Playing at the World

For those of us who grew up with Dungeons & Dragons, it is easy to take the polyhedral dice of gaming for granted. Dice had played an integral role in gaming since Prussian wargamers of the early nineteenth century first developed combat resolution tables. Those games and the many works they influenced, however, relied exclusively on 6-sided dice, apart from a few experimental dead-ends (like Totten's 12-sided teetotum in the late nineteenth century). When modern hobby wargaming culture began in the 1950s, it too stuck with 6-siders: the first Avalon Hill game (Tactics, 1954) requires a "cubit" for combat resolution, and the miniature gamers who contributed to the War Game Digest similarly seemed content to rely on the d6. By 1970, however, polyhedral dice had begun to creep into the wargaming community, as we see in the advertisement above from a 1971 Wargamer's Newsletter. Why do we need those funny dice anyway? What purpose did they serve that an ordinary 6-sider couldn't?

Wargamers constantly reach for greater heights of realism in their simulations, and by the mid-1960s, they increasingly relied on actual military statistics to model their combat. Perhaps the most influential example of this trend is Michael J. Korns's book Modern War in Miniature (1966), a WWII-setting wargame which offers little by way of system other than tables aggregating real-world weapon behavior. Korns reduced these statistics to percentile probabilities: for example, a particular rifle might have a 70% chance to hit a target 200 yards away. But how to resolve those odds during play? There is no intuitive way to extract percentile results from rolling a small number of d6s, but Korns provided an appendix that gave the closest approximation, roughly 5% increments:

Korns's game proved very influential in the American Midwest, and took hold in the two communities where Dungeons & Dragons grew up: Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, and the Twin Cities of Minnesota. For example, Mike Carr, a prominent Twin Cities gamer, incorporated the above table into his 1972 edition of his Fight in the Skies. In Lake Geneva circles, Leon Tucker, himself a professional statistician, advocated strongly for the use of Korns, but was dissatisfied with the means of resolving percentile probability. The need for greater realism demanded more than just approximations of 5% increments. This led to an outpouring of creativity as gamers developed all sorts of improvisational ways of getting percentile numbers: you could draw two cards from a deck with the face cards removed, or pick numbered poker chips out of a hat. Tucker himself proposed an elaborate apparatus involving a graduated tube with a stopper and colored beads as a part of his ongoing collaboration with Gary Gygax and Mike Reese towards a new post-Korns set of modern miniatures rules called Tractics.

Thus, late in 1969, when chatter began in the "Must List" of Wargamer's Newsletter about the commercial availability of 20-sided dice, these implements were presented as a means of generating percentile numbers: the advertisement from the Bristol Wargames Society refers to them as "percentage dice" and doesn't even say how many sides they had. This is an area where the exotic icosahedron excels, as the models sold at the time were numbered 0-9 twice, rather than 1-20. With two throws, one could therefore generate a number from 1-100. Gary Gygax was among the readers of Wargamer's Newsletter at the time, and thus it is unsurprising that he chimed in with a letter in the February 1971 issue saying, "I imagine that sales of 20 sided dice will pick up when Mike Reese starts selling the [Tractics] rules." Then d20 gets an early mention in the Tractics rules published in the fall of 1971.

This was not the first time that the use of 20-sided dice for wargaming had been proposed: Lenard Lafoka wrote an article late in 1968 that described the potential applicability of the icosahedron to wargames, but since readers would have no means of procuring one, Lakofka actually provided instructions on how to construct a 20-sided die out of wood or cardboard. The dice discussed in Wargamer's Newsletter in the early 1970s were available only from Japan or Britain, and for Americans ordering from either was a costly and lengthy proposition. Don Lowry, the publisher of Tractics, couldn't rely on an expensive and slow source for supplying the needs of his customers.

News of an American supplier of 20-sided dice began to spread in mid-1972 through wargaming zines like The Courier, as in the notice from Dion Osika above. The dice were also prominently featured in the first issue of the People's Computer Club magazine of October 1972, with an advertisement that showed a spinner and then five "superdice." Intriguingly, the supplier, Creative Publications of California, only sold their 20-sider in a set with four other dice: one of each Platonic solid. These five geometric shapes alone have a special property (that all of their faces, edges and vertices have the same relationship to their center of gravity) which makes them ideal as dice. Both the 6-sider and 20-sider are Platonic solids, and the list is rounded out by the d4, d8 and d12; all of these shapes have origins that go back into pre-history. The applicability of dice other than the d6 and d20 to wargaming was not clear off the bat; although Dave Wesely, in his work revising Totten, had gone on an epic quest to find a twelve-sided teetotum, ultimately his Strategos N rules did not require anything but d6s. Since the Creative Publications dice were comparatively inexpensive, Don Lowry began to stock them as a service to Tractics customers, initially without even a mark-up.

Gary Gygax frequently helped Lowry to promote new products in his mailer Lowrys Guidon, and with the arrival of polyhedral dice came Gygax's seminal June 1973 article "Four & Twenty and What Lies Between." In it, Gygax explains the probabilities that can be resolved with combinations of d4s, d8s and so on, though he concedes that "the most useful are the 20-sided dice." He knew they could be used for more than just generating percentile numbers: you can also "color in one set of numbers on the die, and you can throw for 5% -- perfect for rules which call for random numbers from 1-20." What would you use that for? Coincidentally, Gygax confides in that same article that he was "busy working up chance tables for a fantasy campaign game." That game, of course, was Dungeons & Dragons.

The first edition of Dungeons & Dragons made far less use of polyhedral dice aside from the d20 than later editions; the d4, d8 and d12 make only very rare appearances. Nonetheless, polyhedral dice quickly became a signature feature of D&D. They were moreover an early stumbling block when demand for the game was high: one could easily photocopy rules, but not dice. TSR continued to resell the Creative Publications dice, but at a considerable mark-up: initially $1.75, then $2.50, then $3.00. Many gamers therefore experimented with alternative methods for generating numbers, reminsicent of the Korns table above. Others eventually found the source of the dice and ordered directly from Creative Publications. By the 1980s, TSR had sufficient sales to strike aggressive wholesaler agreements, and it was only then that they augmented their sets of Platonic solid dice with a newcomer: the d10. In the years since, mad scientists like Lou Zocchi have produced all sorts of unusual dice, some more practical than others. Today, we can't imagine polyhedral dice without thinking of gaming, but their association with games is the sort of happy historical accident that frequently accompanies success.

Dave Arneson had a well-documented love of boats, especially sailing ships. Around the time that Dungeons & Dragons was developed, we see this especially in his work on the Don't Give Up the Ship naval miniature wargaming rules, as well as his unpublished Ships of the Line campaign system. His interest was not limited to the Great Age of Sail, however: Arneson contributed several illustrated articles to the Domesday Book about medieval naval warfare. Those who know Arneson's drawings only from his monster sketches in Dungeons & Dragons or the cartoons in the First Fantasy Campaign may find the level of detail in these illustrations uncharacteristic - but in keeping with the customs of the time, these illustrations were surreptitiously copied from existing sources. The Viking longboat above, for example, attached to Arneson's article "Tigers of the Sea" (DB #5) is obviously (but without credit) reproduced from Edwin Tunis's Oars, Sails and Steam (1951).

After Domesday Book #5 went to print, Gygax lost his job and with it access to the high-end photo-offset graphics we find in early issues. When Chris Schleicher took over production of the zine, all artwork needed to be transferred by hand to mimeograph stencils. Thus the DB #6 article "Sailing Ships Through the Years," which further plunders Tunis, contains recreations of the ship graphics instead of photocopies. While the article does not bear any byline, the text itself replicates Tunis (page 22 through 29) quite faithfully. The renditions of Tunis's nine illustrations for these complicated vessels sometimes introduce simplifications, especially at the edges, but they reproduce the primary elements with considerable fidelity.

For instance, the reflection in Tunis's version above has been largely reduced to a blur by the trace. While the inherent limitations of the mimeograph format preclude approaching the clarity of the original, some substantial changes have been made: small elements like the pennant on the forecastle have been dropped. Or in the carrack image below, the landing boat at the waterline in Tunis has been removed entirely in the DB #6 version.

The final installment in this naval series came in Domesday Book #9, in a piece entitled the "Evolution of Naval Warfare" which is credited to Dave Arneson. In this case, the text of the article is apparently plagiarized from the "Byzantine Navy" section of the Encyclopedia of Military History from 3500 B.C. to the Present (1970) by Dupuy and Dupuy (more recently reissued as the Harper Encyclopedia of Military History). For this article, Arneson provides a new illustration which does not appear to be cribbed from a prior source:

We can see in this ship many elements that Arneson learned from Tunis: the battering ram at the prow, the furled sails, the rows of oars. In those components we also find a prototype for the many less formal illustrations Arneson provides in the First Fantasy Campaign of oared ships with sails furled at a diagonal (though for the dragon head and tail, we must look to the original Viking ship above).

