The Making of Original Dungeons & Dragons Review - Not A History Book, But A Museum

Wizards of the Coast continues to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Dungeons & Dragons not only with a massive Vecna adventure and upcoming anthology Quests From The Infinite Staircase but also with their monumental Making of Original Dungeons & Dragons 1970-1977.

Written by Jon Peterson - whose previous works include Playing At The World, The Elusive Shift: How Roleplaying Games Forged Their Identity, and Game Wizards - this monumental tome is almost 600 pages of TTRPG history stretching from the wargaming space in the year 1970 all the way up to the release of Dungeons & Dragons and it's first few expansions including Greyhawk and Blackmoor.

The tone that Peterson wants to set for this book is set early in his Foreword, "No book published today could hope to give a complete picture of the making of D&D." Peterson cites issues with the 'fragmentary evidence' from its early periods, fanzines that are notoriously difficult to work with, and the very nature of Gygax and Arneson creating a lot of this game in collaboration not only with one another but with their players and being influenced by external resources.

You Can Start At Anytime

The story of The Making of Original Dungeons & Dragons 1970-1977 begins with Gary Gygax, a "32-year-old high school dropout, married with five children." Working as an insurance underwriter with a passion for wargaming and high fantasy fiction.

At this point in his life, he's already hosted the first Lake Geneva Wargames Convention in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. This convention is what fans of Board Games and TTRPGs call GenCon.

This book takes us through the journey of Gygax's initial inspirations as well as the different players who were taking different rulesets, iterating on them, or merging them with other games to create all-encompassing systems.

After being taught how Gygax's Fantasy Supplement was adapted to better fit Black Moor, you get to see how Black Moor's updated rules were fed back to Gygax to allow the process to continue to expand.

Then And Now Aren't So Different

I was enthralled reading about how 'wild west' the landscape was as systems like Chainmail and Braunstein were getting handwritten updates or fan-made companion rulesets back during the early days of TTRPGs. So many stories are told of different gaming groups or cities having variations on rule sets because they fit the play differently.

It's also impossible not to compare how things were to the current landscape of the TTRPG space, now boosted by the power of the internet.

Gygax submitting supplements about dragons or a homemade Fantasy Supplement to expand on the setting options isn't all that dissimilar to the kinds of zines that indie RPG creators are making or expansions/updates for first-party D&D published content that is sold on websites like DriveThruRPG.

Not A History Book, But A Museum

The most impressive aspect of The Making of Original Dungeons & Dragons 1970-1977 isn't in the text recounts of events. A lot of these you'll be able to find in any other in-depth history of Dungeons & Dragons. What makes this book so special is that after getting a few paragraphs of text about the Chainmail Fantasy Supplement or the Greyhawk supplement you'll then be provided with scans of the entire document.

Every page you open up to gives the sense of being able to look at a document behind a plexiglass enclosure at what would be a museum of Dungeons & Dragons, while the written text is a bit more akin to the plaque that you'd see on the side.

Examples of the supplements are incredible, but some of the real gems in this book are draft copies of Dungeons & Dragons including pages describing the different Cleric levels by experience with Gygax's handwritten notes scratching out previous level names and replacing them with new ones.

These kinds of printouts do take up the majority of the space within the book, the first draft of Dungeons & Dragons stretching from page 84 to 182 only to lead directly into a Twin Cities draft as well as the Mornard fragments.

If you are after that narrative history of Dungeons & Dragons where a concrete story is woven with edited first and secondhand accounts then this might not be the book for you, but if you want to see the exact documents that were being used to run RPGs fifty years ago or even the handwritten correspondences between Gygax and Arneson this book is a treasure trove.

This 'museum' like approach to providing readers with high-quality scans of all of the documents also lends itself well to a coffee table book approach (even if it's the size of a coffee table) as you can pick it up, flick to any page and learn something new whether you land on information from Peterson himself, or end up inspecting a page highlighting the characteristics of a Reptile in Blackmoor.

The Making Of Original Dungeons & Dragons 1970-1977 Review | Final Thoughts

Upon first pulling this massive tome out of it's shipping box I was somewhat daunted about all of the information contained within. Once I began reading through it was hard to put it down.

Peterson has done an incredible job not just in providing a timeline and context to the major inspirations and developments that led up to the creation of Dungeons & Dragons but has nailed the monumental task of immortalizing high-quality copies of so many different documents.

With letters between Gygax and Arneson, hand-marked drafts of Dungeons & Dragons, and full printouts of completed versions of Dungeons & Dragons and its original supplements this book lets any die-hard fan of D&D and TTRPG history keep those pieces for themselves to peruse through at their leisure.

If you're after a history of D&D with a hard narrative throughline you might not get as much out of this resource-dense book, but if you have an interest in viewing the documents as if you were there while history was unfolding then every page of this book will bring you interest.

For the Dungeons & Dragons fanatic, this might be the greatest offering of the 50th anniversary celebration.

The copy of The Making of Original Dungeons & Dragons 1970-1977 used in this review was provided by the publisher, all photos were taken by the reviewer