Old School, New Histories

Two pieces on this site that I’m rather proud of are my essays on the secret history of tabletop roleplaying games: Dungeon Master Zero, on the eccentric Indian fighter, pyramidologist, and Anglo-Israelite who brought refereed wargaming to America, and R&D, on Cold War simulation gaming at RAND. One of the things I’m not proud of is that it’s been two years and I haven’t completed what was to have been a trilogy of posts, not to mention a long-promised article for Jonathan Walton’s journal PUSH. The idea for the trilogy came when I read that David Wesely’s Braunstein, a seminal proto-roleplaying game from 1968, was inspired by three books: Charles Totten’s wargame Strategos, the RAND Corporation’s Compleat Strategyst, and Kenneth Boulding’s Conflict and Defense. And it seemed to me that each of those three books could tell us something unexpected and as yet untold about the roots of the roleplaying hobby and maybe something about geek or gaming history more generally.

But a funny thing happened on the way to my third post: two years went by! And in those two years, the whole landscape of information and interest in the history of roleplaying has been transformed. A renaissance in “old school” gaming, that is, gaming that tries to emulate the feel or philosophy of the hobby in the 1970s, has brought with it a new interest in the early history of tabletop rpgs.

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[Cross-posted from Old is the New New. Comments welcome here or there.]