A new book from Dungeons & Dragons publisher Wizards of the Coast is a significant step in the evolution of the Rpg as a whole, as it chronicles the early history of tabletop RPGs. The Making of Original Dungeons & Dragons: 1970-1977 will be released in 2024/6/18 and will compile numerous documentation from the development and release of the first tabletop RPG.

The first chapter of the book is doozy for people who are interested in the formation of what RPG is, Dungeons & Dragons are considering combining 1 image of the first real RPG character sheet, a list of simple stats, or an effort to become a combined two-in-one with a corresponding image between 2 It's very cool to see what works and what works.

The rest of the book contains the 1973 Dungeons & Dragons Draft and the actually published brown-box and white-box rules, which continue to follow, with hundreds of pages of the earliest supplements. It's too neat to see, expand, contract and evolve the idea of a character that belongs to an RPG. For example, the appearance of a now ubiquitous character class like a thief. These are, simply put, the kind of historical documents that are completely lost in time or locked away in private collections that are inaccessible for a lot of games — and it's great to see the company commit to making them available properly.

The creation of the original D&D was curated by prominent Dungeons & Dragons historian John Peterson and contains commentary from. Peterson's 2012 book Playing at The World is the most definitive and comprehensive history of games simulating war and adventure, starting with chess, going through the first professional wargames, before ending with the development of role-playing games. If you're interested in the deep history of what later brought us a lot of aspects of the simulation side of video games, it's a fascinating one.

The original Dungeons & Dragons Making will be released later this month, 2024-6-18, and is a hefty collector's book with shiny pages, heavy stock paper, and 4 separate cloth bookmark ribbons attached. It retails for an equally hefty retail100.