Recent content by James Maliszewski

Days of High Adventure: When Characters Were Born, Not Made In the early days of tabletop RPGs, creating a character looked very different from how we know it today. Read Full Article

Days of High Adventure: Remembering Dave Dungeons & Dragons players owe a great debt to a man some of them have never heard of. Read Full Article

Quite correct. I'm surprised I let those misspellings through.

The New Fowler's Modern Usage (Oxford University Press, 1996) would disagree with you: "The small cubes with faces bearing 1-6 spots used in games of chance are the dice (pl.); and one of them is also called a dice." In point of fact, "dice" is one of those words in English that has multiple...

Those Funny Dice The history (and mystery) of dice. Read Full Article

There are several related matters to untangle here. M.A.R. Barker's Empire of the Petal Throne RPG was published in 1975 by TSR, a year after the release of D&D and the same year as its Supplement II, entitled Blackmoor (and credited to Dave Arneson, even though much of its contents were...

Founding Fathers Modern tabletop gaming owes its roots to traditional war games, a lineage that can be traced to these visionaries from Baron von Reisswitz to H.G. Wells. Read Full Article

To be fair, nearly everyone on Barsoom runs around near-naked, John Carter included. That said, I think it plausible that Burroughs set a modern precedent for scantily-clad protagonists that later fantasy writers followed.

There's no doubt that Moorcock's works were influential upon D&D (particularly the Elric and Hawkmoon series), but direct references to these stories in the game are few. As I quoted, when Gary Gygax took the opportunity to note the strongest literary influences on the game in his estimation, he...

The Books That Founded D&D Beyond Tolkien and "Lord of the Rings," there were plenty of other authors and series that inspired the D&D series. Read Full Article

A Lifetime of Gaming When you have no background in tabletop gaming, you make up your own rules to D&D Read Full Article

A Visit to Trollhalla: An Interview with Ken St. Andre You may have heard of Dungeons and Dragons, but have you heard of Trolls & Tunnels, another tabletop game released at the same time and that was just as popular? James Maliszewski interviews creator Ken St.Andre on Trollworld, storytelling...

Full Circle: A History of the Old School Revival Finally, old school tabletop RPGs are back! But the road to revival had been long and complicated. Read Full Article