Happy 50th Birthday to DUNGEONS & DRAGONS, and the tabletop roleplaying genre

Dungeons & Dragons turns 50 years old today, or at least today-ish. The first few copies of the original release of the game hit the wild in late January and early February 1974, although the ad hoc nature of the game's development and release means there's always been ambiguity over the precise date.

D&D was co-developed by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson, two wargamers from Wisconsin. Since the 1960s they'd been playing and designing wargames, starting off in traditional arenas like Civil War and Napoleonic War games, as well as naval titles (including their first co-designed game, Don't Give Up the Ship!). By the end of the decade they had developed an interest in fantasy fiction, with Gygax particularly driven by his love of the works of Jack Vance, Fritz Leiber, Poul Anderson, Michael Moorcock and Robert E. Howard. Arneson and some of their friends were also fans of The Lord of the Rings, which had recently blown up big time (Gygax was cooler on Rings, which he considered boring, preferring the shorter, more focused adventuring of The Hobbit).

Merging fantasy with wargaming seemed an obvious move, and as early as the late 1960s Gygax was organising a play-by-mail campaign set in a fantasy land called "the Great Kingdom." However, assembling a large army of elves, orcs and goblins was difficult, forcing players to substitute models of, say, French line infantry or Prussian hussars. In 1971 Gygax and Jeff Perren collaborated to create a wargame, which they named Chainmail. Drawing on 1968 wargame Siege of Bodenburg for inspiration, the game focused on medieval battles but also had a "fantasy supplement" with rules on incorporating elves, dwarves and magic into the game.

Arneson was a fan of Chainmail but had also been working on a fantasy variation of Braunstein, an experimental rules system allowing for the control of individual characters on the battlefield. As he developed the project, Arneson added elements including character classes and levels, experience points and armour class, as well as a background setting, which he called "Blackmoor." Arneson invited Gygax to play the game and Gygax immediately saw the potential for it. He developed many of the ideas in greater detail and play-tested the first variations at home with his wife and children. He and Arneson agreed to develop the game as a commercial project; according to legend, Gygax's then-two-year-old daughter picked the title "Dungeons & Dragons" from a list Gygax had been mulling over.

The original Dungeons & Dragons "white box" set from January 1974.

Arneson and Gygax set up the company Tactical Studies Rules (TSR) in October 1973 to handle the project. Their budget for the project was just $2,000 (about $12,450 in today's money), with only around $100 budgeted for artwork. With the budget limited, they were only able to print 1,000 copies, which they sold through local conventions and mail order ads in magazines and fanzines. Arneson and Gygax did not expect big success, but all 1,000 copies were sold within a few months and they rushed through a reprint; more than 3,000 copies were sold in 1975.

To Gygax and Arneson's surprise, they quickly had interest from overseas. In mid-1975 they were contacted by Ian Livingstone and Steven Jackson, who had set up a London-based company called Games Workshop, which was designing boards for popular games like Backgammon and Go. GW became the exclusive European importer of Dungeons & Dragons, which drove the success of both companies. GW later invested in miniatures, co-founding Citadel Miniatures in 1978 and developing a generic line of high-quality (for the time) fantasy figures for use with D&D and other fantasy games like Runequest and Middle-earth Roleplaying. When Games Workshop lost the exclusive distribution licence for D&D, they decided to create their own tabletop wargame using their fantasy figures...although that is a different story.

The popularity of D&D rapidly grew. Arneson and Gygax published several supplements and expanded TSR, launching a tie-in magazine (called The Dragon, later shorted to Dragon) and incorporating new rules and ideas. Notably, D&D did not launch with an established setting or world, instead encouraging Dungeon Masters to create their own world. Gygax and Arneson eventually detailed their home campaign worlds, named the World of Greyhawk and Blackmoor respectively, for supplements, but these remained optional.

The encouragement was well-taken, however, with a young Canadian teenager named Ed Greenwood converting a world he'd created as a little kid for short stories into a D&D campaign world, which he dubbed Forgotten Realms, and started writing Dragon articles in the setting. A very young British writer, Charles Stross, was also encouraged to create his own monsters, "borrowing" the name "githyanki" from an obscure novel called Dying of the Light (by an ultra-obscure writer called George R.R. Martin) for a memorable species for the Fiend Folio tome. Meanwhile, a writer in South Carolina called Oliver Rigney, Jr. agreed to run D&D campaigns for his young stepson and started pondering his own ideas for a fantasy world. In California, the Abrams Brothers were inspired to create their own D&D world, which they called Midkemia. They quickly moved beyond D&D to other rules systems and developed the world further; when a friend from university called Ray Feist asked if he could write a novel called Magician based on the same world, they said okay. Over in the UK a press officer working for a nuclear power plant, named T. Pratchett, invited his co-workers to a D&D night at the local pub and was dismayed when they went totally off the rails and trashed the campaign; he was at least satisfied with one of his creations for the game, an ambulatory chest which ran around on tons of little legs, carrying the adventurers' gear.

