The
fireball is a staple of
Dungeons & Dragons-style magic that clearly distinguishes its modern wargaming roots from the fantasy dress it adopted. As such, the history of the
fireball spell is a history of D&D itself.
The Fireball Fantasy
Where did the concept of a
fireball come from? The
fireball has little grounding in fantasy literature, particularly J.R.R. Tolkien's or Jack Vance's works, which were all influential on D&D's evolution. There are some
fireball-esque descriptions however. Delta attributes two sources for
fireballs in "
More Fireballs." The first is R.E. Howard's "The Scarlet Citadel" published in 1933:
Old Tsotha rose and faced his pursuer, his eyes those of a maddened serpent, his face an inhuman mask. In each hand he held something that shimmered, and Conan knew he held death there... "Keep off" screamed Tsotha like a blood-mad jackal. "I'll blast the flesh from your bones!"... Conan rushed, sword gleaming, eyes slits of wariness. Tsotha's right hand came back and forward, and the king ducked quickly. Something passed by his helmeted head and exploded behind him, searing the very sands with a flash of hellish fire. Before Tsotha could toss the globe in his left hand, Conan's sword sheared through his lean neck.
Jon Peterson identifies a possible movie source from 1939 in
Playing at the World:
Hurling fireballs is less common— in Vance, for example, wizards summon a ball of fire to cast light rather than for assault— but one must not ignore a vivid example from cinema, when the Wicked Witch of the West throws a flaming sphere at the flammable Scarecrow while cackling, “Play ball!”
Delta also posits another movie reference, that of Tim the Enchanter in
Monty Python and the Holy Grail:
In fact, it's rather remarkable what a perfect resemblance Tim's powers have to the D&D fireball spell (including great range and area). But otherwise, the piece is obviously a comical spoof of what a wizard normally looks like.
That said, the movie debuted in 1975, too late to be the origin of the D&D
fireball but certainly going a long way to normalize trigger-happy wizards in fantasy.
Fireball in Miniature
Fireball is commonly acknowledged to originate with the miniature combat rules for Chainmail, D&D's predecessor, as Peterson explains in
Playing at the World:
The primary weapons at the disposal of a seasoned Magic-user are the famous spells “Fire Ball” and “Lightning Bolt.” ...Gygax wrote in the description of these spells in Chainmail that “fire ball” is “equal in hit area to the large catapult hit area.” Dungeons & Dragons elaborates that a fireball “explodes with a burst radius.”
In that regard
fireball is something of a modern invention. Massive destructive power in a burst is similar to grenades, something that wouldn't be typical of medieval warfare. Peterson points this out as well:
While one might imagine a catapult firing crude stones with no propensity to explode whatsoever, catapults may also shoot flaming pitch; in the Elric story “Black Sword’s Brothers,” naval catapults do launch such “fireballs” at one another.
But the origins of
fireball go much further back than that, as Peterson recently discovered in "
A Precursor to the Chainmail Fantasy Supplement":
Chainmail itself drew on a two-page set of rules developed for a late 1970 game run by the New England Wargamers Association (NEWA), which were designed by one Leonard Patt. Patt’s system shows us the first fantasy game with heroes, dragons, orcs, ents, and wizards who cast fireballs at enemies, though his contribution today goes entirely unacknowledged.
Fireball-slinging wizards in
Chainmail actually have their antecedent in Patt's game:
Fireball, which is indeed given as “fire ball” in first edition Chainmail, is one of the signature mechanisms of fantasy gaming, and to find it articulated prior to Chainmail is a stunning revelation. As in Chainmail, the “fire ball” of Patt is a burst effect which a Wizard casts at up to a distance of 24” in game; the burst area of effect is however an inch larger in Chainmail than in Patt. And as they later would in Chainmail, Heroes and Anti-heroes get a saving throw against a fireball in Patt: they “are saved by a throw of 5 or 6.” While saving throws were not an uncommon element in games of the time, the notion that making a saving throw against spells originated prior to Chainmail is also a significant revision to our historical understanding. Chainmail would dramatically expand the capabilities of Wizards, in its first edition adding a “lightning bolt” as a damage spell and eight utility spells, but “fire ball” is not altered in any significant particular from how it appears in Patt.
Fireball in the Dungeon
Having inherited "fire ball" from Chainmail,
Original Dungeons & Dragons made an additional tweak that has managed to murder entire adventuring parties for decades:
While some referees allow Fire Balls and Lightning Bolts to be hurled in confined spaces, blasting sections of stone equal to the remainder of their normal shape, it is suggested that the confined space cause these missiles to rebound toward the sender, i.e., a Lightning bolt thrown down a corridor 40 feet long will rebound so as to reach its stated length of 6" (60 feet underground), and this will mean the sender is struck by his own missile. It may also be compromised, allowing say two feet of stone wall to be destroyed (allowing one foot of stone destroyed for every ten feet the space is short of full distance) and rebounding the missile one-half the distance short.
First Edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons took things one step further, explaining both volume and temperature:
The area which is covered by the fireball is a total volume of roughly 33,000 cubic feet (or yards)]. Besides causing damage to creatures, the fireball ignites all combustible materials within its burst radius, and the heat of the fireball will melt soft metals such as gold, copper, silver, etc.
Delta goes into exhaustive detail on the evolution of
fireball in the various iteration of D&D
on his blog.
Fireball's Legacy
Peterson continues the thread of
fireballs in video games at Gamaustra in "
A brief history of fireball in fantasy games":
Most of these early computer games did not incorporate Fireball, perhaps because it was harder to program an area-of-effect spell than a single-target spell like Magic Missile. One 1970s computer game that did include Fireball was the amateur “dnd” game written by Dan Lawrence, which years later would get a commercial release under the name Telengard (1982). But the earliest commercial role-playing games for personal computers, classics like the Temple of Apshai or Akalabeth (the precursor to Ultima), didn’t let players cast Fireball. Strategic Simulation Inc. (SSI) included Fireballs in their early computer role-playing games such as Wizard’s Crown, and once they licensed Dungeons & Dragons as a media property, it would appear as well in their famous Gold Box games like Pool of Radiance (1988).
And from there the concept spread to modern fantasy gaming incarnations:
Take Blizzard’s Warcraft and Diablo universes. The Orc Warlock of the original game, Warcraft: Orcs vs. Humans, could learn the Fireball spell. In the second installment in that real-time strategy series, Fireball became a Mage spell available to humans as well. From there, Sorcerers (and later Sorceresses) in Diablo learned to cast Fireball, which helped them to deal with crowd, as it dealt area-of-effect splash damage. When Fireball became a staple spell of the Mage class in the World of Warcraft MMORPG, it brought with it a famous damage-over-time effect. Blizzard makes for a nice case study, but we could just as easily have told the story of Fireball in the Elder Scrolls series, or in Dragon Age, or any number of other franchises.
While D&D has largely co-opted a wide variety of fantasy conventions,
fireball is one of the ways it shows its modern wargaming roots.
