Reconsiderations: Old School

Believe it or not, at the very dawn of what came to be called the Old School Renaissance, there was a lot of handwringing, both within its ranks and outside them, over just what was meant by the term "old school." 

Now, I don't recall when I first heard the term applied either to Dungeons & Dragons specifically or to roleplaying games more generally, nor can I pinpoint its precise origin. I have a vague recollection that it was one of those things that was spontaneously generated on the pre-social media Internet in the late '90s or early 2000s, but, as I said, I can't be certain. Regardless, I am pretty sure that the term predated the OSR by some years and generally meant something roughly equivalent to "D&D/RPG from the 70's and/or '80s," with some degree of fuzziness around the edges, both temporally and conceptually.

A lot of people assume that the Old School Renaissance was simply a reaction to the excesses of late 3e and I think there's much truth in this. In my own case, unhappiness with the state of Third Edition played a big role, which is ironic, since 3e had brought me back to Dungeons & Dragons in the first place after having largely abandoned the game several years prior. However, I suspect the roots of the OSR go back even farther, into the dying days of TSR, when AD&D Second Edition was itself a bloated and incoherent mess of a game. Some might stretch things even farther back, looking at the rise of "narrative" and "storytelling" games in the '90s as important data points.

I mention all of this simply as background to what will be my first reconsiderations post. Given the wide range of topics that I'll likely be covering as I write this series, I thought it useful to begin with something very basic and indeed foundational. I also thought it an important subject, because, in the eighteen years since I started this blog, my perspective on this matter have become clearer, if not necessarily different from what I have previously written. In the past, I might have been more circumspect in how I defined "old school" and what I understood it to mean, now I feel as if I have a more solid sense of things.

For me, "old school" is, paradoxically, a modern term. It's obviously not a term anyone "back in the day" would have used to describe D&D or any other RPG, for the simple reason that "old school" is a comparative term, one that depends on time having passed and there being multiple iterations of a game to compare to one another. "Old school" is, therefore, a retrospective category, one invented after the fact to identify certain common features, assumptions, and practices associated with the hobby's earlier years. Like all such categories, it is necessarily imperfect. The people who created and played these games in the 1970s and '80s did not think of themselves as participating in an "old school" style of play; they were simply playing roleplaying games as they understood them.

This is one reason why I have always thought the "R" in OSR stood for "renaissance." A renaissance is not a simple return to the past. It's an attempt to recover something from the past that is believed to possess enduring value, even though the very act of recovery inevitably reshapes it. The artists and scholars of the Renaissance did not recreate the art and ideals of Classical Antiquity they so admired. Neither did the Protestant Reformers did not restore the primitive Christianity they felt had become obscured under centuries of accretions. Both were instances of later generations looking backward for inspiration while simultaneously creating something new, whether they intended to do so or not.

That's also true of the OSR. Whatever else it may have been, the Old School Renaissance was never merely an exercise in preservation. Certainly, there were those whose chief concern was keeping older games alive and accessible. Without their efforts, many important texts and traditions might well have disappeared. Yet, from its earliest days, the OSR was also a creative movement. The proliferation of retro-clones, house rules, and entirely new games inspired by older ones quite quickly made that abundantly clear. Even when its devotees claimed to be "returning" to the roots of the hobby, they were doing so from a historical vantage point that could not help but influence – and, occasionally, distort – their understanding of those roots.

That's why I would argue that the category of "old school" only emerged because the hobby had changed. Certain features of earlier roleplaying games and styles of play came to be seen as distinctive precisely because they were no longer taken for granted. I think this helps explain why debates over the meaning of "old school" were (and remain) so contentious. The term refers neither to a specific type of rules nor to a particular historical period. Rather, it points toward a collection of loosely related ideas, assumptions, and practices drawn from the hobby's formative decades. Different people naturally emphasize different elements of that inheritance. Some focus on rules, while others focus on adventure design, campaign structure, referee authority, player agency, or any number of other factors. None of these perspectives is wholly wrong, because "old school" is itself a modern effort to make sense of a diverse and often contradictory past.

