We've previously discussed how the seeds of a failed Dungeons & Dragons campaign was the inspiration for several video game franchises like Doom and Quake, but there's another D&D campaign that is more popular than both of them combined.
[h=3]Setting the Record Straight[/h]Documenting a campaign to an audience is now commonplace thanks the abundance of diverse media available to enterprising game masters. But that hasn't always been the case, and for an example of how things can get muddled one needs to look no further than the Dragonlance franchise. James Maliszewski explains how Dragonlance changed the industry :
It's true that Dragonlance helped launch the transmedia strategy of expressing Dungeons & Dragons in other channels like books and later animation, it wasn't the first and it wasn't actually based on a campaign. Co-creator of Dragonlance Tracy Hickman explains :
For one of the most successful transmedia franchises based on a campaign, we need to move out of U.S. territory to Japan, where The Record of Lodoss War reigned over fantasy for decades before the arrival of the Lord of the Rings movies.
[h=3]A New War[/h]The D&D craze didn't reach Japan right away, in part because of poor translations of the core rules. When the game was finally translated in the 80s it took off, but there was no easy means of serializing the campaign like there is today. Lewis Packwood explains on Kotaku:
Podcasts, video recordings, text summaries, and even comics are now part of tabletop gaming culture, but in the 80s when Lodoss War was just coming into its own, this was something new. Instead, their adventures were serialized in a print magazine known as Comptiq.
The "replays" (now sometimes termed "actual plays" or "story hour" on ENWorld), would launch a transmedia franchise that is still popular today. Lodoss War launched its own ruleset, Sword World RPG, and the wide ranging novels and spin-offs have sold over 10 million copies. It launched nine video games and even a Massive Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game (MMORPG). That's not all:
And that brings us to my own campaign.
[h=3]Launching Your Own Franchise[/h]The sister of one of the players in my original Advanced Dungeons & Dragons campaign is the English voice actress for Deedlit in The Record of Lodoss War. That connection proved prescient -- at the time, we didn't know Lodoss War based off of D&D -- and Welstar has followed its own path since then, including two novels and a Multi-User Dungeon, RetroMUD .
I've recently launched the Welstar Grand Unification Project (WGUP) in which all the games I play online or in-person, all the fiction I write, and all the maps and media I create will be set in my own campaign that's over three decades old. The line between fiction and storytelling, role-playing and retelling, have become so blurred that it's much easier to combine the two than ever before.
The truth is that this is nothing special. Thanks to podcasts and Twitch channels, and the most recent incarnation of the Open Game License, any enterprising game master can introduce players to her own campaign without launching a multimedia franchise. It just takes a lot of time, effort, and enthusiasm -- which the role-playing industry has in spades.
It's true that Dragonlance helped launch the transmedia strategy of expressing Dungeons & Dragons in other channels like books and later animation, it wasn't the first and it wasn't actually based on a campaign. Co-creator of Dragonlance Tracy Hickman explains :
For one of the most successful transmedia franchises based on a campaign, we need to move out of U.S. territory to Japan, where The Record of Lodoss War reigned over fantasy for decades before the arrival of the Lord of the Rings movies.
[h=3]A New War[/h]The D&D craze didn't reach Japan right away, in part because of poor translations of the core rules. When the game was finally translated in the 80s it took off, but there was no easy means of serializing the campaign like there is today. Lewis Packwood explains on Kotaku:
Podcasts, video recordings, text summaries, and even comics are now part of tabletop gaming culture, but in the 80s when Lodoss War was just coming into its own, this was something new. Instead, their adventures were serialized in a print magazine known as Comptiq.
The "replays" (now sometimes termed "actual plays" or "story hour" on ENWorld), would launch a transmedia franchise that is still popular today. Lodoss War launched its own ruleset, Sword World RPG, and the wide ranging novels and spin-offs have sold over 10 million copies. It launched nine video games and even a Massive Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game (MMORPG). That's not all:
And that brings us to my own campaign.
[h=3]Launching Your Own Franchise[/h]The sister of one of the players in my original Advanced Dungeons & Dragons campaign is the English voice actress for Deedlit in The Record of Lodoss War. That connection proved prescient -- at the time, we didn't know Lodoss War based off of D&D -- and Welstar has followed its own path since then, including two novels and a Multi-User Dungeon, RetroMUD .
I've recently launched the Welstar Grand Unification Project (WGUP) in which all the games I play online or in-person, all the fiction I write, and all the maps and media I create will be set in my own campaign that's over three decades old. The line between fiction and storytelling, role-playing and retelling, have become so blurred that it's much easier to combine the two than ever before.
The truth is that this is nothing special. Thanks to podcasts and Twitch channels, and the most recent incarnation of the Open Game License, any enterprising game master can introduce players to her own campaign without launching a multimedia franchise. It just takes a lot of time, effort, and enthusiasm -- which the role-playing industry has in spades.