Up north in Canada, two archaeology students started playing a D&D game. They quickly tired of the focus on killing monsters and looting their stuff, but became intrigued by applying archaeological principles to the game: who are the monsters, who built these dungeons, and what history led to these events? In 1986 they switched their gaming to the newly-released GURPS system and developed what became known as the Malazan world, with Ian Esslemont penning the first proto-Malazan novel, Night of Knives in 1986 and Steve Lundin (aka Steven Erikson) writing a film script in the same world called Gardens of the Moon; with zero interest from Hollywood he redeveloped it into a novel in 1991, and the rest was, as they say, history.

The AD&D Player's Handbook, 1st Edition, 1978.

Back in the late 1970s, Arneson was not hugely interested in working in a corporate environment and bailed on the game, instead happy to collect his royalties as the game's success began to explode exponentially. This irked Gygax, who continued to work in the trenches of game development, writing and making new business deals. According to some theories, Gygax began development of a new D&D derivative which Arneson which would not be involved in, allowing Gygax to claim sole copyright (and thus royalties) over. This resulted in Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, aka D&D 1st Edition, which appeared in 1978. Arneson's lawyers were unhappy with Gygax's argument, and later legal deals were settled in both parties' favour. However, the existence of "Advanced" D&D kind of required the continued existence of a "Basic" D&D, which appeared in 1981 (after a prototypical version was tested in 1977). The Basic D&D line eventually became the biggest-selling line of D&D projects, shifting over six million copies.

In 1983, TSR shifted strategies by planning a "multimedia event," one of the first of its kind, with a major new campaign set in a brand new world focusing on dragons. This resulted in the Dragonlance setting, spearheaded by a 16-volume adventure series and a novel trilogy, The Dragonlance Chronicles, by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman. The novels became bestsellers, shifting four million copies before the end of the decade. 

In the early 1980s, Gygax decamped to Hollywood to work on a D&D movie and TV show, eventually resulting in the release of a Dungeons & Dragons animated series, but no movie. With Gygax apparently distracted by partying at the Playboy Mansion (as you do), TSR recalled him and manoeuvred him out of the company in 1985.

With Gygax gone, designers felt uncomfortable carrying on using his Greyhawk setting. With Dragonlance featuring many deviations from "core" D&D rules, it was decided to develop a new campaign world. TSR called on Ed Greenwood, who'd been contributing to Dragon Magazine for a decade with articles set in the Forgotten Realms, and bought the setting from him, publishing it in 1987. Tie-in novels also appeared, with the third novel published, The Crystal Shard by R.A. Salvatore (featuring a dark elf protagonist, Drizzt Do'Urden), becoming an immediate big hit. The success of the Realms encouraged a whole slew of new campaign settings, although none became as big as the Realms or the earlier setting: Spelljammer (1989), Dark Sun (1991), Al-Qadim (1992), Planescape (1994) and Birthright (1995).

The 2nd Edition D&D Player's Handbook, 1989.

The 2nd Edition of Dungeons & Dragons launched in 1989, but the game started dropping sales in the early 1990s. D&D had effectively created the entire tabletop roleplaying game industry, resulting in a bunch of other games soon appearing: Empire of the Petal Throne (1975), Boot Hill (1975), Traveller (1977), RuneQuest (1978), Gamma World (1978), Call of Cthulhu (1981), Champions (1981), Star Trek (1982), Palladium (1983), Heroes Unlimited (1984), Paranoia (1984), Doctor Who (1985), Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1985), MechWarrior (1985), Robotech (1986), GURPS (1986), Star Wars (1987), Cyberpunk (1988) and Shadowrun (1989), among many others.

Hugely important was Vampire: The Masquerade, which appeared in 1991. With a streamlined rules system and a cool setting with a ton of deep lore, the game quickly became hugely popular, eclipsing D&D in sales. Weird Western Deadlands, which launched in 1996, was also hugely successful in a similar vein. D&D was increasingly seen as old-fashioned and old-hat, with its rules system feeling archaic (with many core features largely unchanged since 1974, despite three distinct versions of the game having existed) and its overwhelming focus on combat over the social side of roleplaying feeling dated. Unbeknown to fans and players, TSR was also in financial trouble, trouble that continued to expand through bizarre business decisions and the policy of creating more product to push through publishers to create churn, even though the products were not selling.