These articles and illustrations reveal the huge difficulties that face scholars studying material from this period. It is no secret that artists like Greg Bell and Don Lowry copied many elements of their work from existing sources, and this can leave us with a great deal of uncertainty when trying to isolate their styles. Although today many people have a low opinion of Arneson as a draftsman, he surely could trace as well as anyone, and thus artwork by Arneson might contain primary elements with significant sophistication. Moreover, the meaning of a byline (when we're lucky enough to have one) in a fanzine is inherently ambiguous: often, it means something more like "submitted by" than "created by." In Domesday Book #12, Arneson is given credit for an article called "Lincolnshire," though the text of the article is a photocopy of an English translation of the original, medieval Latin Domesday Book section on the city of Lincolnshire. Surely no one would think Arneson produced it, he merely submitted it. A scholar could however read the "Evolution of Naval Warfare" in Domesday Book #9 and walk away with a wholly erroneous impression of Arneson's writing style. Similar pitfalls await us when we try to ascertain his capability as an artist.

It's been a few months since I've discussed the Dalluhn Manuscript here. In the intervening time, I have conducted a more thorough study of the document, consulted with forensics experts and early gamers, and assembled my findings to date into a paper that I present here as an "interim appendix" to Playing at the World along with a few exhibits. Those brave few who have complained that they found PatW too short may take solace in this substantial addition. Like the book, this appendix is dense, scholarly reading, but I'm working on a friendlier account that I hope will appear soon (perhaps in a forthcoming issue of Gygax magazine). For the impatient, I provide a high-level introduction to the evidence below. I believe the paper establishes that the Dalluhn Manuscript preserves the earliest currently known version of the game of Dungeons & Dragons.

The publication of this "interim appendix" coincides with a development in the availability of the Dalluhn Manuscript: I have loaned the original copy of this to the National Museum of Play in Rochester, NY. It goes on display there this coming weekend, on April 13th, 2013, as a feature of their Game Time! exhibit, along with many other interesting artifacts from the history of modern gaming. If want to see it first hand, do drop by; there are plenty of other amazing pieces of history on display.

For those interested in a preview of the content of the paper, without the technical detail, here are a few highlights.

First of all, the paper explores crucial editorial mistakes in the production of the earliest version of original Dungeons & Dragons (OD&D). These are cases where some passages in OD&D are inconsistent with the remainder of the text in a way that hints at what early drafts of OD&D must have looked like. Previously, these have been curiosities to scholars of OD&D. Why does the elemental monster text refer to elemental controlling devices as "medallions, gems, stones or bracelets" instead of the names in the magical item list? Why does the languages passage refer to alignment languages as "divisional" languages? How did the percentage range for the "Ring of Delusion" end up broken? With the Dalluhn Manuscript in hand, we can find answers to all of these questions: each inconsistency points to the content of an earlier draft, a pre-publication system which is preserved in the Dalluhn Manuscript. For "divisional languages," for example, we learn that "dvision" was the name for "alignment" in Dalluhn.

Since OD&D evolved from Arneson's Blackmoor campaign, which in turn began with Chainmail, we would expect that a pre-publication edition would show us a system in the midst of evolving from those influences into D&D as we know it. In fact there are numerous respects in which the Dalluhn Manuscript is an exact "stepping stone" between these earlier systems and OD&D. We can see this wherever notes from Blackmoor in 1972 survived: in the list of investment areas for baronies, for example, which OD&D narrows down significantly. We can see Chainmail preserved in the text of many spells and monsters, quite lucidly in "Light." The most crucial cases, though, are those like the "roc" text where we can see Chainmail and Blackmoor notes combine into the entries in Dalluhn, and then show how the Dalluhn entry clearly bridged the way to OD&D.

These are of course just examples: the paper examines scores of points of evidence like these. Of course, I didn't figure all of this out on my own. Daniel Boggs found many correspondences between the Dalluhn Manuscript and Blackmoor. Geoffrey MacKinney provided a very clever demonstration that the list of Magic-user spells in OD&D must have come after the Dalluhn list, as the exhibit below shows. My goal in loaning this work out to the National Museum of Play is to find a permanent home where the document will be available to scholars who can further explores its history and implications.

In mid-1975, the partnership of Tactical Studies Rules underwent a transformation into TSR Hobbies, Inc. A number of factors motivated this transition, including the need to reorganize following the death of Don Kaye, as well as the company's increasing ambitions in the mail-order and retail hobby sales business (the first steps towards the Dungeon Hobby Shop). The newly-constituted TSR Hobbies, Inc. acquired the assets of Tactical Studies Rules, and work on game development proceeded under the TSR Hobbies, Inc. umbrella. If, however, you received mail from TSR at just the right time in 1975, you might have found the oddity shown here: the transitional name "Tactical Studies Hobbies." To explore the territory around this curious company-that-never-was, let's take a tour of TSR's early letterheads.

The first thing to note about the "Tactical Studies Hobbies" letterhead, apart from the funny name, is the post office box number that has violently replaced Don Kaye's street address (542 Sage Street), the official headquarters of the original partnership. This correction helps us to date when the stationary was originally ordered: the earliest TSR stationary bore this street address, and saw use up through mid-1975, as in this April example:

So, the "Tactical Studies Hobbies" stationary must have been ordered before the post office box was secured - though no earlier than the adoption of Greg Bell's drawing of the iconic lizard-man for Greyhawk as TSR's first mascot. The new title typeface (Elphinstone) is also far bolder, and the letterhead conveys the impression of a larger and more sophisticated company. All of this seems to indicate that "Tactical Studies Hobbies" was an initially-planned name for the hobbies business, which was then abandoned in favor of "TSR Hobbies, Inc." We first see the post office box associated with the TSR Hobbies brand for mail-order requests as of the Strategic Review #3 (autumn 1975). To add to our confusion, however, already in mid-autumn we see letters from TSR on proper TSR Hobbies, Inc. stationary:

This letter was dated nearly two weeks before the "Tactical Studies Hobbies" letter above, so why did that old, erroneous stationary remain in sporadic use? Probably because the demand for letterhead was high at the time, and no one was willing to waste the "Tactical Studies Hobbies" letterhead just because it contained a few mistakes. The address needed to be fixed to ensure return-routability; as for the company name -- well, what's in a name, after all. The new TSR Hobbies, Inc. letterhead lists the three divisions of the growing TSR empire: by this point, the initials "TSR" had become iconic enough, and thus meaningless enough, that no one seemed to find "TSR Rules" to be redundant. This letterhead survived up until 1978; if you were fortunate enough to receive personal correspondence from Gary Gygax, you might have observed variants with his name and title appended to the letterhead:

In other contemporary versions of Gygax's personal TSR Hobbies, Inc. stationary, the name is centered, rather than aligned to the left as we see above. Around this time, letterheads began to exhibit another change, however, as in 1978 the lizard finally gave way to the wizard:

The departure of the lizardman seems like as good a place as any to end today's tour. But consider this shocking counterfactual history: what if it had been Tactical Studies Hobbies that had acquired the assets of the original partnership? The anomalous letterhead that led us on this journey hints that, but for historical accidents, we might today remember the company that gave as Dungeons & Dragons primarily as "TSH."

Years before the publication of Dungeons & Dragons or even Chainmail, the wargaming fan community knew well of Gary Gygax's aspiration to design games. The image above shows the back of a copy of the April 1968 issue of Panzerfaust, an important early wargaming fanzine, which is hand-addressed to Gygax by the editor, Donald Greenwood. Of special note is the sentence Greenwood has jotted in the upper left-hand corner: "Am interested in printing your games." Around a year later, Panzerfaust would serialize Gygax's Arsouf (sometimes called Crusader), a medieval board wargame that represents Gygax's first foray into designs for that crucial setting.

Arsouf depicts the twelfth-century Battle of Arsuf in the Third Crusade, a significant engagement between the Crusader forces of Richard I (the Lionheart) of England and the Ayyubid leader Saladin. Richard's victory that day dealt a significant blow to Saladin's campaign to remove the Crusaders from medieval Palestine, though ultimately Saladin would retain Jerusalem and thus thwart the Crusader's primary objective. When Gygax wrote up his description of the historical battle in the April 1969 issue of Panzerfaust, he stressed the disobedience of the mounted knights under Richard's command, and ponders the counterfactual outcome, "what if Richard's order for counter-attack had been obeyed and the entire Saracen force engaged...."

Historical wargames allow us to explore such alternative outcomes, and either side can prevail decisively in Arsouf. The game takes place on a long, narrow hex mapboard, 54 hexes long and 24 wide, representing an area of coastline just north of the Tel Aviv of today. The Crusader forces start in the northwest of the board, while the Saracens organize themselves along the east; the city of Arsouf is located in the far southwest, adjacent to a road leading south to Jerusalem. The terrain consists of a typical board wargame mix of woods, rivers, marshes, deserts, slopes and roads. The Crusader forces must reach Arsouf to win either a strategic or tactical victory, and similarly the Saracens must obstruct the Crusaders. A strategic victory can only be secured by eliminating the enemy commander: both Richard and Saladin were represented on the board by special pieces.

In the unit counters shown above, Richard is the second from the left on the second row of the Crusader counters (the one which looks like an asterisk), whereas Saladin is the first counter in the first row under Saracens. Due to the limits of Panzerfaust's spirit duplication, in places the rules text and graphics can be challenging to decipher, and would require some conservation efforts to render the game playable.

