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Sheets Before Characters
When Dungeons & Dragons popularized the simulation of characters in games, it entailed that players fill out quite a bit of paperwork. Characters require a record of their names and ability scores...
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A New Dungeons & Dragons Timeline
Following on the official release of the Dungeon Master's Guide, and thus the completion of the core 5th edition Dungeons & Dragons rulebooks, Wizards of the Coast has put up a new timeline of the...
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Quagmire: The Making of a 1980s Dungeons & Dragons Module
As my final contribution to role-playing game posterity for 2014, I wrote a new piece on TSR's internal process of making modules that the traces the evolution of one Expert-series product from its...
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2014: A Year in Review
2014 is behind us. From all of us here at Playing at the World (well, that's actually just me), I wanted to thank everyone who follows the work here. Since the subject matter is a bit niche, and...
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Gaming the Battle of the Five Armies
Years before companies preemptively exploited transmedia opportunities, before computers made games a primary part of any media strategy, it was up to the fans to make game versions of their favorite...
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Fortieth Anniversary of Games Workshop
In February 1975, the circular above went out to a few hundred members of the hobby game community. It announced the formation of a new partnership in the United Kingdom called the Games Workshop,...
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World At War, the TSR of the Twin Cities
In some of the earliest games produced by Tactical Studies Rules, we see a mysterious credit to an entity called "WAW Productions." WAW gets a prominent nod on the cover of the TSR hit location rules...
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To Hit Armor Class Zero
The die roll value required for an attack to hit an armor class of zero, or "THAC0," is the signature combat mechanism of the second edition of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. Revered by some and...
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The Samurai in D&D, via Bruce Sterling
Oriental adventures become a part of Dungeons & Dragons long before TSR released a book by that name. The creativity of the vibrant fan community expanded the game far faster than its designers...
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A Precursor to the Chainmail Fantasy Supplement
Chainmail (1971) is correctly regarded as the first commercially-available fantasy wargame system. The Fantasy Supplement that Gary Gygax and Jeff Perren tacked on to the end of Chainmail inspired Dave...
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Back in 2014, I expressed my intention to celebrate the birthday of Dungeons & Dragons on the last Sunday of January: since it happened to be January 26th, that is commonly given as the...
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A Conversation with Len Patt
Following the revelations published two weeks ago here about a set of 1970 fantasy wargame rules that exerted a clear influence on the Chainmail Fantasy Supplement, one burning question was on...
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How Mana Became a Game Mechanic
Together with University of Hawai'i anthropologist Alex Golub, I wrote an essay about the origins of "mana" in tabletop and computer games. Alex previously distilled our work into a popular blog post...
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The D&D Syndicated Radio Show Pilot
In the early 1980s, at the height of the Dungeons & Dragons fad, TSR heavily promoted the game in mainstream media. This went far beyond mere advertisements: they developed dramatic renditions of...
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See the D&D Draft at the Gen Con Museum
In celebration of its fiftieth anniversary, Gen Con will be staging a museum next month in Indianapolis. The museum will pay homage to Gen Con by showing how the gaming hobby has grown over the past...
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The Dalluhn Manuscript and CONTAX
The Dalluhn Manuscript, a document that preserves early draft text of Dungeons & Dragons, has long defied any attempts at precise identification. In no small part this is because of its unsigned...
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The Gin and Pygmalion, In and Out of Blackmoor
This short piece "In Search of Pygmalion" from October 1974 has no byline, but it was written by Dave Arneson. It tells of an evil magician named "the GIN of Sailik" who spirits away the immortal...
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Vintage Ad: Why Women Don't Play Wargames
This late-1970s variant on one of the earliest Dungeons & Dragon advertisements repeats some conventional wisdom of the day about female participation in the gaming community. But as the text...
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Spellcasting before D&D in Midgard
From the summer of 1971, this excerpt shows the initial Wizard system developed for a game called Midgard, as disseminated through the seventh issue of Hartley Patterson's original Midgard fanzine....
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D&D In the News (1976): Fazzle on the Ryth
There was little mainstream press dedicated to Dungeons & Dragons before the calamitous summer of 1979, and virtually none prior to 1977. This particular article by Mike Duffy is from the Detroit...
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