would be a good time. Each volume has a spiffy new cover by classic D&D artist Erol Otus, and of course updated coverage of its sprawling subject matter.
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.
Last weekend at GaryCon, many of us raised a glass to the memory of Jim Ward, who passed away just days before the convention. Ward was very helpful to me in my research, as he had been a longtime TSR executive, and before that an employee-witness to the tumultuous events of the mid-1980s, and even before that a freelancer who helped bring the science-fiction genre to role-playing games. But still further before that, he was a player in Gygax's Greyhawk campaign, and like any good dungeon explorer, he drew a lot of maps - including this map of a segment of the Greyhawk dungeon area called Wonderland. The Wonderland dungeon, which we know existed in a playable state early in 1975, would become the inspiration for Gygax's later EX1 and EX2 modules based on Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass.
2024 marks the 50th anniversary of the publication of Dungeons & Dragons. Nailing down the exact release date of a product as informally produced as D&D is difficult: I've written about that before (and amended it a bit further). Personally, I still choose to celebrate it on the last Sunday of January, which this year is the 28th. A lot of things will be happening in 2024 to mark D&D's birthday: among them, a re-issue of my first book, Playing at the World. But 2024 also marks another momentous occasion, one that we should honor along with D&D's release: the 200th anniversary of the 1824 publication of Reiswitz's Kriegsspiel, the game that pioneered many fundamental system concepts that would later underpin role-playing games.
Of all the things that I never imagined I would end up working on, I was asked to help put together the Trivial Pursuit D&D edition, which has just been released. It is, well, Trivial Pursuit, but with D&D-specific questions: on monsters, spells, campaigns, characters, and of course the game's fifty-year history. If that sounds like something you'd be interested in, you can find it at the usual places online and in person -- my FLGS just got it in this weekend.
David M. Fitzgerald's E'a: Chronicles of a Dying World is one of the more obscure digest-sized unofficial supplements to early D&D, little known even in the community of its day. E'a did warrant a blurb in Heroic Worlds (1991), and now even has an RPGGeek entry, so it cannot be considered entirely forgotten, but very few were printed. As with many small-press items of this era, trusting the 1979 copyright date inside the book is risky at best -- but through equally-obscure catalogs, it is possible to establish roughly when it became available.
As another anniversary of the birth of Dungeons & Dragons passes, let's look back 48 years to the heady days of 1974, when the idea of dungeon adventuring had only just started to capture the imagination of gamers at large. Alistair MacIntyre had long run "Operation Contact" for the International Federation of Wargaming, so he knew everyone and viewed the release of D&D with some interest -- though he confessed, "I don't have the time or knowledge of fantasy to participate in your underground adventures." He was however "fascinated by the dungeon mazes," and came up with a number of devious dungeon layouts that he photocopied and shared directly with Gary Gygax and others that summer of 1974. Above you can see a dungeon entrance from the wilderness that MacIntyre proposed -- and at the bottom of the cut below, there's a little trick from Gary himself as well.
As much attention as Game Wizards lavishes on conventions, there was more still before the manuscript was cut down to size. Convention tournaments in particular received more attention, and GenCon 1978 had a anecdote that began as follows: "Even the tournament was something of a shambles, with only one group surviving the second round: seven out of eight parties died to an illusion, mistaking for a teleporter something that was actually a deadly pit." This account follows Jon Pickens's description in A&E #39, which makes for something of a funny story, and lets us see with fresh eyes the encounter with Silussa the succubus and her vampire beau Belgos in D3 Vault of the Drow.
When Dave Arneson's lawsuit against TSR was nearing a trial date at the end of 1980, his legal team recruited an expert witness in the person of Jon Freeman. Freeman, who wrote for Games magazine and had recently produced The Complete Guide to Board Games, was a longstanding D&D fan who drove one of the earliest computer adaptations of dungeon-crawling to see a commercial release: The Temple of Apshai (1979), first of the "Dunjonquest" series. Today, we'll take a look (a layman's look, not a lawyer's) at Freeman's argument, beginning with his chart above, which shows how Gary Gygax's earlier Chainmail rules contrasted with both D&D and AD&D.
This single piece of paper constitutes the entirety of the understanding between TSR and the authors of the 1975 Greyhawk supplement: most significantly, it covers a copyright assignment to TSR and an agreement from TSR to pay royalties based on "the cover price of the game rules or game on each and every copy sold." It is quite short, having been drafted pro bono by Gary Gygax's uncle at a time when Tactical Studies Rules was still a partnership, and D&D had sold perhaps 1500 copies. This language is of especial interest because the same form was used for the 1975 D&D contract, and famously Dave Arneson would later sue TSR on the grounds that his rights to royalties extended to titles like the Holmes Basic Set and the AD&D hardcover books. This is a major focus of Game Wizards.