In 1997 TSR effectively collapsed and had to be rescued by Seattle-based Wizards of the Coast, the company founded just a few years earlier to sell the Magic: The Gathering card game. Magic: The Gathering was a colossal, ludicrous sales success and it was easily able to buy TSR and settle its immense debts. Goodwill towards D&D was starting to build again, thanks to the success of the tie-in video games from BioWare and Black Isle Studios, including Baldur's Gate (1998), Planescape: Torment (1999) and Icewind Dale (2000), along with the various sequels. Wizards of the Coast released Dungeons & Dragons 3rd Edition in 2000 to immediate success and acclaim, reasserting the game's position as the market-leading roleplaying game. The d20 rules system pioneered by 3E soon spawned a whole host of other games.

The D&D 3rd Edition Player's Handbook (2000), the first recognisably "modern" iteration of the game.

However, 3rd Edition lacked the long tail of earlier versions of the game, something the release of a "3.5 Edition" in 2003 seemed to exacerbate rather than solve (fans angered by the release of new rulebooks barely three years after the last). Faced with dwindling sales, WotC released the 4th Edition of the game years ahead of schedule in 2008, but the game saw a huge move away from D&D's original rules, resulting in a lot more anger from fans. Many decamped to rival fantasy game Pathfinder, established in 2009 and carrying on the 3rd Edition line of rules. D&D went through a nadir of sales and popularity in the early 2010s, with WotC rumoured to be considering cancelling the game outright. The 5th Edition, released in 2014, was a big improvement, at least in the eyes of the game-buying public, and livestreams of games over the Internet (particularly the Critical Role webseries) soon triggered high sales. The game also got a boost from the major role it played in Netflix series Stranger Things (2016-present). 5th Edition's sales became the healthiest seen for the game since the early 1980s. A revision of 5th Edition is due for release later this year.

It's not always been plain sailing. WotC have been criticised in recent years for ambiguity over AI artwork, trying to cancel the Open Game Licence (allowing third parties to produce compatible material) and a lacklustre approach to D&D's heritage, with very few novels or decent setting material being published. An overzealous approach to copyright protection (resulting in private detectives storming a YouTuber's house after he received a product before its review date) has also proven controversial.

In its fifty years on sale, D&D has shifted around 20 million core rulebooks and sourcebooks, over 100 million spin-off novels and around 30 million video games. A minimum of 50 million people are believed to have played D&D. It spawned the entire tabletop roleplaying industry and played a key role in the development of video games. At least dozens and likely hundreds (maybe even thousands) of published fantasy authors have played the game. Its impact on fantasy, especially secondary world, epic fantasy, might be second only to that of The Lord of the Rings. Hopefully it can enjoy at least fifty more years of success.

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D&D movie entering pre-production

The new Dungeons and Dragons film is moving forwards after a lengthy span spent in legal battles. A couple of months ago Warner Brothers announced that Goosebumps director Rob Letterman would be directing the film and now they are deep in the casting process.

To be clear, Vin Diesel has not been cast in the new Dungeons and Dragons movie. But he probably should be.

Ansel Elgort, who played the lead in The Fault in Our Stars, is in advanced talks to star in the D&D movie. Warner Brothers are also looking for "a Vin Diesel" type of actor for another role, which run through the Universal Marketing Translator, means they want Vin Diesel to do it but not necessarily for his usual high fee. Given The Diesel's well-known love of D&D (he got a cake in the shape of the rulebooks for his birthday), he might be open to negotiation. Let him split a beholder in half whilst screaming "CRITICAL HIT!" and he'll probably be on board.


The new Dungeons and Dragons film will be set in the Forgotten Realms world and will involve the Yawning Portal Inn and the city of Waterdeep. However, slightly curiously, it will be an original story rather than drawing on the hundreds of best-selling novels, gaming supplements or video games. Hasbro and Warner Brothers are looking for a slightly less serious tone for the movie, something more like Guardians of the Galaxy rather than Game of Thrones, and are also hoping it will be successful enough for them to launch a shared movie universe. Normally this would elicit groans, but given the vast diversity and richness of the dozens of D&D worlds, this franchise is actually uniquely suited for such treatment.

It looks like the movie will enter production proper later this year for release in 2018 or 2019.

Meanwhile, producer Tom DeSanto is developing new film and TV properties based on the work of the late D&D co-creator Gary Gygax. D&D itself will not be involved, as Warner Brothers and Hasbro control the screen rights to it, so this will draw on Gygax's other games, novels and materials.

