Reconsiderations: Old School

Believe it or not, at the very dawn of what came to be called the Old School Renaissance, there was a lot of handwringing, both within its ranks and outside them, over just what was meant by the term "old school." 

Now, I don't recall when I first heard the term applied either to Dungeons & Dragons specifically or to roleplaying games more generally, nor can I pinpoint its precise origin. I have a vague recollection that it was one of those things that was spontaneously generated on the pre-social media Internet in the late '90s or early 2000s, but, as I said, I can't be certain. Regardless, I am pretty sure that the term predated the OSR by some years and generally meant something roughly equivalent to "D&D/RPG from the 70's and/or '80s," with some degree of fuzziness around the edges, both temporally and conceptually.

A lot of people assume that the Old School Renaissance was simply a reaction to the excesses of late 3e and I think there's much truth in this. In my own case, unhappiness with the state of Third Edition played a big role, which is ironic, since 3e had brought me back to Dungeons & Dragons in the first place after having largely abandoned the game several years prior. However, I suspect the roots of the OSR go back even farther, into the dying days of TSR, when AD&D Second Edition was itself a bloated and incoherent mess of a game. Some might stretch things even farther back, looking at the rise of "narrative" and "storytelling" games in the '90s as important data points.

I mention all of this simply as background to what will be my first reconsiderations post. Given the wide range of topics that I'll likely be covering as I write this series, I thought it useful to begin with something very basic and indeed foundational. I also thought it an important subject, because, in the eighteen years since I started this blog, my perspective on this matter have become clearer, if not necessarily different from what I have previously written. In the past, I might have been more circumspect in how I defined "old school" and what I understood it to mean, now I feel as if I have a more solid sense of things.

For me, "old school" is, paradoxically, a modern term. It's obviously not a term anyone "back in the day" would have used to describe D&D or any other RPG, for the simple reason that "old school" is a comparative term, one that depends on time having passed and there being multiple iterations of a game to compare to one another. "Old school" is, therefore, a retrospective category, one invented after the fact to identify certain common features, assumptions, and practices associated with the hobby's earlier years. Like all such categories, it is necessarily imperfect. The people who created and played these games in the 1970s and '80s did not think of themselves as participating in an "old school" style of play; they were simply playing roleplaying games as they understood them.

This is one reason why I have always thought the "R" in OSR stood for "renaissance." A renaissance is not a simple return to the past. It's an attempt to recover something from the past that is believed to possess enduring value, even though the very act of recovery inevitably reshapes it. The artists and scholars of the Renaissance did not recreate the art and ideals of Classical Antiquity they so admired. Neither did the Protestant Reformers did not restore the primitive Christianity they felt had become obscured under centuries of accretions. Both were instances of later generations looking backward for inspiration while simultaneously creating something new, whether they intended to do so or not.

That's also true of the OSR. Whatever else it may have been, the Old School Renaissance was never merely an exercise in preservation. Certainly, there were those whose chief concern was keeping older games alive and accessible. Without their efforts, many important texts and traditions might well have disappeared. Yet, from its earliest days, the OSR was also a creative movement. The proliferation of retro-clones, house rules, and entirely new games inspired by older ones quite quickly made that abundantly clear. Even when its devotees claimed to be "returning" to the roots of the hobby, they were doing so from a historical vantage point that could not help but influence – and, occasionally, distort – their understanding of those roots.

That's why I would argue that the category of "old school" only emerged because the hobby had changed. Certain features of earlier roleplaying games and styles of play came to be seen as distinctive precisely because they were no longer taken for granted. I think this helps explain why debates over the meaning of "old school" were (and remain) so contentious. The term refers neither to a specific type of rules nor to a particular historical period. Rather, it points toward a collection of loosely related ideas, assumptions, and practices drawn from the hobby's formative decades. Different people naturally emphasize different elements of that inheritance. Some focus on rules, while others focus on adventure design, campaign structure, referee authority, player agency, or any number of other factors. None of these perspectives is wholly wrong, because "old school" is itself a modern effort to make sense of a diverse and often contradictory past.

That's why nowadays, when I speak of "old school," I do not mean a museum piece or a slavish recreation of how roleplaying games were played in 1977, 1982, or any other year. Neither do I mean a particular game, edition, or collection of mechanics. Rather, I mean a tradition of play, one that took shape during the hobby's formative decades and whose characteristic assumptions can still be discerned beneath the considerable diversity of the games now associated with it.

Those assumptions are precisely what I mean by "old school." They have less to do with descending armor class, race-as-class, or any other rules idiosyncrasy than with a particular understanding of the relationship between players, referees, characters, and settings. They concern what roleplaying games are for, how they are meant to be played, and what kinds of experiences they are best suited to provide. The details will necessarily vary from game to game and table to table, but I think there is nevertheless a coherent thread running through them. It is that thread, rather than any single rules system or historical period, that I now understand to have been the true subject of the Old School Renaissance (and, by extension, this blog).

By Any Other Name (Part II)

A couple of years ago, I wrote a post in which I briefly touched on the variety of names by which the Game Master or referee is known in older roleplaying games. Since I'm currently knee-deep in revising Thousand Suns, which uses the term GM, I found my mind wandering a bit back to this topic, trying to remember what alternate terms the RPGs of my youth employed. 

A quick check through my library revealed the following, but, as ever, I am certain I missed some important ones. Feel free to fill in any obvious blanks in the comments. I have intentionally not included games whose term is Dungeon Master, Game Master, or referee, since these aren't especially noteworthy.

• Ars Magica: Storyguide
• Call of Cthulhu: Keeper of Arcane Lore
• Chill: Chill Master
• Ghostbusters: Ghostmaster
• Golden Heroes: Script Supervisor
• Marvel Super Heroes: Judge
• Skyrealms of Jorune: Sholari
• Space Opera: StarMaster
• Star Ace: Campaign Master
• Starfaring: Galaxy Master
• Star Trek (Heritage): Mission Master
• The Fantasy Trip: Fantasy Master
• The Morrow Project: Project Director
• Timemaster: Continuum Master
• Toon: Animator
• Top Secret: Administrator

As I'm said, I'm sure there are others, especially after 1990 or thereabouts. Still, I must confess I was a bit surprised by how few I could identify. My recollection was that, back in the day, every roleplaying game had its own unique name for the referee, but I suppose I was mistaken. 

Interview: Rudy Kraft (Part I)

A long-standing and popular feature of this blog has been its interviews with designers, artists, and other luminaries of the hobby. From the beginning, I’ve believed it’s important to preserve and share their memories, insights, and experiences. They deserve to be heard not only by those of us who remember those now-ancient days firsthand, but also by later generations of roleplayers who might otherwise never encounter the stories behind the games they love.

That’s why I’m always especially pleased to speak with someone whose contributions were largely unknown to me in my own youth. Such conversations are reminders of just how many hands shaped this hobby in its formative years.

Rudy Kraft, who was involved in the early days of Chaosium – or The Chaosium, as it was then styled – very kindly agreed to answer a series of questions I put to him. As you’ll soon discover, he did so with remarkable generosity and detail. What follows is the first part of our conversation; the second will appear tomorrow.

1. How did you first become involved in the hobby of role playing?

I first got involved in gaming as a hobby because of my father. I was the oldest of five children—although we started gaming before the fifth child was born. We had family games of Clue and Monopoly—mostly Clue. At some point, my father bought me a Christmas present of the old Avalon Hill game Afrika Korps. He and I played that a lot often leaving it set up on the desk in my parents' bedroom. Because I liked this game, he bought additional Avalon Hill Games at least once a year until I went away to college in 1974.

Starting in elementary school, I became an enthusiastic reader of both science fiction and fantasy.  During this time, I read and reread The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings and Asimov’s Foundation series on multiple occasions.  

During high school, some friends and I created a space exploration war game where one person acted as the moderator and the other people explored a star map from different locations until they ran into each other and presumably fought a war.  

When I was at Cornell University, I read a lot of science fiction and touched the periphery of SF fandom. In one fanzine I read about this new game, Dungeons & Dragons. This almost certainly occurred in August 1975. The game sounded interesting to me, so I ordered a copy of it which I received in September. Once I looked at it, it became obvious to me that I did not know how to get started in the game and I set it aside.