That's why nowadays, when I speak of "old school," I do not mean a museum piece or a slavish recreation of how roleplaying games were played in 1977, 1982, or any other year. Neither do I mean a particular game, edition, or collection of mechanics. Rather, I mean a tradition of play, one that took shape during the hobby's formative decades and whose characteristic assumptions can still be discerned beneath the considerable diversity of the games now associated with it.

Those assumptions are precisely what I mean by "old school." They have less to do with descending armor class, race-as-class, or any other rules idiosyncrasy than with a particular understanding of the relationship between players, referees, characters, and settings. They concern what roleplaying games are for, how they are meant to be played, and what kinds of experiences they are best suited to provide. The details will necessarily vary from game to game and table to table, but I think there is nevertheless a coherent thread running through them. It is that thread, rather than any single rules system or historical period, that I now understand to have been the true subject of the Old School Renaissance (and, by extension, this blog).

What If the Satanic Panic Had Never Happened?

I was recently reminded by a reader of the assertion that, rather than harming the sales or long-term fortunes of Dungeons & Dragons, the furor surrounding the game during the so-called “Satanic Panic” of the 1980s ultimately proved beneficial. According to this view, the controversies gave the game a level of publicity it might otherwise never have achieved, helping to propel it toward broader cultural visibility. This was certainly the position taken by TSR Hobbies and many of its employees in the years that followed and there is some evidence that lends this interpretation a degree of plausibility.

At the same time, others have suggested that this narrative is too neat and reassuring, as well as too dependent on outcomes that were visible only in retrospect. The difficulty, of course, is that the question itself resists a definitive resolution. There is no way to measure what would have happened had the moral panic not occurred. Indeed, any attempt to do so quickly runs into the limits of counterfactual history, where causes and effects cannot be isolated or tested.

The problem, as my reader put it, closely resembles survivorship bias. I think we've all seen the illustration of the battle-damaged aircraft from the Second World War. If not, I've included it at the top of this post. During the war, military analysts initially studied the bullet holes on planes that returned from combat, assuming the holes marked the most vulnerable areas. What they eventually came to realize is that the opposite was true: the planes that did not return had likely been hit in the places where the surviving aircraft were unmarked. The most important evidence was not what could be seen, but what was missing.

A similar bias may shape how we remember the Satanic Panic’s impact on the history of Dungeons & Dragons. The people who became lifelong gamers in the 1980s and 1990s were, by definition, those who passed through that period of censorship, stigma, and negative publicity. They are the aircraft that returned. Their presence is visible and their stories are often told, sometimes with pride, as proof that the panic failed or even that it backfired.

What is far harder to see are the players who never made it that far. The children whose parents forbade the game. The schools and libraries that quietly removed it from their shelves. The local groups that never formed because the social cost of participation seemed too high. These absent players leave no testimonies, no fond memories, and, of course, no sales figures. They are the aircraft that never returned and their absence subtly shapes the conclusions we draw about the era.

This does not mean that the claim that the Satanic Panic helped Dungeons & Dragons is false. It may be true or partly true or true in some contexts and not in others. Nor does it mean that the opposite claim, that the panic caused lasting harm, can be demonstrated with any greater certainty. The counterfactual remains unprovable. What it does suggest is that confidence in either position should be tempered by an awareness of what cannot be measured.

For readers who lived through that period, I'm curious about your own experiences. At the time you first encountered the game, was easy it to access or was contested or even forbidden? Did you know people who were interested in D&D but discouraged from playing or who drifted away under social pressure? I ask all this not merely out of curiosity, but because, as I'm sure I've mentioned before, I barely knew that the Satanic Panic was a thing with which anyone had to contend. I was aware of its existence, of course, but I never intersected with it in the slightest, nor did any of my friends. Without exception, our parents and extended families were supportive of our newfound obsession and, in fact, encouraged it, especially in my case. My own perspective is thus not very helpful in assessing this question.

In any case, I don't expect to come to any unassailable conclusions by raising this question. The Satanic Panic, after all, was an amorphous thing, neither a simple obstacle to the hobby's growth nor an obvious catalyst to it. It was a cultural pressure that some people resisted, some endured, and others, like myself, never encountered. That said, I think there is strength to the suggestion that any account of it that focuses only on those who remained risks mistaking survival for inevitability and resilience for proof that nothing was lost. That's why I'm curious to hear from others and their experiences of it.