A History of Epic Fantasy - Part 7

For many writers of epic fantasy, the primary reference point is J.R.R. Tolkien and The Lord of the Rings. However, in the 1970s another way of enjoying fantastic fiction arose. This was in the form of roleplaying, pen-and-paper games that allowed players to create characters and take part in narrative adventures of their own.

Roleplaying can be defined as a meeting of spontaneous improvisation - where people have to play a character and react to rapidly changing situations as their character would, not themselves - and board games. Americans Gary Gygax (b. 1939) and David Arneson (b. 1947) were avid players of board games and wargames, elaborate recreations of historical battles using miniature figures. The two gamers met in 1969 at the second Gen Con gaming convention in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. Their shared love of naval combat games led to them creating their own naval wargame, Don't Give Up the Ship!

The two gamers were still working with miniatures but were slowly moving towards what would become the more familiar form of roleplaying. Arneson had created a board game without a (permanent) board called Blackmoor, in which the players created characters who used medieval technology in a fictional realm, initially highly fantastical but then drawing on science fiction ideas. In 1971 Gygax had created a miniature game called Chainmail which recreated medieval combat and featured rules for armour and weapons. He also produced a fantasy supplement, which added monsters, elves and a small number of magical spells.

In 1972 the two designers met again and compared notes. Gygax saw the appeal of welding miniatures-style combat rules to Arenson's free-flowing Blackmoor idea and experimented with this himself, beginning a series of nascent roleplaying adventures in a land called Greyhawk. Seeing the potential, they collaborated on a rule set. This became the very first edition of Dungeons and Dragons, released in January 1974.

In D&D, players create characters who belong to one of several races (humans, elves, dwarves, gnomes and halflings are the standard races; optional rules allow players to control everything from fairies to dragons) and who also play one of several classes or occupations (warrior, barbarian, monk, paladin, wizard, priest, druid and bard are among the most typical classes). The players then have to roleplay their characters, explaining how and why they have joined forces to form a party of adventurers. Another player, the Dungeon Master, then runs the adventure, describing the scenery and adversaries the party has to face and playing all of the other parts in the game. In return for achieving successes, the players gain experience points and can "level up", gaining additional abilities and bonuses to attack and defence. There is no board, with the players and DM instead describing what is happening orally and the game being dependent on communication. Early D&D focused on exploring underground dungeons and ruined castles in search of treasure. However, the game rapidly expanded to include adventures in cities, on the high seas and everywhere players could conceive of.

The generic fantasy backdrop to D&D is often said to have been ripped off from Tolkien. However, Gygax always denied this. Although he'd been a fan of The Hobbit and had included halflings in the game as tip of the hat to it, he disliked Lord of the Rings. Instead, he drew on other sources such as Fritz Leiber (whose Lankhmar setting Gygax later licensed as a D&D setting; he paid Leiber so much money for it that Leiber was able to live off the deal for several years) and, most notably, Jack Vance. D&D's magic system is in fact pretty much identical to that in the Dying Earth series of novels, even down to some of the spell names. Other writers such as Robert E. Howard were cited as inspirations.

Gygax as depicted in Futurama.

A modest success at first, D&D exploded into a wider form of popularity with the release of Advanced Dungeons and Dragons in 1977, which dispensed with the previous box set design and emphasised play using just the rulebooks and dice, with no miniatures necessary (although optional rules for their use remained). The game was rebooted with new editions in 1989, 2000, 2008 and 2014. As of last year, Hasbro (the current owners of the game) had estimated that a conservative minimum of 20 million people had played D&D and the game had sold more than $1 billion worth of materials.

Other roleplaying games followed, such as Marc Miller's  Traveller (1977), Steve Perrin's RuneQuest (1978) and Superworld (1983), Steve Jackson's GURPS (1986), Mike Pondsmith's Cyberpunk (1988), and a series of highly influential RPGs from Jordan Weisman: MechWarrior (1986), Shadowrun (1989) and Earthdawn (1992). There was also the Star Wars title from West End Games (1987) which was important in establishing the now-defunct Expanded Universe and pinning down names and terminology for a lot of the worlds, races and technology in the setting. However, Dungeons and Dragons remained by far the biggest of them all.


The impact of D&D on fantasy was notable. Studying at San Diego University in the late 1970s, Raymond E. Feist was introduced to the game by his friends. Unimpressed with the existing rules and settings, they began changing things around and developing their own setting. Steve Abrams did a lot of work in the creation of this world, which was dubbed Midkemia. In 1977 Feist asked if he could try writing a novel set in that world, to which his colleagues agreed. This became the seminal novel Magician, eventually published in 1982.


