Playing at the World

Sometimes chunks of gaming history come down to us without much context. That is the case with today's specimen, a crude British booklet "collected and compiled" by Chris Bursey called The Observers Book of Monsters. It contains a blend of new and recycled creatures for Dungeons & Dragons, of an apparently early date, but gives no direct indication of when or how it came to be made. But thanks to the invaluable fossil record of fanzines, we can connect a few dots and shed some light on its production.

The Observers Book furnishes clues by disbursing credit for its "collected and compiled" contents liberally, to both published titles and homebrew contributors. It anthologizes several of M.A.R. Barker's creations in the 1975 role-playing game Empire of the Petal Throne, from the Biridlú to the Yéleth, as well various monsters that appeared around the same time in TSR's first periodical The Strategic Review, and even a few from the early fanzine the Dungeoneer. Before we scold him for piracy, do note that Bursey was giving the Observers Book away for free: as a note inside reads, "Apologies for mistakes and poor presentation; but what do you expect for nothing?" Unfortunately for us, because he did not sell it, we cannot trace and date it through the catalogs of retailers and distributors as we usually consult for a commercial product.

Beyond crediting published sources, the Observers Book also attributes monsters to Bursey personally and to a set of other named individuals: Fred Hemmings, Martin Easterbrook, Chris Walton, and Mike "Big Oz" Brown. In the earliest listing of members of the British D&D Player's Society in Owl & Weasel #14 (March 1976), we can already find Bursey, Hemmings, and Easterbrook listed. In fact, Bursey and Hemmings share a street address in Slough, an exurb west of London.

Fred Hemmings was active in science-fiction and fantasy fandom in Britain before the publication of D&D, and when he attended EuroCon in 1972, his presence was noted by Hartley Patterson. Patterson, the prime mover behind the Anglo-American Midgard family of games, was also the publisher of News from Bree, a transitional game fanzine that began as an offshoot of the Tolkien Society but abruptly refocused on D&D when it became available. Patterson talks in issue #16, in January 1976, of his initial difficulty finding people who shared his approach to D&D, but then reports that recently "I've encountered the Slough complex of Fred Hemmings and Chris Bursey which after some adjustments fitted quite well with mine."

By News from Bree #18, printed in May 1976, Patterson had begun to include occasional sidebars with D&D monsters submitted by the readership, including Martin Easterbrook. The next issue contains a letter from Chris Walton of Birmingham and several monsters submitted by Chris Bursey. By #20, Bursey's monster submissions warrant a few illustrations (drawn by Charles Beaumont, who would soon produce the cover for White Dwarf #1):

Monsters like black orcs and night gaunts return in the Observers Book, so we can see it as a sort of compendium of the monsters published in fanzines like News from Bree, mixed in with more official creations. To make sure his customers got their money's worth, Bursey also threw in six pages at the end of rules for a variant character class, the Unholy Cleric. But the remaining twenty-four pages enumerate 130 monsters, often in terse descriptions -- without graphics, which would surely be a let down after Beaumont's illustrations.

One reason we know to look in News from Bree for the originals of these monsters is that black orcs pop up again in the pages of White Dwarf #4, though an explicit credit for them to Bursey and News from Bree only appears in issue #6. Don Turnbull, in a project he called "Monsters Mild & Malign," had "spent many hours scouring through D&D magazines in search of new monsters interesting enough to use in my own dungeon." Soon, Turnbull pivoted to republishing entries submitted specifically to White Dwarf for a similarly-alliterative column called the "Fiend Factory" which would ultimately populate much of the Fiend Folio (1981).

But Bursey's primitive pamphlet must have beaten that tome to market. The prevalence of early monsters from Empire of the Petal Throne, and issues of the Strategic Review dating to 1976, helps us to hone in on a date. Because Bursey also included Jim Ward's creature the "Mobil Dis" from Dungeoneer #3, which we know shipped in the first days of 1977, that year is the absolute earliest he could have produced the Observers Book. But by 1978, we no longer see Bursey's name in the fanzines where it once appeared. Given that the Observers Book scrupulously avoids any monsters in the core D&D books or supplements, it seems doubtful it was written by someone who had seen the Monster Manual, as it contains many creatures, like the peryton, that appear there. Most likely, the Observers Book appeared in the same sweet spot as All the Worlds' Monsters and similar third-party attempts to beat TSR to a bestiary.

As a final aside, the name "Observer's Book" comes from a popular series of twentieth-century British guidebooks. Applying that brand to a fantasy world is an obvious enough notion that the Wallace & Gromit film Curse of the Were-Rabbit prominently features its own "Observer's Book of Monsters", in which the titular creature is depicted -- and in a charming coincidence, Bursey includes a were-rabbit in his book, reprinting his original description in News from Bree #19:

Previously on Forgotten Variants: The X-Fragments

One of the great riddles that has vexed D&D players for generations is this: why did armor class in original D&D descend from 9 to 2 instead of increasing as it gets better? The answer is spelled out in the first draft of D&D: if you were a first-level fighter rolling to hit, the number you needed was equivalent to 20 minus the armor class of your target. To hit AC 2, you needed an 18, to hit AC 3, a 17, and so on. Armor class descended to make it easy enough to calculate your needed roll that you wouldn't even have to consult a table. Unfortunately, the published D&D game broke this algorithm, which has obscured the motivation for descending armor class ever since.

The pre-publication D&D system stipulated that an entry level fighter has only a ten percent chance to land a hit on a target wearing plate armor and a shield. With each level you went up, that likelihood would increase by five percent: so a second-level fighter needs a 17 to hit AC 2, a third-level fight needs a 16, and so on. Presumably that calculation still remained easy enough to perform that this all served as something like a precursor to THAC0 (in its relentless quest to perfect combat systems, the OSR has previously recognized this as the rough algorithm behind the original attack matrices).

If this system was so intuitive, why didn't TSR stick with it? The most obvious reason is that the attack matrix in the GD&D draft was limited to attackers level 1 through 9, so it can afford to dedicate a column to each level. The attack matrix in published D&D, however, goes up to level 16 and beyond -- so to keep a manageable number of columns in the table, they consolidated levels 1 through 3 of the original attack matrix into a single column. The average of the values in GD&D for the first three levels is 17, and that is the number we see in the first consolidated column of the published D&D chart. Things drift a bit from there: the average of levels 4 through 6 in GD&D would be 14; that has been skewed to 15 in published D&D. No doubt this drift owed to the fact that when you nearly double the number of levels, you need to slow the progression so it isn't too easy for high-level characters to hit. With this consolidation, the original elegance of armor class was instantly lost, and the rationale for the original design was hopelessly obfuscated. This broken remnant of pre-publication D&D cast a long shadow over Holmes Basic and the 1st and 2nd editions of AD&D.

We know that "armor class" was originally a Chainmail term, and Chainmail attached numerical values ascending from 1 to 8 to its armor classes, so that as the armor class of targets went up, likewise did the rolls required to hit them with missile fire. Those eight Chainmail armor classes are transposed exactly into the eight armor classes of OD&D: apart from swapping the order of "Shield Only" and "Leather Armor," the only change is that they are numbered 9 to 2 instead of 1 to 8. But in Chainmail you roll 2d6 to hit, so moving to a d20 to-hit roll (where better rolls are higher) would require something different. In a 1979 interview with Gryphon magazine, Gygax explained, "The concept of armor class and weapon size originated in Chainmail. When I put it into Dungeons & Dragons I just reversed the order of armor class."

But attributions for design choices in original D&D are rarely uncontroversial. In a number of interviews, Arneson credited an unidentified naval wargame involving ironclads as an inspiration for armor class and other early combat system elements. Since the armor classes of D&D are obviously identical to those in Chainmail apart from their ordering, we may be at a bit of a loss to isolate what about armor class this ironclad game could have inspired -- if not the descending values. Arneson's remarks understandably sparked a manhunt for candidate systems with the right age and properties. I was one of many people who, having scoured the fossil records of gaming for the answer, asked Arneson which system he meant, exactly, to no avail. It is true in general that the concepts of armor thickness and withstanding points of damage existed in several naval wargames prior to Chainmail, but less clear which system(s) could have inspired the authors of D&D to alter the armor system in Chainmail to look the way it does in GD&D.

If we accept the rationale for descending armor class given in GD&D draft, then the relevant properties we'd be looking for in a naval game just got much more narrow. That's because reversing the numbers was no mere cosmetic change, but a change made for the very specific purpose of simplifying the calculation of to-hit rolls yielding a number from 1-20. While many pre-D&D to-hit systems used percentile resolution, with dice or cards, prior systems based on rolling 1-20 to hit are exceptionally rare. Given the specific way that "funny dice" got attached to D&D, there are only so many places to look for potential influences.

Old school Dungeons & Dragons fans know that Greg Bell's beloved lizardman from the inside cover of Greyhawk (1975) served as the logo of TSR Hobbies up until it was replaced by the wizard logo in 1978. But when you get out a magnifying glass and take a closer look at the miniaturized lizardmen on TSR products, especially toward the end of those three years, you might spot a doppelganger at work.

In developing the Art & Arcana project, there were a few details about the visual history of the game that were, well, too arcane even for a book called Art & Arcana. Each of the TSR logos over the years admits of a certain amount of variation, so a slight logo redesign may not warrant the attention of posterity -- but the case of the impostor lizardman sheds light on an overlooked piece of artwork.

The original lizardman in Greyhawk lacked the stark contrast that a logo requires, so it was a high-contrast alternative version of Bell's drawing which began to appear on early company letterhead as soon as the Tactical Studies Rules partnership dissolved in 1975. This more solid version reduced well to a thumbnail, and even granted a bit of a third dimension to the left foot truncated in the original Greyhawk crop. It was this version, rather than a shrunken Greyhawk original, which started appearing in miniature on the cover of products like Blackmoor (1975):

But ultimately, it was not solid enough: the lizardman quickly faded, as TSR changed printers and began reproducing artwork with a different process. The problem is evident in attempts to transpose it onto 1977 color products. This lizardman on the original Holmes Basic box looks like the target of a Disintegrate spell:

The one on the back of the Gen Con 1977 program fares little better:

Even touched up to heighten contrast, the lizardman was too visually busy to make a good logo. Something had to be done. At the end of 1977, Bell's lizardman was quietly replaced by a body double. Every effort was made to preserve the design of the original, down to replicating Greg Bell's signature; probably we should look no further than Dave Sutherland to find the responsible artist. The first printing of the original Monster Manual clearly features an inverted Bell lizardman on its cover:

... but if you turn to the very last page, the impostor reveals himself.