In October, I overheard two people talking about playing Dungeons & Dragons. It turned out that there was a small group of people playing the game regularly in the same dormitory where I ate my meals.  They played every Saturday, so I first started playing Dungeons & Dragons on the second Saturday in October 1975. In fact, I had a 50th anniversary celebratory session in October this year where, for the first time in years, I played rather than DMed a game of Dungeon & Dragons.

Following that first session, I became very addicted to playing Dungeon & Dragons to the point where it significantly adversely affected my grades. During those years, I bought Empire of the Petal Throne and Metamorphosis Alpha, but I never persuaded anyone to play them instead of D&D. 

Smith's Most Well-Known Creation

Artwork by Clark Ashton Smith

I've already touched on the fact that, compared to his contemporaries, H.P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard, the overt influence of Clark Ashton Smith on later writers is minimal and I stand by that assessment. I would, however, like to point out an obvious exception to this: the deity Tsathoggua. Unlike nearly everything else CAS created in his weird tales, Tsathoggua not only reappeared multiple times within his own story cycles but was also used by some of his colleagues in theirs. Indeed, the first time the name Tsathoggua appears in print is not in one of Smith's stories but in Lovecraft's "The Whisperer in Darkness."

In that story, Tsathoggua is mentioned three times, mostly in passing, as part of a litany of other ancient beings, like Cthulhu and Shub-Niggurath. However, one of these mentions not only describes him but associates him with CAS:

It’s from N’kai that frightful Tsathoggua came – you know, the amorphous, toad-like god-creature mentioned in the Pnakotic Manuscripts and the Necronomicon and the Commoriom myth-cycle preserved by the Atlantean high-priest Klarkash-Ton.

Klarkash-Ton is, obviously, Smith and "the Commoriom myth-cycle" is then-unpublished "The Tale of Satampra Zeiros," which had been written in 1929 but not published until a few months after "The Whisperer in Darkness." We must remember that the writers in the Weird Tales circle regularly discussed and shared drafts of their work with one another, which is how HPL beat Smith to the punch when it came to introducing his own creation.

When "The Tale of Satampra Zeiros" was published, Smith talks a bit more about Tsathoggua by reference to one of his idols:

He was very squat and pot-bellied, his head was more like a monstrous toad than a deity, and his whole body was covered with an imitation of short fur, giving somehow a vague sensation of both the bat and the sloth. His sleepy lids were half-lowered over his globular eyes; the tip of a queer tongue issued from his fat mouth.

Smith would go on mention Tsathoggua several more times in his Hyperborean stories, as well as in his Averoigne stories, where the god appears under the variant name Sodagui. From these other stories, we learn that Tsathoggua – also known as Zhothaqquah – once dwelled on the planet Cykranosh, which we call Saturn, where "some of [his] relatives were still resident ... and were worshipped by its peoples." His relatives include his "uncle," having the unpronounceable name of Hziulquoigmnzhah, about which I'll have a little more to say in an upcoming post.

From "The Seven Geases," we find out that, after having from Saturn "in years immediately foIlowing the Earth's creation," Tsathoggua slept in a secret cave beneath Mount Voormithadreth. That story describes him as having "great girth and his batlike furriness and the look of a sleepy black toad." This particular story is interesting, because Tsathoggua not only appears in the flesh but actually speaks, carrying on a brief conversation with its unfortunate protagonist, Ralibar Vooz. We also learn that the god enjoys blood sacrifices offered to him by his worshipers.

I can't help but wonder why it was that Tsathoggua, of all of Smith's creations, should be the one that Lovecraft (and, apparently, Robert E. Howard, though the story in question was never completed during his lifetime) should find compelling enough to include in his own stories, if only by reference. I don't really have any theories to offer, since, as fond as I am of Tsathoggua, he's nothing truly notable about him. Perhaps Lovecraft and others simply liked the sound of his name. Whatever the reason, I think it's unquestionably the case that Tsathoggua is Smith's most well-known creation. 

The Glittering Lure

I could not permit the 120th anniversary of the birth of Robert Ervin Howard to pass without a comment, however brief. The problem is that, after all these years, what more could I possibly say about him, his work, and his legacy that others have not already said before and said better?

Even so, Howard persists, not as a relic of the pulp era and not merely as the creator of Conan the Cimmerian, but as a writer whose vision still exerts a mighty gravitational pull. His stories refuse to stay put in their historical moment. They feel immediate, urgent, volatile, and alive. That is no accident. Howard did not write as an antiquarian or as a stylist; he wrote as someone possessed by an idea. Civilization, in his view, is a fragile veneer stretched over something older, darker, and more honest. His fiction presents this truth again and again, not as theory but as lived experience.

In a 1926 letter to his friend, Tevis Clyde Smith, Howard enclosed a short poem:

I am the spur 

That rides men's souls,

The glittering lure

That leads around the world.

It is tempting to read this as youthful bravado, but it also functions as a manifesto of sorts. Howard understood the power of story as provocation, as something that drives people rather than comforts them. His tales are spurs: they prod, unsettle, and awaken half-buried instincts. They lure readers not toward safety or progress but toward forgotten ages of blood, fire, and iron. I think this is the crux of his appeal. Howard does not reassure us about who we are; he reminds us of what we once were and what, perhaps, we still are.

Conan is the most famous expression of this vision, but he is far from its only vehicle. Kull, Bran Mak Morn, Solomon Kane, each embodies a different response to the same underlying tension. Barbarism and civilization are locked in an endless cycle and neither emerges morally unscathed. Howard’s heroes stand between these worlds, belonging fully to neither. They are not noble savages or enlightened rulers. They are survivors. Their virtues are physical, instinctual, hard-won. Through them, Howard staged his ongoing argument with modernity itself.

What makes this compelling is its sincerity. Howard believed what he wrote. The loneliness, the defiance, the brooding fatalism – these are not literary poses. They are emotional truths drawn from a young man struggling with isolation, economic anxiety, and a deep sense of historical displacement. Even when his plots verge on melodrama, the conviction behind them carries everything forward. His stories do not feel manufactured; they feel lived in.

This is why Howard’s legacy extends far beyond sword-and-sorcery. Undoubtedly, he helped shape that genre, but, more importantly, he articulated a worldview that continues to resonate. Tabletop roleplaying games, modern fantasy, movies, TV shows, comics, and more carry his imprint. Yet he remains oddly marginal in literary discussions. He's admired and cited, but rarely examined with the seriousness he deserves. That is slowly changing and rightly so.

Consequently, anniversaries like this matter not because they allow us to say something new about him and his work, but because they give us the opportunity to say something again. To reread “Beyond the Black River.” To rediscover an overlooked poem. To remember that a young man from Cross Plains, Texas reshaped modern fantasy not through polish or prestige, but through raw imaginative force.

Howard died young, but his stories endure as spurs still digging into the soul, glittering lures drawing us back to lost ages of steel and shadow. On this 120th anniversary of his birth, that seems reason enough to pause, tip one’s hat, and acknowledge the truth of his own words: he still leads his readers around the world.

The Voice of Clark Ashton Smith

Even though he lived until 1961, there is not, so far as I am aware, any film footage of Clark Ashton Smith. There is, however, a recording of his voice, made in the 1950s, reciting some of his poetry. It's well worth a listen, if you have the time.

Donjons et Dragons

Despite Clark Ashton Smith's knowledge and use of the French language in his poetry and fiction, this post is not about him. Rather, it's about a curious book sent to me by an English-speaking reader, who thought I might find it fascinating – and he was correct!

Written by Mathilde Maraninchi and published in 1982, Donjons et Dragons is an incredible artifact from the early days of the hobby. At just under 100 pages in length, it's both an introduction to "a new type of boardgame [jeu de société]: the roleplaying game" and as a playable summary of the rules themselves. That latter part, for me, is one of the most remarkable things about this peculiar volume: it functions as a bootleg D&D rulebook released a year before the official French translation of the Moldvay Basic Set (which I owned). 

There is a great deal I could say about Donjons et Dragons simply on the basis of reading it and perhaps I will in future posts. For now, though, I wanted to focus on the interior artwork by Joël Bordier, which is incredible. For example, here are the illustrations of several of the character classes:

There also some remarkable monster illustrations as well, in this case a young green dragon with red spots (dragon vert à pois rouges junior) and a gelatinous cube of color (cube gélatineux de couleur):

As I said, the book is probably worthy of several more posts. Before I do that, though, I'm curious to see if any of my French-speaking readers are familiar with this book and, especially, the circumstances under which it was published. It appeared before any TSR-sanctioned edition of D&D and looks to be a pretty close copy of the 1977 Holmes rulebook (though I haven't spent much time comparing them, to be honest). That makes it a unique historical document, if nothing else.

