dungeons and dragons... and me
Okay, so you may have noticed that I’ve been not writing for a long time. I have half a dozen half-written or somewhat-finished-but-I-dunno drafts in my gmail that never got sent out, and after awhile, I even thought, maybe I’ll let this newsletter peter out too. Because, well, I think literally two people reads this? Lol.
But! I do feel bad about not writing sometimes because I wrote more for me than anything else, and also I got a nudge from Buttondown for my long-ish absence. And I kind of just wrote this for a zine* this morning, so I thought I’ll share it here too. * this is a D&D one-shot that I will be doing mainly for Patricia, one of my two readers. See! You get perks for being one of my only newsletter readers!
So, I am not really an expert on Dungeons and Dragons, which means some of these stuff might be outdated or have since been disputed (if so please tell me!) but it is one of my special interests, and that means I’ve gone through phases where I read a lot about it. And this is what I know, as of now.
Once upon a time, there was a dude named Dave Arneson. He read a then-popular fantasy war gaming ruleset called Chainmail by Gary Gygax and Jeff Perren (named not bolded because I don’t know what happened to him), and this prompted Arneson to create his own fantasy world + gaming rules, Blackmoor.
Arneson met Gygax in 1972, and together, they created the world of Greyhawk, and the first rule set for Dungeons & Dragons. They couldn’t find a publisher for this game, so in 1974, they started TSR (Tactical Studies Rules) to publish the game on their own. They started out with a 150-copy print run, and by the following summer, they had ordered another print for 1,000 copies. D&D slowly became huge among gamers, which would lead into things like the Satanic Panic, but let’s not get into that.
Arneson left TSR after a year at the company, and when TSR created Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (AD&D) they claimed that the game had changed significantly enough to no longer pay Arneson royalties, and in 1979 Arneson had to file a suit to Gygax & TSR continue retaining his credit and royalties as a co-creator.
The tables would turn for Gygax as TSR became bigger and bigger, turning into a large enough corporation that they voted him out of the company in 1986. The company had trouble keeping up with rising competitors like Vampire: The Masquerade, however, and soon became experimenting with CD-ROM games, and got into a distribution deal with Random House. This did not end well, and they ended up overprinting stock, and unable to pay their printers. In 1996, their printer was refusing to publish any of their new products as they were too heavy in debt, and many TSR employees were let go.
By 1997, they were basically making saving throws, and thankfully Wizards of the Coast (WotC) came through.
WotC published a card game you might’ve heard of called Magic: The Gathering back in 1993, and by ‘97 they were big enough to be in talks about buying Dungeons & Dragons. Not only they did that, they also made amends with Gary Gygax, making payments to Gygax’s family for his part in creating the game. (Did they do the same with Arneson? I have absolutely no idea.) This solidifies D&D as an IP that belonged to WotC, which helped when Hasbro bought over WotC in 1999.
The game has had many ups and downs since then (everyone likes to pretend the 4th Ed never happened but I insist that there are good things about the 4th Ed too) and by the time D&D Next (aka 5th Ed) was introduced in Sept 2014, there was a slow revival of the game. Thanks to actual play shows like Critical Roll, podcasts like Adventure Zone, and its inclusion in popular streaming shows like Stranger Things, D&D became… cool?
I kind of grew up with D&D but am also as much as a newbie as many others, because I was deliberately kept out of my brothers’ games through my childhood. I did spend a significant amount of it reading through my eldest brother’s Dungeon and Dragon magazines (these are two different mags btw!) and had that level of familiarity of the game (plus, like any nerdy kid, I read Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit and Treasure Island and Dracula and etc. around that age and used these settings when playing pretend.)
In high school I played around with text/speech RPGs on chats, and in college, desperate for more players (esp female-presenting ones so they can rope their girlfriends in, too) I was allowed in my brothers’ campaigns*. We played 3.5, moved to 4th Ed when it was released, but our (their) enthusiasm petered out with 4th Ed. I did try to start my own campaigns a few times, but always being the most (only) enthusiastic one in the group, we never went further than 3-4 sessions. Some never went past session zero! This is probably going to be the case even now - my general rule of thumb is, if it gets too difficult to schedule (like, a few attempts at a session in a row had to be postponed, or less than half of the party are available for several sessions in a row) then that campaign is not meant to be and I shouldn’t waste any more time planning it. On to the next! But at least I’ve since learned about solo adventuring and will run my campaigns for myself if others aren’t as into it. Just last Wednesday night, I ran a solo campaign and I’m probably going to continue doing so later tonight.
*by this point I was already almost out-nerding them anyway, and by now I’m the person they ask when they want to know weird nerdy lore stuff.
The rest of the zine I’m doing will NOT be in this newsletter, because they’re just more D&D stuff (specifically, helpful info if you’re new to the game). Will there be a newsletter next week? Will one of my drafts finally get finished and posted? Ioun knows. But for now, have a GREAT New Years, and hopefully next year will bring more awesome games, comics, and pure nerd joy <3
I wrote most of this in the morning before work started, and am scheduling the newsletter in the last ten minutes before clocking out. I had decided to treat myself to some books because the KLCC crowd have been leaving me with extremely high stress + overwhelmed levels, (hence me needing to engage in my special interests in the evening, to get out of that headspace) and I will get books to celebrate surviving 2022 in general, haha. It was so hard choosing which 2-3 books from my super large stack of “to-buy” titles to take home, though! Seriously sakit hati to be leaving Maggie Stiefvater’s Greywaren and Tom Taylor & Bruno Redondo’s Nightwing: Get Grayson at the office, but oh well, what to do. At least I also received a few cool review copies recently that I can take home too, like Kacen Callender’s Lark and Kasim Start A Revolution. Maybe if I do a campaign with a contemporary setting and super queer characters… or something inspired by Maggie Stiefvater’s Raven Boys quartet/Dreamer trilogy…
Hey, Covid is not over so stay masked, drink lots of water, and stay safe!