Judges Guild

• 1. Introduction

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  Judges Guild was founded on the 4th of July, 1976, and what began as a collection of homemade game notes would reshape how millions of people played Dungeons and Dragons. Bob Bledsaw had been running his own D&D campaign at home, and he believed those materials were worth sharing. He and his partner Bill Owen drove to Lake Geneva, Wisconsin to pitch the idea to TSR, the company behind D&D itself. TSR's verdict at the time was blunt: no one would be interested in supplemental materials. That assessment turned out to be spectacularly wrong. Within a few years, Judges Guild had over 250 products in print and a staff of 42 people. It produced the first published RPG supplement to feature a fully developed city environment, a product that would define what a role-playing supplement could be. So how did a company that started from one man's home campaign rise to lead an entire industry, and how did it fall, revive, and find itself again?

• 2. The Lake Geneva Trip

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  On the 17th of July, 1976, Bob Bledsaw and Bill Owen walked into TSR headquarters with an unusual pitch. They wanted to publish the play aids from their own D&D campaigns, alongside Owen's rules for a game set during the American Civil War. At TSR, they met Dave Arneson, who co-created Dungeons and Dragons itself. Arneson gave the pair verbal approval to produce supplemental materials, known as play aids, for both D&D and Advanced Dungeons and Dragons. TSR's only published play aids at that moment were the Dungeon Geomorphs. The general mood at TSR was that the market simply did not exist for this kind of product. Every piece of Judges Guild material would still be subject to TSR review to maintain continuity within the game systems, but the door was open. Owen eventually left the partnership before the company was incorporated in 1978, leaving Bledsaw to build Judges Guild largely on his own terms.

• 3. City State and the Shield

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  The product that defined Judges Guild was City State of the Invincible Overlord, the first published RPG supplement to present a fully realized city environment. Nothing like it had appeared in the hobby before, and it was followed quickly by additional cities, maps, and supporting materials. Among the company's other standout products were Tegel Manor and the Judge's Shield, a foldout three-page compilation printed on heavy stock. The Shield gathered monsters and rules that were at the time scattered across numerous TSR rulebooks, all in one quick-reference document. That format was so useful that the term "judge's shield" became standard across the industry for all similar products that followed. Judges Guild also produced licensed supplements for Traveller, RuneQuest, Tunnels and Trolls, Villains and Vigilantes, Chivalry and Sorcery, DragonQuest, Empire of the Petal Throne, and Superhero 2044, as well as three magazines: The Judges Guild Journal, The Dungeoneer, and Pegasus.

• 4. Rise and Decline

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  At its peak in the early 1980s, Judges Guild employed 42 people and had more than 250 products in print. That scale was remarkable for a company that started from campaign notes. But even while those numbers were growing, the ground was shifting under the company's feet. The broader roleplaying industry was moving toward professional typesetting, full-color art, and hardcover production, and Judges Guild was slow to follow. Its fantasy products stayed rooted in a 1970s style of dungeoneering: puns, gauntlet-style dungeons, isolated cities surrounded by open wilderness. Newer publishers were offering more integrated worlds that matched what players now expected. The license to publish Advanced Dungeons and Dragons materials lapsed in 1982. City-State of Tarantis appeared in 1983 to little notice. By 1985, the firm was on hiatus. Gamescience reprinted some of the old adventures afterward, and Mayfair Games obtained a contract to release a repackaged City State of the Invincible Overlord in 1987, though many of the changes Mayfair made were poorly received.

• 5. Return and Legacy

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  Judges Guild came back in 1999, selling revised copies of City State of the Invincible Overlord and reintroducing Pegasus magazine, which ran for two issues, numbered 14 and 15. The company also released the Revised Treasury of Archaic Names and an edited version of Dark Tower, and began producing products for the d20 System. In 2002, Necromancer Games published revised editions of City State of the Invincible Overlord, the Player's Guide to the Wilderlands, the Wilderlands of High Fantasy boxed set, and a revised Caverns of Thracia, all under license and in cooperation with Bledsaw and original Judges Guild writers. In 2006, the Wilderlands of High Fantasy setting was licensed to James Mishler's Adventure Games Publishing for a variant campaign called Wilderlands of High Adventure, using Castles and Crusades rules. That same year, Goodman Games and Eostros Games received licenses to update The Thieves of Fortress Badabaskor, Citadel of Fire, and Dark Tower for d20, with all three released in 2007. Bob Bledsaw died of cancer in 2008, and his son, Bob Bledsaw II, inherited the company. The last manuscript the elder Bledsaw worked on before his death was Lost Man's Trail, published in 2011 as the first original Judges Guild product in more than 25 years. In 2014, Judges Guild and Goodman Games partnered to release deluxe hardback editions of the original catalog, including pages from The Judges Guild Journal.