A Poet Among the Pulpsters

CAS at age 19

When discussions turn to the triumvirate of Weird Tales – H.P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, and Clark Ashton Smith – there is a tendency to group them together as if they all sprang from the same soil and wrote from the same impulses. In reality, Smith stands apart in a crucial way. Lovecraft was, at heart, an antiquarian essayist who transformed his philosophical anxieties into cosmic horror. Howard, by contrast, was a storyteller of raw physicality, a bard of blood and thunder who wrote like a man shadowboxing the page. Smith, however, came to weird fiction by a very different road. He was a poet first, last, and always and that vocation shaped every sentence he ever wrote.

Today marks the 133rd anniversary of Smith’s birth, which seems as good an occasion as any to reflect on what made his work so distinctive. Rather than simply commemorating another member of the Weird Tales stable, I think it’s worth pausing to consider how Smith’s early life as a poet (and the literary circles in which he moved) gave his fiction its singular texture and enduring power.

Clark Ashton Smith’s literary career began not in pulp magazines but in the rarefied world of early twentieth-century poetry. Born in 1893 in Auburn, California, he had little formal schooling, largely due to health issues, but he compensated through voracious self-education. He devoured classical literature, taught himself French and Spanish, and immersed himself in the Romantic and Symbolist poets. By nineteen, he had produced The Star-Treader and Other Poems, a volume so striking in its imagery and diction that contemporary critics compared him to Keats and Shelley. For a brief moment, Smith seemed destined for a serious poetic career.

Central to his early success was George Sterling, often called the “uncrowned king of Bohemia” in San Francisco literary circles. Sterling became Smith’s mentor, champion, and friend, introducing him to writers and artists and encouraging his lush, decadent style. Sterling himself wrote in a fin-de-siècle mode, rich with classical allusions and sensual imagery, and Smith absorbed this esthetic deeply. From Sterling, Smith learned that language could be luxuriant, that excess was not a vice but a virtue, and that literature could aspire to the condition of dream or myth rather than mere narrative efficiency.

CAS and George Sterling

If Sterling gave Smith his ornate beauty, it was Ambrose Bierce who supplied the venom. Bierce, by then an aging icon of American letters, recognized Smith’s talent and corresponded with him. Where Sterling fostered romance and rapture, Bierce sharpened Smith’s sense of irony and cruelty. Bierce’s influence can be felt in Smith’s merciless endings, his delight in cosmic indifference, and his refusal to grant characters easy moral victories. The combination of Sterling’s estheticism and Bierce’s mordant wit produced something rare: prose that is simultaneously sumptuous and pitiless.

The problem for Smith was that poetry did not pay. By the 1920s, the market for ornate verse had largely collapsed. Smith found himself in financial difficulty and turned, reluctantly at first, to writing fiction for magazines like Weird Tales. It is important to emphasize that Smith did not approach this shift as a conversion. He did not become a pulp writer in the way Howard wholeheartedly embraced the form. Instead, he treated fiction as trade work, seeing it as necessary labor to save himself and his aging parents from utter penury.

Even so, Smith never simplified his voice. He did not trim his sentences, streamline his vocabulary, or abandon his baroque imagery. If anything, he doubled down. While other writers adapted themselves to the expectations of pulp magazines, Smith forced the magazines to accommodate him. His stories read less like conventional narratives and more like prose poems that just happen to feature necromancers, dying empires, and alien gods.

I think this poetic foundation explains why Smith’s fiction feels so different from that of his peers. In Smith, language is not merely a vehicle for story; it is the story. His plots are often simple – curiosity leads to doom, hubris invites annihilation, etc. – but the pleasure lies in how those ideas are expressed. He builds atmosphere through rhythm and sound, crafting sentences meant to be savored aloud. His vocabulary is famously archaic and exotic, not as an affectation but as an extension of his poetic training. Words matter to Smith almost like physical objects, chosen for their texture as much as for their meaning.

His worldbuilding, too, reflects a poet’s sensibility. Whereas Howard constructs the Hyborian Age through action and Lovecraft builds his cosmos through dreadful revelations, Smith creates settings through sensory accumulation. Colors bleed into one another. Landscapes are described like paintings glimpsed in flickering torchlight. Cities feel half-remembered, as if drawn from some collective unconscious. His imaginary realms, whether Zothique, Hyperborea, or Averoigne, are not maps but moods.

Perhaps most telling is Smith’s attitude toward horror. Lovecraft’s terror is intellectual, rooted in the shattering of human significance. Howard’s horror is visceral, something to be fought or fled. Smith’s horror is esthetic. His monsters are often beautiful, seductive, or strangely noble. Doom is inevitable, but it arrives wrapped in velvet. This, too, comes from poetry, from the Decadent tradition that finds fascination in decline and ruin. For Smith, decay is not merely tragic; it is strangely lovely.

This places him at a peculiar angle to his Weird Tales compatriots. Lovecraft wrote to reveal philosophical truths. Howard wrote to thrill and exult. Smith, however, wrote to evoke. His stories appeal to me not because of memorable protagonists or clever twists, but because of the way they sound and even feel, if that's the word. They linger in my mind like fragments of strange dreams.

In the end, Clark Ashton Smith is best understood not as a pulp writer who could occasionally write beautifully, but as a poet who temporarily inhabited pulp fiction. Forced by circumstance to trade verse for narrative, he brought with him Sterling’s decadent romanticism and Bierce’s biting skepticism, infusing Weird Tales with a voice unlike any other. Sixty-five years after his death, that voice still echoes, ornate and unforgiving, reminding us that even in the cheapest magazines, true art can take root and flourish in the strangest soil.

What If the Satanic Panic Had Never Happened?

I was recently reminded by a reader of the assertion that, rather than harming the sales or long-term fortunes of Dungeons & Dragons, the furor surrounding the game during the so-called “Satanic Panic” of the 1980s ultimately proved beneficial. According to this view, the controversies gave the game a level of publicity it might otherwise never have achieved, helping to propel it toward broader cultural visibility. This was certainly the position taken by TSR Hobbies and many of its employees in the years that followed and there is some evidence that lends this interpretation a degree of plausibility.

At the same time, others have suggested that this narrative is too neat and reassuring, as well as too dependent on outcomes that were visible only in retrospect. The difficulty, of course, is that the question itself resists a definitive resolution. There is no way to measure what would have happened had the moral panic not occurred. Indeed, any attempt to do so quickly runs into the limits of counterfactual history, where causes and effects cannot be isolated or tested.

The problem, as my reader put it, closely resembles survivorship bias. I think we've all seen the illustration of the battle-damaged aircraft from the Second World War. If not, I've included it at the top of this post. During the war, military analysts initially studied the bullet holes on planes that returned from combat, assuming the holes marked the most vulnerable areas. What they eventually came to realize is that the opposite was true: the planes that did not return had likely been hit in the places where the surviving aircraft were unmarked. The most important evidence was not what could be seen, but what was missing.

A similar bias may shape how we remember the Satanic Panic’s impact on the history of Dungeons & Dragons. The people who became lifelong gamers in the 1980s and 1990s were, by definition, those who passed through that period of censorship, stigma, and negative publicity. They are the aircraft that returned. Their presence is visible and their stories are often told, sometimes with pride, as proof that the panic failed or even that it backfired.

What is far harder to see are the players who never made it that far. The children whose parents forbade the game. The schools and libraries that quietly removed it from their shelves. The local groups that never formed because the social cost of participation seemed too high. These absent players leave no testimonies, no fond memories, and, of course, no sales figures. They are the aircraft that never returned and their absence subtly shapes the conclusions we draw about the era.

This does not mean that the claim that the Satanic Panic helped Dungeons & Dragons is false. It may be true or partly true or true in some contexts and not in others. Nor does it mean that the opposite claim, that the panic caused lasting harm, can be demonstrated with any greater certainty. The counterfactual remains unprovable. What it does suggest is that confidence in either position should be tempered by an awareness of what cannot be measured.

