I recently took a look at two books
about games written more than 20 year ago. Heroic Worlds and
The Complete Wargames Handbook now provide extremely dated
views of the adventure gaming hobby, particularly roleplaying games
and traditional board-and-chit wargames (with some digression into
the then-nascent computer games). Reading them again not only reminds
one of the state of the hobby at their particular time, but how far
we’ve come, what’s changed, and what hasn’t.
I acquired each book at different times
of my gaming career. I found Heroic Worlds at a local
bookstore when it first came out. It proved a solid reference in
keeping track of games and supplements I already owned and as a guide
giving me a glimpse into games I might want to buy. I recently found
The Complete Wargames Handbook at a small wargaming
convention’s flea market; it provided an interesting if dated look
at the wargaming industry from one of its key creative personalities.
Both offer interesting lessons about the adventure gaming hobby over
time.
Heroic Worlds
Lawrence Schick’s Heroic Worlds: A
History and Guide to Role-Playing Games first appeared in 1991
from Prometheus Books. In the pre-Internet Age it served as a
comprehensive and informative catalog of existing roleplaying games
at the time. Some who are jaded by today’s Internet Age – where
anyone with a computer and an internet connection can upload their
own history of roleplaying games, lists of published materials for
various games, and interviews with industry luminaries – might find
Heroic Worlds rather dated, tame reading, though much of the
information remains invaluable today in this handy, analog reference
tome.
The 448-page masterpiece serves as an
impressive monument to meticulous cataloging of the vast and diverse
field of roleplaying games and supplements available at the time. The
book features a host of elements that help it stand out as a
reference work, even as one limited in its particular time:
Historiography: One of the first
chapters offers what may stand as the first, published history of
roleplaying games. It includes references to both key personalities
and products in the development and advancement of the roleplaying
game industry. Various subsections cover roleplaying games in the
news, different “waves” of development, and the growth of
different genre-based games. Certainly more recent work has covered
this territory – and more than 20 years of subsequent development –
more thoroughly, but Schick’s arguably remains the first.
Publisher Reference: Heroic
Worlds includes an appendix listing all known roleplaying games
publishers up to that time, including postal addresses where
available, and lists of games each company published. Granted, it’s
all woefully out of date today, but provides an interesting picture
of the 15 year-old industry. What does it say about the adventure
gaming hobby when this early reference work already makes a point of
noting “NLA” – “No Longer Active” – after a host of
company listings?
Award Listings: Another appendix
lists “Award-Winning Games,” including Origins, H.G. Wells, and
Charles Roberts Awards through 1990, notable roleplaying games
mentioned in Games magazine’s annual list of the top 100
currently available titles, and Schick’s own list of top 10 games
in Heroic Worlds (and an interesting top five list of
“Appalling RPG Products”). Although more comprehensive and
current listings live somewhere on the internet today, they reside at
disparate websites; no doubt the list of appalling products has grown
exponentially over the years.
Sample Artwork: Although
extremely sparse, black-and-white artwork from cataloged projects
peppers the tome, providing a small glimpse into various game lines’
graphic styles. Each illustration includes the artist’s name, title
of the product in which it appeared, publisher and publication date,
and copyright and permission citations.
Genre Summaries: The “Game
Index” portion of Heroic Worlds – the bulk of the book –
covers roleplaying games across numerous categories...and for each
category Schick offers a brief, sometimes more substantive summary of
the genre’s qualities and significant game titles contributing to
the popular success of the field. Schick also includes his top five
recommendations in each category. (Solo game aficionados might take
interest that Schick deemed “Solo Gamebooks” a valid category.)
Insider Insight: Readers find
short essays by industry luminaries scattered across the catalog
listings. Most discuss the design behind particular game systems or
general approaches to roleplaying game writing. The list of
contributors looks impressive: Dave Arneson, Greg Gorden, Gary Gygax,
Steve Jackson, Tom Moldvay, Sandy Petersen, Ken St. Andre, Michael A.
Stackpole, Greg Stafford, and a host of others who aren’t
“household” names but whose contributions to the adventure gaming
hobby remain essential. These first-hand accounts remain essential to
those seeking primary sources on the earliest days of roleplaying
games, especially from luminaries who have since passed away.
Catalog Information: By far
Heroic Worlds’ most impressive accomplishment remains its
catalog listing of what seems like every roleplaying game product
ever published through 1990. Entries include valuable publication
reference information like authors, cover artists, interior artists,
format, page count, publisher name, and publication date. Schick
includes brief summaries of each product, expanding on the subject
and contents, and occasionally including his own opinions...all
contributing to small, insightful tidbits on nearly every item
cataloged.
Author Lawrence Schick remains one of
the key personalities of the roleplaying game industry’s early days
– giving him an excellent perspective to assemble the catalog and
contact fellow luminaries for the insights he included in Heroic
Worlds – though he’s not as well-known as many others with
more recognizable names. He served as head of design and development
at TSR in the early 1980s (what I frequently call “The Golden Age
of Roleplaying”) and was responsible for hiring such luminaries as
Tom Moldvay and Dave Cook. His greatest claim to fame comes from
designing the infamous Advanced Dungeons & Dragons module
S2 White Plume Mountain. Like many of his fellow game
designers of the period he later moved into the electronic gaming
industry, including game-related work with America Online (AOL).
What can readers learn from Heroic
Worlds today?
* Compiling a comprehensive catalog of
every available product – complete with accurate author and product
information – even back before the boom in roleplaying games during
the 1990s was a Herculean task, and might prove daunting even with
today’s technology.
