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 ManualMonster Manual is the collection of creature rules TSR published in 1977 as the first hardcover book in the Dungeons & Dragons line. Games journalist David M.
- Forgotten RealmsForgotten Realms hides a message inside its own emblem. Until the year 2000, the setting's official logo contained tiny runic letters.
- 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.
- RavenloftRavenloft is a campaign setting for the Dungeons & Dragons roleplaying game, built around a pocket dimension its designers call the Demiplane of Dread.
- 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)Dragon shipped its final printed issue, number 359, in September 2007. That closed a run that started three decades earlier, when the magazine backed a young…
- 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 DarknessWorld of Darkness arrived in 1991 with a game about vampires hiding in plain sight, and within a few years it had sold millions of books and turned its…
- 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.
- PlanescapePlanescape is a Dungeons & Dragons campaign setting built around a single unplanned image. Artist Dana Knutson sketched a robed figure with blades where her…
- Player's HandbookThe Player's Handbook became, in 2024, what Wizards of the Coast called "the fastest-selling Dungeons & Dragons product ever." The company also called it…
- 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)The Star Wars Roleplaying Game from Fantasy Flight Games arrived in 2012 with a bold proposition: one galaxy, three completely separate games, all designed…