Treasured Surviving Relics

  When Dungeons & Dragons appeared in 1974, it was already the product of more than one campaign, more than one imagination and more than one approach to fantasy gaming. In our look at Greyhawk , we saw how Gary Gygax's campaign helped push the new game beyond the foundations established by the three little brown books. Now it is time to look at the other great campaign at the heart of the game's creation. Blackmoor was Dave Arneson's campaign, and Dungeons & Dragons Supplement II: Blackmoor , published by TSR in 1975, was the first substantial attempt to bring some of Arneson's ideas into the published game. It is an unusual book. Despite its title, it is not really a campaign setting guide. Instead, it is a collection of rules, monsters, treasures, experimental systems and, most importantly, The Temple of the Frog — one of the most historically significant adventures ever published for a role-playing game. The Other Half of Dungeons & Dragon...

The Prose Edda , also known as the Younger Edda or Snorri's Edda, is one of the most important surviving works of Scandinavian literature and one of our principal written sources for Norse mythology. Written in Iceland around a century after the end of the Viking Age, the work preserves stories of the Norse gods, giants, dwarves and elves, together with accounts of creation, heroic traditions and the final destruction of the world at Ragnarök. Its mixture of prose and powerful verse provides an extraordinary record of traditions that had previously been transmitted orally. The stories preserved in the Edda have subsequently influenced writers and artists from Richard Wagner to J. R. R. Tolkien and have become part of the foundation of modern fantasy. The work is traditionally associated with the Icelandic scholar, historian and poet Snorri Sturluson , and is generally dated to around 1220. The Four Sections of the Prose Edda 1. Prologue The Prologue is the most cont...

The history of Dungeons & Dragons is not only the history of the games themselves. It is also the story of the worlds that players created around them, and of the designers who continued developing those ideas when the original publishers moved in different directions. For players who followed the evolution of TSR's Dungeons & Dragons line, the dispute between Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson over royalties became one of the defining episodes of the game's history. While those disagreements unfolded, the Basic and Expert branches of D&D continued to develop, eventually leading to Frank Mentzer's Companion, Masters and Immortals rules sets. The Known World During this period Bruce Heard took responsibility for the D&D line and worked with a freelance writing team on the setting that players increasingly knew as the Known World . The major innovation was the Gazetteer series. Rather than leaving the setting as a loose collection of places mentioned...

The first Kickstarter project I ever backed was Space: 1889 . That fact alone probably says something about the appeal of this particular game. Long before steampunk became a familiar genre, Space: 1889 imagined an alternative Victorian age in which humanity had mastered travel through the Ether and begun exploring the other worlds of the Solar System. It is a wonderfully old-fashioned piece of science fiction, deliberately evoking the spirit of the great adventure writers of the nineteenth century while turning their imagined futures into a role-playing setting. A More Civilized Time The premise is wonderfully simple. Humanity has conquered the inner planets and now travels between worlds aboard ether-flyers. Mars is inhabited by ancient Martian cultures, Venus is a steaming wilderness, Mercury contains regions of extraordinary heat and cold, and the Moon and Asteroid Belt remain open to exploration. Earth itself is still recognisably the Victorian world of 1889. The g...