Ruins & Revisions

The year is 1974. You hold in your hands three small booklets titled Dungeons & Dragons: Rules for Fantastic Medieval Wargames Campaigns Playable with Paper and Pencils and Miniature Figures. Maybe you’re a wargamer. Maybe you’re a sci-fi/fantasy fan. Either way, when you sit down to play this game, you’ll become part of a creative vanguard that will forever change tabletop gaming.

The original D&D didn’t call itself an RPG, because its creators, Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson, did not realize they’d created one (so to speak). Wargames generally situated the player as a leader or a commander, though some (such as Fight in the Skies and Western Gunfight) encouraged them to play “in character” as an individual. That fundamentally shifted player priority from taking competitively advantageous actions to doing what the character’s personality dictated.

Though OD&D wasn’t the first game to situate players as roleplayers, it cleared the ground for the concept of a dedicated roleplaying game to take root, particularly in the fertile soil of cooperative storytelling that existed within the SFF fandom. These early adopters were not unfamiliar with organized activities that shared a similar, top-down structure with wargaming; some collaborative storytelling endeavors conducted by post followed defined rulesets and were arbitrated by what we’d think of as gamesmasters.

OD&D appealed to these two groups for different reasons. There was, of course, some overlap—Gygax had banked on that—but the game’s draw wasn’t restricted to the center of the Venn diagram. The potential to play it as a wargame or to use it as a tool for fantasy storytelling cast a wide net over its target demographics.

The game’s versatility stems from its incompleteness; OD&D is not a system in the modern sense, but a collection of tools to be used, or ignored. For Gygax (at least ostensibly), this incompleteness wasn’t a design flaw—it was a vital feature for an organic, heterogenous experience. ‘If the time ever comes when players agree on how the game should be played, D&D will have become staid and boring indeed,’ he wrote in Alarums & Excursions issue 2 (and quoted in Jon Peterson’s The Elusive Shift).

Whether you wanted to modify D&D to perform as a crunchy wargame or as a looser storytelling device, if you were willing to put in the work, then you could make it work for you. The original D&D isn’t a catered meal; it’s a potluck. The game exists as whatever you bring to the table.

This D&D experience is likely foreign to many (if not most) modern players. Even in our current homebrew culture, GMs typically don’t fill in the gaps from scratch, whether modifying existing rules or importing subsystems. And the proliferation of so-called retroclones has in recent decades sanded down OD&D’s rough patches and painted over them with modern expectations and conventions, effectively hiding the game’s original nature from both the uninitiated and veterans alike.

But that age of obfuscation has ended. Marcia B.’s Fantastic Medieval Campaigns revives the content of those original three booklets along with the Chainmail system (a fantasy-medieval wargaming system co-created by Gygax and upon which OD&D was predicated) and a handful of optional rules selectively drawn from across the breadth of the game’s history.  Everything has been reorganized for usability and accessibility, and rewritten to avoid contravening copyright—but without “fixing” the inconsistencies and incompleteness that were the foundation for OD&D’s original success.