Dungeons & Dragons White Box 01

Let's start at the beginning:

ONCE UPON A TIME, long, long ago there was a little group known as the Castle and Crusade Society. Their fantasy rules were published, and to this writer’s knowledge, brought about much of the current interest in fantasy wargaming. For a time the group grew and prospered, and Dave Arneson decided to begin a medieval fantasy campaign game for his active Twin Cities club. From the map of the “land” of the “Great Kingdom” and environs — the territory of the C & C Society — Dave located a nice bog wherein to nest the weird enclave of “Blackmoor,” a spot between the “Great Kingdom” and the fearsome “Egg of Coot.” From the CHAINMAIL® fantasy rules he drew ideas for a far more complex and exciting game, and thus began a campaign which still thrives as of this writing! In due course the news reached my ears, and the result is what you have in your hands at this moment. While the C & C Society is no longer, its spirit lives on, and we believe that all wargamers who are interested in the medieval period, not just fantasy buffs, will enjoy playing DUNGEONS & DRAGONS®. Its possibilities go far beyond any previous offerings anywhere!

I'm not going to criticise. Rather, note the tenor of the forward given... there's no grand mission statement, no philosophy of play, no rhetoric about inclusivity or artistic transcendence. There's a youthful pride in the tone, found in the use of quaint language to describe the ordinary, the sense of something exciting about the start, the utter lack of self-importance or the remotest awareness that the writer might one day be looked upon as an engineer of history. Blackmoor is introduced playfully; no one at the time has a preconception of it, so it is merely a place between here and there. The language is reminiscent of Roald Dahl, with a bit of Lewis Carroll... and the self-reference isn't to "role-players" but "wargamers." That alone carries a considerable weight that we ought to hold fast in our memories.

While it is possible to play a single game, unrelated to any other game events past or future, it is the campaign for which these rules are designed. It is relatively simple to set up a fantasy campaign, and better still, it will cost almost nothing. In fact you will not even need miniature figures, although their occasional employment is recommended for real spectacle when battles are fought. A quick glance at the Equipment section of this booklet will reveal just how little is required. The most extensive requirement is time. The campaign referee will have to have sufficient time to meet the demands of his players, he will have to devote a number of hours to laying out the maps of his “dungeons” and upper terrain before the affair begins. The third booklet of this set will be of great help in this respect, for a number of helpful suggestions regarding how to accomplish it all have been given in order to help you accomplish the task with a minimum of time and effort. There should be no want of players, for there is unquestionably a fascination in this fantasy game — evidenced even by those who could not by any stretch of the imagination be termed ardent wargamers. The longevity of existing campaigns (notably "Blackmoor" in the Twin Cities and "Greyhawk" in Lake Geneva) and the demand for these rules from people outside these campaigns point towards a fantastic future. Tactical Studies Rules believes that of all forms of wargaming, fantasy will soon become the major contender for first place. The section of this booklet entitled Scope will provide an idea of just how many possibilities are inherent in DUNGEONS & DRAGONS.

Note the usual beats here, stretching back 50 years. The expectation that the activity cannot be done casually; the assumed abundance of players; the expectation that this thing is going to be big one day. The above, written in 1973, states the campaigns mentioned already have "longevity." How far back, then, does D&D really go? We're not told, but we see plainly that 1973 wasn't the starting point.

Further, consider that the work is done to meet "the demands of the players," and not for self-aggrandisement. As the foremost creator of a single game world on the internet (arguably), I would argue that yes, the needs of the player to have a game world that is structured, laboured upon, with maps and a display of terrain, needed hours of commitment... that is absolutely the contract I signed upon becoming a DM. That there are those who complain at this cost, who feel this cost should assign them some importance above the player... and damn it, that the player should be grateful for the effort, and not critical of whatever may have resulted from that effort (as they have every right to be), has become a normal part of our present game culture. But there it is, as near to the beginning as we need have it: expect that you'll have to work. I have written on the value of doing something in service of those outside ourselves.

These rules are strictly fantasy. Those wargamers who lack imagination, those who don't care for Burroughs' Martian adventures where John Carter is groping through black pits, who feel no thrill upon reading Howard's Conan saga, who do not enjoy the de Camp & Pratt fantasies or Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser pitting their swords against evil sorceries will not be likely to find DUNGEONS & DRAGONS to their taste. But those whose imaginations know no bounds will find that these rules are the answer to their prayers. With this last bit of advice we invite you to read on and enjoy a “world” where the fantastic is fact and magic really works!

E. Gary Gygax, Tactical Studies Rules Editor

1 November 1973, Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. 

As someone of a few years, I gain a bit of humour at the choices of literature that made the cut, as it were. No, not Tolkein, Burroughs. No, not Lovecraft, Howard. No, not Vance, Leiber. Oh, sure, no doubt such names might have arisen, if there'd been a reason to include a fourth or a fifth example... but as someone who remembers 1973, who remembers when Tolkein was not a god while Lovecraft was generally met with an attitude of "meh"... it is, after all, the same book over and over... I get a little pleasure from sources a little closer to the bone of what I saw D&D representing when I began to play in 1979.

But that aside, we see the origin of that effort to paint the atmosphere with a brush design to promote feeling over gameplay. I understand the reason for it; atmosphere grabs, atmosphere impels, atmosphere sells content. It's an easy way to put butts in the seat, and the folks here are only following up a long history of 20th century marketing. But "atmosphere" has since remaining the lingering poison of this game, putting butts in seats that never should have come to a game night, and who couldn't pick Howard or Lovecraft out in a line-up (hint, it's the dead one). But that is not the fault of Gygax, the author of this piece. He didn't know. He couldn't have known. No one could have.