Mapping the Blogosphere

Although I was already following this project, yesterday a number of friends, readers, and patrons pointed out its latest development, which is really quite fascinating. The blogger Elmcat put in a lot of effort to map out the tabletop RPG blog scene in the form of a graph that shows "nodes" and "edges" – the web of connections (in the form of links) between blogs and their posts. The resulting map, shown above, is very impressive and genuinely interesting for the way it shows the distinct ecosystems that exist within the larger blogosphere, as well as the relative influence a blog has through its posts and links in and out.

The image above is a combined map, depicting the RPG blogosphere from 2003, when the first gaming blog appeared, to the present day. Consequently, it's not representative of our present moment, which looks like this:

As you can see, the 2025 map is a lot less cluttered, owing to the fact that there a lot fewer active blogs and blogs, in general, are not nearly as widely read as they were prior to the rise of social media. Even so, there are still quite a large number of blogs out there and, though their influence is waning, they continue to generate discussions (and arguments) within that portion of the RPG hobby that reads them.

Elmcat's map is an amazing piece of work. If you go to it, you can sort it by year, from 2003 to 2025, and zoom in to view it more closely. This enables you to see the name of each node, which is to say, each blog and its connections to other blogs. I find that feature the most remarkable thing about the map, since it visually represents the distinct "scenes" within the hobby and how closely (or not) they are to one another. 

Likewise, the relative influence of each node is apparent by its size and color, with influential blogs being bigger and darker in color. In case you're wondering, the big orangish-red node in both of the above maps is Grognardia. Here's a zoomed in version of the first map, the one that covers all years between 2003 and 2025

Aside from the gratification of knowing that, despite it all, this blog retains a place of prominence within its corner of the RPG blogosphere, it's great to see the names of so many of the great OSR blogs of yore, many of which are now defunct. 

Zooming in on Grognardia's solar system in the 2025 version of the map is interesting, too, but for a completely different reason – so many of today's most prominent blogs are unfamiliar to me. Mind you, I don't read as widely online as I used to, tending mainly to my own little garden, but, even so, seeing what the big and influential blogs are nowadays was genuinely eye-opening. It's a reminder that I probably need to devote more time to reading and interacting with the wider hobby again, something I haven't really attempted since the First Age of Grognardia. I suspect it might do me some good.

In any case, I highly recommend you take a peek at Elmcat's blog post, which is a stunning piece of work. This is the kind of stuff we used to see more of in the past and I want to support and promote it when we see it again. 

Gratitude

As longtime readers know, I owe my introduction to Dungeons & Dragons – and, through it, to the larger hobby of roleplaying – to the disappearance of James Dallas Egbert III in August 1979. My father was utterly fascinated by the news coverage and the “strange new game” that supposedly played a part in Egbert’s vanishing. He talked about it constantly. My mother, ever practical, bought him a copy of the Holmes Basic Set from the Sears catalog store so he could see for himself whether the game bore any resemblance to the breathless, confused media reports.

Dad’s reaction on receiving it was characteristic. “What am I going to do with this?” he asked and he meant it. The box went straight into the upstairs linen closet, where it sat – unopened and undisturbed – until Christmas of that same year, when I asked if I could have it to learn how to play D&D. The rest, as the saying goes, is history.

In a very real sense, I owe my entry into the hobby just as much to my parents, especially my mother, as to Egbert’s disappearance. Had my father not been captivated by those stories, had my mother not ordered that Basic Set on a whim, it’s entirely possible I never would have found my way to roleplaying games or, if I had, it might have happened later and under very different – and perhaps less welcoming – circumstances. That’s one of the reasons I remain deeply grateful to them both. My young life and, truthfully, my present one could have been very different indeed.