Even without clicking to magnify the images, one can clearly see how the impostor lizardman's legs are largely colored in black, while the inverted Bell lizardman on the Monster Manual cover sports detailed leg musculature. The impostor is imbued with a whole left foot. The blade of his axe is similarly colored solid, except for the edge, in the impostor version, whereas the original has all sorts of textures that appear confusing when minimized.

The original Bell lizardman would never be seen again. We can see the impostor on both the cover and interior of the Steading of the Hill Giant Chief, which was released for Origins in 1978:

The career of the impostor lizardman was a short one, spanning just the first half of 1978: enough time for him to show his new face in a few advertisements, on the bright red merchandisers TSR distributed to retailers, on the return address of corporate envelopes, and even in the interior of Gamma World:

However, in high contrast against the color backdrop of the Gamma World box, the impostor fares little better than the original as a logo... he may not be disintegrating, but he looks hacked to pieces:

So it was that between Origins and Gen Con in the summer of 1978, the switch was made to the new wizard logo, which would appear on the Players Handbook and the module series beginning with Descent into the Depths of the Earth. If we put it under a microscope, the wizard reveals a bit of detail, but it is iconic, easily recognizable from its outline alone, even when inverted -- and even when miniaturized down to fit the spine of a slender hardcover book to a size where text is practically illegible. The wizard would last TSR into the 1980s.

Before any daring cartographer mapped underground dungeons in pursuit of fantastic adventure, Chainmail described a system for subterranean tunnels on paper. It needed these rules to simulate the discipline of the mines, a siege operation that involved tunneling under castle walls in order to, well, undermine them, destabilizing the walls to the point of collapse, after which invading troops could surge through the breach and storm the castle. These rules were a fairly late addition to the medieval system practiced in Lake Geneva, and they likely owe a debt to an earlier system blurb that Jack Scruby appended to Newell Chamberlin's rules in a 1965 issue of Table Top Talk.

Any set of medieval rules worth their salt had some system for laying siege to fortresses. A siege system can be found on the last page of the LGTSA Medieval Miniatures rules in their 1970 Panzerfaust incarnation. But all of the action in those sieges stays above ground, involving catapults, ladders, mantlets, and the like. Chainmail incorporated those rules, which measured quantified points of damage dealt by siege weapons against fortifications, with some small modifications and expansions:

Domesday Book #5 adds only a tease that mines "are only possible when conducting campaigns." But Chainmail went on to include this system for mines, countermines, and breaches to those LGTSA rules. That this system appears as a kind of modular chunk at the end of the section, something tacked on, reminds us of how Scruby appended to the end of Chamberlin's medieval system his own rules on those three subjects, divided into two similar sections. Crucially, Scruby expected that opposing players would secretly record their mining efforts on paper and reveal the results to one another to determine the success of countermines, a clear antecedent to the system shown in Chainmail.

Chainmail, however, requires the use of a neutral third party, a judge, who would monitor the secret progress of both teams of tunnelers and inform players if and when they intersected. It is in this respect, by having a referee who keeps secret information on those underground maps, that this Chainmail system prefigures the underground adventures of Dungeons & Dragons. Or so Gygax had it: in a 1979 article in The Dragon, he asserts that Dave Arneson, who pioneered the dungeon adventure concept in his Blackmoor campaign, did so under the influence of these paragraphs of Chainmail as applied to situations from fantasy fiction. "Following Chainmail’s advice to use paper and pencil for underground activity such as mining during campaign game sieges, taking a page out of the works of Howard and Burroughs et al, he brought the focus of fantasy miniatures play to the dungeon setting.”

Given other respects in which Blackmoor demonstrates an obvious debt to Chainmail, it would be a striking coincidence if Arneson had lighted on the idea of using a neutral referee to manage underground maps completely independently of this. But the notion of using paper and pencil to keep a hidden record of secret locations has a number of other key precursors in gaming. When Ken St. Andre struggled, in the introduction to Tunnels & Trolls (1975), to explain the secret maps of Dungeons & Dragons, he could only say, "The game is played something like Battleship. The individual players cannot see the board."

For those who grew up with the plastic clamshell case and rattling pegs of the game Battleship (1967) sold by Milton Bradley, this may seem like a curious analogy. But Battleship was originally a pencil-and-paper game, which traded in the early twentieth century under names like Salvo (1931).

Salvo functioned much like the mining system of Scruby, where each player tried to guess where the other had placed secret marks on a map, effectively a piece of graph paper. You have to trust that your Salvo opponent accurately reports the scoring of hits and misses turn by turn ("B7.""Miss!"), though at the end of the battle, both sides could compare maps to detect any shenanigans. One can readily see how the pen-and-paper component of Scruby's mine and countermine system might have been inspired by Salvo -- especially given that an article on Salvo appears in a 1961 issue of Scruby's zine the War Game Digest:

Bob Mulligan had transposed Salvo into a broader naval campaign games of shipyards, factories, convoys, blockades, and fleet actions, and the basic idea behind it would inspire many such variants. We should understand Salvo as a foundational game in the development of hidden movement systems that tracked activity "off board," one that served as an obvious inspiration for Avalon Hill naval wargames like Bismarck (1962). But the fundamental idea of requiring opposing players to record secret information on a blank grid before a game begins quickly jumped out of the water and into all sorts of other applications: board games like Mind Maze(1970) repurpose the plastic clamshell of Battleship to have players design a labyrinth for opponents to explore... but games in this tradition will have to wait for another post.

Chainmail goes farther than these head-to-head contests by recommending a neutral referee keep track of enemy mines instead of the players. To find a closer antecedent for this adult supervision, we need to look to another naval wargame from the first half of the Twentieth century: Fletcher Pratt's Naval War Game (1940). Although designed for waterline ship model play on a large table or even a cleared floor, the game assigns its referee to manage underwater activities through paper and pencil for one problematic class of vessel: submarines.

The Fletcher Pratt rules were well known in midwestern wargaming circles in the late 1960s, and so would be the practice of having a referee track on paper things that happen in the depths where players cannot see. There were no submarines in the Napoleonic setting of Gygax and Arneson's first collaboration, Don't Give Up the Ship, but it shows the influence of Fletcher Pratt in numerous particulars. Did it inspire the authors of Chainmail to add a judge to Scruby's system for mines and countermines? Perhaps not directly, but Fletcher Pratt is certainly part of the web of influences that surrounded the evolution of Chainmail, Blackmoor, and ultimately Dungeons & Dragons. Sometimes the best we can do is just to illuminate that web.

[Well, okay, Arneson does note a French submarine in his research notes for the Napoleonic campaign.]

Previously on Roots of Chainmail: Missile Fire in Chainmail, Courtesy of Charles Sweet

It is no exaggeration to say that Greg Bell was effectively the first staff artist of Tactical Studies Rules. Not only did he famously draw the cover of the Dungeons & Dragons box set, as well as around twenty-five more internal illustrations, but he illustrated the company's first release, Cavaliers and Roundheads (1973), as well as key titles like Warriors of Mars (1974). Though he was never formally on staff at TSR, his fingerprints are all over their earliest work. Which is why it is so interesting to peer back in time a little before TSR, when he was drawing covers like the one above for the fanzine Drum Call of the "Blackhawk Militaria Society," a group in Rockford, IL.

Bell's signature blocky style should be readily recognizable to people familiar with his D&D art, like the iconic lizardman which served as TSR's logo, but in case there's any confusion, inside we find an explicit credit to him - and a nod to fellow Rockford gamer Jeff Perren's interest in screening films. From Bell's connection to Perren, we can easily understand how he came to work on Cavaliers and Roundheads, a collaboration between Perren and Gary Gygax.

Other issues of Drum Call lack credits for cover illustrations, like this one from #6, which has a "cover drawn by" inside which was never filled out with a name. But we can probably safely ascribed this to Bell as well, especially after comparing it to this cartoon from the fifth issue of the Strategic Review in 1975.

One of the great privileges of working on a book like Art & Arcanais that you get to meet a lot of these original artists, people who never could have imagined that their work would bring them to the attention of posterity. Greg Bell is a most humble guy, if perhaps a bit mischevous; it was a pleasure to talk to him last year down at an old hobby shop in northern Illinois about working with Gary Gygax on some of the earlier fantasy art in the history of gaming.

Inside Drum Call, we can find an interesting tidbit of that fantasy history. On September 2, 1972, gamers in Rockford held a convention that drew about fifty people, including Gary Gygax, his son Ernie, and Don Kaye from Lake Geneva, as well as locals like Jeff Perren, Gygax's co-author on Chainmail. But perhaps most intriguing here is the reference to "Mary of the Lake Geneva group," who ran a fantasy game. Could that be Mary Gygax? No, much more likely it was Mary Dale, one of the early playtesters of Dungeons & Dragons, who we might surmise was already hooked on fantasy before the fateful collaboration between Gygax and Dave Arneson towards Dungeons & Dragons had begun.

Dungeons & Dragons grew out of a tradition of miniature wargaming, and distributors of figurines were among the first companies to supply D&D to hobby shops. Although the D&D rules downplayed the necessity of using minis, they do tout their value in adding "real spectacle" to the game through "the eye-appeal of the varied and brightly painted miniature figures." Miniatures were to early D&D what graphics became for computer games. Supplying miniatures suitable for fantasy RPGs ultimately grew into a substantial industry of its own, but at the humble beginning, the first miniatures that TSR sold along with D&D were made by the father of American miniature wargaming: Jack Scruby. Above are examples of some of these early Scruby miniatures arrayed for combat.