In 1981 two young Canadians named Steve Lundin and Ian Esslemont started playing a game of D&D with a group of friends and began developing their own fantasy world. However, they found the rules limiting and became more interested in narrative roleplay, focusing on tragedy rather than heroism. The release of GURPS (Generic Universal Role Playing System) in 1986, which encouraged a more freeform style of play, saw them add a lot of weight and colour to their world. Shortly afterwards Esslemont wrote very early versions of novels he called Night of Knives and Return of the Crimson Guard (published, after many delays, in 2004 and 2008 respectively). Around the same time Lundin wrote a film script he called Gardens of the Moon. Unable to interest anyone in it, he re-tooled the script as a novel in 1991; eventually (under the pen-name Steven Erikson) it was released in 1999 as the first volume of The Malazan Book of the Fallen.

Even more established writers got in on the act. In the late 1970s a writer named James Oliver Rigney started running games of D&D for his stepson Will. Shortly afterwards he was contracted to write a series of new Conan novels under the pen-name Robert Jordan. He was also just beginning to come up with an idea about a fantasy world where only women could use magic and where magic had a precise set of guiding rules, much like the D&D magic system. The influnce of D&D on The Wheel of Time is debatable (Jordan never cited it as a major inspiration), but it is interesting that the biggest epic fantasy author after Tolkien (so far) at least dabbled with the game.

Around this time George R.R. Martin, recently moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico, discovered roleplaying. He enjoyed it as a pastime, but it didn't really grab his attention until he was given a copy of Superworld in 1983, which allowed the players to become superheroes. Martin soon began running an epic adventure for his players and collaborators. After a couple of years of focusing on the game rather than his novel-writing career (which had stalled with the failure of The Armageddon Rag), Martin hit on the idea of using the game as a source for fiction. The result was the Wild Cards anthology series, which began in 1987 and is still running today.

Dungeons and Dragons itself did not initially inspire much in the way of fiction directly based on it, despite the release of several different campaign worlds or settings for the game. The first proper D&D novel was Quag Keep (1979), written by none other than the highly-regarded Andre Norton, but fiction deriving directly from the game was not particularly successful until 1984. In that year Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman released Dragons of Autumn Twilight, the first novel in The Dragonlance Chronicles, which went on to become one of the biggest-selling epic fantasy series of all time. In 1988 R.A. Salvatore released the Forgotten Realms novel The Crystal Shard, the first novel featuring his dark elf hero Drizzt Do'Urden, a series which went on to be even bigger and more successful.

Dungeons and Dragons had a big impact on the field of fantasy. It consolidated a lot of ideas (some previously originating with Tolkien and other authors) that would become important in the subgenre as it developed, such as worldbuilding, magic, the various races and the idea of a "party" of disparate individuals coming together for a common cause, as well as both inspiring epic fantasy authors and, through its spin-off novels, directly starting the careers of numerous others.

But the modern fantasy genre hadn't quite come into being yet. The groundwork for that was laid at the very end of 1976 when a successful science fiction author and editor named Lester del Rey established a new imprint for Ballantine Books and started looking for authors to kick the line off memorably.

The Worlds of D&D: Greyhawk

The History of Greyhawk

Dungeons and Dragons was created in the early 1970s by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson as an extension of their tabletop wargame, Chainmail. The earlier game was about massed battles between armies of miniatures, initially focusing on historical events and then bringing in fantastical creatures and magic. Continuing the process, Gygax extrapolated out a game focusing on a smaller group, consisting of say 4-6 heroes, in which they went off adventuring. The original focus of the game were 'dungeon crawls', with the players exploring ancient ruins, killing monsters and disabling traps to gain both loot and 'EXP' or experience points. As the characters gained EXP levels they gained more abilities, became tougher and more difficult to kill and more skilled in evading traps.

Of course, amassing vast quantities of loot by itself was no real reward. You needed somewhere to retreat, freshen up, sell your loot and buy new gear before resuming the battle. And of course, repeated dungeon-crawling gets a little monotonous after a while, so why not have adventures above ground? And hey, instead of fighting monsters how about the heroes having to say investigate a murder or guard a caravan or something instead? And if you're going to be moving around outside the dungeon, then you need a world to do that in...