But that’s only part of it. They didn’t just toss the game in my path and walk away. They encouraged me – sometimes directly, sometimes in small, nearly invisible ways – to keep going. They drove me to remote hobby shops tucked into strip malls or down side streets when I was hunting some obscure game or module. They clipped announcements from the local paper about “games day” events at the library. They let my friends and I take over the basement for hours on end. I doubt they ever really understood what D&D was or why it captivated me, but that never mattered. What mattered to them was that I was enjoying myself and that these games had opened doors to other interests – history, languages, mythology, religion – that broadened my world and, to some degree, shaped who I was becoming in obviously positive ways.

They also never once questioned the value of D&D or roleplaying games. They didn’t treat my hours spent reading rulebooks or drawing maps as a waste of time, nor did they worry that the hobby was odd, dangerous, or somehow leading me astray – quite the contrary! I often hear stories from people my age whose parents did fear Dungeons & Dragons and whose anxieties left lasting scars. I have no such stories of my own to tell. All that panic completely passed me by, which, I suppose, is no surprise given my own origin story as a roleplayer. If my parents weren’t put off by the James Dallas Egbert case, none of the other sensationalist nonsense that later swirled around the game stood a chance. That quiet vote of confidence, unstated but unmistakable, mattered more than I realized at the time.

Looking back, I can see that what they offered me wasn’t just permission but the freedom to explore something that excited me without judgment or fear. Childhood passions often flare and fade quickly, but they took this one seriously enough to let it grow. I don’t want to paint an overly rosy picture; ours wasn’t a sitcom household where every quirk was lovingly indulged. They had their flaws, as all parents do, and I certainly had mine. But when it came to this strange new hobby of mine, they showed patience, generosity, and an uncomplicated willingness to let me be who I was becoming through contact with it.

For that, I'll remain grateful to my parents. Their small, steady acts of support nudged my life in a direction neither they nor I could have predicted. If I’m honest, most of what followed – the friendships, the writing, the years spent exploring imaginary worlds – all trace back to that unopened box in the upstairs linen closet and to the two people who, without fully understanding it, gave me permission to open it.

Thanks, Mom and Dad.

Why I Stayed

My birthday was last week and, contrary to what I expected, it proved an occasion to look back over my life and ponder a few things. I don’t mean this in a maudlin or self-critical way. For the most part, I’m fairly content with my current existence and reasonably comfortable with my creeping senescence. Rather, I found myself thinking about the fact that, forty-six years after first discovering Dungeons & Dragons, I’m still actively involved in the hobby of roleplaying, while so many of the people with whom I first discovered it are not.

I was 10 years-old at the Christmas holidays of 1979, when I first opened the D&D Basic Set edited by J. Eric Holmes. That was the beginning of my journey. Through the end of childhood and into my early teens, roleplaying games felt like a shared discovery, something my friends and I stumbled into together, almost like finding a secret passage beneath the ordinary world. We played obsessively – after school, on weekends, and during those seemingly endless summer vacations. At the time, it would have seemed absurd to imagine any of us ever not playing. RPGs were simply what we did, eclipsing nearly every other pastime.

That shared enthusiasm didn’t last. By my mid-teens, very few of the friends with whom I’d entered the hobby were still playing. Some drifted away gradually, their interests and circumstances changing. Others dropped it abruptly, as if a curtain had fallen on that chapter of their lives. In the years that followed, careers, families, and the usual responsibilities of adulthood pulled still more away. Yet I’ve always wondered whether those explanations were truly sufficient. Many hobbies survive the transition to adulthood. In my circle of childhood friends, though, roleplaying games mostly did not.

To be fair, I eventually made other friends who shared my passion for gaming, but they were almost all people I met through the hobby, not the ones I’d grown up with. That’s why I often wonder why I stuck with it when so many others did not. I don’t believe it’s because I was more dedicated or imaginative; some of my friends were far more talented referees and players. Nor do I think the hobby itself changed in some way that pushed them out. They’d already drifted away long before the edition wars, the OSR, or any of the other developments one might offer as convenient explanations for their departures.

If I’ve come to any conclusion at all, it’s that roleplaying games continued to scratch an itch nothing else quite could. They combined the pleasures of reading, worldbuilding, problem-solving, and camaraderie into a single, strangely durable form. Even during my late high school years, when I didn’t play as often as I’d have liked, I still found myself returning to rulebooks, adventures, and setting material, much as one might return to a favorite novel or album. RPGs became part of the architecture of my inner life.