Although we had the opportunity to show some fantasy miniatures in the Art & Arcanaproject, we did not have a chance to get into the knotty details of the earliest products in the space. Anyone who has glanced at the back of Men & Magic in the first printing of D&D would know that TSR had a pretty thin catalog at the beginning of 1974. The only thing they could advertise in that space other than Cavaliers and Roundheads and dice was "a complete line of Scruby Miniatures, including Fantasy."

The reason they had these minis available right out of the gate is that Don Lowry had approached Jack Scruby earlier about producing a line of these figures for Chainmail. At the time Chainmail appeared, no one produced fantasy miniatures; Gary Gygax and Don Kaye had to make "conversions" of various historical soldiers and plastic toys into their imaginary combatants. Scruby was a natural choice for the job because he had an unmatched pedigree in the figure business: when he founded the War Game Digest in 1957 and jumpstarted the American miniature wargaming community, he had already been casting figures for years. Gygax worked closely with Scruby on the development of this fantasy line, reviewing samples of the projected figures in the spring of 1973, before TSR was even founded.

TSR hoped Scruby would distribute D&D rules, so they promoted his fantasy figures wherever they could; they sold Scruby miniatures at their booth at GenCon in 1974. If you inquired about these fantasy figures with TSR that year, you would get back the following description of their Scruby fantasy offerings, along with some ideas for how the miniatures could be used and integrated with existing collections:

A few interesting things to note about this initial list: for one, it suggests multiple purposes for the miniatures at different figure scales, for example proposing that the Ogre figure could serve as a Gnoll or a Giant when used with figures outside the base scale, and the Super-Hero could be a Titan among 25mm figures. Titans were not yet in the game: they would be first specified in Greyhawk in 1975, though their existence had already been teased in the first printing of D&D. Goblins could also serve as hobbits with the right paint job. It is something of a narrow list: Gygax had corresponded with Scruby about a far wider range of monsters in 1973, including wraiths, balrogs, and most importantly dragons -- the absence of the dragon in this starting line-up is sorely felt.

Scruby would add to the selection as the year went on. Gygax had recommended to Scruby that he cast at least one standing wizard, in addition to the mounted T-4 figure. This would be produced as figure T-13. By the time Scruby published his Soldier Factory News for the summer of 1974, we can see the line has grown to fourteen Tolkien minis. Scruby was no subject matter expert on fantasy: centaurs are not really a Tolkien thing, say. We see in T-5 he gives the singular of "elves" as "elve," and indeed the bases of his figures reflect that.

Whenever we dig deep into historical sources, we always uncover a riddle or two. Note that Scruby here gives figure T-9 as "Hobbit, chainmail, shield, sword." Gygax above described T-9 as "Dwarf, with shield, fighting with axe." When Don Lowry lists the same figure in Lowrys Guidon #9, he gives it as "Dwarf, with shield, fighting with sword." So which is it supposed to be, a hobbit or a dwarf, and does it wield a sword or an axe? We might venture that the figure in the lower left of the panorama at the top of this post is what Gygax meant by T-9: its base does label it as a dwarf. Unfortunately there survives little period photography of these miniatures, though we have an unlabeled picture below from a 1975 Wargamer's Digest which could conceivably be T-9 as Scruby describes it; the one to the right is certainly T-12.

Or maybe the figure shown here on the left was a T-14, and its description omits mention of the shield? When he first saw Scruby's samples in 1973, Gygax complained that the dwarf should be "a big larger than Goblins" and that "to be perfect they should be made stockier -- perhaps nearly as broad in the shoulder as they are tall." He does not then record seeing a hobbit at all. But perhaps Scruby never beefed up his dwarves, and there is no practical way to tell them apart from his hobbits. What you actually got in the mail when you ordered a T-9 from TSR may have even varied over time.

Another tidbit you can observe from the TSR product sheet above is the mention of existing British fantasy miniatures. That refers to the Miniature Figurines (Minifigs) line of Middle-earth miniatures, which they started advertising at the end of 1973; they would soon rebrand these as "Mythical Earth" to avoid the ire of the Tolkien estate. TSR would partner with Minifigs in 1976 to produce a line of D&D branded miniatures, the first that would sell with D&D on their packaging, and by then any ongoing relationship with Scruby had ended. From that point forward, license agreements for D&D miniatures became a coveted commodity in the industry: TSR would award them to a variety of shops before bringing miniature production in house in 1982, when Duke Seifried was on staff and could oversee their effort. But for the oldest in old school, accept no substitutes: Jack Scruby's fantasy miniatures should have a place on any OD&D miniature player's table.

[Although the originals are hard to come by at this point, some firms today produce figures based on molds cast from these Scruby originals, as is the case with many old-school miniatures.]

Back when D&D turned 40 in 2014, I put up a post about the date I favored for celebrating its anniversary: the last Sunday in January. Today, January 27, is the last Sunday in January 2019, and the day that I will be tipping a glass to Gary Gygax, Dave Arneson, and the many others who made D&D possible 45 years ago. Above is an excerpt from a letter that Gygax sent to Arneson -- as it reads, just days away from the printing.

I've noticed that a few people have adopted January 26 as the anniversary of the publication of D&D, as that happened to be the last Sunday in the month of January back in 2014. I favor a Sunday because it was on Sundays that Gygax invited people to come to his house to trial the game, as I mentioned in my earlier post. But my whole point was that there isn't a lot of precision to be found in dating the release, so celebrating a few days earlier or later doesn't do any harm from my perspective.

Speaking of a few days later - a couple years after the release of D&D, when TSR finally got around to registering the game with the copyright office, their filing gave a date of January 30, 1974.

Should we go with that date instead? This date may have just been picked in 1976 to reflect when the game was roughly available; it seems unlikely that there was any moment, back in the informal days of January 1974, when the principles of TSR solemnly declared, "a moment ago this work was not copyrighted but now it is." Copyright law (before the Copyright Act of 1976) allowed these things to be pretty loose. Moreover, the question of when the text was actually proofed and complete, and thus copyright-able, is distinct from when the game was actually printed, when it was available for order, and when the first copy was actually put together and handed out. For example, the trademark date, when they bothered to file that in 1977, states that the game was "in commerce" as of January 15, 1974.

Does that mean it was out then? Or just available for order? Or is it just another date that was picked retrospectively to reflect the game's availability around January?

The way I see things today, I think it's unlikely many people had copies of the game in hand before February. But still, the last Sunday in January is the day I at least honor the anniversary. Think back to when Gygax wrote those words above, about D&D being just days away from printing... and just how far the game has come since.

The Illusionist in Dungeons & Dragons was created by Peter Aronson, an early Boston-area fan. In 1975, Aronson submitted an initial description of Illusionists to TSR , who ran it in the fourth issue of the Strategic Review. Then the following year, Aronson's additions with system for higher-level Illusionists appeared in the debut issue of The Dragon. But Aronson didn't stop there - he made a number of further expansions and corrections which he circulated informally in 1977, of which the first page is shown above. Today, we're looking at the complete Illusionist subclass for OD&D as Aronson envisioned it, and the implications it created for "schools" of magic in role-playing games.

The basic concept of illusions in fantasy games had existed prior to Dungeons & Dragons: the 1971 first edition of Chainmail introduced the spell "Phantasmal Forces," which "creates the apparition of a unit or creature." The version of that spell in the 1974 edition of Dungeons & Dragons allows "the creation of vivid illusions of nearly anything the user envisions," with the ominous possibility that "damage caused to viewers of a Phantasmal Force will be real if the illusion is believed to be real." The power to create such illusions carried over to the "Wand of Illusion" and the "Illusion Generation" ability of magic swords at the very start of D&D.

Aronson saw in this the possibility for a sort of Magic-user who specialized in illusions, who could cast new spells like "Hypnotism", "Blindness,""Change Self", and "Nondetection." He sent his original write-up for the Illusionist subclass to TSR before he had seen Greyhawk, the first supplement to OD&D, which expanded the number of experience levels specified and with it the spell list for Magic-users. Necessarily, Illusionists would need higher level spells as well, which led to Aronson's additions to the class in the first issue of The Dragon.

The Illusionist subclass of Magic-users opened the door to the idea that wizards could specialize in some particular sort of magic - and in no small part, that spells should be formally classified into schools. Even before the Illusionist saw print in the Strategic Review, Len Lakofka had taken the idea of Magic-user specializations to the next logical step, in a series in his fanzine Liaisons Dangereuses describing a set of fantasy miniatures rules intended to be compatible with D&D. In the July 1975 issue, Lakofka broke spell casters down into four areas of specialty: "illusion, elements (fire and air or water and earth), change properties (healing, polymorph), command (fly, protection, charm, hold)." We can see these categories as precursors to the "types" of magic that organized spells in AD&D: Illusion, Evocation, Alteration, Enchantment/Charm, and so on. As he continued to serialize his system, Lakofka refined these into class roles for the Illusionist, Charmer & Enchanter, and Elementalist.

Some Elementalist spells are furthermore restricted just to "Fire Users," an idea Lakofka would evolve into the "Pyrologist" subclass of Magic-user that appeared the following September in Liaisons Dangereuses #74. By that point, his fantasy miniatures rules had run in the center of the first issue of The Dragon -- right alongside Aronson's expanded Illusionist rules.

The following year, Aronson felt he needed to revisit the Illusionist. An article he submitted to Wild Hunt #19 gives the rationale for most of the changes in this 1977 version of the Illusionist class. Aronson notes that because he had originally designed the class before Greyhawk, it was burdened with number of inconsistencies with the evolving D&D system that needed to be addressed.

In addition to fixing the system of previous spells, Aronson could not resist adding a few new ones. The Color Bomb, Dreams, and Phantoms spells are unique to this 1977 version. He compiled these revisions into a six-page description, of which the first page is given above. If you want to take his final Illusionist system for a test drive, here's the other five:

The Illusionist has cast a long shadow over the magic system of D&D: fifth-edition spells like "Color Spray", "Illusory Script", "Alter Self", "Phantasmal Killer", and "True Seeing" all have their roots in Aronson's design. And of course Wizards can specialize in the School of Illusion. This vividly reminds us how the system of D&D was a truly collaborative effort, where ideas that players devised became integral components of the game. But beyond their historical value, these rules give OD&D fans the opportunity to play the Illusionist as its creator intended -- so give them a spin!

