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An A to Z of RPGs
This A to Z of roleplaying games was originally written for the A to Z blogging challenge in April and debuted on the Designers & Dragons Facebook group. It’s alphabet-focused description of 26...
View ArticleAuthor’s Notes: Designers & Dragons Origins
In December 2012 I received a query from some of the folks at DTPRG about whether I’d be interested in writing product histories for a long series of classic D&D products to be released through...
View ArticleAuthor’s Notes: This is Free Trader Beowulf
I’ve worked with both Matthew Sprange and Marc Miller before. Matthew Sprange was the publisher of the first edition of Designers & Dragons, the doorstopper leatherette hardcover that you can now...
View ArticleIs the OGL Era Over? (Part Four)
In January of this year, Wizards of the Coast earned the anger of a wide swath of the roleplaying industry by trying to revoke the OGL, an open license that they’d actively encouraged people to build...
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2023: The Year in Roleplaying
2023 was a year that could have easily been eclipsed by Wizards of the Coast’s constant missteps. It’s not just that they’re the biggest company in the industry, but also that their missteps were so...
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Giants of the Industry: Jennell Jaquays
In 1975 and 1976, the gaming community was thrumming with a pent-up creativity enabled by the brand-new Dungeons & Dragons game (1974). One of the young creators electrified by this new creativity...
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Happy 50th Anniversary to Dungeons & Dragons
When is Dungeons & Dragons’ birthday? We don’t really know. RPG Historian par excellence Jon Peterson has investigated the issue a few times and come up with the answer that the game was almost...
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The Onyx Path Crowd Funding Records
Kickstarter was launched in 2009, but 2011 was the year it really took off in the roleplaying field. Bulldogs! (2011) raised $13,430 that year and that seemed like a big deal, but we didn’t yet know...
View ArticleAuthor’s Notes: Daylighting the ’10s
I’ve been working on Designers & Dragons: The ’10s for four years now, and from time to time what I was writing about has been uncomfortable. That’s most frequently been due to topics of sexual...
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Designers & Dragons Origins: What’s In a Name?
This month (and likely next month) I am closing out my work on the first volumes of Designers & Dragons Origins, which contain product histories for all of OD&D, AD&D 1e, BD&D, and...
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Giants of the Industry: James M. Ward
Jim Ward, one of the principal creative forces in the first generation of roleplaying design, has passed away. The number of memorials appearing for him from many of the best-known and most noteworthy...
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This is Free Trader Beowulf is Out!
This is Free Trader Beowulf: A System History of Traveller is now out. It’s available from Mongoose Publishing as a PDF and as a preorder for the hardcover, which is currently scheduled for September....
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