The core rules of Arsouf cover six pages in the June 1969 Panzerfaust. A turn represents one hour of action. Each movement phase is followed by an enemy archery phase. Separate combat results tables for melee combat and archery are given, both relying on the roll of a single six-sided die. There is however a prior table consulted for flanking or rear attacks which can easily result in a complete elimination of the attacked unit (thus, unit orientation in a hex is very significant in the game). In keeping with typical "shock" rules for the ancient and medieval wargaming settings, attackers are granted an impetus bonus when charging, especially for mounted units. Two other tables govern the morale of troops in perilous circumstances, and in a nod to the historical circumstances of the battle, mounted Crusaders may disobey orders to stand and instead charge archers under certain conditions. Finally, the system has a few more sophisticated wrinkles, including a split-move for horse archers and a rudimentary unit concealment mechanism to allow archers to hide in swamps.

The serialization of Arsouf concluded in the July 1969 Panzerfaust with the publication of the map, which was segmented into six pages. Overall, the system departs less from board wargaming conventions than Gygax's earlier work on Arbela (1968), but unlike Arbela, Arsouf never made it beyond the amateur production means of Panzerfaust. Given that it represents a medieval wargame designed by Gary Gygax a full year before the founding of the Castle & Crusade Society, Arsouf preserves unique insights into Gygax's earliest thinking about medieval wargame systems.

The first edition of Dungeons & Dragons did not ship with any sort of character sheet. The Men & Magic booklet did provide "a sample record of a character" (pg.10) which comprised only the example character's name ("Xylarthen"), his class, his six abilities, and his gold and experience totals: it omits even fundamentals like level and hit points. Nowhere in the original game did there appear a pre-printed, fill-in-the-blank form for recording the vital statistics of characters. The fan community immediately grasped the usefulness of keeping one such form per character, especially in a campaign with many players. It is therefore not surprising that the first fanzine dedicated to a Dungeons & Dragons campaign included just such a character sheet: the one we see above, from the Haven Herald #1 of Stephen Tihor's Endore campaign in New York, dated May 3, 1975.

In this first-generation character sheet, we see something far more detailed than the ten bare facts suggested by Men & Magic. Tihor wisely lists not just the name of the character, but also the name of the player, at the top of the sheet. In addition to the class, he records alignment and race. And beyond the six abilities themselves, he includes various derivate statistics, specifically Constitution, Dexterity and Charisma bonuses; presumably, they are given here so further reference to the rulebooks would be unnecessary. The sheet charmingly enumerates the levels between one and twenty, as if characters would just mark them off as they inexorably advance. The system for managing hit points requires that characters first record their hit dice, then the result of that roll as the "value" or their maximum hit point total, followed by their "current" hit points after sustaining any damage. Crucially, the sheet leaves ample room for listing equipment and treasure (perhaps a less obvious distinction than Tihor might have intended), and encourages accounting for the dreaded tedium of encumbrance.

Only a month after the first issue of the Haven Herald appeared, the long-running APAzine Alarums & Excursions began. In its second issue, in July 1975, Alarums offered a different spin on the character sheet, one tailored especially to novice players.

Jack Harness put this sheet together, with a careful five-step plan for character generation that emphasizes offloading work from the dungeon master. It offers far less detail than the Haven Herald sheet, but contains several innovations of its own. As Step Three indicates, this sheet captures an early rule for rolling 3d6x6 up to three times in order to arrive at a playable character. It furthermore encourages participants to play two characters at once in a dungeon adventure. While we see here no place to record equipment, or even character level, there is quite a bit of helpful guidance about relinquishing dice, doing "only your fair share of talking," and a rather intriguing encouragement to study your character's ability scores to decide what they "suggest to you as [an] actor?" Also note the brief and early mention of house rules on spell points.

By Alarums #5, in October of 1975, the fan community had attained an even higher level of sophistication. Dick Eney, having reviewed prior efforts to record the state of a character, therefore proposed in that issue the following two-sided form, which he explicitly names a "character sheet."

The Eney sheet is the first Dungeons & Dragons character sheet worthy of the name. It provides for a legion of potential circumstances that might arise in gameplay. It anticipates that all of the base abilities might be under some temporary modification. It requires players to tabulate the value, and weight, of items in their possession, and distinguishes between weapons, miscellaneous equipment and "stashed property." It includes a place for listing languages known to the character, provisions for opening doors or hearing noise, and even includes places to fill in "times resurrected" or various geasa that a character might suffer under. It gives ample room for specifying hirelings, listing spells and even a catch-all section for "special relations, prejudices, weapon purposes, etc." In Alarums #8, Eney ran a separate, summary sheet intended for quick reference by dungeon masters, at four characters per page.

The next evolutionary step would be printing such sheets professionally, instead of typing them for distribution through a fanzine. Bob Ruppert of Boston took this step with his "Dungeons & Dragons Character Sheets," which he circulated through the American Wargamer at the end of the year:

Ruppert's sheets exhibit a number of innovations. Most noticeably, each sheet is class-specific. Thus on the Magic-user sheet we see blanks for spells of various levels, whereas we find nothing about magic on the Thief sheet, but instead find blanks for percentile skills like opening locks, removing traps and so on. Only the Intelligence ability is listed in all capital letters on the Magic-user sheet, just as Dexterity is listed on the Thief sheet. The detail offered by the sheets surpasses even that of Eney's efforts; for example, the listings for gold tabulate the amount "tithed to the church."

By the time Ruppert began offering his sheets for sale, at two cents each or eight for fifteen cents, TSR had already contracted to distribute the Character Archaic (September 1975), a playing aid that contained its own character sheets. Although the sheets bundled in the Character Archaic featured portrait illustrations of different character types, the statistics listed never varied between sheets. They moreover contain a superset of the statistics of Dungeons & Dragons and Empire of the Petal Throne; therefore D&D players might puzzle over the "Psychic Ability" and "Comeliness" listings in the abilities. Although the Character Archaic sheets contained fields for saving throws, unlike any earlier sheets, they lacked many of the features familiar from the sheets designed by Eney or Ruppert. Fan reaction to the Character Archaic sheets was, unsurprisingly, lukewarm, especially after TSR began issuing cease-and-desist letters to fans who distributed their own sheets, including Ruppert. This dampened enthusiasm for fan-designed sheets, and paved the way for the character sheets TSR would begin producing itself over the next two years.

As an historical aside, several of these fan sheets mention "brevet ranks." Brevet ranks were a common convention of the early days of Dungeons & Dragons that allowed a starting character to begin at a higher level, but the character then had to earn enough experience to reach that level before they could progress beyond it. The "Swanson Abilities" mentioned on some sheets were an early system of beginning merits and flaws invented by Mark Swanson (and documented in Alarums #1) which differentiated starting characters, as otherwise all starting characters of a given class had very similar abilities. Finally, note that all of these 1975 sheets list Constitution as an ability before Dexterity; this follows the original order of abilities in Dungeons & Dragons, which later versions of the game would reverse, and is a good indicator of the age of a character record. If you want to play old school Dungeons & Dragons as the first fans did, these sheets are a good place to find some inspiration.

As a previous post here covered, Dungeons & Dragons was the first game to make practical use of all five Platonic solids as dice. The first printing of Dungeons & Dragons (1974) did not, however, employ the classic abbreviations of dice notation: d4, d6, d8, d12 and d20. Instead, we see constructions like, "From 2-16 snakes can be conjured (roll two eight-sided dice)." Initially, TSR had no need for dice notation, instead favoring number ranges which assumed players could infer the dice needed: this was the convention through the Holmes Basic Set (1977), which is full of systems of the form, "Damage: 3-24 points." These same conventions prescribe dice throws in the contemporary Monster Manual.

The Players Handbook (1978), however, suddenly makes liberal use of dice notation, without any preamble, as if players were expected to recognize a "d20," and more significantly, qualifiers like "5d20." This strongly hints that dice notation had been in use long before TSR embraced it, and we can in fact trace its origins to the very dawn of D&D fandom: as we see above in Alarums & Excursions #1, in an article by Ted Johnstone on "Dice as Random Number Generators."

Alarums #1 ranks among the very earliest D&D fan publications, and it is clear from Johnstone's tone that dice notation was not yet an established convention. After describing each of the dice in turn, he proposes that they be "referred to hereafter for convenience's sake as D4, D6, D8, D10 and D12." Since Johnstone intends to discuss the bell curves associated with multiple dice, he further introduces a qualifying number before the "D", in constructions like, "with a D12, you have 1/12 chance of rolling a 12, but with 2D6 you only have 1/36 chance of matching it." Throughout the article, he uses this compound construction to discuss the properties of "12D6," "2D4" and so on.

Johnstone however skips the notation "D20," instead favoring "D10." This was not because Johnstone actually possessed a ten-sided die, but rather because the numbering on early icosahedra ran from one through ten twice. To find the D20, we must consult a separate article in that same issue of Alarums, by the editor's husband, Barry Gold, which for its discussion of treasure allocation provides a slightly different dice notation syntax:

Gold's syntax explicitly refers to the "D20" instead of the "D10," and also introduces the abbreviation "%ile" for what later notations would call the "D100." While the "%ile" abbreviation saw little uptake, the "D20" had considerable staying power.

