A Brief History of Role Playing Games

Dungeons & Dragons? What's That?

By Victor Raymond
Illustrated by Lew Hartman

So it was near the end of 1973, that Dungeons & Dragons was published by Tactical Studies Rules (TSR). It appeared initially in a 5" x 9" cardboard box with a woodgrain wrap and a white cover. Inside were three booklets: Vol. I Men and Magic, Vol. II Monsters and Treasure; and Vol. III Underground and Wilderness Adventures. Later editions would include reference charts and have a completely white box cover, but the first printing was small in scale. Sales, albeit slow in the very beginning, picked up quickly, taking TSR by surprise.

Gamers involved in their local clubs would report showing up to a meeting all set to play another battle in their current miniatures campaign, only to find people puzzling over three tan booklets, graph paper, and oddly-shaped dice. It was, in a word, strange. Yet these same gamers would get hooked on D&D quickly, resorting in some cases to copying the rules by xerox, because demand had completely stripped initial supply.

John M. Ford recalled that, to the gamers he knew in Indiana, the summer of 1974 was "the summer of love" - campaigns sprouted quickly, and in many cases, took over a major portion of the lives of the people playing in them. Lee Gold noted that referees made changes as they saw fit: "When the Hannifens [friends of hers] next came down to Los Angeles, I invited them to play ... but warned them that I had on my own authority as Dungeon Master made some changes to the Rules."

The combination of rules scarcity and individual creativity resulted in many campaigns being very different from what Arneson and Gygax may have intended. Some players, such as Steve Marsh, got into contact with Gygax and the TSR staff, and endeavored to get clarifications. To the extent they were able, Gygax and Arneson offered their opinions.

Ultimately, however, games and campaigns developed that were as idiosyncratic as the players and referees themselves. A brisk business was done on convention panels trying to resolve this or that aspect of the rules, but the cat was out of the bag. Had TSR had the position of respectability of Wargames Research Group in Great Britain, it might have been able to issue definitive rulings about How to Play. But this was not to be, at least initially, and it seems from articles and opinions printed at the time that this question vexed Gygax severely. He would attempt to revisit it later, with the development of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (AD&D).

By the end of 1974, play of D&D had spread around the country, taking hold particularly in Boston, New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. Other pockets were to be found in the Midwest and in Texas. And many of the people whose names would later appear on games as designers in their own right began playing at this time: Greg Costikyan, Ed Simbalist, Marc Miller, John M. Ford, Steve Perrin, and many, many others all began playing, some of them forced into becoming referees because nobody else was interested in puzzling out the rules.

In Lake Geneva, however, it became clear that TSR had a hit on its hands. Within quick succession, there was a first printing, then a second, then a third, each in increasing numbers. And plans began to emerge for other games shortly thereafter. Among them included Warriors of Mars, a game set in the world of Barsoom and Star Probe, a more science fiction oriented campaign game. TSR also continued to pursue the publication of various historical miniatures rules sets, such as Tricolor and Cavalliers and Roundheads. And while some of these games had modest success, none of them held the same degree of attraction as D&D in the minds of gamers.

And along with the development of new rules sets came the development of a regular publication to inform players about TSR's games and game development, The Strategic Review. The first issue was produced in Spring 1975, and included such articles as a new monster for D&D, the Mind Flayer, some modifications for Tactics, TSR's WWII miniatures game, and an article on random dungeon generation for solo expeditions. Originally planned as a quarterly, by the fifth issue it had gone to bimonthly, and plans were underway for a completely new magazine.

The second issue of The Strategic Review is notable for the announcement of the death of Donald Kaye, who had passed away as the result of injuries sustained in an auto accident. This left Gary Gygax as the surviving founder of TSR - at the very time TSR was entering into a fantastic period of growth. The second issue also saw the announcement of a new game, War of Wizards, which was the creation of Prof. MAR Barker, set in the world of Tekumel. War of Wizards was ostensibly a board game that simulated the magical duels fought in the Hirilakte arenas of the Five Empires, but it was the precursor to a much more complete set of role-playing rules set in the same world, called Empire of the Petal Throne.

In subsequent issues of The Strategic Review further additions were made to the rules, with explanations of existing rules to aid in the play of the game. Along with the further expansion of the D8dD rules came another, somewhat more disquieting editorial trend, Some of the conflicts between TSR and other game manufacturers began to surface, initially in exchanges about the fairness of reviews of D&D, and later about whether GenCon or Origins was the "national" gaming convention.

There were elements of truth on all sides of the debates. True, Avalon-Hill and SPI did have a tendency to act as if they were the only companies that mattered. However, it could also be said that Gary Gygax's responses were somewhat hot-headed, and reflected his understandable belief that his work was fine exactly as it was, be it a set of rules or a gaming convention.

