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A Forgotten Variant: The Observers Book of Monsters
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...
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Why Did Armor Class Descend from 9 to 2?
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...
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Artistic Arcana: The Impostor Lizardman
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...
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Subterranean Chainmail: Mines and Countermines
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...
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Artistic Arcana: Greg Bell Before TSR
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...
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Artistic Arcana: Scruby Fantasy Miniatures and TSR
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...
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D&D's 45th Birthday
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...
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The Complete OD&D Illusionist
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...
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Identifying the Dice of the 1970s
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...
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Dave Arneson's Origins 1977 Tournament
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...
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Dungeons & Dragons at a Distance: Early Play-by-Mail D&D
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...
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GenCon 1971 and the Castle Sewer Game
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...
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Early Play-by-Post D&D in Britain
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...
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d6s to Roll for Wandering Monsters in 1980
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...
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Fredda Sieve and Her 1963 "Zazz" 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...
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The Elusive Shift, My New Book
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...
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A Forgotten Variant: Mythrules (1978)
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...
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Player Typologies, from Wargames to Role-Playing Games
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...
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The Origins of Rule Zero
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...
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A History of Hero Points: Fame, Fortune and Fate
"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...
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