Dice notation was immediately seized upon by readers of Alarums. In the second issue, Robert Sacks refers to generating abilities with "3D6+D4 or D20 instead of 3D6." Mark Swanson in Alarums #3 boggles that anyone would think "saving throws are done D10+D10" as he believed "everybody knew that saving/hitting throws are done on a D20." When Swanson's own fanzine the Wild Hunt began in February 1976, it also adopted dice notation, as can be seen in this table, hand-drawn by Swanson, in the first issue:

As the fan community began to aspire towards commercial products, dice notation became commonplace, despite TSR's apparent disinterest.[*] In the August 1976 issue of Alarums, Steve Perrin provided some instructions to the fan community for contributing monsters to his upcoming project All The Worlds' Monsters (1977), which would appear under the Chaosium imprint. Perrin recommended to Alarums readers that the variable attributes of monsters "should be expressed as what sort of dice should be rolled," and gives "2D6+6 to give an 8-18 range" as an example. Thus, All the Worlds' Monsters pervasively used dice notation in its monster descriptions, and the first printing contains the following introductory blurb:

In the entry for the "Air Squid" mentioned there, we see numerous examples of dice notation: a beak attack that deals 1D10, tentacles that constrict for 1D8, an intelligence of 2D6, and so on. All the Worlds' Monsters anthologized contributions from many prominent fans of the day, and its dice notation represented the consensus position of the community at the time. The following year, Perrin would go on to produce the Chaosium's signature role-playing game Runequest (1978), which in its first printing gives this concise statement of dice notation:

This could serve nicely as the description of dice notation that the Players Handbook conspicuously lacked, at least until the Dungeon Masters Guide (1979) gave a lengthier account of dice and notation. Certainly TSR was aware of All the Worlds' Monsters, and Runequest narrowly beat the Players Handbook to the market. But more significantly, Gary Gygax had long been a contributor to Alarums, and certainly read Johnstone's article in Alarums #1, given his response in the second issue. The dice notation in the Players Handbook does differ in subtle respects from the earlier fan systems: for example, it uses a lower case "d" instead of an upper case "D," so one rolls "2d6" instead of "2D6." The Players Handbook also prefers to spell out "percentile" rather than abbreviating it (later, the DMG would sporadically use "d%"). It is however clear that TSR chose to embrace a longstanding practice when it added this notation to the game of Dungeons & Dragons in 1978: one so familiar and intuitive that no special explanation of the notation was warranted.

While the precise abbreviations for the names of dice may seem a matter of slight historical import, eventually the abbreviation for an icosahedron would become practically synonymous with the game of Dungeons & Dragons, as the d20 System (2000) became the basis for Wizards of the Coast's third edition of Dungeons & Dragons and many dependent games. Studying the origins of dice notation moreover gives us another window into the way that TSR accepted the contributions of fans and addressed competing ideas in the marketplace.

[*] Before the Players Handbook, there were only sporadic and fragmentary references to dice notation in TSR publications, and these only in contributions to its periodicals. An article by Omar Kwalish for the June 1977 issue of the Dragon copies the percentile derivation table from Fight in the Skies, but gives it the title "Percentages Generated with Two Standard Dice (D6)." In February 1978, Rob Kuntz's first article on the Cthulhu mythos (a first draft of the material later to be famously redacted from Deities & Demigods) describes how Cthuga, Lord of Fire, "may summon up to 8 12 hit die (8 d12) fire elementals." These sorts of casual mentions only further illustrate how widespread dice notation had become without TSR's explicit endorsement.

Nothing is more satisfying than rolling the dice and seeing not only that you hit, but that you hit exceptionally well. The adrenaline rush of critical hits proved so compelling that there is scarcely a game today, be it on a tabletop or a computer, where hits can be scored in which they don't have a chance to be critical hits, dealing additional damage. But the time-honored tradition of getting double damage on a natural 20 did not ship with the earliest version of Dungeons & Dragons. In fact, D&D spent decades resisting this idea of critical hits. Even without TSR's endorsement, critical hits still became a part of gaming everywhere, largely due to the impetus of fans like Gary Switzer, who sent the critical hit rules above to APA-L in May 1975.

Now, the term "critical hit" does turn up in the first printing of D&D, but only as language grandfathered in for a very specialized form of combat. Mike Carr's First World War aerial combat wargame Fight in the Skies (1968) had long relied on critical hit tables, and the "Battle in the Skies" aerial combat rules in the Underworld & Wilderness Adventures pamphlet (where you fight on dragons or griffins, rather than biplanes) openly appropriate from Carr, down to borrowing his critical hits.

In both cases, a critical hit is always scored on a particular location on the target, and the chances of scoring a critical hit vary by location. The results of a critical hit in Fight in the Skies are much more varied than the four outcomes we see in this simple table in U&WA: they might cause drastic changes in elevation, inability to turn, or even smoke trails. But clearly the U&WA critical hit system, like its predecessor, does allow for combat to conclude from a single fortunate shot. These rules had no applicability to earthbound combat in Dungeons & Dragons, however.

As exemplified above in Switzer's rules from APA-L #522, the earliest fan-designed critical hit systems tried to adapt this hit location concept to ordinary fighting. They also often incorporated an idea of critical "trips" or "fumbles" for exceptionally poor performance in combat (in Switzer, a trip might result in a dropped weapon, giving an enemy a free strike). Similarly, the "Warlock" system derived from the Cal Tech D&D variant, as published in the Spartan Simulation Gaming Journal #9 in August 1975, has separate tables for 2-12 critical "hit" and "fumble" outcomes, with a critical hit on the spine having a 20% chance of an instant fatality. And while Switzer has us roll a separate die to determine whether or not a critical hit or fumble occurred, "Warlock" builds the chance of a critical into the "to hit" roll itself: "Warlock" rolls percentile dice to hit rather than a d20, and one aims to roll below a target percentile, so in this chart we see the chances of a hit (CH) or fumble are scaled against the target percentage number (#) such that, if you must roll a 59 or below to hit, you will score a critical on a 3 or lower, but fumble if you roll 98 or above.

Growing enthusiasm for critical hit and hit location systems in 1975 required some response from TSR. They surely did nothing to discourage these when they provided a hit location system for gunshots in Boot Hill that included a "mortal wounds" category, but the first application to the D&D system came at the end of the year in Blackmoor. Although it shied away from the term "critical hit," Blackmoor nonetheless provides a detailed hit location system, effectively dividing a target's hit point pool into various parts of the body, based on the body type: a humanoid has 15% of their hit points in their head, say. Sufficient hit points of damage to any single part will incapacitate it, which in the case of the head, naturally results in death, even if the rest of the body is undamaged. However, the part of the body hit by a given blow is decided through an additional percentile roll (dependent on the size and orientation of combatants), so the chances of triumphing through bashing in the skull are remote. The hit location system in Blackmoor saw little uptake in the fan community.

The burdensome complexity of these hit location systems must have been a barrier to adoption. None of these systems involve rolling high on a d20 roll or any of the simple damage multipliers that we associate with later critical hit systems. Indeed, nothing in the original D&D rules awarded any special privilege to rolling a natural 20: on the early attack matrices, no roll higher than 17 is ever required to hit any foe. The idea of specially privileging a roll of 20 appeared very soon after D&D, however. It can be found in the summer of 1974, in the pre-publication draft of M.A.R. Barker's Empire of the Petal Throne, as an elegant and succinct statement that an attacker scores double damage when a twenty is rolled:

This mechanism is repeated in the fall 1975 TSR edition of Empire of the Petal Throne (pg.32), though it further clarifies, "This must be a 'natural 20': i.e. not including any hit bonuses." This is surely the earliest use of the term "natural 20." The TSR edition also adds an "instant death" provision that, on a further d20 roll, either a 19 or 20 will always instantly slay the target. While nowhere does the passage use the term "critical hit" or hit location, it does stipulate that this mechanism "simulates the 'lucky hit' on a vital organ."

A few months prior to the TSR release of Empire of the Petal Throne, the Greyhawk pamphlet applied this same idea to the system of certain magic swords. Most famously, the original "Vorpal Blade" specified in Greyhawk "will always sever the neck" on a roll of 18 through 20. Many of the other swords specified have similar mechanics: the "Sword of Cold" for one "scores triple damage when a 20 is rolled." Nowhere does Greyhawk link this to the concept of critical hits, but that didn't stop the rest of the world from making the connection. In the Samurai character class rules proposed in the Dragon #3 (1976), for example, Mike Childers gives a system for katanas complete with a "chance of critical hit" table that provides for "automatic" criticals on a "to hit" roll of 20, or in some cases lower. But this sword-based usage of "critical hits" did not become canon for D&D.

As competing game systems emerged, they almost unanimously included critical hits inspired by fan efforts to specify hit location. Bunnies & Burrows (1976) lets your rabbit score a critical on a "to hit" roll of a natural 0 on a d10, and then roll again to determine where the critical landed. The Arduin Grimoire (1977) has percentile-based tables for the results of critical hits and fumbles, though it only obliquely hints at when they should be invoked. Direct competitors like Chivalry & Sorcery (1977) and Runequest (1978) featured critical hits prominently. By this point, D&D did not merely ignore critical hit variants: it explicitly rejected them. Gygax wrote in Dragon #16 (July 1978) that "the 'critical hit' or 'double damage' on a 'to hit' die roll of 20 is particularly offensive to the precepts of D&D." When critical hits (or fumbles) are played, as he puts it, "the whole game system is perverted, and the game possibly ruined" by the precipitous deaths of powerful monsters or player characters. This text anticipates the blanket dismissal that would show up in the Dungeon Masters Guide the following year of "such rules as double damage and critical hits" (pg.61).

