Curated category
Origins Award winners
- Sid Meier's Gettysburg!Sid Meier's Gettysburg! arrived in 1997 with a question baked into its design: what if the bloodiest battle of the American Civil War could be fought again…
- Star Wars: X-Wing (video game)Star Wars: X-Wing launched in February 1993 on floppy disks, and its first shipment of 100,000 units sold out before the weekend was over.
- Star Wars: The Roleplaying GameStar Wars: The Roleplaying Game arrived in 1987, the year Ronald Reagan was still president and two full decades before anyone had heard of a galaxy-spanning…
- 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…
- Monster ManualThe first hardcover book for any Dungeons & Dragons game arrived in 1977. Gary Gygax wrote the original Monster Manual as a 108-page supplement for Advanced…
- Forgotten RealmsEd Greenwood began writing stories about the Forgotten Realms as a child, starting at the age of eight. He came up with the name from the notion of a…
- Birthright (campaign setting)Birthright arrived on gaming tables in 1995, and it asked players to do something no Dungeons and Dragons setting had asked before: rule a nation.
- RavenloftIn 1978, Tracy and Laura Hickman wrote adventures that would eventually be published as the Dungeon & Dragons modules Pharaoh and Ravenloft.
- Final Fantasy VIIFinal Fantasy VII arrived in Japan on the 31st of January, 1997, and within three days had sold over two million copies. That pace was not an accident.
- Dragon (magazine)June 1976 marked the debut of The Dragon, a monthly magazine published by TSR to replace its earlier publication called The Strategic Review.
- Dungeon (magazine)Dungeon magazine arrived in 1986 with a simple promise: every page would contain an adventure. No reviews, no editorials, no letters section crowding the…
- GURPSGURPS, the Generic Universal Role Playing System, arrived in 1986 with a simple but radical premise: one set of rules should work for any world, any genre…
- Vampire: The MasqueradeVampire: The Masquerade arrived in 1991 with a question that flipped the entire premise of tabletop gaming: what if you were the monster?
- World of DarknessMark Rein-Hagen began developing the World of Darkness series in 1990 at White Wolf Publishing. His goal was to create a new major role-playing game project…
- Magic: The GatheringMagic: The Gathering was born in the summer of 1993, when a doctoral candidate in combinatorial mathematics walked out of a hiking trail near Multnomah Falls…
- Call of Cthulhu (role-playing game)Call of Cthulhu arrived in 1981 with a premise that broke every rule tabletop gaming had established. The characters were doomed. Survival was unlikely.
- Chivalry & SorceryChivalry & Sorcery arrived in 1977 with a very specific argument: that Dungeons & Dragons was not realistic enough. Its creators, Edward E.
- BattlesystemBattlesystem arrived in 1985 as something the world of tabletop gaming had rarely seen: a bridge between the intimate storytelling of Dungeons and Dragons…
- EberronIn 2002, Wizards of the Coast launched a competition called the Fantasy Setting Search to find a new world for Dungeons & Dragons.
- PlanescapeImagine a place where the sky does not exist. Instead, an all-pervasive light waxes and wanes to create day and night for those who live there.
- Player's HandbookThe first Players Handbook arrived in June 1978 as a 128-page hardcover book. Gary Gygax wrote the text while Mike Carr edited it and penned the foreword.
- Risk (game)Risk began in 1957 as a French board game called La Conquête du Monde, meaning The Conquest of the World. Its inventor was Albert Lamorisse, a film director…
- Star Wars Roleplaying Game (Fantasy Flight Games)Fantasy Flight Games announced the acquisition of the Star Wars roleplaying license at Gen Con 2011. This marked a significant shift after Wizards of the…