Curated playlist
Dungeons & Dragons
- Dungeons & DragonsDungeons & Dragons was born partly from a two-year-old girl's enthusiasm. When Gary Gygax presented his daughter Cindy with a list of possible names for the game he was developing, she exclaimed, "Oh Daddy, I like Dungeons & Dragons best!"…
- Chainmail (game)Chainmail, the medieval miniature wargame created by Gary Gygax and Jeff Perren, arrived in 1971 with a modest first print run and quickly sold one hundred copies per month. Few people who bought that slim rulebook could have guessed they…
- Game System LicenseThe Game System License arrived on the 17th of June, 2008, with the promise of opening up Dungeons and Dragons 4th edition to the wider world of tabletop publishing. Wizards of the Coast, the company behind D&D, released it to the public…
- D&D BeyondD&D Beyond arrived on the 15th of August 2017, as a digital companion for Dungeons & Dragons fifth edition. The Financial Times would later call it "the go-to way of showing discontent" with the game's publisher. In January 2023, a leaked…
- Dungeon MasterThe Dungeon Master sits at the center of every Dungeons and Dragons game, controlling nearly everything that happens except the choices of the players themselves. Picture a single person responsible for the terrain, the monsters, the…
- Dungeons & Dragons controversiesDungeons & Dragons arrived as a commercial game in 1974, and within a decade it had been accused of promoting Satanism, witchcraft, suicide, and murder. Courts heard lawsuits blaming the game for a teenager's death. A one-person advocacy…
- Magic in Dungeons & DragonsIn 1974, the 36-page Volume 1: Men & Magic pamphlet appeared as part of the original Dungeons & Dragons boxed set. Twelve pages within that slim booklet described individual spells where the text often referenced earlier Chainmail…
- TSR, Inc.In 1992, a game convention that TSR had been running for years broke every previous attendance record in the United States, drawing over 18,000 participants. The company behind that convention had started barely two decades earlier, unable…
- Wizards of the CoastWizards of the Coast began in Peter Adkison's basement outside Seattle in 1990, with a handful of employees and a name borrowed from a guild of wizards in a Dungeons and Dragons campaign Adkison was running. The company's first products…
- Editions of Dungeons & DragonsDungeons and Dragons arrived in 1974 as a box set assembled on a production budget of just $2,000, with only $100 set aside for artwork. Gary Gygax paid contributors as little as $2 for a small piece and $3 for a larger one. That scrappy…
- Alignment (Dungeons & Dragons)Gary Gygax, co-creator of Dungeons & Dragons, introduced the alignment system in 1974. The original game allowed players to choose among three alignments: lawful, chaotic, and neutral. Lawful implied honor and respect for society's rules.…
- BattlesystemBattlesystem arrived in 1985 as something the world of tabletop gaming had rarely seen: a bridge between the intimate storytelling of Dungeons and Dragons and the sweeping spectacle of mass-scale fantasy warfare. Over 800 counters came…