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Enchanted Trinkets Complete--a hardcover book containing over 500 magic items for your D&D games!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="grodog" data-source="post: 5927498" data-attributes="member: 1613">In addition to the fantasy gaming clubs like the Castles & Crusades Society, IFW, and I'm sure many others in the late '60s, there were actually earlier forms of what I think of as "proto-role-playing" going on prior to the publication of D&D too:<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">modern wargaming rules go back to HG Wells' _Little Wars_ and the German traditions of Kriegspiel dating back to the early 1800s (but your father probably wasn't around then, eh? <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /> )</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Fritz Leiber and Harry Fisher created Lankhmar and with it Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser and the World of Nehwon as a game in 1937 (and it naturally later became a vehicle for gaming and fiction, with TSR's Lankhmar boardgame in 1976)</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Fletcher Pratt's naval warfare rules were first published in 1940, and were in widespread use by the Navy by the 1950s</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">By the 1950s, Lin Carter was an active participant in early forms of wargaming and in Diplomacy fantasy variants based on Howard's creations, and likely Tolkien's too, and he later wrote Royal Armies of the Hyborean Age for FGU in 1975 (a set of fantasy miniatures rules for Conan's world); and note the fiction focus in these early wargames authors:  all were SF/F authors!</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">MAR Barker had already created his Tekumel world, so when D&D launched it was turned into a vehicle for EPT to be published (in 1975), but EPT predates D&D by at least a decade if not longer</li> </ul>Gary and Jeff Perren first wrote Chainmail in 1968, although Guidon didn't publish it for 2-3 years until 1971, so it's certainly possible if he was in the Twin Cities/Lake Geneva/Chicago corridor, that he could have seen early forms of fantasy wargaming with miniatures as early as 1965.  And D&D was also being rushed into print in 1974, at least in part to be the first true RPG system published because so many other folks were latched onto the fantasy miniatures/proto-role-playing concepts.See also <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wargaming#History" target="_blank">Wargaming - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia</a> and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_role-playing_games#Wargames" target="_blank">History of role-playing games - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia</a> for some more worthwhile context to see if any of that rings bells for your father.  Knowing where/when he was in college might help to pinpoint better the possible accuracy of his recollections, too.</blockquote>

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