Dungeons & Dragons (1974)

• 1. Introduction

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  Dungeons & Dragons arrived in 1974 in a brown wood-grain box, digest-sized, with a subtitle that sprawled across the packaging: Rules for Fantastic Medieval Wargames Campaigns Playable with Paper and Pencil and Miniature Figures. Nothing about that description hinted at what was inside. The entire production budget was two thousand dollars. Artwork got a hundred of those dollars. The cover art was copied from a comic book. And yet this set, published by Tactical Studies Rules under the product code TSR 2002, was the first published role-playing game in history. How did something so raw, so underfunded, so rough around the edges become the template for an entirely new form of entertainment? The answers live inside those three slim booklets and in the decisions Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson made when they had almost nothing to work with.

• 2. A Game Unlike Any Other

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  Before this set existed, games had boards, tokens, and fixed outcomes. The original D&D introduced a different premise: players could be fighting-men, magic-users, or clerics, and they could be human, dwarf, elf, or hobbit. They had numerical abilities covering strength, intelligence, and dexterity. They had levels they could advance through. They could explore underground dungeons full of halls, rooms, locked doors, tricks, and traps. They could hire specialists and men-at-arms. They could construct fortifications and establish baronies. The rules were modeled on medieval Europe, but the scope was wider than any wargame that came before it. One of the two reviewers in The Space Gamer No. 2, Tim Waddell, put the appeal plainly: "The most stimulating part of the game is the fact that anything can happen. Nothing is impossible." The other reviewer in that same issue, Andy Pudewa, added a caveat that still resonates: "D&D cannot even begin to get interesting in less than 20 hours playing time."

• 3. Built on Almost Nothing

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  With only a hundred dollars for artwork, Gygax recruited anyone nearby who could hold a pencil. Local artist Cookie Corey contributed work. Greg Bell, who belonged to Jeff Perren's gaming group, drew several pieces. Dave Arneson, co-creator of the game itself, contributed illustrations. Gygax also pressed his wife's half-sister, Keenan Powell, into service, along with fellow TSR co-founder Don Kaye. The pay scale was two dollars for a small piece and three dollars for a larger one. Each artist received the same amount as a royalty every time another thousand copies were printed. Bell's contributions carried an additional complication: several of his drawings were based on comic book art from the anthology Strange Tales. The cover of the second booklet, showing a sorcerer in front of a blazing cauldron, was lifted from a Doctor Strange story in Strange Tales No. 167. The cover of the set itself, depicting a sword-wielding Viking warrior on a rearing horse, came from that same issue.

• 4. The Tolkien Trouble

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  The original printing described certain creatures using names drawn directly from J. R. R. Tolkien's fiction. Some player characters could be hobbits, and the forest giants were called ents, both lifted from Middle-earth. Legal difficulties followed. The names were changed, hobbits becoming halflings and ents becoming treants. Those replacement terms have stuck ever since. The Monsters & Treasure booklet, one of the three that came in the box, contained some of the first visual depictions of what would become the game's most iconic creatures. Many of those monsters were adapted from mythology and from a range of literary works beyond Tolkien. The set also included brief guidelines on using monsters as player characters, a possibility that later editions would develop at length.

• 5. What the Rules Assumed

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  The three volumes in the set totaled 112 pages across different page counts: 36 pages for Men & Magic, 40 pages for Monsters & Treasure, and 36 pages for The Underworld & Wilderness Adventures. Six reference sheets with tables and charts completed the package. But the rules assumed the reader already owned two other games. Players were expected to have played Chainmail, the miniatures wargame from which D&D descended, and to be familiar with its measurement and combat systems. The rules also presumed ownership of Outdoor Survival, a board game published by Avalon Hill, which was meant to support outdoor exploration and adventure. Movement rates in the set were measured in inches, a direct inheritance from the miniatures tradition. Men & Magic specified that miniature figures were optional; cardboard counters were suggested as a substitute. The combat system included in the set as an option later evolved into the standard system across subsequent editions.

• 6. Supplements and Survivals

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  The first thousand copies sold well enough that the set went through many printings. Supplements began appearing the following year: Greyhawk and Blackmoor both arrived in 1975. Three more followed in 1976 with Eldritch Wizardry, Gods, Demi-Gods & Heroes, and Swords & Spells. Printings that began in 1976 shifted to an all-white box and added the label "Original Collector's Edition". Even the cover of the Men & Magic booklet changed between editions; the initial printing showed a mounted warrior, while the 1976 printing replaced it with a fighter holding a sword. Advertisements for the game had begun appearing in spring 1974, the same year of publication. The set won the Strategists' Club Award for Best New Game in 1974, and by 1977 it had taken three Origins Awards: All-Time Best Role-Playing Rules, Greatest Contribution to the Hobby for the period 1967-77, and a place in the Adventure Gaming Hall of Fame.

• 7. Legacy in Print and Auction

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  Games Magazine inducted D&D into its Hall of Fame in 1984. The Pen & Paper RPG Hall of Fame followed in 2002. Scrye named it the All-Time Favorite Role-Playing Game in its Player's Choice poll in 2006. The set also holds the H.G. Wells Award. In 2013, the original was re-released as part of a deluxe premium collectors set, packaged in a wooden box and containing reprints of the original booklets alongside the first four supplement booklets; each booklet received new cover art but was otherwise reproduced faithfully, including the original interior illustrations. The market eventually placed a concrete figure on surviving first printings: on the 9th of December 2016, a first printing of the boxed set sold on an eBay auction for more than twenty thousand dollars, a number that suggests how far a brown wood-grain box with a borrowed cover painting and two-dollar illustrations had traveled since Gygax assembled it on a budget of two thousand dollars.