Vintage Dungeons & Dragons

Dungeons & Dragons, sometimes abbreviated as D&D or DnD, is a fantasy tabletop game developed by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson in the 1970s. The game launched in January of 1974 as a set of three booklets sold in a woodgrain-patterned cardboard box: Men & Magic, Monsters & Treasure, and Underworld & Wilderness Adventures. By the end of the year, the first edition of 1000 hand-assembled sets had sold out. Gary Gygax had been interested in war games since the 1960s, when he organized the Lake Geneva Wargames Convention (Gen Con) in his Wisconsin hometown. Gygax met Arneson at the second annual Gen Con, and they soon began to collaborate on a new idea building on elements of the medieval warfare game Chainmail, which Gygax had created with Jeff Perren in 1971. Because it was impossible to find a publisher willing to take on the project, in partnership with Don Kaye, Gygax formed Tactical Studies Rules in 1973 to produce the new game. They called it Dungeons & Dragons, a name supposedly selected by Gygax’s two-year-old daughter Cindy from a list of various alternatives. After Dungeons & Dragons debuted in 1974, the publishing company was restructured as TSR Hobbies, Inc. In 1975, the second and third printings of D&D also sold out. That year, TSR released its first two supplements, Greyhawk and Blackmoor, which laid out new character classes or ranks that define a character’s skills and abilities. Gygax and Arneson’s imaginary worlds were influenced by popular fantasy novels, including Jack Vance’s Dying Earth series and J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings—so much so that Tolkien Enterprises’ threat of a copyright suit forced TSR to change the names of some D&D creatures. This didn’t deter fans of the fantastic universe created for Dungeons & Dragons: In less than a decade, D&D would be generating millions of dollars in sales and TSR would become the world’s leading seller of role-playing games (RPGs). One of the great innovations in Dungeons & Dragons is that players create their own complex characters, rather than the generic military formation common to previous war games. Led by the Dungeon Master, an appointed referee and storyteller, these characters enact elaborate adventures within a fantasy world and gain experience points (XP) in order to increase their powers. Because of its open-endedness, a D&D story or campaign can continue indefinitely, as there is no traditional winner or loser in the game. The Dungeon Master typically uses official modules (later called “adventures”) published as books or boxed-set guides that outline player knowledge and activities in a certain scenario. A module includes background plot information, maps, descriptions or drawings of locations and creatures, and suggested rules for player interactions. Players roll various multi-sided dice to determine whether their attacks or other actions are successful. For its fourth printing in 1976, Dungeons & Dragons was packaged in a white box that would be used for future versions of the original game. Supplements III and IV—Eldritch Wizardry and Gods, Demi-Gods, and Heroes—were also introduced in 1976. That same year, the first D&D standalone module, “Palace of the Vampire Queen,” was published by Wee Warriors and distributed by TSR. For the first time the following year, Dungeons & Dragons editions were divided into basic and advanced versions, with the latter including far more rules aimed at more serious gamers. The 1977 basic release, edited by John Eric Holmes, was the first to include a set of dice packaged with the game. Miniature figures had always been encouraged in D&D game play, drawing on a convention of tabletop war games, but the first official line of Dungeons & Dragons miniatures—produced by Minifigs of the United Kingdom—also wasn’t released until 1977. Grenadier Models had been licensed to make official D&D miniatures in 1980, but TSR started producing its own figures in 1983. During the late 1970s, three hardcover rule books were released to complement the advanced game: Player's Handbook (PHB), the Dungeon Master's Guide (DMG), and the Monster Manual (MM). By the mid-1980s, more than 750,000 copies of the D&D rule books were being sold each year, and Gygax had sold his interest in the company after royalty disputes. The widespread popularity of Dungeons & Dragons inspired Rona Jaffe’s 1981 novel Mazes and Monsters, centering on a group of college students and the dangers of a fictional role-playing game modeled on D&D. The book featured real-world fears that D&D exerted a dangerous influence on its players and, in 1982, it was adapted into a made-for-TV film starring Tom Hanks. After high-school student Irving Lee Pulling, who regularly played Dungeons & Dragons, committed suicide in 1982, his mother sued TSR. The next year, after her case had been dismissed, Pulling formed Bothered About Dungeons and Dragons (BADD). BADD’s media campaign against Dungeons & Dragons played on the existing fears of conservative Christian groups who claimed the game encouraged voodoo, murder, suicide, sexual perversion, gambling, cannibalism, devil worship, and witchcraft. Such negative media attention only increased the game’s sales. Further revised sets of D&D were released throughout the 1980s by authors Tom Moldvay, Frank Mentzer, and David "Zeb" Cook, and the game was also translated into several foreign languages for the first time. In 1989, TSR published Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 2nd Edition, which was made up of three core rule books edited by Cook. This version moved away from the more suggestive themes and artwork to a version more closely aligned with medieval history and mythology. After financial missteps in the 1990s, TSR was acquired by game-publisher Wizards of the Coast LLC, famous for its Magic: The Gathering card game, in 1997. Three years later, in 2000, the company released its Dungeons & Dragons 3rd Edition, which combined the basic and advanced version back into a single multi-genre game built around 20-sided dice, sometimes called the “d20 System.” A 4th Edition debuted in 2005, and for Dungeons & Dragons’ 40th anniversary in 2014, the 5th Edition was launched. In recent years, Dungeons & Dragons also appeared in the popular Netflix series Stranger Things, igniting a new round of interest in vintage Dungeons & Dragons sets and miniatures.