Nonetheless, the term "natural 20" did creep into the vocabulary of the Dungeon Masters Guide, and while many magic sword rules from Greyhawk had been modified, we still see that a weapon like the "Sword +2, Nine Lives Stealer" will draw life force from an opponent on "a natural 20." The mythical resonance of the natural 20 is too compelling to resist. Despite decades of continuing prohibition of critical hits, they were almost ubiquitously incorporated into house rules and thus the everyday play of D&D. Controlling the rulebooks does not enable you to stop a popular idea. At some point, the rulebooks have to change to meet the demands of players, and, decades too late, they did for critical hits.

In 1974, Tactical Studies Rules had a very limited advertising budget to promote their new game Dungeons & Dragons. Their first advertisements therefore appeared in fanzines, sometimes places that required no payment for running a promotional notice. That was the case with TSR's first advertisement, which Gary Gygax sent to the Great Plains Gameplayers Newsletter in February 1974, surely only weeks after Dungeons & Dragons was released. In it, we see the prototype for the advertisements that would follow in the first year of the game's life.

As of that first advertisement, we see that TSR had only two products available: D&D and the lesser-known Cavaliers and Roundheads, an English Civil War setting miniature wargame. The line at the top of the order form contains handy blanks to let customers fill in how many copies of each they would like. The flyer is especially noteworthy for downplaying the title Dungeons & Dragons and emphasizing "Swords & Sorcery" above all else: this actually led some early recipients of the flyer to mistake the very name of the game. It moreover says virtually nothing about what the game is or how it works: if you had never heard of D&D before, would this advertisement convince you to try it?

By mid-year, TSR had added a third title to their product line, the Napoleonic miniature wargame Tricolor. With its release came a new advertisement:

These two versions of the mid-1974 advertisement are identical but for a pen mark. The version on the left was mailed by Gygax to the GPGPN in July; the version on the right appears in the June issue of Wargamers Digest. The name Dungeons & Dragons is still deemphasized. TSR has added Tricolor to the list of available products, replacing the order form of the earlier sheet. Where the original advertisement above suggests that orders should be sent to "Dept. B" at TSR President Don Kaye's address (542 Sage St.), in these advertisements "B" has been replaced: in one by a "W" and in the other by an undecipherable blot.

At the end of the year, after Warriors of Mars and Star Probe joined the TSR product line, TSR printed double-sided flyers, with one side greatly resembling the Feburary 1974 advertisement above, as it relegated all new releases to the flip side. We see that in the advertisement below, which Gygax sent to GPGPN in January 1975. Note that it is in color because TSR supplied the editor of GPGPN with a stack of these flyers, enough for one to be stapled into each copy, where previously the editor had photoduplicated one for publication himself. It is possible that there exist color versions of the original February 1974 advertisement as well.

While this advertisement might at first glance appear identical to the February 1974 original above, note that the first line of the order box differs: rather than pre-specifying that customers will order D&D or Cavaliers and Roundheads, it instead allows customers to choose from other products, no doubt including Tricolor, Warriors of Mars and Star Probe, all of which appear on the reverse. This was the last version of the advertisement to show D&D in its original incarnation.

By the summer, the Dungeons & Dragons box set had been redesigned: it was now a white box rather than a woodgrain box, and the cover art of the first volume (famously a swipe from the comic book Dr. Strange) was replaced by a fresh piece of artwork. This called for all new advertising flyers, as in this black-and-white instance shown below, which shipped with an early (probably the earliest) advertisement for Empire of the Petal Throne on its reverse. Finally, this advertisement promotes the name "Dungeons & Dragons" to almost equal prominence with the promise of "Swords & Sorcery," and is also the first advertisement to convey any sense of the play of the game. It will end this tour of the earliest D&D advertisements.

Many sources, including Playing at the World, assign to Dungeons & Dragons an initial release in January 1974. Our best evidence comes from contemporary notices like the one above, a letter written by Gary Gygax late in 1973 that foretells the imminent release of the game. Now, with the fortieth anniversary nearly upon us, a burning question arises: when exactly should we celebrate? While there is no shortage of anecdotal accounts describing when, and to whom, the first copy of the game was sold, there is little concrete evidence to indicate any particular birthday. This author, however, will be lifting a die to toast the anniversary on Sunday, January 26th, 2014, on the basis of the following chronology surrounding the release of Dungeons & Dragons.

The birth of a game is not such an easy thing to timestamp as the birth of a person. A game must be printed, assembled, advertised, and sold. At what point do we consider the game available? When the publishers have copies in hand, that they can distribute to friends? When sales have been made to the general public? Surely copies existed in January of 1974, but the first advertisements didn't start appearing until February, and the game was available to the general public only through the post at first, so formal sales must have come later. Ultimately, there is an unavoidable ambiguity surrounding the release of a product like this, one that probably can't be resolved to any single day. The best we can do is to box the date in between the earliest references to the game, as enumerated below:

June 1973: Around this time, we find the first published hints that Dungeons & Dragons was in process. Above is an excerpt from the June 1, 1973, issue of the Gamesletter, which in a curt blurb first notified the world that Gary and Dave were developing "an extensive set of rules for fantasy campaigns." Gygax inserted another hint in Lowrys Guidon around the same time: “I regret to state that I have been so busy working up chance tables for a fantasy campaign game of late that I have had no time to experiment with any CRTs." Surely this "fantasy campaign game" was Dungeons & Dragons, which was deep in development at this juncture.

September 1973: A notice in Gamer's Guide #40 from the Midwest Military Simulation Association (MMSA), Dave Arneson's group in Minneapolis, tells of the ongoing "Fantasy (Sword and Sorcery) simulation being run in conjunction with Gary Gygax's group in Lake Geneva." From the Twin Cities side, one frequently gets the impression that the interaction with Lake Geneva involved running a game more than designing one.

November 12, 1973: Gygax states in a letter to George Phillies that "we have just formed a firm to produce miniatures rules (Tactical Studies Rules, with the release of Cavaliers and Roundheads in October)." This is surely among the earliest references to TSR.

December 1973: In letter to Jim Lurvey (shown at the top of this blog post), Gygax expands on the plans of TSR: "We have just formed Tactical Studies Rules, and we wish to let the wargaming community know that a new line of miniature rules is available. TSR currently has ECW rules (Cavaliers & Roundheads), and as of January we should have a fantasy campaign set (a really superb game, built from Chainmail and Arneson's 'Blackmoor')."

This is the first hint we see that Dungeons & Dragons was intended for a January 1974 release. While the foreword to Dungeons & Dragons was dated November 1, 1973, the game could not have come out before the New Year, given the copyright date of 1974. From there, it is just a question of how far into the 1974 the game arrived.

February 1974: This month's issue of El Conquistador, a postal Diplomacy fanzine that carried wargaming news and articles, announced that "the Lake Geneva Tactical Studies Association has now released its set of fantasy campaign rules (Dungeons and Dragons)." For a notice to appear in a February issue, of course, it would have to be sent before the beginning of the month, in most cases. This suggests that as of the publication of that magazine, the game was already available. The notice even invites the general public to play Dungeons & Dragons on Sundays at 1:30 PM at Gary's house in Lake Geneva.

Another data point from later in the month comes in a letter to the Jim Lurvey dated February 27, 1974, in which Gygax asserts that "the LGTSA has been involved in a fantasy campaign for over a year now, using the Dungeons & Dragons rules (Gygax & Arneson) just recently made generally available."

March 5, 1974: Gygax writes to Arneson reminding his co-author that "every flyer you pass out could mean more royalty dollars. Remember, every retail sale we make is $1.00 to you. Put a flyer in all letters, right?" By this point, Gygax is fretting over sales and strategizing about spreading word of the availability of Dungeons & Dragons.

May 1974: Notices of the publication of Dungeons & Dragons were now widespread. These early references to the game have no need to mention a release date, however.

July 1975: In Alarums & Excursions #2, Gygax gave his first concise history of Dungeons & Dragons. The account culminates with the release of "D&D in January of 1974." So in this early account, written eighteen months after the game became available, Gygax reaffirms that the prediction he made in December 1973 was accurate, and that D&D came out in January.

Taken all together, the evidence seems sufficient to support a January 1974 release for Dungeons & Dragons. But no contemporary source gives any indication of when, during the month of January, the game might have come out. Much later sources, for example Gary Gygax's piece in the 1999 Collector's Edition box set, assert that "the first sale of a Dungeons & Dragons game was made in late January 1974." Is it plausible that it was in fact late in the month? Given Gygax's February 27, 1974 remark that D&D was "just recently made generally available," a date in the last week of January seems as good as any. If it had instead been earlier in January, would Gygax still say that the game had "just recently" come out?

For all the reasons listed above, it's probably impossible to narrow in on one date and say with any certainty that this is when the game was released. But if we need to celebrate somewhere in the neighborhood of late January, then the last Sunday of the month (this year, the 26th) seems like the best candidate. As the El Conquistador advertisement above notes, Sunday was the day when Gary invited the world to drop by his house, at 1:30 PM, to have a first experience of Dungeons & Dragons. Since it's a weekend, many of us can clear our schedules to revisit some classic tabletop. So this coming January 26th, 2014, do take the time to celebrate the birth of Dungeons & Dragons and role-playing games.