Over the next five years, TSR refined the language of their new agreements to be clearer about what rights authors were assigning, and for which sales they would receive compensation. I am definitely not a lawyer, but I am going to offer below a few layman's thoughts about the evolution of TSR's contract language during this period.
Game Wizards is very decidedly not a book about who invented which system in D&D. But early drafts of the book did track one design choice in D&D that Dave Arneson perennially criticized: the system wherein characters gain more hit points as they go up in level. Arneson held that character hit points should instead be fixed at character creation, and that characters should become harder to hit as they rise in level. While that story thread failed its save against manuscript bloat, restoring it does add context for Gygax and Arneson's subsequent disputes. Probably the most well-known place Arneson mentioned his system was in the introduction to the First Fantasy Campaign (1977), as shown above.
Game Wizards has "turn results" at the end of the annual chapters to track the big picture, while casting the business of D&D as the sort of game that Gygax and others often made it out to be. Early drafts of the book actually had a 1970s-style Diplomacy variant serialized from the beginning, with installments throughout, which both served as a sort of ersatz dramatis personae and also would have made the chapter closer look more like what you would have seen for turn results in an actual Dippy zine back in the day. I was eventually persuaded it was too obscure and gimmicky, and scaled it back to its current form. But for the amusement of anyone digging into the book now, this is an (unpolished) excerpt of what that might have looked like.
From September 1973 to September 1975, Tactical Studies Rules was a partnership of hobbyists, not a corporation. Under Wisconsin law at the time, partnerships apparently couldn't sell stock shares -- but TSR devised a way to sneak key people some equity in the venture. The above shows the partnership granting five "units of value" to Dave Arneson, on May 1, 1975. So, what were these "units of value"?
While Game Wizards has plenty to say about the big picture of TSR's corporate financials, it also pays a lot of attention to the early, scrappy days when D&D was more of a hobby than a business to the people who made it. This visual timeline of the 1972-4 process is intentionally pretty high-level, showing sequences of events rather than exact dates, but it is the working model I used for this era as I wrote the book. It is a little different from the timeline certain books (including mine) have given in the past.
The above model, drawn from the narrative of Game Wizards, shows roughly how many people TSR had on staff between 1976 and 1985. Obviously, staffing fluctuated over a given year, and these plotted points are not anchored to any particular date on the calendar, but they impart a general sense of TSR headcount across its peaks, midpoints, and valleys. At the macro level, staffing ramped up steadily after the Egbert incident, accelerated recklessly in 1982, and then plummeted sharply thereafter. But this isn't the way that Gary Gygax remembered it... and that warrants a bit of explanation.
Underpinning the business story of Game Wizards is the financial model shown here of TSR as a company, from the founding of TSR Hobbies in 1975 to the ouster of Gary Gygax at the end of 1985. Although it leaves out coverage of the earliest years, this chart is in effect the narrative of Game Wizards visualized: it also locates major events on the timeline, and along the very bottom shows who was running the company when. So where does this data come from?
I have a new book coming out next month called Game Wizards. Unlike my previous books, which are histories of game design, this is an early history of Dungeons & Dragons as a product: of how it came to be a product at all, of the people who made it, of its unlikely success, and of the battles that its success caused. If you've read my "Ambush at Sheridan Springs" article from 2014, this is a book-length expansion of its story. It follows the business journey of D&D, as well its creators, from their hobbyist origins up to Gary Gygax's ouster from TSR in 1985.
Scouring through the polyhedral dice available to early gamers, you can sometimes stumble across a peculiar looking ten-sided die numbered 0 through 9. While these are obscure dice in America, they are well known in Japan, where they were included in an elementary school toolkit called a "Sansuu Setto" (さんすうセット, or 算数セット), which just means "arithmetic set." Today, let's unbox a Sansu Set, and look at a few variations on the d10s you can find within.
In cataloging the polyhedral dice available to early gamers, we shouldn't neglect a few products that weren't marketed as dice at all. In the 1960s, educational supply companies made models of the regular polyhedra available for classroom use, like the classic Edmund Scientific set shown above. Although they are unnumbered, a flick of the pen (or marker) might fix that. The question is, how well would they have served as dice?
Everything leaves a trace. That's been my guiding principle researching the history of early wargames and role-playing games: any commercial product that survives, no matter how obscure, had to be available somewhere and somehow, and that means a paper trail. All too often the products themselves give us little indication of when they were made, as was the case with today's subject, Monsters! Monsters! Monsters! Galore. But with the help of distributor catalogs, we can show how it became available in 1980.
