2024 marks the 50th anniversary of the publication of Dungeons & Dragons. Nailing down the exact release date of a product as informally produced as D&D is difficult: I've written about that before (and amended it a bit further). Personally, I still choose to celebrate it on the last Sunday of January, which this year is the 28th. A lot of things will be happening in 2024 to mark D&D's birthday: among them, a re-issue of my first book, Playing at the World. But 2024 also marks another momentous occasion, one that we should honor along with D&D's release: the 200th anniversary of the 1824 publication of Reiswitz's Kriegsspiel, the game that pioneered many fundamental system concepts that would later underpin role-playing games.

Reiswitz published his Anleitung in 1824 as a training tool to instruct Prussian officers to command troops in times of war. Over the preceding forty years, a number of German authors had built complex chess variants that took the name of Kriegsspiele, but it was the work of the Reiswitz family, and in particular the younger Reiswitz, that laid the groundwork for RPGs with:

• The idea of a neutral referee (Reiswitz uses the word Vertraute), the only participant who had complete knowledge of the game situation. The referee created the "general idea" of a game, and gave to each of the participants a specific character (a commander) with particular aims. Most importantly, the referee made sure that each player only knew what such a commander in their position would know. 
• Players use words to describe what they want to attempt to do. Player interactions with the referee took the form of written dispatches: just like an early 19th century commander, players would receive field reports from a referee (e.g. "Squad 3 reports they have seen French troops marching towards Jena"), and would then "move" in Reiswitz's game by writing a response (e.g. "Squad 3 is ordered to hold the nearby hill and wait for reinforcements."). 
• Dice are rolled to determine how successful players are in the things they attempt to do. When forces clash, the referee rolls dice against a statistical model to determine how efficacious riflemen, artillery, and similar armaments would be. His game had a concept that troop formations could withstand "points" of damage before they were destroyed, and the dice in his game determine how many such points would be inflicted.

Recently, as part of getting Playing at the World ready for its re-release with MIT Press, I was re-reading Ernest Dannhauer's 1874 account of the origins of the Reiwswitz game, and I was struck by the fact that he was writing it to mark the 50th anniversary of Reiswitz's game. Around the same time, Verdy du Vernois substituted a spoken conversation with the referee for written orders in his version of the wargame, and from there, it would be another hundred years before these principles came down to the Midwestern gamers who created D&D. All of this just makes me wonder where, with another century or two of innovation, the principles of D&D might take us.

Happy birthday, D&D - and happy birthday to one of your grandparents as well!

Last weekend at GaryCon, many of us raised a glass to the memory of Jim Ward, who passed away just days before the convention. Ward was very helpful to me in my research, as he had been a longtime TSR executive, and before that an employee-witness to the tumultuous events of the mid-1980s, and even before that a freelancer who helped bring the science-fiction genre to role-playing games. But still further before that, he was a player in Gygax's Greyhawk campaign, and like any good dungeon explorer, he drew a lot of maps - including this map of a segment of the Greyhawk dungeon area called Wonderland. The Wonderland dungeon, which we know existed in a playable state early in 1975, would become the inspiration for Gygax's later EX1 and EX2 modules based on Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass.

Gygax in his introduction to Dungeonland (EX1, 1983) tells us that the module was "originally conceived for and used in the Greyhawk Castle dungeon complex." We know that it already existed early in 1975 because he mentions it in a letter to Alan Lucien dated February 6 of that year. Lucien had just sent Gygax the "Tomb of Ra-Hotep" (which was reprinted in the special edition of Art & Arcana), and Gygax, musing over how to repay him, suggests "Wonderland, maybe?" Likely Wonderland was in a playable state in 1974, around the time that Ward first began playing with Gygax.

Afterword to EX2: "A similar scenario was an early part of Castle Greyhawk. The adventurers came upon it quite by accident after about a year of play. They were ready for it: not only did they thoroughly enjoy the change of mood, but they were very much tested by the encounters in the place. (l DMed this strictly and in a very tough manner.) They came back time and again for more adventures, going from Dungeonland to The Land Beyond the Magic Mirror and back again quite a number of times."

Player maps can be very difficult to identify - they usually don't come with dates or titles, just sketches of rooms with minimal notations. Ward left behind hundreds of them, many just small fragments of dungeon areas that we'll probably never be able to identify. But the ones we can identify readily demonstrate that these were early, in the 1974-1976 time period, and this particular map just has too many of the requisite features to be anything else: it shows location for Humpty, the Lion and the Unicorn, and even a Walrus on the beach. In light of those, we can probably safely guess what the flowers are as well, and that this map segment relies more on Through the Looking-Glass than the first book.

Unfortunately, player maps can only tell us so much. No one could reconstruct the original Wonderland from this map, and we would be hard-pressed to link it to the famous 1983 published map in EX2 (which sold quite well in its inaugural year). We are in a more fortunate situation with some of Ward's other maps: it is fairly easy to link these two images, for example, to Rob Kuntz's contemporary map of Bottle City:

But as people studying this past, who feel more of it slip through their fingers every year, every little bit of data helps. And nothing encapsulates the player experience, the world of D&D as Jim Ward and many other found it in those early days, quite so well as a dungeon map. Thanks for keeping it around, Jim.