I don’t begrudge my childhood friends for having “abandoned” the hobby. Their lives simply went in other directions, as lives often do. I wouldn’t be surprised if some still remember our campaigns with fondness, even if they haven’t rolled a die in decades. Others may barely remember the details, but I remember those early days with great affection. In a very real sense, they laid the groundwork for the life I lead today. Even so, it’s hard not to wonder why I stayed immersed in this hobby while they did not.

I suspect many long-time gamers have had similar experiences. We are the ones who stayed, often without entirely meaning to. Something in roleplaying games held our attention long after the initial spark that brought us in. Perhaps that’s why so many of us older players end up blogging, designing, or running campaigns well into middle age. We’re still trying to understand what this odd pastime means to us and why it continues to matter so much after all these years.

In the end, I don’t know precisely why I stuck with RPGs when most of my childhood friends let them go. But I’m grateful I did. The hobby has given me friendships, creative outlets, and a way of thinking about the world that I doubt I would have found elsewhere. Maybe, in some small way, staying with it all these years is my way of honoring the unbridled joy we all felt around the table, back when we had no idea what we were doing and felt as if a vast, unknown world had been opened to us.

Embodied

I'm still catching up on everything I left behind while attending Gamehole Con XII last week, which is why I've fallen a bit behind on my usual posting schedule here, as well as on Patreon and Substack. I apologize for that, but such is life. I figure I'll settle back into my usual rhythm by the coming weekend, if not sooner. I, unfortunately, have a lot to do this week that doesn't involve my online life – like preparing for the first session of the new campaign I'm starting with the former House of Worms players. I'll talk more about that particular topic soon, but, for now, I wanted to continue with some thoughts occasioned by my time in Madison, Wisconsin.

I was very blessed to have shared a hotel room with one of the players of my Barrett's Raiders campaign. Though we’ve known each other for years, our friendship had only existed in the digital realm until last year’s Gamehole Con, when we finally met in person. Even after all these years of online gaming, there’s something quietly profound about that first handshake and the realization that someone you’ve shared countless imaginary worlds with actually exists in the same one as you. Perhaps it’s my age showing, but I still place great value on the tangible and largely unmediated experiences.

Online friendships are real. I have many that I treasure deeply, but there’s a particular joy in crossing that invisible line between the virtual and the physical. Sharing a meal, talking late into the night, comparing notes on games and life are all things that remind me why conventions like Gamehole Con matter. They’re not just about dice and character sheets; they’re about connection, which grounds this strange hobby of ours in real human company.

In the course of our many conversations at the con, my friend said something that struck me as both insightful and absolutely true. He remarked that one of the great things about our hobby is that, unlike most others, it’s entirely possible (and even likely) that, if you attend a convention, you’ll meet the very people who helped create something you love. And he’s right. Throughout the convention, I regularly chatted with Marc Miller, the creator of Traveller, swapping thoughts and stories as if we were old friends. If you’re a fan of a particular actor or director, the odds of ever spending time with them, let alone engaging in a long, thoughtful conversation, are practically nil. In this hobby, though, that kind of connection isn’t rare or guarded by velvet ropes. All it really takes is showing up with curiosity and a love of the game.

What makes this even more remarkable is that so many of the hobby’s “celebrities” (for lack of a better word) are, themselves, fans. I can’t tell you how many times, while sitting down to talk with someone well-known in the hobby, he told me how much he enjoyed Grognardia and how glad he was that I’d returned to blogging. A few times, I was even introduced to others as “the guy who writes Grognardia” and the look of recognition that followed was both humbling and gratifying. I was particularly tickled to discover that Ed Greenwood had bought all thirteen issues of my Tékumel ’zine, The Excellent Travelling Volume, because he’s a fan of the setting. I’ve met Ed several times before, but even so, that revelation surprised me.

My point here isn’t to brag (much) but to emphasize something I think is special about our hobby. There’s no vast gulf separating creators from players. In most cases, they’re the same people, sitting across the same tables, rolling the same dice, and dreaming the same dreams. That shared enthusiasm, that sense that we’re all participants in something communal and ongoing, is what gives tabletop gaming its continued vitality, even after half a century.