For readers who lived through that period, I'm curious about your own experiences. At the time you first encountered the game, was easy it to access or was contested or even forbidden? Did you know people who were interested in D&D but discouraged from playing or who drifted away under social pressure? I ask all this not merely out of curiosity, but because, as I'm sure I've mentioned before, I barely knew that the Satanic Panic was a thing with which anyone had to contend. I was aware of its existence, of course, but I never intersected with it in the slightest, nor did any of my friends. Without exception, our parents and extended families were supportive of our newfound obsession and, in fact, encouraged it, especially in my case. My own perspective is thus not very helpful in assessing this question.

In any case, I don't expect to come to any unassailable conclusions by raising this question. The Satanic Panic, after all, was an amorphous thing, neither a simple obstacle to the hobby's growth nor an obvious catalyst to it. It was a cultural pressure that some people resisted, some endured, and others, like myself, never encountered. That said, I think there is strength to the suggestion that any account of it that focuses only on those who remained risks mistaking survival for inevitability and resilience for proof that nothing was lost. That's why I'm curious to hear from others and their experiences of it.

The 3 Waves of the RPG Moral Panic

I've mentioned many times on this blog that, to a great extent, I owe my introduction into the hobby of roleplaying to the furor surrounding the disappearance of James Dallas Egbert III in August 1979. Consequently, I've always had a deep interest in the history of the moral panics surrounding D&D and RPGs more generally. That's why I was intrigued when I saw that Seth Skorkowsky had released a lengthy video essay about this very topic. It's a well-presented and informative video and I highly recommend it to anyone interested in this subject. Thanks to Loren Rosson for recommending it to me.

Retrospective: Conquest of the Empire

Stop me if you've heard this before: I was never a wargamer, but I liked the idea of wargames, specifically simulating a military or other conflict through the use of a board, tokens, and dice. There's just something inherently appealing to me about this, which probably explains why I've spent more than four decades trying but rarely succeeding at finding a wargame that really clicked with me. I owned and played a number of Avalon Hill and SPI games in my youth, but, with the exception of Diplomacy, I was never very good at them (and even there I was hampered by my inexplicable tendency to play Austria-Hungary).

However, in 1984, Milton Bradley released a line of games under the banner of the "Gamemaster Series" that caught my attention. The series was an experiment in bringing wargames to the mass market. Each entry in the series came in a massive, shelf-dominating box filled with lavish components and a rulebook that looked intimidating compared to more traditional boardgames like Monopoly or Risk. The series began with Axis & Allies, designed by Larry Harris, and followed swiftly with another of his creations, Conquest of the Empire.

While Axis & Allies presented World War II in game form, Conquest of the Empire did the same thing for the Roman Empire's Crisis of the Third Century. The game was a grand-scale battle for supremacy across the Mediterranean world after the death of Marcus Aurelius. It was, in every sense, a spectacle, a game whose physical components alone promised an epic experience before a single die was rolled. As a young history buff with a particular affection for Greco-Roman history, this was the game I'd been waiting for.

To appreciate Conquest of the Empire, it helps to recall what the gaming landscape looked like in the mid-1980s. The boundary between “mainstream” and “hobby” games was much starker than it is today. Wargames were, as I noted above, largely the province of companies like Avalon Hill or SPI. They were sold in specialty stores to an audience comfortable with long rulebooks and hex maps. By contrast, the Gamemaster Series was an attempt to bridge that gap by combining high production values, streamlined rules, and compelling subjects to attract both traditional hobbyists and curious outsiders like myself. 

Axis & Allies was, I gather, very successful. Certainly my friends and I enjoyed playing it and we did so often. Of course, even in the 1980s, World War II was a staple of wargames. Conquest of the Empire thus deviated just enough to be considered daring. Furthermore, its subject, the period of the Military Anarchy, was less familiar and its map of the Mediterranean world, divided into provinces and trade routes, hinted at something more intricate than the average family game. Of course, that's precisely why I loved it.

Opening Conquest of the Empire for the first time is something I cannot forget. To start, the box was enormous. Inside lay nearly four hundred molded plastic miniatures, such as legionnaires with raised shields, catapults, coins, and galleys to patrol the Mare Nostrum. There were also cities to build, roads to lay down, and an oversized, vividly illustrated board depicting the known world from Britannia in the northwest to Aegyptus in the southeast. Following the death of Marcus Aurelius, the empire teeters on the brink of chaos. Each player takes the role of a would-be emperor, commanding armies, building cities, taxing provinces, and waging war until one emerges victorious. It's a straightforward and appealing premise – especially to my teenage self.

Like Axis & Allies, the game was structured around economic management and military conquest. Provinces provided income, which could be spent to raise legions, fleets, and fortifications. Armies moved along roads or across the sea, engaging in battles resolved by simple dice rolls. Catapults were useful in sieges and galleys could ferry troops to distant shores. Victory went to the player who amassed the most wealth and territory, though, in practice, the game often ended in exhaustion or mutual ruin long before an emperor was crowned.

That said, the game was not without its flaws. Its economy could snowball rapidly, favoring whoever secured a few prosperous provinces early on. Combat could be pretty random, with legions sometimes crushed or exalted on a handful of dice. The rules for roads and taxation added an appealing Roman flavor but little in the way of meaningful choice. Players spent much of the game counting coins, rebuilding destroyed forces, and waiting for their next chance to strike. One might argue that some of this is, in fact, realistic or at least true to history, but it didn't always make for a satisfying game.

Even so, Conquest of the Empire often felt epic. Setting up the board, arranging your legions, and surveying the Mediterranean was a ritual of grandeur. It was easy to imagine oneself as a latter-day Caesar, eyeing the spoils of empire. The game rewarded patience more than finesse and spectacle more than subtlety, but it delivered a sense of scale that my friends and I found incredibly alluring. It's little wonder that I still think about this game decades later.

From what I have read, it seems that Milton Bradley’s Gamemaster Series never achieved the mainstream success the company had hoped. Axis & Allies became a perennial favorite and spawned multiple editions and spin-offs, but Conquest of the Empire eventually vanished from store shelves, remembered fondly by those of us who had the chance to play it back in the day. I suspect part of the reason was that its theme was less immediately engaging to American audiences and its rules required a level of commitment somewhat closer to Avalon Hill than to Parker Brothers.

I don't mean that as a criticism at all. I absolutely adored this game and deeply regret that my original copy was lost sometime in the '90s. Conquest of the Empire might not have achieved what Milton Bradley had hoped for it, but, for me, it was a near-perfect "middle road" between simple boardgames and the esoteric complexities of "true" wargames. If there were more games like this, I might actually play them.

Belated

October 1 came and went this year without my taking note that it was the birthday of Dave Arneson. I only realized this belatedly and the oversight has been weighing on me ever since. It’s not just that Arneson deserves to be remembered; it’s that forgetting him, even unintentionally, feels emblematic of a larger problem within the hobby of roleplaying games.

Arneson, as everyone reading this surely knows, was one of the two men without whom Dungeons & Dragons (and, by extension, the entire hobby of roleplaying) would never have come to be. Yet, despite that foundational role, his name and his contributions are too often overlooked, overshadowed, or, worse still, treated as footnotes to someone else’s story. It’s as though we remember him only when we’re reminded to, rather than as a matter of course.

As this year shows, I’m as guilty of this as anyone. I should have remembered October 1 instinctively, the way I do July 27, Gary Gygax’s birthday. The fact that I didn’t speaks volumes, not about Arneson himself, but about how unevenly we remember our own history. Arneson’s legacy is not just that he co-created a game; it’s that he opened the door to an entirely new form of play, one that invited imagination, collaboration, and improvisation in ways no game had before.

His Blackmoor campaign remains one of the great, underappreciated achievements in the history of the hobby. It was the first sustained experiment in what we now take for granted: a shared world, evolving through the choices of its players. So much of what defines roleplaying today, like the open-ended campaign, the emphasis on character, the freedom to explore an imagined world rather than simply play through a fixed scenario, traces back to the quiet, curious mind of a young man running games in Minnesota in the early 1970s.

Forgetting Arneson is easy precisely because his influence is everywhere. It has become invisible through ubiquity. Every time we sit down at a table together (real or virtual), describe what our characters do, and ask, “What happens next?," we are living in the world he imagined. We rarely stop to think about that, not because we’re ungrateful, but because the roots of the hobby have sunk so deep we no longer see them.