How can you recognize a polyhedral gaming die made in the 1970s? The video above gives my tips for collectors and researchers who want to roll old school. After the cut, I give a quick reference guide to identifying these dice.

A brief note on scope: this list is restricted to polyhedral dice that were known and available to the hobby gaming community of the 1970s, which basically means that information on how to order them could be found in zines and catalogs of that period. Other numbered polyhedra overlooked by the hobby wargaming/RPG community are not included here. Note as well that this reflects research I consider to be stable, but these are difficult objects to study, and there are still open questions that might nudge these conclusions one way or another.

1970s Dice Quick Reference Guide

Japanese Standards Association (JSA) Dice (1960s)

d20 dice map: staggered.

Identify by finding in its plastic case, or compare dice to the dice ladder above.

Bristol Wargames Society Dice (1970)

d20 dice map: additive (9)

Identify by comparing to dice ladder. Imported to the USA by Lou Zocchi. Later in the 1970s, they may have introduced some additional colors.

Creative Publications Dice (1972)

d20 dice map: symmetric (7:235)

Dice maps are the same as Holmes dice, which are widely available. Identify by the colors (comparison to Holmes is shown below), as well as the sharp engraving of the numbers, especially the "3". Only released in white (d20), blue (d12), green (d8), pink (d6), and yellow (d4).

Zocchi 1st Generation Dice

Percentile Set (1975)

d20 dice map: partially symmetric (7:248)

Original distribution was red and white only. Resold by TSR until 1977.

Polyhedral Set (1976)

Uninked:

Inked:

Identify with color and sprue marks: blue d20 (sprue on 7/8 vertex), yellow d12 (sprue on 5), orange d8 (sprue on 1), green d4 (sprue on face 2:13). Note as well the oversized, warped d12, and the pointy d4. The dice map of the blue d20 matches the ladder for the 1975 percentile dice. In 1977, some additional colors for the first generation d20 were introduced, including orange and yellow (and probably green as well).

Holmes Basic Dice (1977)

d20 dice map: symmetric (7:235)

Released in white (d20), blue (d12), green (d8), orange (d6), and yellow (d4). Colors are slightly darker than original Creative Publications solids.

1977 Percentile Set

(Pink d6 shown for color reference only)

Shipped in TSR boxed games like War of Wizards, Boot Hill, and Top Secret.

Comparison of Holmes (back) and Creative Publications (front):

Zocchi 2nd Generation Dice

d20 dice map: symmetric (7:458)

Identify with sprue marks: d20 face (two molds, either on the face 7 or 8), d12 (face 5), d8 (face 1), d4 (face 2:13)

First releases in red, white, blue, yellow, orange and green (1977). Subsequent releases included black, brown, and violet (1978), and from there branched into many other colors by 1980, including gem styles. Note as well limited releases of transitional "swirl" colored dice. From 1978 forward, many sets shipped with a pipped d6; by 1980, Zocchi began making a matching numeral d6 for these sets.

Selected Dice After 1979

TSR Dice (1980)

d20 dice map: symmetric +10 (7:235)

Included a matching d6 and d10. d20s numbered 1-20.

Prototype summer 1980 release shown. Dice map is the same as later Moldvay dice, which are widely available.

Armory 1st Generation (1980)

d20 dice map: symmetric (7:458)

Identify with "A" instead of "1" on faces of d20, d8, and d4.

Shipped in nine opaque colors and five gem colors off the bat, with many other colors quickly added. Sets included a pipped d6. Note that pre-1980 Armory dice packaging contained Zocchi 2nd generation dice.

Heritage (1981)

d20 dice map: symmetric (7:458)

d20 ladder identical to Zocchi. Identify with circle embedded in the face of the 1 on the d20 and d12. Primarily shipped in red, white, blue, yellow, orange, and green; also seen brown in the wild. Up to 1980, Heritage blister packs (which may be labeled "Kriegspielers" or "Dungeon Dwellers") contained Zocchi 2nd generation dice. "Adventure Gaming" blister packs made by Heritage contained dice as shown here, though some (probably early 1981) contain a mix of Heritage dice and Zocchi 2nd generation dice.

The Dungeons & Dragons tournaments run at the 1970s Origins conventions are the stuff of legends: there was the Tomb of Horrors (1975), the Expedition to the Barrier Peaks (1976), and then the famous Against the Giants trilogy (1978). So... what happened in 1977? TSR boycotted Origins that year, and the D&D tournament was thus administered by a recently-departed employee: Dave Arneson. Today, we will look at that tournament through contemporary reports of players and a few surviving play artifacts -- like this list of the twelve pre-generated characters who made up the tournament party.

Origins 77 was run by SPI in Staten Island, NYC, on July 22-24, with a total attendance of around 2,200 gamers. Arneson was responsible for entertaining about ten percent of then with sixteen D&D sessions spread across the days of the convention, each run for a twelve-person group.

Although Arneson at the time was already doing work with the Judges Guild and Heritage, he could not rely on corporate support to provide referees for the tournament. So, he reached out to his friends, including veteran players like Richard Snider and Dave Megarry -- though perhaps not all of the DMs had their level of experience. Bill Herdle tells us in A&E #26 that "The Dungeons & Dragons tournament there was run by Arneson et al, completely independent of TSR, and prizes were supposed to be furnished by Heritage Models. I won’t comment on the merits of the contest, as my group spent most of its time trying to cope with an incompetent DM. (I offer as evidence for this contention the fact that he later entered the “Novice D&D” event at GenCon).”

Others who commented on the adventure itself questioned its suitability for tournament play -- a common complaint at the time, though, and one that had already been levied against the Tomb and Expedition in the years before. Howard Mahler acted as the caller for one of the Friday night groups (as character #4, by far the most powerful), and he had trouble even figuring out the goal of the dungeon, let alone how to achieve it:

Alex Murocmew played in that same group Friday night group, taking the role of one of the low level twins (#11), and similarly remarked on the difficulty of achieving the objective, as "there were too many players and not enough motivation or excitement." One of the more informative player reports comes from Glenn Blacow, who jumped into a last-minute opening for a Sunday run as pre-gen character #8, only to be very disappointed by his party:

Blacow helpfully tells us the objective of the adventure: to locate a tome and destroy it. This is corroborated by another surviving play artifact from the tournament: Richard Snider's notes on one of his runs, where John M. Corradin played as #4 and led the party. Snider notes the last-minute frenzy of the group to discover the location of the tome, and critiques Corradin in particular for not simply using magic to find the answer.

While the other Origins tournaments of the 1970s -- including a little shindig put together in 1979 by Harold Johnson and Jeff Leason called Lost Tamoachan -- went on to mass-market publication as glossy TSR modules, the Origins 1977 tournament fell into total obscurity. But the fossil record does yield up enough data to give a sense of what it might have been like to be there. Looking at early documents like these always pays dividends in trivia -- like that even in 1977, Arneson still wrote armor class values with Roman numerals, a holdover from his early days. But they also shed light on a forgotten story of D&D, one of the last major tournaments of the original D&D era.

Sometimes, for whatever reason, you can't get together with your Dungeons & Dragons group in person. Long before D&D came out in 1974, people had used the mail to play games like chess or Diplomacy, even when conquering outer space. So, in the first two years of D&D's existence, a time over which only a few thousand copies of the game had sold, scattered early adopters began to play D&D by post. Of course, given the dynamic, immediate experience of D&D, this is easier said than done, but nonetheless these activities were a significant component in how the fan community first approached this new game -- that is to say, with a certain amount of social distancing.

Probably the best overview of the first wave of play-by-mail Dungeons & Dragons was given by Jim Cooper in Impassable #59, from December 1975. At the time, Cooper knew of around ten postal D&D efforts underway:

... though he included campaigns like Steve Tihor's 1975 Endore game, primarily a face-to-face affair in New York and Princeton, which proposed a postal dimension as described in Haven Herald #3. But Tihor has to admit the problem inherent in any postal adaptation: "an average expedition will take about as much time as a game of Diplomacy" -- and bear in mind that postal Diplomacy games could take years to resolve.

Cooper believed that Jim Lawson started the first play-by-mail D&D game, the world of Fantasia. The first issue of his Fantasia zine (soon retitled Fantasia Today) was postmarked January 6, 1975, which indeed makes it a good candidate for being the earliest zine dedicated to a D&D campaign. Lawson, a veteran of prior Midgard games, solved the play-by-mail problem by fusing D&D with Midgard: as a result, in addition to allowing a "Hero-Type," a "Wizard-Type", and a "Cleric-Type," Fantasia also let players adopt a "Ruler-type." Among those who quickly signed up to play as a "Ruler-Type" was one Brian Blume. Lawson's campaign also included a few people closer to home such as Bill Hartley, another name mentioned in Cooper's list.

Cooper identifies Charles Gaydos's approach as the "first authentic D&D PBM game; no Rulers anywhere." Gaydos can be found advertising his modest effort in the July 1975 issue of Wargamer's Information:

In the very next issue, he hastened to report, "I have more than enough players now," but this just encouraged others to pick up the slack: in the October issue of that zine, Jim Hayes proposed to run his own play-by-mail campaign following Gaydos's model. Tom Corke, part of the Youngstown Diplomacy posse, got the word out for his own campaign, and its associated zine The Westron, through venues like the Quick Quincey Gazette:

An East Bay Diplomacy fan named Fred Bolin started his own play-by-mail D&D campaign that, as Cooper notes, borrows "from the latest masterpiece from TSR: Empire of the Petal Throne." The most direct of these borrowings is a profession system, which Bolin adapts to the various fantasy races he included: so elves, dwarves, and hobbits say, could not be slavers, but dwarves excelled as goldsmiths. His postal approach to dungeon exploration focuses on giving general orders for the party that would be followed until conditions arise that require more input from the player.

Collectively, these early play-by-mail dungeonmasters constitute quite a few of the names in TSR's Strategic Review lists of DMs; you can see Brad Stock's play-by-mail campaign given its own plug in the February issue (Steve Marsh was already "Contributing S&S Editor" for the magazine then). Those interested in Stock's Geu-Ramysh campaign can read a little blurb from Bill Seligman about it in Alarums #16. One of the other players in Stock's campaign was Stewart Levin, who would go on to start the Roskild-Skaar campaign in 1976, which based its postal component on the Kam-pain rules which had previously fueled Midgard Ltd.