It’s easy to forget, especially when so much of our engagement now takes place online, that this is a living, breathing culture made up of people who still gather, talk, and play together. Conventions like Gamehole Con are a reminder of that. They're little oases where the virtual becomes tangible and the hobby renews itself through conversation and camaraderie. Each year I attend, I come home not only inspired to create more but also profoundly grateful to be part of something that remains, at its heart, so wonderfully human.

Belated

October 1 came and went this year without my taking note that it was the birthday of Dave Arneson. I only realized this belatedly and the oversight has been weighing on me ever since. It’s not just that Arneson deserves to be remembered; it’s that forgetting him, even unintentionally, feels emblematic of a larger problem within the hobby of roleplaying games.

Arneson, as everyone reading this surely knows, was one of the two men without whom Dungeons & Dragons (and, by extension, the entire hobby of roleplaying) would never have come to be. Yet, despite that foundational role, his name and his contributions are too often overlooked, overshadowed, or, worse still, treated as footnotes to someone else’s story. It’s as though we remember him only when we’re reminded to, rather than as a matter of course.

As this year shows, I’m as guilty of this as anyone. I should have remembered October 1 instinctively, the way I do July 27, Gary Gygax’s birthday. The fact that I didn’t speaks volumes, not about Arneson himself, but about how unevenly we remember our own history. Arneson’s legacy is not just that he co-created a game; it’s that he opened the door to an entirely new form of play, one that invited imagination, collaboration, and improvisation in ways no game had before.

His Blackmoor campaign remains one of the great, underappreciated achievements in the history of the hobby. It was the first sustained experiment in what we now take for granted: a shared world, evolving through the choices of its players. So much of what defines roleplaying today, like the open-ended campaign, the emphasis on character, the freedom to explore an imagined world rather than simply play through a fixed scenario, traces back to the quiet, curious mind of a young man running games in Minnesota in the early 1970s.

Forgetting Arneson is easy precisely because his influence is everywhere. It has become invisible through ubiquity. Every time we sit down at a table together (real or virtual), describe what our characters do, and ask, “What happens next?," we are living in the world he imagined. We rarely stop to think about that, not because we’re ungrateful, but because the roots of the hobby have sunk so deep we no longer see them.

Perhaps that’s the real issue. Arneson’s case is just the most visible example of how the contributions of countless others – designers, artists, playtesters, editors, and even just fans – have been forgotten. The history of roleplaying is not just the story of a few Great Men, but of a community of experimenters and dreamers, most of whose names never made it onto any game’s credits page. Our hobby, like any living thing, was nurtured by many unseen hands.

So, while this post began as an apology for my forgetting Dave Arneson’s birthday, perhaps it should instead serve as a reminder simply to remember. To remember Arneson, certainly, but also to remember all those who came after him – and before him – who helped shape the peculiar, beautiful pastime that continues to inspire all of us more than fifty years on.

Belated happy birthday, Dave. We still roll the dice because of you.

Initiation

Over the past few months, I’ve been thinking a lot about my own introduction to the hobby in late 1979. My experiences weren’t unique, but they were mine and it’s important not to treat them as universal. Even among those who started around the same time, no two stories are exactly alike. The same goes for anyone who might read what follows and think, “That’s not how I remember it.” Your memories are no less real, but neither are they more representative than my own. There’s no single, definitive way to have entered the hobby and we’d all do well to remember that. I raise this point only to make clear that what follows comes from my own recollections of being ten years old, discovering Dungeons & Dragons, and, through it, the larger world of nerd-dom.

Like a lot of the kids I grew up with, my first awareness of D&D didn’t come from spotting a box on a toy store shelf or from advertising. It came as a result of the media hoopla surrounding the disappearance of James Dallas Egbert in August 1979. I've talked about this many times before, so I won't waste too much time with it here. What's important to bear in mind is that this event and the sensationalist news coverage that it elicited it played a key role in my earliest sense of what the hobby was like. Even though I never saw anything "dangerous" about D&D or roleplaying games, many people seemingly did and that knowledge colored my early experiences. 

