TSR at the Table: A TTRPG Historian Delves into D&D's Product History

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Today’s issue is looking at DESIGNERS AND DRAGONS: ORIGINS, a new history-oriented project from Evil Hat Productions that explores some of the earliest published adventures from the people behind the earliest versions of D&D and the stories you may never have heard before.

The history of TTRPGs and D&D is a space that has been well documented, but that has also had significant portions of its content lost to time. If it were not for scholars like Ben Riggs and Jon Peterson, a lot of that history would hardly be known by this generation. Now a new set of historical texts is taking a closer look at early D&D content and bringing to life the stories behind some of the classic D&D adventures published in the first 20 years of D&D’s history.

Designers and Dragons: Origins is the latest set of histories written by award-winning historian Shannon Appelcline. While his previous books focused on an overview approach to TTRPG history, the new volumes are adopting a more incremental approach.

“[Designers and Dragons: Origins] is very different because it is a collection of product histories,” Appelcline told TTRPG Insider. “It does talk some about the bigger scope things such as TSR's near bankruptcy in 1985 and 1983 and several other historical points, but it doesn't make that history he core of the books. It goes through each individual product and asks ‘what is the unique history that we know about about this product?’”

Appelcline about the original D&D adventures when an opportunity to flesh out a lot of the original books. DrivethruRPG reached out to him about how they were bringing all of the old books from TSR and early D&D publishers to its platform with the hope of combatting piracy. They asked Appelcline to write short historical blurbs about each book to offer context, the historian told TTRPG Insider. These blurbs were written as a side project to help fans get to know these core texts and what had happened to them. He began to collect, expand and revise the blurbs in 2017 after he and his wife moved to Hawaii. Those expansions turned into the basis of Origins, which he eventually presented to Evil Hat Productions for their consideration in 2024 (and are now available for crowdfunding starting on October 21.)

Those four books will include:

• Vol 1: Original D&D and Advanced D&D 1e (1971-1983)

• Vol 2: Advanced D&D 1e (1983-1988)

• Vol 3: Holmes D&D, B/X D&D, and BECMI D&D (1977-1987)

• Vol 4: BECMI D&D, Black Box D&D, and Mystara (1987-1995)

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How D&D Design Changed During TSR’s Run

What will fans of D&D’s history discover in Origins? The books include deeper looks at why something was produced, how it was made, the weird things that may have occurred in its development and some of the stuff that we may never have known about. For example, an adventure titled Palace of the Silver Princess was almost recalled and buried by TSR, according to an excerpt published in Rascal News.

Some trends and phenomena that long-time fans might not have realized before include the shifting quality of publishing, according to Appelcline. The physical copies of D&D adventures published between 1974 and 1988 improved their production and design, Appelcline noted, moving from black-and-white to increasingly complicated colored cover designs; a shift reflective of the company’s growth over time.

There was also the shift in the adventure design from dungeon delves to narrative oriented campaigns. “There was an evolution in core design in the 1980s as you went from the very delvey original adventures in the 70s that began with Against the Giants and Tomb of Horrors,” Appelcine noted. “Then you hit 1983 and Dragonlance comes out. The big change there was suddenly, it was all narrative focused. Dungeon Masters were telling the story of heroes who were going out to save the world. It was a big, dramatic change, and it’s what a lot of people kind of consider as the end of the old school.”

The third and final trend he noticed was how TSR’s design team abandoned the Basic D&D line by handing it off to freelancers so they could focus on Advanced D&D, which was the newest version at the time. “AD&D was seen as the prestige line,” Appelcline noted, “If you were a designer, you probably wanted to be working on the Prestige line because that implied you were a prestige designer.” He also speculated that there was a loss of interest in Basic D&D because of Dave Arneson’s name. The business people at TSR “didn't care about as much [about AD&D] because they wanted to support the line that had Gary Gygax's name all on his own because he was still at the company through at least 1985,” Appelcline speculated. “It's always been a large suspicion as to why the Basic D&D line was less well served by some of the people within the company,”

The four volumes will contain details about hundreds of texts published by TSR, according to Appelcline. Each book contains product histories that are about 4-10 pages long and go into details about the art, the stories and how it was published. It’s a popular supplement that will help long-time fans of D&D’s earliest versions learn a lot more about the adventures of the day.

Appelcline had to research hundreds of texts, but the work made the historian appreciative of Gygax, Arneson and the other writers involved in D&D’s history.

“Anytime I do any historical research, I come out of it loving the product and the designers more than I did before,” Appelcline stated proudly, noting how it allowed him to look at the thought process behind the work and understand why they did what they did. He also noticed the biases and perspectives of the writers, such as how Midwestern-centric the original TSR team was.

But a historian’s work is never finished. While Origins still has to be funded and published in partnership with Evil Hat Games, Appelcline said that he’s already working on his next project, titled Designers and Dragons: Lost Histories. The Lost Histories will provide more details about D&D in the 2010s while two additional volumes will help cover some of the stories that the original texts didn’t touch.

 He also mentioned a plan to update the original Designers and Dragons texts in the coming years that will reorganize all the details to make it more organized.

Thanks to Shannon Appelcline for chatting with me, and for Evil Hat for setting this up. You can back the campaign today.

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