So were born the original D&D campaign settings, actually surprisingly quickly after the original game was released in 1972. Dave Arneson worked on a setting called Blackmoor (eventually absorbed into the later Mystara setting), whilst Gygax's home setting developed quite quickly as well. In his case, the elaborate dungeon (eventually amassing several dozen levels) was located underneath a location called Castle Greyhawk and its attendant city. As the campaign progressed, the players seemed more reluctant to return to the dungeon and preferred getting involved in the politics and factionalism of the city itself, or exploring the countryside beyond its walls, including yet more dungeons (such as the formidable Temple of Elemental Evil) and other cities. With Gygax running several games a week as well as running TSR, the company publishing D&D material, there was no time for elaborate worldbuilding, so he based the map of the continent on one of North America, aligning Greyhawk with Chicago and its southern rival, Dyvers, with Minneapolis.

As the campaign unfolded, the world of Greyhawk became home to many famous and powerful warriors, wizards and clerics, such as Mordenkainen, Bigby, Tenser, Melf (legendarily named because the player couldn't decide on an original name so went for Male+Elf) and Rary. As D&D itself was being developed and revised constantly at this time, these names found their way into the rulebook as spells such as Bigby's Crushing Hand, Tenser's Floating Disc or Melf's Acid Arrow, which survive pretty much to this day.

The 1983 World of Greyhawk boxed set for Advanced D&D 1st Edition.

Greyhawk made its public debut in Dragon Magazine (then The Dragon) in June 1976, where Gygax was serializing a novella called The Gnome Cache. He revealed the setting was a world called the Oerth, which was similar to Earth, and mentioned the first Greyhawk deity, St. Cuthbert, in the following issue. An adventure published that year, Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth, was also nominally set in the setting. Gygax had no plans to publish the entire setting himself, feeling that players were more interested in creating their own worlds to play in, and was surprised when fans kept asking him about it.

In 1978 Gygax finally relented, and many more adventures set in Greyhawk emerged (such as Tomb of Horrors and The Village of Hommlet, which introduced the Temple of Elemental Evil), along with a novel, Quag Keep, written by respected SF author Andre Norton. In 1980 TSR published a folio set called Greyhawk. Gygax had taken his original, North America-based maps and drawn a new landmass around them which became known as the Flanaess, the eastern third or so of a vast continent called Oerik on the world known as the Oerth ('Oi-th', pronounced as with a strong Brooklyn accent, according to Gygax). The setting was hugely popular and led to a deluxe box set called The World of Greyhawk, released in 1983.

Unfortunately, Gygax began an acrimonious withdrawal from TSR around this time, and as part of the separation agreement TSR retained ownership of the Greyhawk setting and all its characters, something Gygax later came to regret as he saw his world developed in a manner he was not impressed with in later years. In 1988 the Greyhawk Adventures hardcover book was published, which was a more cohesive single-volume guide to the setting and brought the history of the world forward by some years. However, TSR had become more invested in its Dragonlance and Forgotten Realms settings and Greyhawk was not properly revisited again until 1991, when the Greyhawk Wars board game was published. This game saw the continent being torn apart in a huge, game-changing war. The subsequent From the Ashes boxed set reintroduced the setting as a D&D game world but, despite some good reviews, was not a huge success. Although a few additional materials leaked out, the setting looked like it had been abandoned for good.

Despite this, there were a few last bursts of activity. In 2000 the new, 3rd Edition of the Dungeons and Dragons game was published by new owners Wizards of the Coast. The game was a huge success, and eagle-eyed players were surprised to learn that the game had a 'default' setting which was Greyhawk. The Greyhawk gods were named the 'default' gods of the game, and Greyhawk-specific items and locations were mentioned here and there through the core rulebooks and many of the earlier adventures. A very brief guide to the setting was also published, as well as 3rd Edition reprints of earlier Greyhawk adventures, such as the Temple of Elemental Evil super-adventure. It looked like Greyhawk had been brought back into the fold for good, but it was not to be.

WotC decided to make Greyhawk the setting for their collaborative, massive 'living campaign' world, Living Greyhawk, a newer version of the Living City and Living Jungle mass-campaigns for 2nd Edition (both set in the Forgotten Realms). Run by the RPGA Network, this was effectively a pen-and-paper based version of online games such as the then-popular Ultima Online and Everquest, and the later World of WarCraft. Whilst the game was successful, with several thousand players signing up and playing regularly, it was also notably non-canon. It also absorbed the resources of all the Greyhawk material planned for 3rd Edition, meaning that for people not interested in the Living Greyhawk setting, no new stand-alone material was published after 2001, whilst WotC concentrated on Forgotten Realms and a new setting, Eberron, although a single adventure, Ruins of Greyhawk, did creep out in 2007 as one of the final 3rd Edition game products. WotC shut down Living Greyhawk in late 2008 as D&D 4th Edition was launched.