Even in 1976, as D&D headed towards ever greater popularity, play-by-mail variants would continue to exert an influence over the community. This was the era of postal games like the Pits of Cil (see the nine-page rulebook here). It would not be long before these efforts became more ambitious, and people imagined ways -- such as the Loera campaign -- they might incorporate massive number of players into a world united by the post. The intrinsic limitations of playing by mail meant these efforts grew more marginal over time; it seems unlikely D&D would have reached the pinnacle of its success had it been confined to envelopes. But the determined few who could only play at a distance felt the game was worth the trouble. In retrospect, this offers us a bit of needed perspective: with our Internet, Zoom, Discord, Roll20, and so on, we've got it easy.

On the eve of virtual 2020 Gen Con, let's turn back the clock a half century and look at one of the more obscure Gen Cons: the fourth, held in 1971. The above gloss on the event appeared in TSR's 20th Anniversary chronology, which unfortunately is not notable for its accuracy: elsewhere on the same page, it asserts that Chainmail was published in 1969, say, and that its "Fantasy Supplement" would not be added to the game until 1972. For that reason, I've long dismissed its report of a "castle sewer" game as entirely spurious... but it turns out there was a man-to-man scale miniatures game at Gen Con in 1971 that involved sneaking through the sewers, and that it did not go unnoticed -- it was actually the hit of the convention.

On August 23 and 24, 1971, Gen Con IV was held at the American Legion Hall in Lake Geneva, the first year that the convention was not based at the Horticultural Hall (which hosted an antiques show that weekend). Contemporary reports suggest that the Legion Hall was hot and crowded, especially after some 250 gamers crammed themselves into the two floors of the building. The main and second floors were reserved for gaming, including the Panzerblitz tournament mentioned in the history above; dealers were relegated to the basement, next to the bathrooms, in a decidedly miserable dungeon layout.

Don Greenwood of Panzerfaust attended the convention and reported "fantasy games utilizing Giants and Goblins drawing particular interest," which is to be expected as Gygax evangelized his new game Chainmail. But Greenwood identified the "most intriguing" game on display "was a village set up for WWII using 2 second rules."

It was a refereed game where a "judge" managed positions of individual troops in the village: that combined with the Second World War setting and a miniatures system where one move equals two seconds of real time suggests it was Korns's Modern War in Miniature. Korns was on the planned event list for Gen Con IV; Mike Carr was supposed to be judging "a small scale infantry action" using Korns on Sunday.

The most intriguing aspect of the setup that Greenwood mentions was that the houses had removable floors, and "a system of sewers underran the table." It is this aspect of the game that is mentioned by all of the reports on Gen Con IV that I can find: John Mansfield in Signal called this setup "the most popular game of the Con," describing it as "a small village clearing game in miniatures" and mentioning how "the roads even had sewers."

A highly abbreviated note from Gary Gygax in Gamers Guide gives us a bit more detail: that it was "a 'town' about 4.5' x 4.5' for WWII street fighting. The town had full buildings which lifted to reveal basements and sewers below - manholes in the street opened." Surely those "sewers" wouldn't have been mentioned by everyone who saw the game if they hadn't seen use during play. So it seems that during the 1971 Gen Con there was a battle involving the sewers -- just not a fantasy one. The reports don't say if the WWII village included something like a castle... but it wouldn't have been out of place for certain period settings in Europe.

So could Mike Carr have brought this elaborate display down from the Twin Cities to run as a Korns game? Gygax tells us otherwise, as he attributes the town setup to the St. Louis Chapter of the IFW. None of the reports mention who judged the game, though, and it is at least possible that someone other than the usual St. Louis crowd (the likes of Oliver Wischmeyer and Mark Jumper) did so over the course of the convention.

But all this does suggest that some half-forgotten fragment of Gen Con lore was preserved in TSR's 20th Anniversary chronology, the idea that an individual-scale wargame incorporating "sewers" was played there in 1971, at a crucial juncture when Chainmail was seeing heavy use, but dungeon adventures in Blackmoor do not seem to have started yet. By August, Dave Arneson had returned from his summer European vacation, and a full contingent from his Twin Cities group staged Napoleonic games on the main floor of the Legion Hall that year -- though Arneson exempted himself from referee duties for the convention, as he planned to play. Given that he was on hand, and this town-clearing Korns game was the "most popular game of the Con," Arneson surely saw it, even if he didn't play in it personally.

No one should come away from this piece believing that Arneson directly borrowed the idea of dungeon adventuring from this "sewer" game: for one thing, his underworld was on paper, not staged as physical terrain. But the thing that makes events like Gen Con so important to the hobby is how they cross-pollinate between gaming communities, exposing attendees to new concepts that can bounce around in their heads for a while and emerge with a fresh spin. The influence of any given event on a particular person is often impossible to measure: but the aggregate influence of a half-century of this cross-pollination on the community is unmistakable. Which is why I hope that we'll all be back together again in person at Gen Con in 2021.

Earlier on in our quarantined year, this blog reviewed how some of the earliest adopters played Dungeons & Dragons by mail, as far back as 1975 -- but socially-distanced role playing was not exclusively a North American phenomenon. Today, in solidarity with social distancing on the other side of the Atlantic, let's look at early play-by-post D&D in Britain, including dungeons like the Anubis Labyrinths, which was carried in the zine Leviathan: the cover of issue #3, from September 1976, is shown above.

There existed many points of interconnection between the wargaming and science-fiction communities in the UK and the USA, so there was no single conduit through which D&D invaded Britain. But when Roger Lightly of Pasadena came to Cambridge for the fall semester of 1974 with a copy of the rules, he spread the gospel of California-style D&D to many of his fellow students. One of them, Graham Buckell, became a vocal evangelist for the game in Britain; it was he, for example, who tipped off Hartley Patterson to its existence, through a letter he sent to News from Bree #14 (March 1975). And soon thereafter, Buckell informed Owl & Weasel in October of 1975 that he had started a postal D&D campaign.

Buckell had already been experimenting for some time with D&D play-by-post systems based on sealed envelopes that players opened to indicate which choices they made at decision points. Nicky Palmer, a Brit then living in Denmark, had elaborated on Bucknell's system earlier in 1975:

So even before the O&W announcement landed, Buckell had recruited fifteen players, which was all that he could handle. But after people clamored for more, Malcolm Griffiths volunteered to run a second section, prudently taking on only five players at once. Griffiths, in a letter to NFB #20, divulged some helpful details about Buckell's style of postal game. Each player constructed a party from a budget of 400,000 points to spend on character levels, races, ability points, and magic items; parties also had a 1500gp slush fund for mundane equipment. The highest-level character in the party automatically becomes the personal character of the player. (I've chopped his column in half for legibility):

David Tant proclaimed himself the first player to escape from Buckell's dungeons, and his account of it in the fanzine Chimaera #19 gives an overview of how the adventure played in practice. Chimaera was itself a manifestation of the strong zine-driven tradition of play-by-post Diplomacy in the UK, one sparked by Don Turnbull's classic zine Albion (and its little brother Courier). These sorts of Dippy zines routinely incorporated an occasional wargame that played well by the post, and some farmed out gamesmastering duties for particular games to someone other than the editor -- a practice that quickly spread to role-playing games. So it's unsurprising that the editor of Chimaera tapped Tant to run a play-by-post version of D&D in its pages, a game called the "Pits of Cil."

As the "Pits of Cil" rules show, Tant retained Buckell's point-buy system for parties -- and he wouldn't be the only one. Hard on his heels came another 1976 zine with a similar scope of games, called Leviathan. Its play-by-mail D&D campaign grew out of Clive Wardley's face-to-face "Ancient Anubians" game, which drew heavily on Zelazny's Creatures of Light and Darkness. Wardley gave his initial "Anubis Labyrinths" rules in Leviathan #4 (November 1976), though the reproduction is a bit rough on alternate pages:

So many players volunteered for the Anubis Labyrinths that Wardley had to draw twelve names by lot; MUD fans may be amused to see Richard Bartle among them, he was heavily active in the postal gaming community at the time. Wardley gave players a generous 500,000 point budget to construct their parties, and he allowed recently-introduced character classes, including the Alchemist that appeared in Dragon #2, as well as the psionic abilities as given in Eldritch Wizardry. The general complexity of getting the parties set up meant he wouldn't published the game start scenario for the "Anubis Labyrinths" until Leviathan #8 in 1977.

Wardley alluded to the fact that, like Chimaera, Leviathan also ran an Empire of the Petal Throne game, and indeed, looking at the cover of Leviathan #3 above, you can see that it furthermore incorporated En Garde, Boot Hill, and even War of Wizards. Each of these games had their own subzines that shipped to the subscribers playing in them; for example the Petal Throne subzine was the Jakálla Journal (this issue shipped late in 1976):

And Leviathan furnishes just one more example of a British tradition of postal D&D campaigns that followed in the wake of Buckell: another would be Martin Hammon's campaign in his zine The Blimp. As it did in the United States, postal D&D played an important role in the spread and popularization of the game in Britan. Even though in retrospect, these games may look like only a pale shadow of the tabletop experience, the paperwork they generated nonetheless gives us some of the most detailed records of how the game was initially received and adapted overseas.

It doesn't get more old school than rolling a d6 to check for wandering monsters in a dungeon. In the early 1980s, rolling a "1" meant you were in for a fight. Back then, you could even acquire dice which replaced the "1" with a monstrous face: like the Flying Buffalo "Death Dice" (above left), or Lou Zocchi's Gamescience "Demon/Orc Dice" (right). But the very first dungeon delvers encountered wandering monsters when the die came up "6" -- the rule shifted to encounters resulting from a "1" around the time these two dice appeared. Read on for a bit more about dice in this tradition, and the change in the wandering monster rules that went along with them.

