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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Guest 6980939" data-source="post: 9371731">And, the Foreword by Jon Peterson (again, the best I could transcribe from a screenshot):In celebration of the 50th anniversary of the publication of Dungeons & Dragons ( 1974 ) this omnibus gives the complete text of the final game and its first three supplements with supporting material from before and after the release that sheds light on D&D's development, creation, and reception. Focusing on the years 1974-1977, it provides both a definitive edition of the original incarnation of D&D and indications of how it came to be what it is. Beyond published products, this book reproduces drafts, correspondence, magazine articles, and other related ephemera. No book published today could hope to give a complete picture of the making of D&D. For reasons of space and copyright, not everything can be included. And for many early parts of this story, there is but fragmentary evidence. The commentary in this book is intended to be an account that will stand regardless of anything that might come to light in the future. When we examine the development of D&D, in the crucial period of 1972-1973, we must inevitably contend with the respective contributions of the game's co-authors, Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson. Following a bitter public dispute that began in 1977 over credit and royalties, both authors made contradictory public statements about who did what. It has long been my position that the contributions of both creators were indispensable - that the game would not have appeared, let alone survive for a half a century - without the work and ideas of both Gygax and Arneson. But that said, the original designers of D&D were themselves participants in broader communities in wargaming and science fiction fandom. . . (bottom portion obscured in screengrab). . .significant typos, and have problems with dating and attribution. They may therefore be difficult to parse, but fanzines and other such ephemera are presented here in their original form with some digital cleanup to remove blemishes and other artifacts. Much of the immediate context of D&D began with the Castles and Crusades society, a medieval wargaming club to which Gygax and Arneson both belonged. In the pages of the club fanzine, Domesday Book, Gygax first published material he later compiled in Chainmail ( 1971 ). As the draft Forward to Dungeons & Dragons related, the society's fictional " Great Kingdom" setting encompassed the territory known as Blackmoor, the site of Arneson's seminal fantasy campaign. While there is no small controversy about the details, it is safe to follow the foreword and say that " from the Chainmail fantasy rules Arneson drew an expanded set of rules for battles and the campaign" for Blackmoor, which Gygax further developed into the first draft of Dungeons and Dragons. Readers may know that more material of Gygax's is reproduced in this volume than of Arneson's. Gagex was quite a prolific writer and necessarily left a longer paper trail of his activities in the original D&D. The collaboration between the pair of them was not entirely a happy one even before Dungeons & Dragons was published, and assessing which one of them contributed a given idea can be challenging. Certain early documents relating to Blackmoor were published by Judges Guild in the First Fantasy Campaign (1977). Though it also anthologizes material created after the 1974 publication of the original Dungeons and Dragons boxed set with little signposting to date the age of respective passages. Those documents aren't included here. Though, this book summarizes their contents where necessary. It is my privilege to help make this rare early material available to gamers interested in the history of the original system. . . (bottom portion obscured in screengrab). . . on the spot to create a coherent play experience. Thus, any attempt to identify a single "original" play style for these rules can only ever be one interpretation. As Chainmail puts it, " these rules may be treated as guidelines around which you form a game that suits you. "Note that the " rules for fantastic medieval war games campaigns" that make up original D&D were created by and sold to a wargaming community that was almost exclusively white, middle class men. The rules compiled here offer little by way of rules for other players, nor indeed for anyone who wouldn't easily identify with a pulp sword-and- sorcery hero. Especially before 1974, the rules made light of slavery, in addition to including other harmful content. To reiterate the disclaimer Wizards of the Coast includes on legacy D&D content, " These depictions were wrong then and are wrong today. The content is presented as it was originally created, because to do otherwise would be the same as claiming these prejudices never existed. "I'd like to thank a few people who helped me parse and understand this material in various ways, including Bill Meinhardt, Mike Mornard, Dave Megarry, Dave Wesely, Bill Hoyt, Mike Carr, Frank Mentzer, Dan Boggs, and - ever so long ago - Dave Arneson. I'd also like to thank the team at Wizards, including Judy Bauer, Janica Carter, Matt Cole, Kate Irwin, Bob Jordan, and Jason Tondro.</blockquote>

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