Once I had a copy of D&D to examine, I couldn't make heads or tails of the rules. Even though my copy was supposedly a "basic set," I found the rulebook nearly impossible to understand. I might as well have been written in Latin or Greek, because at least then I could explain why I had such difficulty making sense of it. When I sometimes compare opening that rulebook to peering into a grimoire, this is what I mean. The knowledge was there, but it was opaque and intimidating. Consequently, my real education came not from the printed word but from my elders in the hobby, older kids who had already passed through the veil and were willing to usher me along, like my friend's older brother.

What's interesting from the vantage point of the present is that he didn't sit us down and explain rules systematically. Instead, he showed us how to roll up characters, how to read the dice, and so forth. In a number of cases, what he told wasn't something I could find anywhere in the rulebook, but none of us minded, because we had faith that what he was teaching us was correct, even though, as we later learned, that much of it wasn't. In any case, this is vital to understanding how I came into the hobby. My friends and I were taken under the wing of someone we perceived to be already knowledgeable about D&D, who showed us the ropes, even if he did so imperfectly. 

It's equally important to understand that, despite the media coverage, roleplaying was still very much a fringe activity in my earliest days. The first truly "mainstream" edition of Dungeons & Dragons – the Moldvay and Cook/Marsh boxed sets – weren't released until 1981, more than a year after I started playing, so you had to venture into some pretty peculiar places to find RPGs (though, to be fair, my Holmes set was ordered through a Sears Catalog). The hobby shops of my youth were nothing like the bright, well-stocked game cafes of today. They were dim, cluttered, often a little musty. Aisles were packed with model kits, miniatures, and stacks of books. The proprietors were frequently brusque, eccentric men who seemed to size you up as you walked in, as though to determine whether you were really there for the games or had simply wandered in by mistake. To buy your first set of dice or a module was to pass through a kind of test and, if you succeeded, you carried your treasure out like a relic looted from the catacombs.

From the outside, of course, it all looked baffling. I don't think my parents ever really understood what roleplaying games were, for example, and their confusion was not unusual. Outside my circle of friends and the other players I'd meet in various locales, it was very uncommon to encounter anyone who knew what we were playing – which is perfectly understandable, given how hard even we found it to learn to play. Inside our circle, though, the hobby felt like we had been given access to something powerful and hidden. Once we'd been shown how to play, once we'd rolled those dice, and said what our characters wanted to do next, we belonged. We were now part of a fellowship that outsiders could not easily understand and that was part of the fun.

No one ever handed me a torch or a robe. There was no altar, no oaths sworn in secret chambers. Even so, I can't help but think of my introduction into the hobby as an initiation. That introduction was not at all straightforward. It wasn't simply a matter of “learning a new game” that it might have seemed to outsiders. Instead, it was baffling and mysterious and thrilling, not to mention occasionally off-putting. It felt like a rite of passage for me as a kid on the verge of his teen years. Decades later, I remain grateful for it all. It was a terrific way to enter this hobby.

Short-Term

As you know, I'm currently refereeing three different roleplaying game campaigns: House of Worms (Empire of the Petal Throne), Barrett's Raiders (Twilight: 2000), and Dolmenwood (which doesn't have a separate name, despite my long-held practice of bestowing them). Dolmenwood is the newest of the three, having been started a little less than a year ago (November 2024), while the other two of much older vintage – House of Worms has been going for over a decade of continuous play, while Barrett's Raiders will celebrate its fourth anniversary this December. 

Though I never specifically set out to run a multi-year campaign when I began any of these, I nevertheless hoped that they would last for several years. Indeed, it remains my firm belief that roleplaying games are best enjoyed not as some casual entertainment but as something demanding more sustained commitment from both players and the referee. This is, in my opinion, the ideal form of roleplaying, for reasons I've elucidated elsewhere. Consequently, I always feel a little bit defeated when a new campaign doesn't quite take and sputters out after only a few weeks or months.