* The internet helps find game
information. In its time Heroic Worlds served as a great resource for
gamers and collectors, documenting the products published to date
with enough information to give customers an idea whether a game
supplement was worth pursuing. Today publisher websites, game forums,
and reviews help gamers make these decisions.
* A sense of wonder still comes from
reading about early roleplaying game developments from the people who
pioneered them.
* Even back then, in the early days of
roleplaying games, companies and games came and went.
* Heroic Worlds offers an
interesting perspective about the exponential growth of games (a
subject I’ve discussed before); if all the game products published
in the first 15 years of the roleplaying game industry could fill a
448-page book, how many pages could the games published in the
hobby’s first 40 years fill?
The Complete
Wargames Handbook
I’ve dabbled in wargames – both the
board-and-chit as well as the miniatures varieties – for years, but
never to the same degree as roleplaying games. But when I found a
copy of James Dunnigan’s The Complete Wargames Handbook: How
to Play, Design & Find Them (revised edition) at a recent
convention flea market, I grabbed it to add to a small but growing
collection of non-fiction books about gaming (my “academic”
gaming bookshelf). Published in1992, it’s a contemporary volume to
Heroic Worlds for a different aspect of the adventure gaming
hobby...arguably one that’s been around for a little longer than
roleplaying games.
The Complete Wargames Handbook
offers a broad overview of the board-and-chit wargaming hobby, with a
number of specific insights from the author’s involvement as
founder of Simulations Publications Inc. (SPI), publisher of
Strategy & Tactics magazine, and a prolific writer and
game designer. Chapters cover such diverse subjects as “What Is A
Wargame?” “How to Play,” why people play wargames, designing
wargames, their history (up to the date of publication), a look at
player demographics, computer wargames, and “Wargames at War.”
Most chapters offer information useful to both players and designers.
Dunnigan’s style remains conversational and easily digestible, as
if he’s having a casual conversation with readers about wargames.
He also demonstrates many concepts he discusses through a small
wargame included within the book itself: The Drive on Metz:
September 1944. Dunnigan devotes about a third of the book to
computer wargames, though the lessons applied there derive from and
inform development of analog board-and-chit wargames.
Dunnigan offers several insider
revelations garnered from his years in wargame publishing and
consumer surveys conducted through Strategy & Tactics
magazine:
Rules Master: While discussing
designing a wargame, Dunnigan reveals how at SPI they maintained a
“rules master” file on computer with the core text of rules one
could easily customize and modify for the current game. He attributes
the practice to Avalon Hill’s Tom Shaw whom he once asked how to
start writing the rules to a game. “It’s simple. You simply take
the last game we published and use it as a model.” Many wargames
using basic core concepts in the style of the one he provides in the
book could easily fit into that mold, with existing rules updated and
amended for the combatants, terrain, and period; but this technique
would hardly suffice at all for today’s complex card, board, and
roleplaying game rules.
Guidance: Dunnigan’s
“Designing Wargames” chapter contains his 10 steps or guidelines
to designing a wargame, each demonstrated using The Drive on Metz
as an example. His advice includes “Keep It Simple” and
“Plagiarize,” as he states, “a dramatic way of saying ‘Use
available techniques’” (as demonstrated in his use of the “rules
master”).
Solitaire Play: After having
conducted numerous surveys from Strategy & Tactics
readers, Dunnigan claims solitaire play is the preferred play style
for wargamers:
“Playing wargames solitaire is by far the favorite
mode for most wargamers. The most common reasons for playing
solitaire are lack of an opponent or preference to play without an
opponent, so that the player may exercise his own ideas about how
either side in the game should be played without interference from
another player.... For those players who do like to play with
opponents, solitaire play is valued as a means of perfecting tactics
and techniques in a particular game that will enhance the chances of
success.”
Solo gamers across the adventure gaming
hobby sometimes feel odd about playing multi-player games on their
own. Dunnigan provides logical justification for solitaire gaming,
both as a prelude to play against live opponents and as a purely
solitary activity in the enjoyment of games (and study of history).
Historiography:
Dunnigan offers an insider’s perspective on both the history of
wargames and the challenges that plagued what at times has seemed
like an ailing hobby. He also includes a list of “current”
wargame publishers and magazines at the time, many of which no longer
exist.
James Dunnigan is one
of the luminaries of the wargaming industry. Besides his work with
SPI and Strategy & Tactics he’s been inducted into the Academy
of Adventure Gaming Arts & Design Hall of Fame, written numerous
books on military subjects, and designed an impressive host of games.
BoardGameGeek.com called him “One of the most important figures in
the history of wargaming.”
Readers can still learn a great deal
from The Complete Wargames Handbook today. Dunnigan’s
guidance in designing games – whether or not one uses the “rules
master” technique – remains helpful, particularly toward those
with “unpublished games” (as he says, “I deliberately refrain
from calling them ‘amateur’ because I am consistently impressed
by the quality of unpublished games compared to many of those that
are published”). The Drive on Metz itself proves an easy
introduction to board-and-chit wargaming. Unfortunately this aspect
of the adventure gaming hobby has continued its decline, with a few
notable surges, in the face of other far more successful and visible
aspects like collectible card games, roleplaying games, and even
historical miniatures wargames.
Alas, both Heroic Worlds and The
Complete Wargames Handbook remain out of print and the realm of
second-hand book dealers. James Dunnigan has made the text of his book available for free reading online. I am glad to own paper copies
of both volumes, for they help fill out a slowly growing shelf
holding books about games to better inform my meager game design
efforts.
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