The Flying Buffalo "Death Dice" seem to have appeared shortly after the fifth edition of the Tunnels & Trolls rules -- you can find them advertised in the January 1980 Flying Buffalo catalog that shipped in fifth edition boxed sets:

From its first edition in 1975 up until its fifth edition, T&T followed the rule that, "At the beginning of each turn, the D.M. rolls 1 die -- if he gets a 6, he springs a W.M. [wandering monster] or three on the lucky people." That text is a loose paraphrase of the original 1974 Dungeons & Dragons language, which read: "At the end of every turn the referee will roll a six-sided die to see if a 'wandering monster' has been encountered. A roll of 6 indicates a wandering monster has appeared." This high-roll-means-monsters precedent would inform random encounter rolls for the next several TSR games: Empire of the Petal Throne and Metamorphosis Alpha would both follow it, as would the Holmes Basic Set in 1977.

Other early non-TSR role-playing games like Bunnies & Burrows and Traveller also stipulated that high rolls on a d6 led to random encounters. All these rules ultimately derived from Avalon Hill's Outdoor Survival requirement that players roll a die at the end of their turn: "if you roll a 5 or 6 you must play the Wilderness Encounter chart," which in that game could mean stumbling into the maw of a hungry predator.

But the 1979 fifth edition of T&T abruptly reversed the guidance, stating that "At the beginning of each turn the GM rolls one die - if a 1 comes up, he springs a wandering monster or three." And by the time the Moldvay Basic Set revised the Holmes set early in 1981, D&D agreed: it instructs referees to "roll 1d6: a result of 1 indicates the party will encounter a Wandering Monster in the next turn." So... when did the roles of 1 and 6 become reversed, and why?

One early place we see a 1 resulting in a random encounter offers us a clue: that is the Realm of Yolmi (1977), an obscure game which used a d8 for wandering monsters:

The use of dice other than a d6 for random encounter checks made the number 6 lose some of its luster, as it was no longer at the upper bound of what you could roll on a d8, a d12, or a d20. But the lower bound for all those dice remained constant at 1. If we look ahead to the summer of 1978, the Steading of the Hill Giant Chief module shows wandering monster checks that also depend on rolling a 1 on a d8 or a d12:

... and this was surely the motivation for the AD&D rule as it appears in the 1979 Dungeon Masters Guide, namely that "When an encounter check is indicated, roll the appropriate die, and if a 1 results, an encounter takes place." If we had to assign any single marker to the place where the rule firmly switched to rolling 1s, it would be here. The "appropriate die" varied based on the environment checked for potential encounters; in the dungeon, as the example DMG dungeon crawl shows us, "the DM rolls a d6 to see if a 'wandering monster' appears." This is surely what drove Moldvay to override the guidance on d6 wandering monster rolls in Holmes. And Lou Zocchi's "Demon/Orc" dice were just made for this rule, when they came on the scene late in the spring of 1980:

Probably the widespread association of high rolls being good and low rolls being bad, with a 1 especially signifying a critical fumble, helped steer play at the tabletop in this direction -- though the current edition of D&D has gone back to favoring high rolls (on a d20) leading to random encounters. But back in the early 1980s, there was a substantial market for d6s decorated for the dramatic revelation of an encounter to come, so much so that in 1981, Zocchi followed up with his "Destiny Dice" d6s with a skull and crossbones in place of the 1:

As with Zocchi's "Demon/Orc Dice," the image wore off easily, leaving some barely recognizable today. But they are still perfect for adding a bit of early-80s flavor to any gaming table.

Previously: Identifying 1970s Polyhedral Gaming Dice

Dungeons & Dragons required the use of five polyhedral dice when it first came out, and back then in 1974, the only place TSR could acquire them was from Creative Publications. But theirs were not the first set of plastic Platonic solids marketed in America as dice. A decade before, Advertising Attractions, Inc. of New York sold the Zazz "Polyspheres" game, an invention of Fredda Sydney Sieve, which featured all five polyhedra with numbered faces. Today, we're going to look a bit at Sieve and how she came to make these plastic polyhedra.

It had not previously escaped the attention of dice fanciers that a patent filed in 1963 by a Fredda F. S. Sieve shows dice that are a dead ringer for the Zazz Polyspheres. A decisive connection between that patent and Advertising Attractions is revealed in this March 1960 newspaper article, which documented Sieve's vacation in Boca Raton. She seems to have been a true polymath with a rich life, performing piano concerts for charity when she wasn't running her own business.

After the death of her husband in 1953, Sieve had relocated from Boston to New York City, and it was there that she founded a new company, "Advertising Attractions, Inc., to produce advertising novelties which she invents and markets all over the world." These "novelties" were mostly done in plastic: she had learned a bit of chemistry from her late husband, a scientist who did some work in pharmaceuticals. And it was largely to such companies that Sieve marketed her novelties: drug companies dispense a great deal of branded swag to doctors in order to keep them loyal customers. And so Advertising Attractions made a plastic novelty like a calendar ashtray which reminded smokers of Pfizer bestsellers of the day like Niamid and Vistaril.

The placards on that ashtray, twelve in total, could be plucked off and assembled into a dodecahedron -- which is exactly what Sieve did. These oversized dodecahedron calendars were sold as paperweights, hollow with some loose sand inside to keep make them stay put. Sieve patented them in 1956, and sold a branded Squibb calendar in this form factor that year; other examples as late as 1970 survive.

Perhaps it was work on these huge d12s that got Sieve interested in developing plastic polyhedra as numbered dice rather than as calendars. The Zazz Polyspheres, as sold in 1963, were intended for play in a point-scoring game where players took turns rolling the dice, tabulating their totals according to a formula given in the rule sheet folded into the dice case. Aside from the d6, the Polysphere faces were hand-numbered, not molded onto the dice, which suggests that the polyhedra themselves might not have been manufactured with the intention to use them as dice, but were later repurposed by Sieve for her game. Most notably for D&D fans, her early d20 was numbered 1-20, rather than 0-9.

Zazz d20 dice map: mirror 9/6 + 10

(Which is, incidentally, one of the more elegant d20 maps you'll see.)

Perhaps the weightiest question about the Zazz Polyspheres is whether they have any connection to the Creative Publications dice that would come on the market in the early 1970s. The short answer is, probably not, though you can never rule out an indirect influence. But it is interesting to note that the Zazz d6 is stamped with a Hong Kong manufacturers mark, and Creative Publications would later have their dice made there as well. The Polyspheres are also of roughly the same size as the later Creative Publications dice, though of course those later d20s would be numbered 0-9, which makes the Zazz set an attractive collectible for D&D fans. Even though the early D&D community seemed to be totally unaware of the Zazz dice, you could roll them in a dungeon adventure today -- though her d4, with only one number per face, would require its own rule (maybe that the face that lands down is the result of your roll?).

Since Playing at the World came out, I've been asked now and again about extending its historical timeline for just a few more years. After toying with a few potential approaches to that, I ended up writing The Elusive Shift, which focuses on what gamers meant when they called something a "role-playing game" once that term came into fashion. Thus, The Elusive Shift is first and foremost an early history of RPG theory, and an exploration of whether the 1970s community succeeded in delineating a new genre of games from previous practices -- which is the "elusive shift" in the title. The book is also my love letter to the many small press games and fanzines through which gamers explored the possibilities of this new genre in the first five years of its existence.

The book breaks down into six chapters.

At the beginning, "The Two Cultures" explores wargame and science-fiction fandom leading up to the release of Dungeons & Dragons. While PatW does precisely that in far greater detail, here I review some of the activities described in chapters 3 and 4 of PatW for their theoretical conclusions in particular; for example, how wargamers talked about what they were doing when felt they had exceeded the boundaries of traditional conflict simulation. This section may also serve as a fentanyl-concentration refresher of PatW for those who don't have it all fresh in their minds.

The second chapter, "How to Play", briefly examines the dialog at the core of D&D and how it interfaces with the system of the game. In particular, it follows how people characterized the "statements of intention" voiced by players and what sort of influence those statements exert over game events. This chapter introduces an early critical stance I call "Eisen's vow," the position that player enjoyment of the game is diminished by understanding how the referee resolves system events.

The meat of the book begins in earnest with the third chapter, "Designing for Role Play". The narrative here focuses on 1970s discussions of how three mechanics of early role-playing games could influence player behavior: abilities, alignment, and experience. Does playing a low intelligence character mean that your statements of intention as a player should be foolish, and were referees obliged to police that? Similar questions arose about alignment, which early players viewed sometimes as guardrails around character behavior, and sometimes as a judgment imposed by the referee -- if not both. The chapter concludes with controversies about personal progression, whether the goal of accumulating experience points might impede role playing, and what sorts of alternative goals referees or players might impose on the game that are more conducive to being "in character."

The other side of the tabletop is the subject of the fourth chapter, "The Role of the Referee", which examines the sort of agency that referees have in creating a world and controlling the flow of game events. This includes some discussion of how referees could induce a property that early adopters called "immersion." It looks at design evolutions like the way saving throws, traditionally imposed by the referee, began to morph into mechanisms that players could invoke themselves, like the Fame and Fortune Points of Top Secret. Finally, this chapter considers early refereeless role-playing games (with even a smidgeon about computer games), which provide a different angle of illumination on why games have referees and what they actually do.

At this point, a brief interjection (a volta, perhaps) on the subject of "Transcending Design" explores skeptical arguments about the purpose of system in role-playing games in the face of "free-form" practices, and the very need for an industry to produce improved systems if indeed, as some maintained, published rules are only ever a starting point for play around the table.

With that understanding of how players, referees, and the system interact, the fifth and longest chapter "Toward a Philosophy" then dives into the first crop of self-identified essays that address the nature and philosophy of role playing. Largely this chapter follows the early thinking of Lew Pulsipher, Steve Lortz, and Ed Simbalist as they grappled with defining what these games were and how best to approach them. This literature took shape right before the James Dallas Egbert incident triggered a dramatic change in the demographics of players, which caused new stresses, inducing the community to delineate sanctioned ways to approach role playing, as opposed to the disparaged practices of the newly-arrived "munchkins." This introspection about what it meant to role play culminates in a survey of ways that people positioned RPGs at the time: from viewing them as an art form, or a simple diversion, or a tool for psychological development, or even as something more profound, perhaps something mystical.