Perhaps that’s the real issue. Arneson’s case is just the most visible example of how the contributions of countless others – designers, artists, playtesters, editors, and even just fans – have been forgotten. The history of roleplaying is not just the story of a few Great Men, but of a community of experimenters and dreamers, most of whose names never made it onto any game’s credits page. Our hobby, like any living thing, was nurtured by many unseen hands.

So, while this post began as an apology for my forgetting Dave Arneson’s birthday, perhaps it should instead serve as a reminder simply to remember. To remember Arneson, certainly, but also to remember all those who came after him – and before him – who helped shape the peculiar, beautiful pastime that continues to inspire all of us more than fifty years on.

Belated happy birthday, Dave. We still roll the dice because of you.

What If Lovecraft Had Lived into the '60s?

In our reality, H.P. Lovecraft died on March 15, 1937 at the age of 46. While it would be a stretch to say that he died "young," he certainly died younger than most men of his era. For example, Clark Ashton Smith, who was born less than three years after Lovecraft, died in 1961 at the age of 68. With a better diet and better access to medical care, it's not at all improbable to imagine HPL living into his 60s or even 70s – long enough for him to see World War II, the end of the Great Depression, and the monumental technological and social changes of the ensuing decades. If he had lived, what might Lovecraft have written and what impact might it have had?

I have no answers of my own to this question, but, back in 1978, at the 38th World Science Fiction Convention in Phoenix, Arizona, several notable science fiction and fantasy writers and commentators held a panel on the very topic. Led by Dirk W. Mosig, the panel also included Donald R. Burleson, J. Vernon Shea, Fritz Leiber, and S.T. Joshi. If you're interested and have the time, you can listen to the panel, which consists of six half-hour audio files. 

• Part 1
• Part 2
• Part 3
• Part 4
• Part 5
• Part 6 

The files are surprisingly clear, given how old they are, and the discussion is interesting. Fritz Leiber's comments are, in my opinion, among the most notable, especially in light of the fact that Lovecraft read an early draft of the Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser story, "The Adept's Gambit," As I said, if you have the time, it's well worth your time.

Lovecraft the Blogger

One of the curiosities of H.P. Lovecraft’s literary career is how little of his work was actually published during his lifetime. Only a modest number of stories appeared under his byline in Weird Tales or elsewhere. Despite this, his typewriter was rarely still. He was, after all, a writer, and writing, as any writer will tell you, is not something one can simply turn off.

What makes this paradox even more striking is the sheer volume of his correspondence. Lovecraft is estimated to have written somewhere between 60,000 and 100,000 letters. The exact number is impossible to know, since fewer than 10% survive today. Even if we take the lower estimate, it still makes him one of the most prolific epistolarians of the 20th century. These were not perfunctory notes dashed off in haste. Many ran to dozens of pages, dense with his thoughts on history, politics, philosophy, architecture, literature, science, and, of course, his own dreams and nightmares. For many of his correspondents, a letter from Lovecraft was less a personal communiqué than a miniature essay.

It was in these letters, more than in his published tales, that Lovecraft revealed himself most fully. Through them we glimpse the breadth of his interests, the peculiarities of his mind, his recurring dreams, his everyday concerns, and, inevitably, his darker and less creditable opinions. If his fiction shows us his esthetic vision, his correspondence shows us the man behind it.

Perhaps I am biased because of my own proclivities, but Lovecraft’s letters remind me of blogging. He had no blog, of course, but his endless correspondence functioned in much the same way. The letter was his medium of self-expression, his way of thinking aloud to an audience that was at once personal and diffuse. Many of his letters were, in fact, shared among friends or passed from hand to hand, much as a blog post today might be reposted, linked, or shared across social media.

Nor was this his first experiment with a pre-digital mode of communication. Before his vast correspondence, Lovecraft had already been active in something that feels strikingly like a low-tech precursor to blogging, namely, the world of amateur journalism and the Amateur Press Associations (APAs). In the 1910s, he was deeply involved with the United Amateur Press Association (UAPA), editing its official organ, The United Amateur, and publishing some of his earliest fiction and essays there. As anyone familiar with the early history of roleplaying games knows, an APA is a kind of distributed network. Members submit their work, which is then collated, printed, and mailed out as a collective periodical. In the pre-digital age, this was often how people with literary ambitions, eccentric opinions, or obscure interests found one another and shared their work. For Lovecraft, the UAPA provided a forum, an audience, and, most importantly, a community.

It’s not hard to see the connection. To be anachronistic, the UAPA was Lovecraft’s early “platform,” while his letters became his lifelong “feed.” Both offered him a way to connect, exchange ideas, and keep writing, whether or not the commercial magazines accepted his fiction. That’s one of the reasons we know Lovecraft better than we know most of his contemporaries. His fiction reveals his artistic ideals, but his correspondence and amateur journalism reveal his mind. Just as blogs today offer insight into their authors’ lives, passions, and obsessions, so too do Lovecraft’s letters and UAPA writings.

I’ve often thought of Grognardia in similar terms. This blog has never been my fiction, nor even my formal criticism, however much I’ve sometimes tried to make it so. Instead, it is an extended conversation with others who share my interests. Lovecraft would have understood that impulse. He may have written comparatively few stories, but he never stopped writing, leaving behind a record of himself more complete than almost any of his contemporaries. That’s not a bad model for the rest of us who also feel compelled to share our thoughts, fears, and dreams with others.

Of Periwigs and Pallid Masks

Virgil Finlay's depiction of Lovecraft as an 18th century gentleman

Since its initial publication in 1981, the default setting of Call of Cthulhu has been the 1920s, reflecting the decade in which many of H.P. Lovecraft’s stories take place. Over the years, however, Chaosium has greatly expanded the scope of the game through a variety of alternate historical settings. Beginning with Cthulhu Now in 1987, these supplements have offered Keepers and players the chance to explore the Mythos in different cultural and technological contexts, each one shedding new light on Lovecraftian horror by viewing it through a fresh historical lens. These settings reveal how the themes of cosmic dread and forbidden knowledge persist across the centuries.

Yet one historical period remains conspicuously absent: colonial America. To the best of my knowledge, Chaosium has never released a full supplement set in 17th- or 18th-century British North America. That strikes me as a peculiar omission, especially given Lovecraft’s own lifelong fascination with the 18th century. Lovecraft spoke often and fondly of the colonial era, which he regarded as the last bastion of esthetic and intellectual refinement before the coarsening of the modern world. His affection for 18th-century diction, architecture, and worldview was not mere antiquarianism. It was, in his mind, a form of temporal displacement. In a letter, Lovecraft wrote:

"I know always that I am an outsider; a stranger in this century and among those who are still men. ... Everything I loved had been dead for two centuries

His disdain for the Revolution and American independence from Britain was equally unambiguous. In another letter, he declared:

“When my grandfather told me of the American Revolution, I shocked everyone by adopting a dissenting view ... Grover Cleveland was grandpa's ruler, but Her Majesty, Victoria, Queen of Great Britain & Ireland & Empress of India commanded my allegiance. 'God Save the Queen!' was a stock phrase of mine.”

When others rose to honor The Star-Spangled Banner, Lovecraft would famously remain seated or, in some cases, sing “To Anacreon in Heaven,” the 18th-century drinking song whose melody Francis Scott Key had used as the basis for his poem, later adopted as the U.S. national anthem.

More than a personal affectation, Lovecraft’s British colonial sympathies run deep in his fiction. His only novel, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, which I discussed in my earlier post today, is perhaps the clearest example of what I am talking about, but it's far from the only one. In Dreams in the Witch House, for example, the 18th-century witch Keziah Mason enters into a pact with Nyarlathotep and survives (at least in some form) into the modern age. The Shunned House delves into the lingering corruption left behind by late 17th century Huguenot émigrés to Rhode Island. Over and over, Lovecraft imagines New England not simply as a place with a long history, but as a place haunted by its own past of Puritan zealotry, pre-Christian beliefs, and unsettling imports from the Old World.

With that in mind, I began to toy with the idea back in the 1990s of writing a Call of Cthulhu supplement set in 18th-century British America. To be clear, I don't mean Revolutionary America. As I've already noted, Lovecraft had little patience for the mythology of 1776. What intrigued him (and me) was the world just before that rupture, when Boston remained loyal to the Crown, when the frontier still loomed dark and unknown, and when superstition and science existed in uneasy proximity. It’s a setting steeped in ambiguity, where the Enlightenment had only just begun to push back the shadows and had not yet succeeded.