Just in time for the fortieth anniversary of Dungeons & Dragons, some spectacular new historical evidence has come to light: a partial copy of a pre-publication working draft of Dungeons & Dragons, typed and hand-edited Gary Gygax. Credit for discovering this goes to Michael Mornard, one of the original D&D playtesters, who unearthed this material in an old storage box a few weeks ago. Gygax photocopied these selections from his working draft back in 1973, and gave them to Mornard for his personal use. In these “Mornard Fragments,” we can see examples (like the one shown above) of pre-D&D text like that preserved by the Dalluhn Manuscript – in fact, decisively similar to Dalluhn, and unarguably created by Gygax. These Fragments have a good deal to teach us about the development of D&D, and handily they also establish that Dalluhn was in fact a polished version of such a working draft, incorporating the authors’ edits of the time for wider distribution, probably for playtesting.

The Fragments provide us another window into the complex editorial process that created Dungeons & Dragons. There are sixteen surviving pre-D&D pages in the Mornard Fragments; extrapolating somewhat recklessly from the material shown, we might guess the entire thing was around a hundred pages. The typewriter used to create the Fragments is the personal typewriter used by Gary Gygax for his work in the early to mid-1970s. The handwritten addition shown above to the asterisked entry for Pirates is recognizably Gygax’s block capital hand.

The Fragment’s pages are numbered 24-31, then 41-47, and finally page 61. Much of the surviving material shows charts, notably the monster and treasure charts, but also saving throws, dragon types and outdoor encounters. A substantial passage of descriptive text about adventuring in the Upper World (Wilderness) is also included. A preliminary analysis suggests that some of the typed material in the Fragments slightly predates Dalluhn (as above), though in other places incremental additions show material not present in Dalluhn but which would appear in the published Dungeons & Dragons.

The Fragments must have been created fairly close in time to the Dalluhn Manuscript, as there is comparatively little textual difference between the two versions: look to Monsters & Treasure pg22 for Treasure Type A, the final form of the “Prize Matrix” text shown here, to see just how changed this passage would be by the time Dungeons & Dragons hit the printers. The category of “Prisoners” has been replaced by copper pieces (prisoners are relegated to a footnote), the order of the categories of land, desert and water has been shuffled, and of course the term “Prize” has been replaced by “Treasure” throughout.

Because the Mornard Fragments show material so similar to the Dalluhn Manuscript, they are an excellent source for establishing that the Dalluhn Manuscript contains a system that Gary worked on; the other side of that coin, however, is that because they are so similar, the Fragments can only illuminate so much about the development of the system that Dalluhn hasn’t already shown us. We can review minor variations, as in the example above, but only in a few places (for example, in the dragon text) do we see substantial material that is not in Dalluhn.

In light of this new evidence, I will be revising my previous assessment of the Dalluhn Manuscript, and replacing it with a new essay that treats both the Mornard Fragments and the Dalluhn Manuscript jointly. Together, these will give us still more insight into the 1973, pre-publication state of D&D. Stay tuned for more information here about this extremely interesting find.

[for best results, watch on YouTube directly]

In honor of the fortieth anniversary of Dungeons & Dragons, and for a change of pace, in this video I review the development of Dungeons & Dragons through twelve rare artifacts from the period leading up to the first publication of the game. They include original documents from Braunstein, an early letter from Gary Gygax on the medieval setting, Dave Arneson's notes for his own early medieval game, fanzines and maps associated with the Castle & Crusade Society, and various pre-publication D&D rules. Readers of my book will see quite a few things from my personal treasure chest that I haven't discussed before. A full breakdown of the contents is after the jump.

1. Braunstein Order Card: Surviving written correspodence from Wesely's first Braunstein
2. Gygax Medieval Society Letter: 1970 letter from Gygax on a proposal medieval wargames group
3. Arneson’s Medieval Braunstein: A surviving set of instructions for a 1970 medieval multiplay game
4. Domesday Book #3: Copy of the DB hand-addressed from Gygax to Arneson
5. The Great Kingdom Map: Map showing Blackmoor and other Castle & Crusade Society holdings
6. Don’t Give up the Ship: A pre-publication draft of Gygax & Arneson's naval wargame
7. Wizard Gaylord Sheet: A surviving pre-D&D character sheet from the Blackmoor campaign
8. Creative Publications Dice: a d20, including an instance with colored faces
9. CoTT 1972 Blackmoor: Last issue of Arneson's Corner of the Table before D&D collaboration
10. Greyhawk Dungeon: A player map from 1973 of Greyhawk, drawn by Mornard
11. Mornard Fragments: Pre-publication 1973 D&D rules
12. Dungeons & Dragons: 1974 first printing of D&D

When we study the monsters that populated the early setting of Dungeons & Dragons, sometimes we're at a loss to identify any particular source for them. The basilisk, for example, might have come to gaming through any number of fantasy authors or encyclopediae of mythology. But other times it's very clear from whence monsters came. Take the case of four lesser-known creatures from the Monster Manual: the Ki-rin, Shedu, Couatl and Su-monster. All debuted in Eldritch Wizardry (1976), and all have a mythological pedigree, but all certainly owe their appearance in Dungeons & Dragons to a particular work: Ernst and Johanna Lehner's A Fantastic Bestiary (1969). An image of the Japanese mythological creature the Ki-rin, probably the most famous of the four monsters, from that book is shown above. A thorough analysis of the Fantastic Bestiary demonstrates that its influence goes back much farther, to the very dawn of role-playing games.

The Lehners'Fantastic Bestiary is largely a picture book, a compendium of public domain images of monsters. Its chapters group monsters into families: of dragons, underwater monsters, aerial monsters, and so on. At the end of the book is a helpful glossary that gives capsule descriptions of eighty monsters along with an index to the illustrations. In this regard it is not dissimilar to other volumes of its era - so how do we know that Eldritch Wizardry drew on this one in particular?

We find the first hint in the names alone. The specific spelling and punctuation "ki-rin" as opposed to "ki-lin" or "ki'lin" is rare in sources on Japanese mythology. Even the famous Japanese beer spells its name without a hyphen. Eldritch Wizardry gave no illustration of the Ki-rin, though it stated that the monster resembled a "cloudy horse," which seems like a reasonable fit for the picture given above.

If the Ki-rin were the only piece of evidence, the debt of Eldritch Wizardry to the Fantastic Bestiary would be tenuous at best. But Eldritch Wizardry also marks the first appearance of the Su-monster. While again, no illustration of the Su-monster is given, the text describes it as follows: "their bodies somewhat resemble a wasp-waisted, great chested hound. Their heads appear much like gorillas'. All four feet are prehensile and armed with long and extremely sharp nails as well." Now take a gander at the following illustration, reproduced in the Fantastic Bestiary:

Discoveries of unfamiliar animals in the New World captured the popular imagination in the sixteenth century, but often led to gross misunderstandings: the creature this illustration attempts to represent is the humble opposum, with its young clinging to its back. Early accounts called it the "su-monster," and thus the name entered Dungeons & Dragons. Because Eldritch Wizardry focused particularly on psionic powers, the Su-monster and its fellows employ them liberally. The same happens to the Couatl of South American myths, which is depicted among various feathered serpents in the Fantastic Bestiary. Another of these new entrants is the Shedu, which again can be traced back to an illustration in the Fantastic Bestiary:

The Shedu, according to Eldritch Wizardry, is "somewhat similar in appearance to Lammasu, being human-headed winged creatures with bull-like bodies." To find this alone, again, would be inconclusive: but to find the Shedu with the Ki-rin, the Su-monster and the Couatl introduced to the game simultaneously is decisive.

But does the influence stop there? After all, the Lammasu itself first appeared in Greyhawk the year before Eldritch Wizardry - could it too have derived from the Fantastic Bestiary? There are numerous depictions of the Lammasu so named in that volume. In fact, the influence of the Fantastic Bestiary can clearly be found even before Dungeons & Dragons went to print, in the Dalluhn Manuscript. Take the example of the Gorgon, a monster whose nature much changed between the Dalluhn Manuscript and the published version of Dungeons & Dragons:

"An iron-clad bull[ish] monster" with poison breath as described in the Dalluhn Manuscript is far too close to the glossary of the Fantastic Bestiary to be mere coincidence. However, by the release of Dungeons & Dragons, the description had been rephrased, and now Gorgon breath petrified rather than poisoned. It is only thanks to the survival of the Dalluhn Manuscript that we can even detect how the Fantastic Bestiary factored into the earliest thinking about monsters. But there are plenty more fascinating questions to investigate in this volume. Although the Fantastic Bestiary is no longer in print under that title, Dover has been kind enough to keep it available as the Big Book of Dragons, Monsters, and Other Mythical Creatures

In memory of Gary.

FANTASY NUTS UNITE! [Someone] is producing a multi-player Fantasy game... It will include giants, wizards, Heroes and Rulers as some of the cast of Characters. The rules of the game are but a guide to the use of your own imagination in play. Many unique concepts are outlined.

