I think there has been something of an informal conspiracy of silence about the contents of the Castle & Crusade Society's famous 1970-1972 fanzine Domesday Book over the years. I suspect this has been driven by a perfectly natural tendency on the part of collectors to create a mystique about rarities in their possession - though really, I'm not pointing fingers here, and even if I were, I'd probably have to start by pointing at myself. People are also starting to get serious about the history of D&D, however, and this secrecy really is doing the historical community a disservice. I think we need to shatter a few myths and shed a bit of light here. I spent the better part of five years trying to assemble enough evidence to be able to say what really happened in the early history of role-playing games, and it was a near-constant process of discovering that widely-held beliefs are inconsistent with documentary evidence.
So, to kick off with some heresy, I don't think the Domesday Book is very important as a historical resource.
Thursday, July 26, 2012
Thursday, May 17, 2012
After completing a seven-hundred-page book, an author can only feebly protest that there was not sufficient space to include all points of interest on the matter. The argument weakens further when the subject lies within the realm of popular culture, and still further when it is games. To have reached such an unnatural girth, any work on so light a subject must have been stuffed with superfluities, and if any digressions landed on the cutting room floor, for that readers should give thanks.
Playing at the World is not free of sidetracks, but as a history of wargames and role-playing games, it raises only the scaffold of a narrative, the barest support structures necessary to give the course of events a foundation and a shape. It relies only sparingly on visual illustrations. It anchors facts in a source, but rarely in a chorus of corroboration.
Work of such intensity and duration builds a momentum, and carries the author forward even when the text must become fixed for release. To glide the author gently to a halt, to clear his cutting room floor, to collect the inevitable corrections and to give more definition to the unworthy scaffold, this blog will present additional matters of interest in the history of simulating wars, people and fantastic adventures.
Playing at the World is not free of sidetracks, but as a history of wargames and role-playing games, it raises only the scaffold of a narrative, the barest support structures necessary to give the course of events a foundation and a shape. It relies only sparingly on visual illustrations. It anchors facts in a source, but rarely in a chorus of corroboration.
Work of such intensity and duration builds a momentum, and carries the author forward even when the text must become fixed for release. To glide the author gently to a halt, to clear his cutting room floor, to collect the inevitable corrections and to give more definition to the unworthy scaffold, this blog will present additional matters of interest in the history of simulating wars, people and fantastic adventures.
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