Beyond Lovecraft’s own writings, there’s ample real-world history to inspire such a setting. The Salem witch trials, with their mix of religious hysteria and communal fear; the First Great Awakening, with its itinerant preachers stirring up visions of damnation; the beliefs of cunning folk in rural hamlets; and the syncretic spiritual traditions that arose from the cross-pollination of Europe, America, and Africa. All offer rich material for investigators to explore. The coast is dotted with smugglers' coves, abandoned forts, and plague ships quarantined offshore. Whispered rumors persist of forgotten Norse ruins in the north, ancient earthworks in the Ohio Valley, and strange lights dancing over the Blue Ridge Mountains.

In my own early drafts, I imagined that investigators might include skeptical physicians educated in Edinburgh, disgraced ministers fleeing scandal, or agents of the Crown sent to look into troubling reports from the hinterlands. They might chase whispers of beings haunting the Green Mountains or discover ruins whose builders are unknown to any tribe or settler. A frontier printer might find references in colonial pamphlets to the Sussex Manuscript or a Dutch merchant in Albany might acquire a fragment of a tablet whose script matches that of no known human tongue.

One of the things that initially drew me to this idea was the clarity of the colonial setting. It offers fewer technological conveniences, fewer societal safety nets, and fewer distractions, all of which I felt heighten the tension and sense of isolation. Even so, the setting is anything but simplistic. The early 18th century was a period when science, superstition, and theology all vied for dominance in the human mind. A figure like Emanuel Swedenborg, for example, could be taken seriously not only as a scientist and engineer but also as a visionary who conversed with spirits. That intellectual ambiguity suits the Mythos perfectly. What better era than this to imagine the slow, dreadful replacement of the Puritan conception of God with something darker and utterly indifferent to mankind?

As I said, I never got very far in developing the supplement, mostly because I became absorbed in another, related idea for Call of Cthulhu (more on that in a future post). However, I still think about it from time to time. Given Chaosium’s longstanding embrace of historical settings, I remain surprised that colonial America has yet to claim its rightful place among them. If nothing else, such a setting would offer a subtle tribute to Lovecraft’s own longing for an age of powdered wigs, flintlocks, and candlelight.

Were I not already neck-deep in other projects, I might be tempted to take the idea up again. Perhaps one day I will, assuming, of course, that some other industrious soul doesn’t beat me to it ...

Pulp Fantasy Library: The Case of Charles Dexter Ward

Of all the stories H.P. Lovecraft ever wrote, only one can rightly be called a novel, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward. Completed in 1927 in a burst of activity following his return to Providence after having lived in New York, the manuscript remained unpublished until 1941 (four years after Lovecraft’s death) when it appeared in Weird Tales in an abridged form over two issues. (The full version would appear two years later in 1943.) Lovecraft never revised it and in letters he dismissed it as “a cumbrous, creaking bit of self-conscious antiquarianism” 

Yet, as is often the case with Lovecraft’s self-criticisms, his judgment was harsher than that of his readers. The very traits he found embarrassing, such as the novel's patient accumulation of historical detail, its period flavor, and its deeply rooted New England setting, are precisely what give it lasting appeal. A rare hybrid of Gothic horror and weird fiction, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward seems to me to owe as much to Poe and the 19th-century ghost story as to the cosmicism of Lovecraft’s later Mythos yarns. Indeed, no less a critic than S.T. Joshi considers The Case of Charles Dexter Ward "among the most carefully wrought fictions in Lovecraft's entire corpus."

The story opens with the puzzling disappearance of the titular character, who is a studious young man from Providence, Rhode Island. Ward is in an asylum to which he'd been committed after a disturbing change in his personality. Once merely eccentric in his love for history, he has recently become withdrawn, secretive, and obsessed with the occult, especially the life of his great-great-great grandfather, Joseph Curwen, a wealthy 18th-century merchant rumored to have been a necromancer. Curwen’s shadowy history of graverobbing, alchemical experiments, and whispered dealings with otherworldly beings ended, at least in official accounts, when Providence citizens raided his estate in 1771. However, no body was ever conclusively identified.

As Ward’s historical research deepens, he discovers Curwen’s letters, records, and formulas. He then begins retracing his ancestor’s steps. His studies turn to experimentation and strange lights, voices, and even disappearances unsettle Providence. Ward’s physical appearance subtly shifts, while his speech adopts 18th-century patterns and his manner grows cold and predatory. Those close to him, most notably his family doctor, Marinus Bicknell Willett, suspect that Ward is no longer entirely himself. 

Their fears prove justified. In a hidden laboratory and a network of tunnels beneath the city, Ward revives the dead to extract ancient knowledge, making use of the “essential saltes [sic]” of long-buried figures. The truth then emerges that, through these same rites, Curwen himself has returned and assumed the identity of his descendant, whom he murders. Thus, it is not Ward but a reborn Joseph Curwen who is responsible for recent events.

In the end, Willett confronts the necromancer masquerading as Ward in the asylum. Using an incantation from Curwen’s own notes, Willett defeats him, reducing him to a "thin coating of fine bluish-grey dust." This is the Call of Cthulhu RPG's spell, resurrection, employed in reverse. Willett then shields the family from the full truth, calling it a case of madness, but the evidence of Curwen’s return and the scale of his occult dealings, suggest something far older and more terrible than mere insanity.

Lovecraft frames The Case of Charles Dexter Ward as a tale of the gradual unearthing of secrets, rich with colonial history and a sense that the past is never truly gone. It is not only a story of necromancy, but also a meditation on ancestral legacy. Consequently, the narrative builds slowly through. old letters, newspaper clippings, genealogical charts, and the reasoned observations of Willett, a man of science forced to confront the unscientific. As the pieces fall into place, the reader shares Willett’s growing conviction that the past is not inert but a living, active, and indeed malevolent presence.

I find it tempting to wonder if the novel isn’t, in some oblique way, Lovecraft turning his gaze inward. Ward is, after all, an antiquarian from Providence, enamored of the past to the point of losing himself in it, a description that could fit Lovecraft himself. Ward’s fate, consumed and supplanted by his own ancestor, reads almost like a dark warning about what happens when one’s obsession with bygone ages ceases to be an intellectual pursuit and becomes an act of resurrection. Perhaps Lovecraft, consciously or not, was toying with the idea that his own retreat into colonial history and musty archives carried, if not such lurid dangers, at least the risk of being overwhelmed by the very past he adored.

Lovecraft himself dismissed the book as a stylistic failure, but this may have been more a reflection of his perfectionism than of the work’s real value. In retrospect, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward stands as one of his best efforts, blending historical mystery, Gothic atmosphere, and supernatural horror into a single, sustained vision. In my opinion, the novel’s enduring appeal lies in its rich evocation of Providence’s past and its slow, inexorable unmasking of ancestral evil. Here, Lovecraft married his antiquarian obsessions to a fully realized narrative arc, creating a tale that is at once intimate in its focus and cosmic in its implications, a rare fusion that continues to reward rereading nearly a century after it was written.

Architect of the Modern Imagination

E. Gary Gygax died on March 4, 2008, at the age of 69. Just over three weeks later, this blog published its first post. That was no coincidence.

Though I’d begun reflecting seriously on old school Dungeons & Dragons in late 2007, shortly before I joined the ODD74 forums, it was Gygax’s death that galvanized me. His demise marked the end of an era and, for me, the beginning of a personal project to explore, celebrate, and better understand the legacy of the game he helped bring into the world.

Today would have been his eighty-seventh birthday. In light of that, I want to pause and remember the life of a man who, though I never met him, profoundly shaped my own. More than that, he shaped the lives of millions, often in ways so pervasive we no longer recognize their origin.

Volumes have been written about Gygax's career, his eccentricities, his talents, and his failings. Seventeen years later and more than half a century since the release of Dungeons & Dragons, it’s time to say something both bold and, I believe, undeniably true: Gary Gygax was one of the most consequential cultural figures of the 20th century.

That may sound hyperbolic, even to readers of this blog. Gygax didn’t lead a nation, win a war, or cure a disease. What he did do was co-create a game that fundamentally reshaped the imaginative landscape of the modern world. Just as significantly, he popularized it. Through passion, persistence, and a gift for theatrical self-promotion, he took a niche idea, half rooted in wargaming, half in pulp fantasy, and gave it structure, rules, and language. He turned it into something accessible, repeatable, and endlessly expandable. He turned it into Dungeons & Dragons.