Besides The Strategic Review, work was proceeding apace on two different supplements for D&D, both intended to clarify the rules for players and referees. The first, Greyhawk, was named for Gygax's own D&D campaign, in which many of the rules and modifications had been play-tested.

Greyhawk was notable for introducing new character classes, including the Thief and the Paladin, as well as significantly expanding the list of monsters and magical items. But the campaign section itself was lamentably short, which did not help players unfamiliar with the practices in the original campaign design successful campaign settings on their own.

The second, named Blackmoor for the campaign run by Dave Arneson, introduced more character classes, but took campaign development a step further by providing a small section of the Blackmoor campaign as an example to follow and learn from. Greyhawk was released in the Spring of 1975, and Blackmoor soon followed in the Fall.

By the middle of 1975, then, TSR had managed to produce several different sets of game rules, D&D being pre-eminent. Among them were Boot Hill, a miniatures-based role- playing game for Wild West adventures, and Metamorphosis Alpha, a science fiction game set on a slower-than-light generation starship damaged after passing through intense radiation. Metamorphosis Alpha was the creation of James Ward, and can be considered the first science fiction role-playing game, given its content.

Finally, TSR's sponsorship of GenCon resulted in real growth in the convenfion; GenCon VIII, held in 1975 in Horticultural Hall in Lake Geneva, attracted 1,500 people, which was certainly as many as could be found at Origins I, held that same year in Baltimore. What was happening elsewhere?

Rumblings from Dragon Pass, Tckumel and Other Places

In Illinois, a number of students and staff originally involved with the SIMRAD program of Illinois State University got together and formed the core of Game Designers' Workshop. Among them were Frank Chadwick, Darryl Hany, John Harshman, and Loren Wiseman; a straggler to the fold was Marc Miller.

Their first role-playing project was En Gardel, a small booklet "being in the main a game of the life and times of a gentleman adventurer and his several companions." Set in an unspecified 17th Century country (but most likely France), En Garde! reflected the historical boardgame grounding of its designers, who were also hard at work. on a number of well-received strategy games, including Drang Nach Osten and Triplanetary.

In Minneapolis, an entirely different sort of game was being developed. Professor MAR Barker, at the University of Minnesota, was the originator of an entire world Tekumel - that became the setting for a role-playing game called Empire of the Petal Throne. Prof. Barker was a member of a department at the University concerned with South and Southeast Asian Studies, and he was intensely interested in languages and anthropology. A convert to Islam while studying abroad, he had already established a distinguished academic record working on Klamath, Urdu, Baluchi, and many other languages. Elements from ancient Egypt, Mayan and Central American civilizations, as well as from India and Arabia, were the influences on his creative efforts.

He had begun working on Tekumel as a world when he was a child, and later developed it further as a student. While in college, he became a member of the Nameless Ones, a Seattle science fiction fan group, and had a few stories published in sf fanzines, but his interests led him elsewhere and away from fandom. In a very real sense, significant parallels exist between the creative work of JRR Tolkien and MAR Barker. Both had a passion for linguistics, both were influenced by ancient and medieval history and culture, and both pursued their world-building quietly as a somewhat solitary affair, sharing with others only portions of their work.

There had been elements of game playing, particularly miniatures, present in Tekumel from the beginning, but a specific role-playing game was not developed until after Prof. Barker saw D&D. He found the background setting for D&D to be too vague and certainly internally contradictory, something which spurred his interest in designing a game to match his years of world- building.

The resulting rules were directly influenced by D&D, but were clearly designed to place characters in the context of the world of Tekumel. And what a world it was! After having been settled and terra-formed by humans and other races, Tekumel was spun into a "pocket dimension" and went through tens of thousands Of years of retrograde development. At the start of the game. the characters find themselves in a land with a pantheon of 20 gods, where the Seal Emperor sits behind a jade screen and wields absolute power through a powerful military, an entrenched bureaucracy and a tradition-valuing social structure. The rules came not only with background and history, but also the basic elements of the language spoken in one of the Five Empires, Tsolyanu. Needless to say, the incredible richness of the background tended to overwhelm players and the referee, but there was no doubting the result.

And in California, a group of gamers including Steve Perrin, Steve Henderson and Greg Stafford had been working on a wide range of D&D variants, as well as some particular creative projects of their own. Primary amongst the latter was a strategy game set on a world of fantastic elements, likened to that of the Iliad and the Odyssey - White Bear and Red Moon.

The world of Dragon Pass would in time become the setting of the most prominent challenger to D&D in the mid '70s, RuneQuest.

A Brief History of Role Playing Games Part 1: RPGs to 1976

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