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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Guest 6980939" data-source="post: 9371692">Following is the preface to the book, by Jason Tondro (as best as I was able to transcribe from a screenshot):It's difficult to overstate the impact of Dungeons & Dragons on games and gaming. Modern video games - with their classes, levels, and hit points - are D&D's direct descendants using language, tropes, and mechanics first created by by Dave Arneson and Gary Gygax. Science fiction and fantasy war games likewise descend directly from some of the materials included in this book. The influence of D&D is not limited to gamers. People who have never played D&D brag about leveling up or choose their alignment from a meme depicting a 9-panel grid. D&D is a part of American culture and resonates deeply with audiences from around the globe. Perhaps more important than D&D's worldwide influence is its role in the lives of the millions of people who play the game. Dungeons and Dragons brings people together. It encourages players to adopt the perspective of someone other than themselves and to operate toward a shared goal. In a time when humanity has been wrecked by a global pandemic and forced to isolate, when children have been unable to go to school and friends unable to share a meal, D&D reminded us to never split the party. And as we have - in halting steps and at various comfort levels - emerged from COVID, role-playing games have shown us a way to rebuild relationships and alleviate loneliness. The history of D&D is, therefore, worth knowing. Many authors have attempted to chronicle its history and many of these texts provide valuable insight. This book takes a different approach. It presents the documents that made up D&D in its earliest form so that you, the reader, can see the origins of D&D for yourself. It begins with early writings by Gygax and Arneson, including Gygax's Chainmail rules and selections from Arneson's Blackmoor campaign. The book also includes something never before published: the original draft of Dungeons & Dragons that Gygax crafted on his home typewriter with his and Arneson's annotations and corrections. This draft led to the 1974 publication of the first edition of D&D, which is reprinted here in its entirety. Finally, the three most important supplements to the first edition of the game - Greyhawk, Blackmoor, and Eldritch Wizardry - appear here, as do numerous articles and expansions written by fans, many of which were incorporated into Advanced Dungeons and Dragons in the years after 1977. With a few noted exceptions, every page reproduced in this book is from a first printing with no attempt to correct the original pages. Street addresses and phone numbers have been redacted. The early rules for D&D are important and incredibly influential. But they're also confusing and even contradictory; that's how we've left them. We don't encourage you to try to play 1974 D&D from these pages ( if you want to try, Wizards of the Coast has edited and republished the original Dungeons & Dragons "white box" in both physical and digital formats. These reprints incorporate errata from later printings of the game.) This book presents D&D as it was first imagined, warts and all. What sort of warts are we talking about? One example is including creatures from other intellectual properties, such as JRR Tolkien's Middle-Earth, without permission. In later printings of D&D, Balrogs, Hobbits, and Ents were renamed Balors, halflings, and treants to avoid these copyright issues. Some language in the first iteration of D&D presents a moral quandary. The documents reproduced in this book include many pages of charts and tables alongside lists of monsters, spells, and magic items. But that game content also includes a virtual catalog of insensitive and derogatory language, words that are casually hurtful to anyone with a physical or mental disability, or who happen to be old, fat, not conventionally attractive, indigenous, Black, or a woman. Some people have charitably ascribed this language to authors working from bad assumptions. In the 1970s, historical wargamers in America were predominantly white, middle class men. It isn't surprising that they would dub a class of soldiers "fighting-man. "But when, in the pages of Greyhawk, the description of the Queen of Chaotic Dragons includes a dig at "women's lib" the misogyny is revealed as a conscious choice. It's an unfortunate fact that women seldom appear in original D&D, and when they do, they're usually portrayed disrespectfully. Slavery appears in original Dungeons and Dragons not as a human tragedy that devastated generations over centuries, but as a simple commercial transaction. The cultural appropriation of original D&D ranges from the bewildering ( like naming every sixth level cleric a "lama" to the staggering; God's, Demigods, and Heroes ( not reprinted in this book ) includes game statistics for sacred figures revered by more than a billion people around the world. Were players expected to fight Vishnu, one of the principle deities of Hinduism, kill him, and loot his "+3 sword of demon slaying "? Despite these shortcomings, D&D has always been a game about people choosing to be someone unlike themselves and collaborating with strangers who become friends. It has slowly become more inclusive, and as the player base has become more diverse, the pool of creators who make the game has expanded to include people with a broader range of identity and backgrounds. As these new creators make the game more welcoming, the game is attracting new fans who, in turn, may continue to make the game more inclusive. The future of Dungeons and Dragons, here at its 50th anniversary, is bright. And it all started with the pages that follow.</blockquote>

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