There have already been a few mentions on the forums that I have a book coming out about the history of wargames and role-playing games. I hope it won't be considered off-topic here for me to provide a notice that the book is now officially out. It's called Playing at the World, with the lengthy subtitle "A History of Simulating Wars, People and Fantastic Adventures, from Chess to Role-Playing Games." If you're interested, you can find it on Amazon.

It's a long book (about 700 dense pages) and not an easy one to summarize. It focuses mainly on the two hundred years between 1780 and 1980. I approach the history by ignoring basically everything said or written about gaming since 1980, and instead I try to recover the narrative that the surviving documents of the era tell. The lack of such documents has been a real challenge for historians in the past. As many of you know, I collect ephemera of the 1960s-70s, and the study relies on a huge trove of rare fanzines, letters, unpublished manuscripts and so on, not just from my own collection but from other public and private holdings. As a result, the book can offer unprecedented insight into things like the Castle & Crusade Society, the Blackmoor campaign, early phenomena like Tony Bath's Hyborian campaign, the initial reception of D&D, the start of the broader role-playing game industry and so on. The scope of the book is much larger than just D&D, but D&D is the thread that ties everything together. With a work of this size and complexity, I'm sure I didn't get everything right, but I can say pretty confidently that the book will set a new bar for detail and rigor in handling the history of games. Even for people who are pretty serious about the history of D&D, I'm sure you will find things in here to challenge your assumptions and make you rethink large parts of the story.

I also reproduce a lot of (70+) illustrations, some of which will be of interest to collectors, mostly items from my own collection. Perhaps for people here, the most exciting of those would be an original (pre-D&D) Blackmoor character sheet, one that shows the original Blackmoor names of the abilities (SIWDCCh) and a number of other details of historical note. I also for example provide a copy of the royalty agreement that Gygax and Arneson executed with TSR. I have some neat in-game and in-character correspondence from Gary, from the early 1970s. In terms of wargaming, I have some pretty spectacular reproductions from early games, including the first wargaming map (from Venturini, 1797) - I actually use a full-color excerpt of Venturini's maps as the back cover of the book.

For those of you going to GenCon, there will be a notice for the book in the program, and I'll have a few copies to bring with me to the Acaeum dinner of course.

This sound fabulous, Jon!  Can't wait to check it out

Please bring 2 more copies for Devon and I

I grabbed the Kindle preview and after about, oh, 2 pages I decided to buy it. My question is is there a best way to buy it for the author? I mean do you do better on Kindle or Print? Just Curious.

Zach

Please bring a copy to the Acaeum Dinner for me as well  

Well, that was a good excuse for installing Kindle software on this PC. ^^

Thanks for setting aside your "I still think you're the one who should be writing the book" comment, Jon: sterling work.
And good to see you managed to get a hold of George and Hartley, too!

darkseraphim wrote:Reliance on source docs should finally slaughter a few sacred cows as well.

+1

I bought it for my kindle and reading it now.  Good read so far. I have to say thanks for putting the Great Kingdom map in there. It one of those ur maps that many folks like myself have been waiting to take a look at.

increment wrote:I must maintain that you would surely make a distinct and valuable contribution to the literature, David. But thanks for your commendation!

Apologies; time-constrained IRL... :/

*g*. Nah; from a casual skip-browse through, I can see omissions - absolutely inevitable given the scope! - but nothing too deleterious to the overall narrative /as presented/; aided, of course, by generally presenting the source material "as is". It was amusing to read you repeatedly latch onto the same quotes that I had from publications as diverse as the BMSS Bulletin and O&W and you certainly dug deep to pick up those other sources on my "wishlist"!
The interpretation layer is, of course, always more problematic; not least in the baggage that can bring to the table. Not encouraging others to do so can be fun, too (the title of Chapter Five, for example? ).

Hmm... perhaps the literary section sprawls somewhat and personally feels like it's missing a few elements, presuming the Kindle/PC search function is working properly(!) (Folengo and Clarke for two obvious (to me) examples) that could've hooked neatly into the overall narrative; but I, for one, am a lot happier than I was previously, not least from the p.o.v. of Wikipedia citability.

Cheers,
David.

faro wrote:Hmm... perhaps the literary section sprawls somewhat and personally feels like it's missing a few elements, presuming the Kindle/PC search function is working properly(!) (Folengo and Clarke for two obvious (to me) examples) that could've hooked neatly into the overall narrative

It's true that I don't talk about Folengo or Clarke. As a point of methodology, I tried to adhere to the authors that Gygax and Arneson specifically noted at the time, and by extension to a small number of sources necessary to understand the setting of those works. Occasionally this does sprawl a bit - Section 2.6, which discusses the origins of fantasy monsters, tries to cram into a subsection what could probably be its own book - but I felt a lot of the detail was justified by the way that character-playing integrated with games as discussed in Chapter Four. I wish there had been a history of fantasy fiction I could have just referenced instead of writing my Chapter Two, but ultimately, showing how the formal structure of fantasy fiction contributed to the invention of RPGs, and how RPGs in turn changed the fantasy genre, warranted including a history of the genre customized to this topic.