The future of Greyhawk has not been outlined, but a recent 4th Edition game product made mention of several major worlds: Toril, Eberron, Athas, Krynn and Oerth, the worlds of the Forgotten Realms, Eberron, Dark Sun, Dragonlance and Greyhawk settings respectively. With the Realms and Eberron already back in print as 4th Edition settings and Dark Sun planned for next year, it seems inevitable than Greyhawk will return as a 4th Edition setting, probably in 2011 or 2012.

Fanon map, although drawn from canon materials, of the whole Oerth.

The World of Greyhawk

The setting for the Greyhawk campaign is the world known as Oerth, which is an Earth-sized planet consisting of one large supercontinent known as Oerik and several smaller landmasses, namely the jungle continent of Hepmonaland, the polar continent of Telchuria, and an unnamed, remote landmass in the southern hemisphere. Gary Gygax's original plan was to develop the whole planet in a reasonable amount of detail, but virtually all of the published gaming materials to date focus instead on the eastern third or so of Oerik, a region called the Flanaess.

The Flanaess is a heavily and traditionally Medieval European-inspired land of temperate zones, feuding city-states (the city of Greyhawk being the most well-known), powerful kingdoms, cloistered dwarven cities, remote elven lands and so forth. According to Gygax, Middle-earth was not a strong influence, instead claiming to have been more influenced by the likes of Fritz Lieber, Roger Zelazny, Robert E. Howard and Jack Vance. Humans are more or less the dominant species, but dwarves, halflings, gnomes, elves (and their dark brethren, the drow), giants, orcs, goblins, kobolds, dragons and many other races exist in the setting. Gygax ruled that gunpowder and all of its associated developments does not work on Oerth, thus apparently trapping planetary technological development in the pre-industrial age permanently.

The Flanaess, the main setting of the Greyhawk world.

Greyhawk was developed as a place for lots of individual adventures rather than a massive over-arcing story, but the actions of Gygax's original characters did give rise to a metaplot of a kind. The original 'main' storyline saw various small nations and parts of the Great Kingdom attempting to break away, with varying degrees of success. After Gygax's departure, TSR decided to go for a larger, more epic story in which the evil demigod Iuz attempted to conquer the rest of the world and the other nations of the Flanaess united to stop him, with a few other power groups (such as the Scarlet Brotherhood) attempting to further their own ends during the chaos. By the time the Greyhawk Wars had ended some of the established borders had changed and some kingdoms had risen or fallen. The later TSR and Wizards material is notable for emphasizing Iuz as the prime force of evil in the world, whilst earlier material focused more on local conflicts and problems caused by an evil deity called Vecna. Vecna was transposed to the Ravenloft setting during the TSR years, but made a return to Oerth during the Living Greyhawk era, and is likely to be a major villain in the hypothesized fourth edition of the setting (since Vecna is listed as one of the core deities of the 4th Edition game as well as a Greyhawk-specific deity).

For areas beyond the Flanaess, not much is known. A miniature game called Chainmail (as a nod to the original miniature game which inspired D&D) was under development in 2001 set in Western Oerik, in a region called the 'Sundered Empire', but this game was canned barely before it could get on the shelves and was replaced by the much more generic D&D Miniatures game, and very little material about Western Oerik made it out, and what did appear largely unimpressed the fanbase (since, among other things, it broke the no firearms restriction).


Evaluation

Whilst I've bought a few Greyhawk products over the years and one of my friends still has a copy of the 1983 box set in good condition, the setting has never really grabbed me. I came to it far too late, many years after first getting hooked into Dragonlance and Forgotten Realms, and it lacked the much more original flair of Planescape and Dark Sun. In the 3rd Edition era, Greyhawk's most laudable feature was its emphasis on lower-level adventuring, with very few major and powerful NPCs of the setting being over 20th level, and this was a major change from the very high-magic Forgotten Realms setting, where the number of NPCs over 20th level was frankly ridiculous and there were a significant number over 30th. Greyhawk's old-school, more restrained atmosphere was its most distinguishing feature during this time.

However, whilst Greyhawk itself is a rather generic cod-medieval setting, its place in the historical pantheon of roleplaying settings is assured, as is its huge influence. Whilst the world itself may not be fantastically original, many of its dungeons and adventures, such as the terrifying Tomb of Horrors (Gygax recommended players roll up several characters for the dungeon, since some would inevitably die in the process of exploring it) and the vast Temple of Elemental Evil, not to mention the immense dungeons of Castle Greyhawk, are still popular today (if often transposed to other settings), whilst Vecna and Iuz are classic, old-school bad guys.

With a 4th Edition version of Greyhawk almost certainly on the way, it will be interesting to see how Wizards of the Coast emphasize the setting's differences from Dragonlance and Forgotten Realms in order to hook new players in.