I invoke it here not to fault the originators, but to show how the fault was always in their stars, how the very nature of the game carried its own gravedigging shovel. The genre energy that made it irresistible — that open invitation to imagination — also guaranteed that, sooner or later, the performance of that imagination would eclipse the play.

INTRODUCTION:

These rules are as complete as possible within the limitations imposed by the space of three booklets. That is, they cover the major aspects of fantasy campaigns but still remain flexible. As with any other set of miniatures rules they are guidelines to follow in designing your own fantastic-medieval campaign. They provide the framework around which you will build a game of simplicity or tremendous complexity — your time and imagination are about the only limiting factors, and the fact that you have purchased these rules tends to indicate that there is no lack of imagination — the fascination of the game will tend to make participants find more and more time. We advise, however, that a campaign be begun slowly, following the steps outlined herein, so as to avoid becoming too bogged down with unfamiliar details at first. That way your campaign will build naturally, at the pace best suited to the referee and players, smoothing the way for all concerned. New details can be added and old "laws" altered so as to provide continually new and different situations. In addition, the players themselves will interact in such a way as to make the campaign variable and unique. and this is quite desirable.

I could talk for a long, long time about many of the things here... and I have. We'll assume with the assumption that the rules are for miniatures... and while yes, I've often run games without miniatures, and I agree they're not strictly necessary, I feel it's important to comprehend this from a design strategy. The presence of the miniature assumes a finite-quality as a fundamentalism. The miniature occupies space; it moves through the time of combat and other procedure; its distance is not only relative to other things, it's a relativity that is expected to be measurable. For those who believe that D&D was never conceived as a "tactical" game, or those I've seen who claim to be "OSR" yet dismiss the tactical aspect of the original rules, this is a bombshell. Not one that's going to influence anybody, but nevertheless a fact. Original D&D was tactical. Get past it.

And again, for those who have revised the original work in their head so as to pretend that OSR was an abstract storytelling engine, or that it was deliberately a "simplified" form of D&D, we have the contrary before us: yes, it can be a game of simplicity. It can also be a game of tremendous complexity. I am not separated from the OSR because my game has more rules, more substance, more expectations upon myself, more options for the players, more detail, more relevant social aspects and so on. I am merely separated from others because I worked harder. I chose to use my time and imagination to dispense with the arbitrary limits that lazier, less committed, less caring, less engaged, less ardent enthusiasts chose to give. Being lazy about your game world, even if you frame it as "a simple rule system," is not a virtue... it's merely the option you took. But your choice does not define what the game REALLY WAS, right there in the introduction, just because you wish to see it so. When you attempt to do so, you only reveal how full of shit you are.

Interesting that assumption of "if you've bought this, you're one of us..." not in the sense of having joined a club, but that you're obviously an imaginative, deeply invested true believer like we are. For years and years, unquestionably, this was true. I'll be honest: those first few years of D&D, up until my first game convention I would say, around 1984, one just didn't encounter really stupid people in a game. Oh, sure, a few jerks, I can see their faces now, 45 years later... and occasionally a pompous ass. But an imaginative pompous ass, a problem-solving jerk. One could count on a certain... intellectual elan, as it were. A vitality of thought as motion, a mind with forward drive. In the parlance of the introduction, those with a compulsion to work on D&D, not unlike my own. My high school, as I've said, swilled a pan of some 2,200 students down to twenty, twenty-five nuggets. Most of us wanted to sit and devise some creative work, a map, a game rule, an artistic sketch of a character, a whole campaign. No doubt the originators of D&D were noticing a similar distillation among the various mid-west post-secondary schools that they called home. And the assumption seems to be that the game will also appeal to a certain kind... the right kind. While others won't, so to speak, want to work for it.

In this way, early D&D wasn't democratic at all; it was a craftsman's guild, the sort made of wargamers that would deliberately tank the efforts of a newly arrived player who was judged not to be "worthy" of the club, as they didn't have the assumed strategical/tactical skills. Those folks didn't want to play with dabblers... it is from within those folks that D&D got its start. Its a quiet note that the games foundation wasn't one of inclusiveness, but an expectation of competence. Just as chessplayers self-select to remove those who can't play at the room's level, old school D&D used to as well. But that's not what we mean when we say "old school" today, is it?

And yes, agreed, start small. You don't know what your world is, don't make a world.  Make a back yard. Make a swing, a tire and a slide. And a picnic table for drinks. That's your first game world: three places for the players to go and a home base to buy stuff. Then, when you're ready, add a sandbox. But only when you're ready, and only when you find yourself without work to do, while yet wanting to work. You grow the world because there’s a genuine appetite to expand, not because some online rubric says a "real campaign" needs a continent.

Of course that applies to rules as well as anything. The originators knew they hadn't written enough rules; they knew the rules they wrote wouldn't work for every table. They didn't pretend they had all the answers, which makes their glorification, in the way they have been glorified, rather ridiculous. "Laws" is put in brackets because, since Hammurabi, if there's anything in this world that is never fixed, it's the law. That's a 50 year old snub against people who haven't been born yet, who write "rules as written" as though that's a sensible approach to anything.

That's enough.