The final chapter, "Maturity", begins with where things stood in 1980, when Glenn Blacow published his "Fourfold Way" model, dividing the practices surrounding RPGs into "forms": role-playing, storytelling, wargaming, and power gaming. The widespread adoption of the Blacow model triggered some of the first true theoretical work on RPGs, as people tried to measure levels of player engagement with those forms, and consider how designs optimizing for particular forms might appeal to targeted audiences. But the crush of new systems appearing in the early 1980s left many grasping for purer, more stripped-down approaches to role playing, which in some respects little differed from the free Kriegsspiel that originally fueled D&D. So ultimately, did these intrepid explorers succeed in forging a distinct identity for role-playing games? Well... if you know my work, you might anticipate I'm not about to give a pat answer, but you'll find some of my thoughts about it at the end, anyway.

Oh, and then there's a brief Epilogue, which looks a bit ahead to the end of the 1980s, at what happened when the "munchkins" grew up.

Three things that The Elusive Shift does not try to do:

Attempt to furnish a tidy dictionary definition of "role-playing game". Instead, it illustrates how deeply the early adopters were divided on what would qualify to be an RPG.
Articulate some new theory of RPGs. This is a history book about what people thought and documented in the first five years that RPGs were around, not my own philosophical enterprise.
Engage with later fan or academic theory and criticism of RPGs. Well, okay, it does do that a bit, but mostly because later theory helps to identify the early threads worth following. That material is largely confined to endnotes.

Three things that The Elusive Shift does try to do:

Show both the extent and the limits of what "old school" role-players managed to achieve in the furious and inventive years that followed the acceptance of the term "role-playing game."
Furnish a bibliography of early games, commentary, and essays from the first years of the role-playing community.
Provide more insight into how people approached the oldest role-playing games, in a way that resurfaces some forgotten ideas that might prove useful to contemporary gamers.

The Elusive Shift comes out in a few weeks from now, and will be available in the ways that books are available these days. I'm delighted that MIT Press saw fit to include it in their Game Histories series.

(And yes, it is available for pre-order on Amazon and the other usual places.)

The Elusive Shift talks about around 50 games published before 1980 that we might consider role-playing games -- "we might" because there was so much contention then about precisely what qualified as an RPG. Among the early games that self-identified as RPGs was the obscure Mythrules (1978) by Colin R. Glassey and Aaron Richardson Wilbanks. It escaped the attention of Heroic Worlds, and reportedly had a print run of just 100 copies. It is thus a game that is of interest not for any vast influence it exerted on posterity, but instead, as a manifestation of the creativity unleashed by the publication of Dungeons & Dragons, and the way that early adopters made role playing their own.

One of the very few contemporary places to attest the existence of Mythrules is Dragon #33, which surveyed the magazine's readership on the games they played - Jeff Mallett, of Stanford, California, lists it among the titles that he owned. Mythrules seems to have remained largely a Bay Area phenomenon: it was made in Berkeley, and reportedly distributed at the area convention DunDraCon. Mythrules cites as one of its more immediate influences the local Arduin Grimoire, and perhaps having learned from Hargrave's experiences as a game publisher, Mythrules makes no reference whatsoever to Dungeons & Dragons.

The system of Mythrules uses the familiar five polyhedral dice, generating characters by rolling not just for standard abilities like strength and intelligence, but also for race, on a table that includes a small chance of getting non-humanoid characters like eagles or unicorns. In a manner reminiscent of Chivalry & Sorcery, you then roll for social class, and as starting characters (who are presumed to be 18 years old) of a high social class have enjoyed more leisure time to develop their knowledge and skills, the nobility can start the game with a larger allotment of ability points (not to mention gold) to spend on professional skills, ranging from mundane occupations like carpentry (35 points), to social skills like diplomacy (35) or bargaining (30), to apprenticeships in schools of magic (42-52 points).

The second third of the book is dedicated to spellcasting. Magic in Mythrules closely follows the Earthsea stories of Ursula K. LeGuin, depending in particular on "true names," and apprentices in magic follow either the Master Patterner, Changer, Windkey, Summoner, Chanter, Herbal, Doorkeep, or Namer. Casting is klutz-based, with an initial 5% change of successful spell casting which goes up by 5 each time a caster manages to use the spell successfully: thus, after twenty successful casts, a mage has mastered the spell and can cast it without error. As beginner casting times are also prohibitively long, and spellcasting is further restricted by a spell point system -- and learning spells as well has an ability point cost -- this is not a rapid progression system.

Mythrules' final third mostly covers combat and encounters. Combat relies on a hit location system targeting 17 parts the body, from shoulders to elbows to shins, that can withstand a number of damage points determined by a character's constitution. The hit resolution system is fiendishly complex -- another likely nod to Chivalry & Sorcery -- depending on a slew of speed factors, dodging bonuses, offensive bonuses, weapon defense bonuses, shield defense bonuses, armor damage bonuses, all of which are invoked prior to rolling percentile dice against the Hit By Body Area (HBBA) chart.

Mythrules made it into The Elusive Shift largely for the story of its creation: the authors detail how the "tremendous potential for change and expansion" they found in role-playing games at the end of 1975 inspired them to incrementally develop more system until "it became apparent that we were no longer merely writing addenda to other author's rules but were actually creating an independent game of our own."D&D encouraged precisely these sorts of additions and modifications, ending with a call to treat its rules a framework, on which "building should be both easy and fun." The Elusive Shift views that invitation as a sort of meta-game that tacitly shipped with the original D&D rules, the play of which created games like Mythrules and ultimately, the RPG industry that is with us today.

Previously on Forgotten Variants: the Observers Book of Monsters

One of the threads that The Elusive Shift follows is the development of typologies that sorted players, or sometimes game designs or playstyles, into categories that reflect what kind of experience people want to have when they sit down to game. These form a significant component of contemporary RPG theory. I myself was surprised, doing research for the book, to discover threefold model typologies already discussed in the wargame community years before Dungeons & Dragons came out. In these early discussions, we can see the roots of much of the RPG theorizing that would follow, like the classic fourfold Blacow model shown here.

Whenever a group of people around tabletop plays a game, participants may have conflicting approaches to play. Early wargamers had long observed a trade-off in game design between realism (attempting to design systems that simulated real conflicts with as much detail as possible) and playability (the countervailing drive to build systems that are simple and unambiguously executed), and it wasn't long before they observed the potential for tensions in play between people who prized one goal over the other. By the beginning of 1971, Steven Thornton had perceived that there was more nuance to this than a simple dichotomy:

Thornton saw three categories of wargames: "simulators" who are obsessed with realism; "competitors" who engage in endless rules lawyering for the sake of securing victory; and then the mainstream of "fun" wargamers who are doing this casually "just for enjoyment." Thornton had learned already of the "ill-feeling" that extremist views could cause, and that these could be a threat to the very hobby. Nor did Thornton's words fall of deaf ears: they would be picked up by Fred Vietmeyer a year later:

But Vietmeyer has a more pluralist view of this typology, arguing against what would later be called a "One True Way", as "for one type of player to place his own viewpoint as superior to another's hobby enjoyment is simply being too egotistical." Some players might want to invest hours in painting meticulously researched miniature flags and uniforms for the sake of realism; others might find that "a waste of time." Vietmeyer would return to this theme in another article in The Courier two years later, right at the time that Dungeons & Dragons hit the shelves.

The release of D&D drew another community into dialog with wargamers: science-fiction and fantasy fans. Their presence and incentives upset the traditional typologies of the wargaming community, to the point where people began to see a new type that had come to the table: story focused-gamers. As Lewis Pulsipher wrote in 1977:

Pulsipher sees a distinction between those who wanted to play D&D "as a game" and "those who want to play it as a fantasy novel." His "D&D Philosophy" is very concerned about the lack of agency that players might experience when a game session is too tightly pegged to a narrative, so that "the player is a passive receptor, with little control over what happens." But many in science-fiction fandom sought a way to engage with stories through RPGs that would strike a balance between a game experience and the high drama of fantasy literature.

By 1980, Glenn Blacow had developed his famous fourfold model, which retained the traditional wargame/simulation type, the power-gaming/competition type (originally Blacow called it "ego-tripping"), but introduced in place of Thornton's "fun" wargamer two new categories: role-playing and storytelling. A contemporaneous visualization of it is shown at the header above. Blacow saw the "interaction of these four elements" as determining the "feel" of the game.

Blacow knew well that these "forms" all manifested to some degree it any tabletop RPG, it was really a matter of which dominated, and how much of each was necessary to give a particular player a satisfactory experience -- perhaps the definitive refutation of a "One True Way". His model immediately revolutionized the way people talked about RPGs in the fanzines of the day, which were the closest thing people had at the time to Internet discussion forums.

Various corollaries or extensions of Blacow's model appeared through the 1980s. By the time the Internet came into its own, and those ideas moved onto forums like Usenet, we can see the "threefold model" of gamist, simulationist, and dramatist (or narrativist) agendas begin to take hold. These would be recontextualized by the Forge in the GNS model. But The Elusive Shift shows this RPG theorizing as existing in a continuum that predates D&D, which was steered by the messy reconciliation of traditional wargamers with the new story-focused gamers who entered the hobby from science-fiction fandom. Typologies like this demonstrate why it is impossible to develop the perfect RPG -- the tension between the "forms", however, has fueled tremendous creativity in RPG design for the past four decades.

The idea that a gamemaster has the discretion to alter or discard published rules was not an invention of role-playing games: it derived from a wargaming tradition going back to the free Kriegsspiel of the nineteenth century. But role-players enshrined it as a principle that is today known as "Rule Zero", a proposed meta-rule of role-playing games -- albeit not an uncontroversial one. The critical position that we should hold this as a universal meta-rule occurred to the early adopters of role-playing games fairly early, as shown here, in the "Gamer's First Law" of Ed Simbalist (designer of Chivalry & Sorcery) in Alarums & Excursions #38 in 1978.