Next time, we visit Krynn, the homeworld of the most feared and reviled creature in all of Dungeons and Dragons, the original Jar-Jar himself: Tasslehoff Burrfoot!

The Dungeon Master Has Left the Building

Gary Gygax, the co-creator of the Dungeons and Dragons role-playing game and thus the the entire hobby, passed away today at the age of 69, and is survived by his wife, six children and seven grandchildren. Gygax had been suffering the after-effects of a series of strokes in 2004 and also had an inoperable abdominal aortic aneurysm.


Gygax's impact on the fantasy genre is colossal, although his own novels are not well-regarded. He started playing wargames in 1953 but later claimed gaining a lot of inspiration from Avalon Hill's Gettysburg (published in 1958). In 1967 Gygax organised the first Gen Con gaming convention at his own home, which is now the world's biggest international gaming convention (with 27,000 attendees in 2007). He first met Dave Arneson at the second Gen Con in 1969. In 1971 Gygax released a miniatures wargame called Chainmail. Arneson had developed his own fantasy-based 'setting' for the game called Blackmoor and it was a combination of the rules from these two games that let to the first, basic version of Dungeons and Dragons, published in 1974 under the company name 'Tactical Studies Rules' (TSR). A self-published fanzine was issued called The Strategic Review, but this rapidly evolved into Dragon Magazine, which is still published today.

Dungeons and Dragons was the first recognised roleplaying game and gave birth to a hobby which, it was estimated in 2001, that over 20 million people regularly played. Gygax continued to develop the game through various editions, with the first major revision being Advanced Dungeons and Dragons in 1978. Gygax's home 'campaign setting' of Greyhawk became one of the default campaign settings for the game. In the early 1980s Gygax took a back seat from the company to concentrate on other projects, such as the Dungeons and Dragons cartoon series. Whilst TSR had enormous success in this time by branching out into publishing novels (most notably the Dragonlance line, which went on to sell over 4 million copies in its first decade), its success in the RPG market was challenged by rival companies. Gygax, feeling that TSR was being mismanaged in his absence, left the company in 1985 under a storm of litigation.

Gygax subsequently published two well-received RPGs, Dangerous Journeys (1992) and Legendary Adventure (1999) before entering a state of semi-retirment. Despite his breach with TSR, he reestablished contact with the company in the early 1990s, allowing Greyhawk to be adapted to the 2nd Edition of Advanced Dungeons and Dragons. After TSR collapsed and was bought out by Wizards of the Coast in 1996, he provided additional advice and again allowed Greyhawk to be adapted for the 3rd Edition of the game (released in 2000). He continued to attend Gen Con, but in 2004 suffered two strokes in rapid succession and entered a period of retirment.

Gygax also published ten novels (seven of which were Greyhawk books featuring Gord the Rogue) and lent his voice to a cameo appearance in the Futurama episode Anthology of Interest, in which he was shown to roll dice to decide what course of action to take in parody of the D&D rules. In Futurama Gygax was depected as one of an elite taskforce led by Al Gore and also consisting of Stephen Hawking and Nichelle Nichols (all voicing themselves), whose mission is to safeguard the space/time continuum.

Gygax was keen to distance himself from Tolkien, instead saying his primary influences were the likes of Jack Vance (whose Dying Earth magic system he basically plundered for D&D) and Fritz Lieber. Many modern fantasy authors played RPGs in their youth and some - such as Steven Erikson and Ian Cameron Esslemont's Malazan world; and Raymond E. Feist and the Abrams brothers world of Midkemia (from the Riftwar series) - created their signature worlds as settings for the game.

For myself, I spent over a decade regularly playing in D&D games with close groups of friends, which provided a host of great memories and moments.

Best wishes to Gygax's friends and family. He will be missed.

Paul S. Kemp, the author of the Erevis Cale series of novels (set in the D&D shared world of the Forgotten Realms), wrote the following:

The grandfather of the hobby that stoked our imaginations and gave us all so much happiness has moved on to Elysium.

When you go home tonight, roll some twenty siders with friends, use the word "zounds" in a sentence, then leaf through the 1E Dungeon Master's Guide and marvel at the breadth of the man's imagination.

I mentioned in a post last year that I'd always meant to ask him to sign one of my books for me, but it seemed too presumptuous so I didn't. I wish I had. My career in writing owes a lot to him. When I was young and had nothing but time I used to stay up late and literally pore over the Dungeon Master's Guide, Player's Handbook, and Monster Manual. All were incredible sparks to my imagination.

Carry on, Colonel.