In this, Gygax's closest analog is probably Walt Disney. Neither man invented his medium. Animated film predates Disney, just as fantasy games predate D&D. However, both men synthesized their influences into a new form and then made it a fixture of mainstream culture. Disney did it with cartoons. Gygax did it with dungeons, dragons, and rulebooks put together in his kitchen.

From that small seed, a global phenomenon grew.

If that seems overstated, consider where we are in 2025. Playing Dungeons & Dragons is no longer a fringe entertainment. It is a cornerstone of pop culture. It’s referenced in popular films and prestige television. It inspires bestselling novels, hit video games, and streaming series. Its influence is everywhere, from the language of "hit points" and "levels" to the way we talk about our personalities in the shorthand of alignment. "I'm a chaotic good introvert," someone might say, without either irony or the need for explanation.

None of that was inevitable. Without Gygax, it’s possible that some form of roleplaying game would have come into being, but would it have appeared in 1974? Would it have spread as quickly or inspired so many imitators? Would the worlds of gaming and fantasy fiction look anything like they do today?

Gary Gygax’s true legacy is more than a single game. It’s a mode of thinking, a grammar of imagination. It’s the idea that you don't have to be content with simply reading about fantasy adventures; you can go on one yourself. He gave us the tools to build our own worlds, to share them with friends, and to lose ourselves in collective acts of creativity.

That’s not a footnote to cultural history. That is cultural history.

So yes, Gary Gygax deserves to be remembered and indeed celebrated as a visionary, a pioneer, and one of the key figures in shaping how we imagine and play in the modern age.

Happy birthday, Gary. You didn’t just help us imagine new worlds. You showed us how to make them.

Memories of Game Stores Past (Part III)

I'm old, old enough to remember a time when the local game store was not merely a place to buy things. It was a crossroads, a hub for roleplayers, wargamers, and fans of genre fiction of all stripes. In those days, game stores felt weird in the best possible way: crammed with strange titles, eccentric proprietors, and regulars who treated the place like a second home. They were cluttered, often a bit dingy, and absolutely magical.

I spent countless hours in such stores. I remember walking through their doors and being hit by the smell of old cardboard and newsprint and the sight of wooden shelves bowed under the weight of too many Avalon Hill and SPI boxed wargames. You could browse freely, picking up games you’d never heard of, flipping through rulebooks that transported you to strange new worlds. If you were lucky, someone might be running a game in the back room – and if you hung around long enough, you might even get asked to join.

That’s how I discovered many of the games that shaped my tastes and interests. This was long before carefully curated social media feeds or electronic publisher newsletters, when sheer chance might introduce you to a captivating cover, a staff recommendation, or a game in progress that caught your attention. The old game store was a vehicle for discovery. It introduced me to lots of games I might never have found otherwise.

That kind of store, the kind I knew in my youth, is largely gone.

Certainly, there are still game stores out there, some of them excellent in their own way – but they’re not the same. Most of them survive today by focusing on collectible card games, miniatures wargaming like Warhammer, and modern boardgames. Roleplaying games, if present at all, are often confined to a few shelves of familiar titles from major publishers. The walls of obscure and idiosyncratic RPGs I once browsed for hours have mostly vanished.

The reasons aren’t mysterious. The Internet changed everything. Online retailers offer discounts and immediate availability that physical stores can’t hope to match. Digital publishing has displaced print in many cases. Perhaps most significantly, online play, something I myself participate in weekly, has made many of the accessories that once sustained game stores obsolete. Why buy dice, for example, when a VTT takes care of it?

None of this is inherently bad. In fact, I think it's great that it’s never been easier to find people with whom to play, no matter where you live. As regular readers know, I referee or play in several weekly online campaigns with friends scattered across the world. Likewise, the indie RPG scene is thriving in ways that would been nigh impossible back in the 1980s. Yet, despite all this richness, I can’t shake the feeling that something important has been lost.

Serendipity. That’s what’s missing.

In my experience, the Internet is great at showing us more of what we already like. It’s less good at surprising us. In the absence of physical spaces where different genres, systems, and subcultures once collided, the RPG hobby has become more siloed. It’s entirely possible now to spend years playing RPGs and never stray beyond a handful of familiar games. That wasn’t the case when every trip to the store might reveal something you’d never seen before.

Back then, I had a much more eclectic gaming diet and not just because I was young and had more free time, though that’s certainly part of it. No, the environment encouraged it. Game stores were chaos. They were cluttered with possibilities and they invited you to take risks, to try something new. They were social, too, places where you talked with strangers, traded recommendations, maybe even rolled some dice together.

Today, many of the stores that still exist feel lonelier, at least to me. They’re quieter, more sterile, less open to chance. They sell games, but they rarely feel like places to do anything else.

I don’t say this to complain about change for its own sake. Much as I dislike it, change is inevitable and not all of it is unwelcome. However, I do think we’ve lost something intangible but important. The video rental store analogy fits here. It's true that streaming services offer more movies than any Blockbuster ever did, but no algorithm has ever replicated the joy of stumbling across something unexpected on the shelf or the spontaneous conversation with a fellow customer that convinced you to give it a try.

I miss that. I suspect I’m not alone in doing so. We may well be richer in options than ever before, but in some that I think matter, we are also poorer.

If a Game Falls in the Forest

In discussing the possibility of roleplaying games being invented in another era, I soon found myself thinking more and more about the actual history of the hobby, particularly its beginnings. That’s because every so often, someone unearths an obscure set of notes or recalls the private campaign of a long-forgotten hobbyist and claims that roleplaying games were created before Dungeons & Dragons, sometimes long before. According to these accounts, Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson merely popularized the form, while others were its “true” inventors.

I understand the impulse. Recorded history often overlooks lesser-known figures and it's right to acknowledge the contributions of pioneers who laid the groundwork for later developments. That said, I have difficulty crediting anyone as the “father” of a hobby unless he shared his creation in a way that made it accessible, intelligible, and, most importantly, replicable by people outside his immediate circle.

This may seem a narrow definition of invention, but I believe it’s essential, especially in the case of roleplaying games. A private amusement, even if it includes characters, rules, and imaginative scenarios, does not a new hobby make. Countless clever diversions have lived and died in obscurity, forgotten or never known at all. If no one beyond its creators can play, understand, or build upon it, then its significance is limited at best. To put it bluntly, if a roleplaying game existed in, say, 1958 but was never published, never disseminated, and never expanded beyond its original group, it may as well have never existed.

To put it somewhat flippantly, this is the creative equivalent of the old philosophical question, "If a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, does it make a sound?" Did a roleplaying game “exist” in any meaningful way before D&D if no one else could participate in or reproduce it? My answer is: not really.

To invent something isn’t simply to stumble upon a novel idea. It’s to realize that idea in such a way that others can use, learn from, and transform it. That’s the true achievement of Dave Arneson and Gary Gygax, an achievement no one else can claim. They didn’t just play a new kind of game. They wrote down its rules, organized them, and, however clumsily at first, published them so that others could do the same. No one else had done that before. Here, I think we must be honest: it was Gygax who did the lion’s share of this work. Arneson brought his imaginative brilliance and the experience of his Blackmoor campaign, without which roleplaying games as we now know them would have been impossible, but it was Gygax who hammered the concept into something others could use and got it into print.

With Gygax's efforts in this respect, Dungeons & Dragons would probably never have been published. Instead, we might still be sifting through the remnants of the Twin Cities wargaming scene, piecing together anecdotes about some curious experiment in fantasy miniatures Arneson and his friends played in the early '70s. Because of Gygax, we got three little brown books that any reasonably curious teenager could pick up, read, and use as a blueprint to build worlds of his own. That’s invention in the fullest sense.

None of this is to diminish the role of earlier innovators like Dave Wesely, creator of Braunstein, or others whose names have been lost to time. They’re worthy of celebration. Each, in his own way, added ideas to a growing stew of influences out of which roleplaying coalesced. However, none of these predecessors synthesized those ideas into a coherent, replicable form, let alone shared them widely. They didn’t transmit the concept.

I think that's a distinction that matters. Creativity is common; invention is rare.