Famously, Dungeons & Dragons in 1974 described its system as a "framework around which you will build a game of simplicity or tremendous complexity." Its rules aspired to deliver merely a framework, not a set of iron dictums, because "as with any other set of miniatures rules they are guidelines to follow in designing your own fantastic-medieval campaign."D&D even suggests writing any new or changed rules into the rulebook in pencil, not pen, because "who knows when some flux of the cosmos will make things shift once again."

The use of the phrase "as with any other set of miniatures rules" signals that D&D's attitude towards the rules was not a novel one. Miniature wargames had long embraced referees who concealed secret information from players and ran the system in accordance with Kriegsspiel principles. D&D's language about guidelines most directly paraphrases Chainmail (1971), which stated, "These rules may be treated as guide lines around which you form a game that suits you." But this idea was certainly not exclusive to Gygax's work, it was commonly accepted that miniature wargame referees could adapt wargame rules to their liking. To take just three examples:

Modern War in Miniature (1966): "There is only one rule to our war game: simulate reality. The statistics and tables are designed to help the player in this task. When they get in the way, if they ever should, then you should discard them."

Grosstaktik (1972): "You should regard these rules as a bare framework. Apply them flexibly, and modify them freely in accordance with your own tastes."

Kam-Pain (1974): "The Gamesmaster is the final authority on all rules interpretations... he may freely alter or delete existing rules, and add new ones."

This principle was essential enough to Kam-pain that they codified it under the name of "The GM's Cloak."Kam-pain would, incidentally, fuel the "Midgard Ltd." fantasy campaign, one of D&D's closest cousins.

But codifying it into the rules is one thing, and proposing it as a law that transcends any individual set of rules is another: its transcendence could only become apparent with sufficient examples to draw on. This concept that the rules could be altered as the referee saw fit, once it appeared in D&D, would echo through the games that imitated and followed it, a growing tradition of fantasy role-playing games. Again, to take three examples:

Chivalry & Sorcery (1977): "Chivalry & Sorcery provides the guidelines by which players may easily create the kinds of worlds they want and does not attempt to 'dictate' in any way what must be."

Runequest (1978): "Take those portion of the rules you can use and ignore the rest. Like any FRP system, these can only be guidelines. Use them as you will."

Villains and Vigilantes (1979): "The rules presented in this book are made to be broken, as are all rules... If the Gamemaster feels that he disagrees with any part of these rules or any point made, he should, by all means, experiment and adapt the rules to suit his tastes and needs."

Given the stance of Chivalry & Sorcery, we should not be surprised to find Simbalist, in an offhand note in A&E #35, stating that "if a rule is silly, change it or ignore it." He received a reply from John Sapienza suggesting that that principle should be "engraved in bronze for all writers and designers to ponder." As this idea was per Runequest "like any FRP system," Simbalist was inspired to elevate it to the "Gamer's First Law," a meta-rule governing the operation of all role-playing game systems, "the foundation and mainstay of all FRPing."

However, flexibility was not the only possible approach to running FRP rules. Greg Costikyan contrasted these "open-ended" systems that permitted modification by the referee with "closed" systems with rules that were not intended to be modified. Early refereeless systems like En Garde (1975), gamebook modules like Buffalo Castle(1976), and of course computer role-playing games, showed how designers aimed for "closed" systems quite early on, and this too became a valid approach to FRP, one that has since existed in a tension with those who hold the "Gamer's First Law" as absolute.

So why is this maxim now remembered as "Rule Zero" and not the "Gamer's First Law" or "the GM's Cloak"? Internet RPG discussion forums inherited the idea of "Rule Zero" from earlier Usenet group discussions. My best guess is that Carl Henderson's discussion of FRP meta-rules beginning with a Rule Zero kicked this off, though his categories were quickly transformed by others, and his statement that "the gamemaster has the power to overrule any rule, precedent, combination of rules, or dice rolls" was originally his Rule Two. Ideas like this, once they enter the melting pot of the Internet, can be difficult to trace to their sources.

These Internet discussions, easily Googleable, effectively eclipsed any earlier theorizing in analog media like Alarums & Excursions. It is the ambition of The Elusive Shiftto start the process of rectifying that.

"Hero Points" was the name given by James Bond 007 (1983) to a quantified resource players could expend to alter the results of a particular system resolution. It built on an earlier innovation in the pioneering espionage RPG Top Secret (1980), which introduced "Fortune Points" and "Fame Points" in lieu of D&D saving throws. Over time, this idea took manifold forms in RPGs that followed, from Fudge and Fate Points to Artha in Burning Wheelto Inspiration in D&D 5th edition. Today, we'll look at how this system innovation took shape, beginning with Merle Rasmussen's original pitch for Top Secret, shown in this design letter above.

There's a lot to unpack in the page from Rasmussen's letter shown above (the last sentence ends on the next page with the word "known", by the by), but there are three crucial things to take away from it:

Rasmussen created his Fame and Fortune Points as a replacement for saving throws.
He presents these Points as something players can expend to avoid negative in-game consequences for a character: for example, "when a lethal bullet should strike the character he can use one 'Fortune' point to deflect it."
The difference between them is that Fortune Points are supposed to represent "beginner's luck" that is lost when you're not a beginner any more; whereas Fame Points model the notion that some random assassin will not be the person to kill the legendary James Bond. He also as an aside notes "it may be possible to award these points" to players as well.

For 1978, Fame and Fortune Points were pretty radical ideas. But ideas rarely pop up in only one place: similar mechanisms can be found in games like Commando (1979) with its "Miraculous Escapes" which can be invoked by heroes once per mission, and in the ability of a "Protagonisti"-level character to redo incoming damage rolls "not to his liking" in (the Return of) Once Upon a Time in the West (1979). Both of those, however, still had a chance the hero would take the damages -- unlike Rasmussen's points. Rasmussen allowed a player to use points to simply override a die roll, a power that previously resided only with a referee concealing rolls behind a screen. System evolutions that granted players more control over executing the system are a major thread that The Elusive Shiftfollows in late 1970s design.

Fame and Fortune Points were essentially reactive, like D&D saving throws: undoing negative effects targeting a character. But by this point, saving throws in some RPG designs had begun to move beyond the merely reactive and into the realm of the proactive. This was a feature of the Tyr role-playing games like Space Quest (1977) and Bushido (1978). Space Quest, for example describes a saving throw as something that "may be applied positively, to do something (feat of strength, burst of speed), or negatively, to avoid some damage."

The concept of players expending points to either offset a damaging effect or to preemptively improve performance can be found after Top Secret in Pirates & Plunder (1982), which grants players a pool of "Lucky Breaks" which can be expended either reactively or proactively: as a reactive way to fudge an undesired die result, or as "Adrenaline," a proactive way to boost an ability temporarily during a crisis situation. By 1982, when Top Secret had enjoyed some time to sink in to the melting plot of tabletop play, you could also find gaming groups adapting it out of its original context, like this report from Robert Kern:

What is novel in the Hero Points that Kern describes is how they are awarded: GM's gave them out for "heroic deeds," and to his knowledge, you could only have one at a time. Kern neglects to mention that his group was in fact made up of Victory Games staffers who were currently working on James Bond 007 (for which Kern received credits here and there). JB007 has a concept of Fame Points, but they have any entirely different system function than those of Top Secret -- instead, JB007 awards its players Hero Points.

In JB007, these Hero Points are awarded whenever a player rolls the best outcome on skill checks, or for such actions as "successfully completing a mission or coming up with an ingenious escape from a trap." Some GMs might want to limit players to holding four or five Hero Points, but for exceptional characters, it might make sense to allow reservoirs of up to twenty. Characters expend them to adjust the outcome of rolls "immediately after determining the results," and can spend multiple Hero Points to dramatical shift the result of a system check. So in JB007, Hero Points have a more dynamic economy than Rasmussen envisioned for Top Secret, where a small reserve of Fortune Points are allotted at character creation and Fame Points come only gradually with progression.

Inevitably, once an economy of Hero Points became an element of play, gamemasters would begin to repurpose them as a reward system. In much the same way that some 1970s RPGs fostered role-playing by linking experience rewards to proper in-character behavior (the aforementioned Bushido is one example), by 1984, we can see reports of GMs awarding Hero Points to encourage role playing, as in this description from Martin Wixtead:

That text would be substantially repeated in Wixtead's Year of the Phoenix (1986), though its version goes on to explain that the "Specials" rule is optional in part because "some players feel that using Specials is a way of cheating the game's reality." Hero Points did have their critics, who felt that a meta-game power yanked players out of character, but to those designers who hoped to grant players more "narrative control," Hero Points have proven quite attractive "as a game construct to promote good roleplaying in a definite and controlled fashion." In retrospect, Rasmussen's player-control point system cast a long shadow, sparking one of the most influential design innovations in the history of role-playing games.

A Forgotten Variant: The Observers Book of Monsters

Why Did Armor Class Descend from 9 to 2?

Artistic Arcana: The Impostor Lizardman

Subterranean Chainmail: Mines and Countermines

Artistic Arcana: Greg Bell Before TSR

Artistic Arcana: Scruby Fantasy Miniatures and TSR

D&D's 45th Birthday

The Complete OD&D Illusionist

Identifying the Dice of the 1970s

1970s Dice Quick Reference Guide

Japanese Standards Association (JSA) Dice (1960s)

Bristol Wargames Society Dice (1970)

Creative Publications Dice (1972)

Zocchi 1st Generation Dice

Percentile Set (1975)

Polyhedral Set (1976)

Holmes Basic Dice (1977)

1977 Percentile Set

Zocchi 2nd Generation Dice

Selected Dice After 1979

TSR Dice (1980)

Armory 1st Generation (1980)

Heritage (1981)

Dave Arneson's Origins 1977 Tournament

Dungeons & Dragons at a Distance: Early Play-by-Mail D&D

GenCon 1971 and the Castle Sewer Game

Early Play-by-Post D&D in Britain

d6s to Roll for Wandering Monsters in 1980

Fredda Sieve and Her 1963 "Zazz" Dice

The Elusive Shift, My New Book

A Forgotten Variant: Mythrules (1978)

Player Typologies, from Wargames to Role-Playing Games

The Origins of Rule Zero

A History of Hero Points: Fame, Fortune and Fate