This blurb appeared in 1972, about a month before the first notice of Arneson's Blackmoor campaign in the Domesday Book; just a rumor spreading through science-fiction and wargaming zines. Of course we all know what game that was about - or do we? As Dungeons & Dragons developed over the next year and a half, another fantasy campaign game that let players adventure as magicians and warriors in an imaginary world developed in parallel. It was one of the Midgard games, which briefly lived in the shadow of their more famous cousin. The particular game that inspired the blurb was "Midgard II," which took place on the map shown above.

Playing at the World explains how the original German game of Armageddon (dating from 1967) inspired U.K. resident Hartley Patterson to create the first English-language "Midgard" sword-and-sorcery play-by-mail game. When the game had difficulty getting off the ground, one of the players asked for permission to run another version in the United States: that was Thomas Drake, who then began "Midgard II." He distributed the first advertisements for the game through science-fiction fandom zines, including the following two-page advertisement that ran in the CULT (dating from August 1972):

This circular amply demonstrates why "Midgard II" is of such profound interest to scholars of Dungeons & Dragons. It is a limited information game, where players remain ignorant of the setting at the start of the game, and learn by exploring or purchasing maps. The object of the game is to acquire treasure, magical weapons, spells, and so on, while conflicting with other players and "magical creatures of all sorts." But most striking of all is Drake's insistence that "one of the basic rules of this game is to innovate," to treat the rules as only guidelines. In his capacity as referee, Drake encourages players to "suggest" anything they might want to do, and "if it doesn't violate the basic tenets of the game," then he will make a system ruling for it. The game is moreover endless: there are no victory conditions, you just keep adventuring until you retire or die.

Unfortunately, "Midgard II" comprised a very small base of players and referees, so only a minuscule set of persons ever saw the complete system. The rules were also in a constant state of flux: each issue of the Midgard Journal, the campaign newsletter of the game, modified the rules, and even shipped with a voting card so players could register their opinion on proposed changes. These cards might prove difficult to decipher today:

To vote on these proposals, you needed access to the letter-coded sections of the "Midgard II" rules. Rule M1.4 fell under the naval rules, for example. The sections were as follows:

Basic (B): Terrain features, time scale, movement, sighting. Also includes information on religion, languages, the world calendar, and in post-D&D rules, character attributes (Strength, Agility, Battle Rating, Leadership Rating, and Intelligence).
Expedition (E): Movement into non-friendly territories. Supply, morale, etc.
Fortifications & Siege (F&S): Building and destroying castles, mines, etc.
Maritime (M): Ship building, statistics, movement, wind and weather at sea.

There were then rules for each of the character classes:

Rulers (R): Rulers control countries and have cities, fortifications and armies at their disposal. Population rules, taxation, circumstances leading to revolt, slavery, spies, succession, and court wizards.

Armies (A): Rulers command armies. Composition and movement of forces, classes of morale, organization, circumstantial modifiers, and leadership.

Heroes (H): Heroes wield weapons. Rules of weapon use, armor types, personal combat with other heroes, combat with groups of ordinary soldiers, acquiring armies, raiding and looting, healing wounds.
Wizards (W): Wizard power ratings, wizards vs. wizard, wizards vs. supernatural beings, wizards vs. non-wizards, elemental summoning, demons, contracting with rulers, developing spells.

Spells (LM/MM/GM): Wizards cast spells. Spells are divided into three categories: Lesser Magic, Major Magic, and Grand Magic. Spells are in turn divided into Offensive (O), Defensive (D) or Miscellaneous (M). So spells are desginated by a three-letter acronym and a number: like LMD1, the "Spell of Dodging," or MMM19, the "Zone of Darkness."

After the administrators of "Midgard II" had studied Dungeons & Dragons, around November 1974, they created a lengthy set of rules for "labyrinths." Originally these were grouped under the Basic rules (as documented in Midgard Forum #11), but eventually they ended up being their own category:

Labyrinths (L): 28 pages of rules describing various types of monsters and treasure, all cast in the "Midgard II" system, though many clearly derive from Dungeons & Dragons.

Because the "labyrinths" rules first appeared in November 1974, we must place "Midgard II" among the earliest Dungeons & Dragons variants, alongside the Minneapolis Dungeon game, well pre-dating the published edition of Tunnels & Trolls. But the case of "Midgard II" is even more unusual, because the game brought character-driven fantasy adventures to the world years before the release of Dungeons & Dragons. The "Fantasy Nuts Unite!" blurb above appeared in a fanzine run by Lenard Lakofka, in an issue certainly read by Gary Gygax. While there is no doubt that after 1974 "Midgard II" showed the influence of Dungeons & Dragons, it is unique in that influence may have earlier passed in the other direction as well. Lakofka glossed it at the time: "We suggest you get a copy... we intend to!"

Recently, the Basic Rules of the next edition of Dungeons & Dragons became available for download. While for most, this presents an occasion to ponder the future of the game, for this blog, it inevitably turns our gaze back to the past. To magnify one microscopic detail, we find in the new rules a division of armor into familiar categories, with "studded leather" and varieties of mail including ring, scale, splint, chain and finally plate. These types seem to have been with the game since its inception. So where did they come from? We can gain some initial insight from this article by Gary Gygax in Panzerfaust #43, from April 1971: about a month from when the game Chainmail first became available.

In this early article, written three years before Dungeons & Dragons, we can pick out many familiar keywords. Referring to armor prior to the medieval period, Gygax says it "might be padded, leather, scale armor, ring mail, or chain mail," quite a procession in a single phrase. He notes that in the era of the Norman Conquest, the legs of a fighting man might be protected by "studded leather." Later he cites "banded mail" and "splinted armor," though with the caveat that "none of the authorities can agree as to just what the Hell banded mail was." This all led up to the "Plate period" beginning in the fifteenth century, in which "suits of plate were beautifully made and decorated, but they were entirely functional." Indeed, none of the armor types in the new Basic Rules of Dungeons & Dragons (p.44) go unmentioned in this brief article -- even "hide."

While this article handily demonstrates that Gygax knew of these armor types well before working on Dungeons & Dragons, it is most historically valuable for the citations given in its final sentence. These show us the sources that Gygax consulted for his account of armor, which has been a matter of some confusion.[*] In them, we can find the originals of images Gygax reprinted in the Domesday Book; he plundered Ashdown for weapon depictions given in Domesday Book #5, for example, and his helmets in that issue are taken from Hewitt. In Stone, he could find the following illustration of some of the more exotic armor types, namely ring and scale armor:

This is significant as the prevalence of those armor types in medieval Europe, especially ring armor, became a target of historical skepticism by the mid-twentieth century, largely following Blair's European Armour (1958), which criticized the interpretation of some vague medieval illustrations as indicative of ring mail. Gygax's sources, mostly from the early twentieth century, do not take Blair into account. Thus we might accuse Gygax of neglecting contemporary research in his game designs... except for the fact that Gygax actually did not introduce the ring or scale armor types to gaming. When we look to Chainmail, for example, we see that his system reduced armor to only a few base categories, further divided into those with and without shield, of "armor protection types":

For medieval miniature warfare, Gygax lumps in padded with leather, and considers banded, studded, and splint as equivalent to chain. Ring and scale mail are immediately notable for their omission. Nor did the publication of Dungeons & Dragons fill in that gap. In fact, the first edition of Dungeons & Dragons followed the Chainmail armor categories; unarmored, leather, chain, and plate, which might be worn with or without a shield. Types like padded, banded, and splint, which are at least mentioned in Chainmail, do not appear at all in the original Dungeons & Dragons. This situation remained unchanged through Holmes Basic.

So who first introduced ring and scale to role-playing games? The answer can be found in the first printing of Tunnels & Trolls (1975), which includes a detailed armor chart that divides plate armor into constituent parts (the basinet, breastplate, casque, chausse, cuirass, and solleret), and does the same for chain, ring, and scale. Here Ken St. Andre proves a solitary innovator: though he reuses the ring and scale categories in his Monsters! Monsters! (1976), few soon followed his lead: even the exhaustive list in Chivalry & Sorcery (1977) skips ring and scale, and Steve Jackson's Melee keeps to the simple leather/chain/plate categories of Dungeons & Dragons. Scale armor can be worn by Heroes in Midgard 2; though the rule addition is undated, it surely came before 1977. These types are however present in Runequest (1978), which debuted at almost exactly the same time as the original Players Handbook (1978). It is in the PHB that these familiar armor variants could all finally be worn (when purchased) by characters in Dungeons & Dragons:

Probably, we should understand the addition of more armor types as an attempt by Advanced Dungeons & Dragons to remain competitive with the deeper level of medieval simulation that new titles had begun to offer. We can detect some early hints that this was coming: for example, the entry for "Wood Elves" in the Monster Manual (1977) contains a mention that "they usually wear studded leather or ring mail (armor class 6)." And under "Men," the entry for merchants notes that accompanying mercenaries might include those with "light warhorse, scale mail, light crossbow, sword." It is only natural that the concepts of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons should already be on display in the Monster Manual, even if there was as yet no published system to interpret "scale mail" in the game. But we should be careful to assign the proper legacy to Gary Gygax: his research on armor was ahead of its time, but in expanding his game beyond the simple categories of leather, chain, and plate, he was a follower rather than a leader.