The history of games is full of apocrypha and alternate claimants. Perhaps someone did play something like D&D in the 1940s. Maybe there’s a letter buried in an archive describing a fantasy parlor game with a referee and evolving characters. If so, that’s fascinating, but it’s not the same as creating the roleplaying game as we know it today.

Invention isn’t about who got there first. It’s about who made it possible for others to follow.

From the Brontës to Braunstein

The history of roleplaying games is, by now, well known, at least in broad outline. In the early 1970s, a handful of imaginative wargamers, drawing on a variety of inspirations, both literary and ludic – I hate jargon like that but I can think of no better word – devised a new kind of game. What began as an offshoot of miniatures wargaming blossomed into something wholly novel: Dungeons & Dragons, the first roleplaying game and the start of an entirely new hobby. What’s less often asked is whether something like D&D could have arisen earlier. Could roleplaying games have been invented, not merely in embryonic form, but recognizably so, decades before their actual debut?

It’s a question I was recently asked by a reader via email, though, as I told him in my reply, it's also one I've mulled over many times myself. On the one hand, it seems completely plausible. Human beings have always told stories, assumed roles, and imagined themselves as other people. On the other hand, roleplaying games, as we understand them today, require more than just imagination. They require rules, structure, and a framework for shared storytelling that’s open-ended but repeatable, not to mention playable by groups of people. That’s a tall order and one, I suspect, that might not have been fulfillable much earlier than it actually was.

Even so, I think it's a question worth exploring, as I told my correspondent. That's why I decided to devote this post to the topic, including some brief speculation about just what a roleplaying game produced prior to 1974, had it been created, could have looked like.

Before doing that, though, I wanted to offer a rough definition of what I mean by a "roleplaying game." To my mind, a roleplaying game is not just a game with characters or a narrative, but one in which players assume the roles of imaginary personas within a shared, evolving, fictional world. There must also be open-ended interaction with that world, adjudicated by a set of rules or by a human referee (probably both). In other words, the game must provide a mechanism for ongoing collaborative storytelling that can generate new situations, rather than merely following a pre-written script.

We can quibble about my definition and, truth be told, I'm not entirely happy with it, but I think it's good enough for my present purposes. Given the parameters, then, under what conditions could such a thing even arise?

To start, there must be a culture of play – not just childhood play, but adult leisure time devoted to structured, often abstract, pastimes. This criterion, I think, narrows the field considerably. While games of all kinds are ancient, hobby gaming of the kind that leads to things like miniatures battles, science fiction conventions, or fanzine communities is a fairly recent phenomenon. Prior to the mid-20th century, hobbies tended to be solitary (e.g. collecting stamps, building model trains) or social but formal (e.g. cards, chess, sports). The idea of imaginative, improvisational group play as a serious adult pursuit was likely a bridge too far for most societies until not all that long ago.

Then there is the economic component. RPGs are, by their nature, complex. They typically involve rulebooks, paper, dice, pencils, maybe miniatures, and a steady stream of new materials to read and incorporate. All of this presupposes access to affordable printing, widespread literacy, and sufficient disposable income to indulge in what is, quite frankly, a non-essential pastime.

Add to this the influence of fantasy literature, particularly the kind that fosters immersion in imaginary worlds. While such literature absolutely existed prior to the 20th century – my Pulp Fantasy Library series includes multiple examples of what I'm talking about – the genre had not yet reached the critical mass needed to inspire a broader movement of readers-turned-creators. That wouldn't come until the rise of the pulps and, later, the mass popularity of J.R.R. Tolkien.

All of which is to say: I don’t believe roleplaying games were inevitable. Nor do I believe they could have arisen all that much earlier than they did. Nevertheless, there are a few intriguing possibilities worth considering.

Of all the earlier eras that might have given rise to something resembling a roleplaying game, the Victorian period is perhaps the most plausible. The Victorians were inveterate hobbyists, fond of catalogs, elaborate parlor games, and gentlemanly pastimes pursued with a zeal that often bordered on the obsessive. More significantly, they were among the first to develop formal wargames, none more famous than H.G. Wells’s Little Wars, published in 1913 (technically, post-Victorian, but I'm OK with that).

While Little Wars lacks the improvisational openness and character-centered focus of a true roleplaying game, it nevertheless offers tantalizing glimpses of the path not taken. For example, it encourages the invention of fictional armies and, by implication, fictional countries to support them. Wells himself recounts some of his battles in narrative terms, portraying himself and his opponents as imaginary generals leading imaginary forces, complete with strategic dilemmas and dramatic turns of fate. In this, one can detect the germ of roleplaying. With a slight cultural shift and a bit more emphasis on character over campaign, one can almost imagine Little Wars evolving into something more like a roleplaying game.

One might also consider the games of the Brontë children, consisting of invented worlds, described through stories, poems, and letters. Inspired by a set of toy soldiers given to Branwell Brontë in December 1827, the siblings each created an imaginary kingdom, complete with its own geography, history, and cast of recurring characters. These were private amusements rather than games in any formal sense. There were, for instance, no rules or adjudication, but they demonstrate that the impulse for immersive, serialized storytelling existed, even among children raised in relative isolation. The Brontës' creations are reminiscent in some ways to a referee’s campaign setting, continuously expanded and revised over time and in response to changing events within it.

What’s striking about these two examples is how each contains one half of what roleplaying games would eventually become. Wells provided rules and structured play, but his battles lacked characters in the personal, individual sense and unfolded largely without narrative continuity beyond what the players themselves imposed. The Brontës, by contrast, created intricate, evolving worlds filled with characters and stories, but they did so without any formal rules or mechanisms for shared adjudication. In both cases, the essential components were present but disconnected: storytelling without structure and structure without storytelling. What was lacking was a bridge between these imaginative impulses and the domain of systematized, collaborative play, a framework that could make private fantasy into a repeatable, transmissible experience shared by many. The alchemy of open-ended narrative bound to procedure – the heart of roleplaying games in my opinion – had not yet been discovered.

It was not until the interwar period that some of these conditions began to change. The rise of pulp magazines introduced vast new audiences to tales of fantasy, science fiction, and weird horror. These stories, though often formulaic, laid the groundwork for shared genres and tropes. Even more important were the fandoms that grew up around them, through letters columns, conventions, and amateur press associations. Consider, for example, that H.P. Lovecraft met some of his closest friends, many of whom went on to become influential writers of fantasy and science fiction themselves, through APAs to which he belonged.

These fan communities did more than read. They created. They wrote fiction, debated continuity, argued over setting and character details, and occasionally even imagined themselves in the worlds they loved. This tendency only deepened after World War II, as mass printing and distribution became cheaper and more accessible and science fiction and fantasy matured as genres. Early versions of LARPing, the Society for Creative Anachronism, and the first fantasy board games all emerged from this stew of fannish creativity. It is no accident that Gygax and Arneson also came from this world. Without it, Dungeons & Dragons could never have been created or, if it had been created, would never have found a large audience.

Had someone in the 1930s or 1940s attempted to create a roleplaying game, I suspect it would have looked very different from what we know today. Possibly, it might have taken the form of an elaborate correspondence game, with players sending letters in-character to a central referee, who adjudicated events and mailed back results. Alternately, it might have resembled a parlor game with scripted outcomes. In any case, I suspect it would have remained confined to a small circle of friends, passed between them alone and never published. All of these are intriguing counterfactuals, of course, but they also highlight how contingent the birth of the RPG truly was. It required more than creative individuals. It required the right cultural, economic, technological, and especially social context.

Could roleplaying games have been invented earlier than they were?

In theory, yes. In practice, I highly doubt it. Too many of the prerequisites simply weren’t present until the 1960s and early ’70s: the widespread embrace of fantasy fiction, the do-it-yourself ethos of fandom, the democratization of leisure, and a new cultural openness to improvisation and play. It’s tempting to view RPGs as inevitable, as something that had to happen, but history rarely works that way. In another timeline, Gary Gygax might have remained an insurance underwriter and Dave Arneson a gifted but obscure tinkerer with wargames rules. The creation of Dungeons & Dragons was, in many ways, a happy historical accident.

Even so, it's fun to imagine a world in which Edwardian gentlemen gather in a smoky drawing room, taking on the roles of Martian adventurers or subterranean explorers, while a bespectacled referee consults a sheaf of densely typed rules from behind a screen and invokes the power of the d12. Alas, it never happened nor was it likely to have done so.