One of D&D’s greatest treasures will soon be shared with the world
When pop culture fandoms heat up, collectors begin to come out of the woodwork. Not speculators, mind you, like the pie-eyed, self-styled investor class that has glommed onto trading card games like Magic: The Gathering and Disney Lorcana. No, I’m talking about real collectors in search of rare artifacts, often from early on in the history of a given fandom.
Fans of Dungeons & Dragons are no different in this regard. In fact, the market for rare D&D books and ephemera has been hot as hell going on a decade now. The original, TSR-published “brown box” version of D&D? Even a busted-up old copy will run you close to $13,000 today on eBay. Some items are so obscure, so singular that their very existence is in question. That’s the case for the rare first draft of Dungeons & Dragons, which will be reproduced for the first time ever in a new book, The Making of Original Dungeons & Dragons: 1970-1977. Polygon sat with the project lead, senior game designer at Wizards of the Coast Jason Tondro, to learn more.
Tondro said that the book begins by telling the story of D&D’s co-creators, Dave Arneson and Gary Gygax. It details how Gygax, with his focus on combat made clear after the publication of a game called Chainmail, was introduced to Arneson and an early version of his own game, a proto-RPG campaign called Blackmoor. After an initial playtest of Blackmoor in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, the pair began a correspondence.
“Gygax writes to Arneson,” Tondro said, “and we reproduce this letter in the book, where he [tells] Arneson, ‘Send me everything you have on Blackmoor so I can write it up!’ And Arneson does send him game notes for the Blackmoor campaign. But that’s what they are, game notes. And so Gygax has to work this into a publishable manuscript, and he has to create a lot of new material. And so he sits down at his typewriter, and he types out a 50-page first draft of Dungeons & Dragons.”
The Making of Original Dungeons & Dragons, Tondro said, will include that first draft
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