[*] In fact, Gygax had published a detailed bibliography of his medieval sources months earlier in Domesday Book #7, which encompasses works he consulted on castles, battles, weapons, and many other matters than just armor. It does include the authors listed above among many other authorities. To capture Gygax's contemporary thinking, these lists should be preferred to the far later one at the back of Unearthed Arcana (1985) -- with the caveat that Gygax did indeed rely heavily on the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica for medieval information in the early 1970s for certain particulars, though that would be a story for another time. We also must remember that Conan wears "ring mail" in the "Hour of the Dragon" and scale mail in the "Queen of the Black Coast," and surely fantasy fiction held more sway over early game designers than academic histories.

Yesterday was Gary Gygax's birthday: an occasion to celebrate his achievements and successes. Today, I'm releasing a long piece about another, less cheerful part of his story: the upheaval of TSR's corporate governance which ultimately led to Gygax's ouster in 1985. I have noticed over the years that there has been some confusion about the details of company ownership, structure, and performance which led to this turn of events. I therefore spent some time building a historical record based on the evidence as I see it today. You can read it here:

The Ambush at Sheridan Springs

I tried to keep the narrative high level and uncluttered with footnotes, so there are a number of details that would benefit from further explication. Below we will consider just one of them: the situation that, in 1981, TSR was named one of Inc. magazine's ten most profitable privately-held companies due to an apparent misrepresentation of their revenue.

It might seem simplest to chart TSR's rise to stratospheric profits by graphing a few data points extracted from contemporary sources like that Inc. article. But there are often difficulties in assessing exactly how much money TSR made in a given year. This owes to several factors, the most important of which is that the company was privately held, and therefore reported revenue and profit without the sort of oversight that accompanies the activities of public-traded companies. Over time, in statements to the public, various executives reported different figures for a given year: sometimes, very different figures.

The years 1980 and 1981 were especially problematic for TSR's financial reporting. From a number a bit north of $2M dollars in 1979, revenue leaped dramatically in 1980 as the Dungeons & Dragons fad took hold of America. Just how dramatically is unclear in retrospect, however. We know that the figure that Inc. magazine reported was $16M: an eightfold increase over the previous year. As we see, this placed them sixth on the Inc. ranking for privately-held companies by 1980 revenue growth.

Where did this number come from? The Inc. methodology at the time, as they describe it, "relied on voluntary data generally accepted as strictly confidential." Any information was "verified through signed statements from company officers, support material from outside professionals, and telephone interviews," though Inc. recognized that its list for private companies cannot be called "definitive" because many companies stay private "to avoid having to reveal financial information." This at least suggests that TSR officers must have provided a signed statement to the effect that their 1980 revenue reached $16M.

But we know that TSR officers later painted a more conservative picture of 1980 revenue: in 1983, the Wall Street Journal reported that TSR earned only $8.7M. We also begin to see talk in TSR internal documents of how revenue doubled between 1980 and 1981, even though 1981 revenue estimates ranged from $14-18M [*], which would point to a number close to the $8.7M range for 1980. It wasn't until the very end of 1981 that Inc. published their 1980 list, and no doubt TSR provided its affidavits to Inc. at a time when revenue was rising still higher.

So what happened here? Did TSR intentionally overstate their 1980 earnings, or did they misunderstand them and then revise them after the fact? Were the figures given in 1981 perhaps more indicative of 1981 earnings than those for 1980? There's no doubt that TSR's sudden success took the company by surprise, and it's possible that they arrived at the figures they gave to Inc. in error. We do know that this recognition was a considerable source of publicity and pride for TSR. They even redistributed the Inc. letter of congratulation to all employees and placed a framed copy in the company lobby.

Whichever way we explain the dubious figures, TSR made an impressive amount of money in 1980 and 1981. It wouldn't be until 1982 that declining revenue became a subject of serious concern, which came to a head in the spring of 1983 and resulted in the fracturing of TSR Hobbies into four separate companies. For more on that, see the "Ambush at Sheridan Springs."

[*] 1981 is confusing because TSR changed the end of their fiscal year from September to June (yearly reporting earning in June was more common for companies in their sector), which led to an abbreviated nine-month fiscal 1981 year and therefore some confusion in revenue reporting: do you extrapolate a yearly figure from those nine months, add on an extra quarter from either side, or just report the base figure? This too may have retroactively contributed to the confusion about 1980.

With Gen Con in Indianapolis this week, today we're exploring what is almost certainly the first press coverage of the convention, just following its debut in 1968. This comes from a regional paper, the Beloit Daily News, and it ran two days after the first Lake Geneva Wargames Convention - no one called it Gen Con yet. We can read within that Gary Gygax hosted the convention, and other familiar names from the International Federation of Wargaming feature into the story as well, among the "over 90" gamers who attended.

Expect attendance to run a bit higher than that this weekend, but you still might stumble over me wandering the halls: and on Saturday afternoon at 2:00, I will be appearing on the D&D Documentary panel at the Westin (the room is Capitol I, http://gencon.com/events/66470).

One of the many pleasures of writing about the history of games is receiving unexpected correspondence from the people whose work I study, sometimes people who are very surprised to learn that a pastime they briefly enjoyed decades ago has brought them to the attention of posterity. Such was the case with Craig VanGrasstek, whose 1974 Rules to the Game of Dungeon I covered on this blog (and in Playing at the World) as the earliest known Dungeons & Dragons variant. Craig wrote to me having long lost any copy of the Rules and understandably curious about my interest. This is easily explained: the Rules provide one of our earliest windows into fantasy role-playing as practiced by some of its first fans, a tradition that has survived as "Minneapolis Dungeon."

In the course of my exchange with Craig, he volunteered to make his work available to the readers of today. We therefore present this week the complete text of the Rules to the Game of Dungeon [download PDF] as Craig VanGrasstek originally wrote it up in the summer of 1974. I provide a bit of commentary and context in an Afterword and in endnotes. After the jump, we review three of Craig's play records from 1974, which give further insight into how this important early community went about dungeoneering. Give it a try the next time you want an "old school" experience, and see how it plays!

As my copy of the original text is nearly illegible, I retyped the eighteen-pages of the Rules while retaining pagination and where possible formatting. I had to replace the numbers on the example map, as they were virtually unreadable, though there were only a handful of places where the original text could not be deciphered and a guess had to be ventured. The lost cover has been replaced with artwork of Craig's from this era, one of several Minneapa covers he drew. In the endnotes, I try to clarify both the historical import of the Rules and the system itself, which Craig and I have discussed over the past weeks.

The three play records that follow all date to the months after the publication of the Rules. Those with a working knowledge of Dungeons & Dragons may still find some curiosities in these narratives; inspection of the Rules will clarify most of these oddities. The Rules are best studied with these play records as a chaser, as they illustrate the exercise of the rules, demonstrate a few places where practice differs from theory, and moreover impart a sense of the zany, madcap adventures that teenagers in the Twin Cities enjoyed back in 1974.

The first play record is dated September 22, 1974:

We learn that this expedition sends the party into a familiar dungeon, Blad Mountain. In it, the party encounters bears, gorillas, bulls, snakes, hawks, a giant iguana, a pack of giant rolling meatballs, and a dragon. Weapon breakage seems to be a theme of this session. Note that at the end, next to his signature, VanGrasstek has placed a lollipop with the word "Repent!" next to it: a reference to the fannish cult of comic book character Herbie Popnecker.

Next is October 27, 1974:

In this play report we see some indication of the level ("rank") of participants, as the two warriors are both "eight rank," which translates to third level. This descent emphasizes gambling, and has many more "weirdies" as adversaries: foes that aren't necessarily monsters, are typically silly, and draw strongly on popular culture. The comic book characters Doctor Octopus, Blue Beetle, and Bouncing Boy all make appearances, as does Prince Valiant. The enormous tribute to Monty Python appended to the play record reminds us that their particular style of humor, which runs through all the dungeon descents, was a fresh import at the time.

Finally, December 13, 1974:

The last dungeon descent is perhaps more sober than the other two. A giant, booby-trapped gem incapacitates a few party members. Later, they slaughter a party of nineteen orcs, and the dungeon also houses vicious boars and wolverines. Even in this descent, however, the best way to escape when trapped by a "Do Not Enter" sign is to destroy a wall with a dentist's drill. VanGrasstek also supplies a handy overworld map to one of the local dungeon masters at the end of the play record.

Over on Medium, I posted a new and lengthy piece about the first female gamers, and how Dungeons & Dragons managed to win the interest of women where prior wargames had not. The process of making the hobby more inclusive was not an entirely smooth one, as the illustration above might suggest. You can read the essay here:

https://medium.com/@increment/the-first-female-gamers-c784fbe3ff37

How Gaming Got Its Dice

Arneson's Naval Illustrations

The Dalluhn Manuscript: In Detail and On Display

Tactical Studies Hobbies, an Oddity in Letterhead

Arsouf (1969) by Gary Gygax

Character Sheets in 1975

The Origins of Dice Notation

The First Critical Hits

The Earliest Dungeons & Dragons Advertisements

When Dungeons & Dragons Turns 40

Gary Gygax's 1973 D&D Working Draft

History of D&D in 12 Treasures

A Fantastic Bestiary

Autumn Walk: A 1975 Gygax Poem

Midgard II (1972), the Other Fantastic Medieval Wargames Campagin

The Legacy of Gygax's Armor

How Gary Gygax Lost Control of TSR

Gen Con 1968 and Today

1974 Dungeon Variant, Now for Download

The First Female Gamers