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.

The 50th anniversary year of Dungeons & Dragons is drawing to a close. A number of projects I'd been planning for this year finally came out, and I got involved in a whole bunch of other things I didn't see coming... so much so that I spent far more of this year doing things than talking about what I was doing. So I thought I might do a brief year in review.

Books

• Twelve years after its original publication, Playing at the Worldhas returned under the MIT Press imprint in a second edition. Although only the first volume appeared in 2024, the second volume is slated for an April 8, 2025 release. Now with proper margins and typesetting, the revised edition across its two volumes spans over 1,000 pages. Also, both volumes have Erol Otus covers! Needless to say getting the second volume into shape consumed no small amount of my time this year.
• I also helped Wizards of the Coast produce its commemorative 50th anniversary facsimile reprint anthology The Making of Original Dungeons & Dragons. This had been a long time in the works and it was great to see it finally come out, and to get notices (with PatW 2eV1) in places like the Washington Post. Some people were mad about its front matter, though. 
• We also snuck in a 50th anniversary upgrade to the original D&D Art & Arcana, featuring new gatefolds with some cool material added!
• For fans of the Heroes' Feast franchise, there was a bit more of that, in the form of the Deck of Many Morsels. 
• I supplied one of the chapters for the new Fifty Years of Dungeons & Dragons anthology produced by MIT Press.
• Speaking of anthologies, the Routledge Handbook of RPG Studies got a substantial 2024 revision,  reworking and expanding sections I contributed to.
• (And I suppose the Lucca Comics & Games Gateway to Adventure exhibition catalog took a lot of time this year as well, but since it's not available to the public, it probably shouldn't count as a publication.)

• A number of museum exhibitions honoring D&D's 50th took place this year, including the American Writer's Museum's "Level Up"in Chicago. I served on the content team for that exhibition and contributed a bit to the product on display.
• Gen Con went big for D&D's 50th this year - perhaps "over the top" would be a better description. We did a whole bunch of things:
• In the lead-up to the convention, we streamed six actual play sessions of the various editions of live. I ran the game for the first stream, dedicated to OD&D. (I also played in the 2nd Ed. stream run by Zeb Cook).
• At the convention itself, I moderated seven panels dedicated to the editions of D&D - with the last for the games' future - featuring the designers and protagonists in the development of the game over the years. 
• I wrote an eight-page insert for the convention program about the history of D&D at Gen Con. 
• Finally, we did a museum at Gen Con - not nearly as big as the 2017 museum for Gen Con's 50th, but myself, Bill Meinhardt, and Alex Kammer brought enough goodies to stuff a few display cases with product, drafts, and ephemera from a half century of D&D.
• I stopped in Rochester, NY, on the way back from Gen Con to drop off a few things I had shown at the Gen Con museum for the Strong's "50 Years of Storytelling" exhibition. Also included in the exhibition are 14 original D&D artworks from the Koder Collection. This is still ongoing for another week or so if you're in the neighborhood.
• Perhaps the most ambitious commemoration of D&D's 50th year took place at the Lucca Comics & Games. This encompassed many activities - including dedicating an actual underground passage to Gygax and Arneson -  as well as the exhibition of original D&D art from the Koder Collection that I co-curated. Plenty of footage from the event can be found at the Koder Collection Facebook page. There were also a number of panels, games, and so on, which were recorded and will presumably be available at some point.
• It was also my privilege to make appearances at San Diego ComicCon, GameHole, GaryCon (though I missed my GaryCon panel thanks to air travel fail) and many other conventions where D&D's 50th was on people's minds. 

Other Things

• I was interviewed for a lot of media pieces this year, including the Time Magazine Special Edition about D&D, and (more recently) the Economist's take. 
• The occasion of the anniversary also led to appearances in mainstream venues like the Bay Area's NPR station KQED to talk about D&D's 50th - though the year couldn't get any weirder than being on Jason Alexander's show "Really? No, Really?"
• I found the time to talk a little about what I was doing this year on podcasts like Wandering DMs and Shane Plays.
• I did a little bit of behind the scenes work to help make the D&D postage stamps happen (the USA ones, not the Royal Mail ones).

With the release of its second volume, the second edition of Playing at the World is finally complete. The two books combined total well over 1,000 pages on the conceptual origins of role-playing games. The first edition had been out of print for some years, so if you've wanted to check it out, this would be a good time. Each volume has a spiffy new cover by classic D&D artist Erol Otus, and of course updated coverage of its sprawling subject matter.

Reading the 2012 edition of Playing at the World cover to cover, you would first take in Gygax and Arneson's activities up to 1973 (Section 1), then three historical deep dives into setting, system, and character (Section 2-4), followed by the immediate aftermath of the release of D&D and the birth of the role-playing game industry (Section 5). This ordering encouraged readers to "eat their broccoli," as I sometimes put it, by absorbing a detailed histories of subjects like conflict simulation before getting to the dessert of D&D's reception and success. This certainly was not to everyone's taste, and I gather some diners left the table halfway through the meal.

In 2E, what were the first and fifth chapters of the 2012 edition make up the first volume, The Invention of Dungeons & Dragons. In the newly-released second volume, The Three Pillars of Role-Playing Games, the eponymous "pillars" are setting, system, and character, per the middle three sections of the 2012 original. Ironically, some of the earliest surviving outlines of PatW had precisely this organization, where the histories of system and setting were relegated to appendices after the main narrative. Hopefully this will make the work more accessible, and the core narrative of the first volume a bit more cohesive. The more scholarly bits are reserved for the second volume, including the bibliography and methodology.

The book has been reorganized but not rewritten from the ground up. Instead, it has been updated in places where scholarship has moved forward since 2012. The biggest changes cover recently unearthed draft material from the development of D&D in 1973, but there is also more detail on things like the Midgard phenomenon, the Hyborian campaign, and similar precursor and parallel activities. The book remains a thorough repository for the evolutionary history of fundamental system concepts that D&D popularized: experience points, hit points, the dialog-based interface, limited information scenarios, and so on.

So is the combined PatW2E actually longer than the original? No, it comes in at a slightly lower overall word count -- though because it has been typeset by response professionals rather than myself, the page count, and shelf width, is larger. 

It is in part shorter because it discarded a lot of information redundant with the more detailed coverage in my other books. Discussions of corporate finances, disputes over credit, and so on have largely been removed, as they are better covered in Game Wizards. The fledgling RPG industry of the late 1970s is now better detailed in The Elusive Shift. The brief bits about computer game history in the Epilogue of PatW1E were not very helpful and have basically been dropped, apart from an aside in V1. What remains cannot lay claim to being sharply focused: the book remains necessarily a survey of disparate activities, one that aspires to provide a comprehensive overview of how D&D came to be.

But Playing at the World cannot claim to have "solved" the history of D&D. I believe we remain in the early days of scholarship related to role-playing games, and twelve more years of work could only move the ball forward to far. I do hope the book is more useful as a resource for future scholarship than the original edition. I hope it helps capture sources, influences, and activities that might otherwise have escaped the attention of posterity. If it succeeds only in doing that, I'd be happy with its achievement.