Of course, if I look back at the more than four decades I've been involved in this hobby, I can see far more "failed" campaigns, which is to say, campaigns lasting a year or less, than those lasting two or more years, never mind a decade. House of Worms is truly unique. Were I to live to be one hundred, I doubt I will ever strike gold the way I have with House of Worms. Even after all this time, its longevity is inexplicable to me – a one-of-a-kind coincidence of elements that I couldn't have planned no matter how hard I tried (and I didn't). As that campaign prepares for its conclusion, I cannot help but be profoundly grateful for the experience of such a long and enjoyable campaign.

I bring all this up as something of a prolog to a conversation I recently had with my adult daughter, who's a bit more plugged into the contemporary RPG scene than I am. We were out somewhere and I saw a new roleplaying game with which I wasn't familiar. I thought the idea behind it was interesting but very focused. I told her that I couldn't imagine anyone being able to play this game for very long, to which she replied, "Not everyone wants to play the same game continuously for years." 

Now, obviously, I knew this to be true. Even so, hearing her say that made me ponder the question a bit more. How many of the games I own are broad enough in concept that I can imagine playing them for years? The truth is fewer than I would have thought. Certainly, Dungeons & Dragons and its various descendants have proved that they can support long-term play. I don't hesitate in saying that about Traveller as well, but what about, say, Call of Cthulhu? Is it possible to play a continuous CoC campaign for years with the same group of characters (more or less)? I know of long-running Call of Cthulhu campaigns but how common are they and are the odds stacked against them, given the frame of the game? 

Mind you, I'd argue that the odds are stacked against most RPGs, not necessarily because of their rules or even their focus but because most players and referees grow bored of them after a while. Gamer ADD is a real thing and always has been, though I think it's gotten worse in the last couple of decades. If I had to venture a guess as to why, I think its roots are twofold. First, I think most people nowadays are much more easily distracted. There are so many shiny things competing for their attention that it's harder and harder to keep them on task. Second, there are so many more RPGs to choose from. Gamers have always been prone to neophilia in my experience, so when there are literally dozens of new games released every year, it's little wonder that they find it difficult to commit to any one of them for more than a few weeks or months. They wouldn't want to "miss out," would they?

My daughter is more charitable than I. She compares many gamers' approaches to a charcuterie board. They want a little of this and a little of that but aren't willing to make an entire meal out of salami. Instead, they want to sample everything. That's fair, I suppose, and I can't really be too critical of this perspective, because, at various times, I've adopted something close to it myself. Still, it's another reminder that my tastes and preferences are increasingly out of touch with what the hobby seems to be about. I guess that's just the nature of getting old.

The Dream-Quest of the Old School Renaissance

Earlier this week, in the first entry of the (temporarily?) revived Pulp Fantasy Library series, I wrote about H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Silver Key.” Though that short story isn't at all what one might regard as a horror tale, there's nevertheless a moment that haunts me. The protagonist, Randolph Carter, now middle-aged, has discovered that he can no longer dream. He can no longer reach the realms that once filled his youthful sleep with wonder. The real world, with its routines, explanations, and disappointments, has closed in around him. What’s terrifying here isn’t what lies beyond the stars, but what no longer lies within: imagination itself.

For Lovecraft, this was personal. As I explained in my earlier post, “The Silver Key” is an introspective tale of memory, longing, and the slow death of the inner life. The titular key is not just a magical object, but a symbol of return to dreams, to possibility, to the boundless interiority of childhood. Carter finds it in the attic of his boyhood home, tucked away like some forgotten relic. Using it, he travels not only in space but in time, becoming his ten-year-old self again and vanishing into the Dreamlands. "The Silver Key" is, therefore, a story of reclaiming something lost and, Lovecraft suggests, essential. That’s what makes it resonate with me now in a way it didn’t when I first read it as a younger man. Reading it now, as old age creeps up on me with soft and silent feet, I see that the tale speaks to a hunger that fantasy can sometimes feed – a hunger not simply for escape, but for restoration.

Lovecraft wasn’t the only writer of his era to feel this way. Robert E. Howard, his friend and correspondent, also saw the modern world as a spiritual prison. In a letter to Lovecraft, he lamented “this machine age” and its failure to nourish the soul. He believed that many young people yearned for freedom because the world offered so little of it. That yearning animated nearly all of his fiction. Conan the Cimmerian is, if nothing else, free: untamed, unruled, and untouched by the slow death of civilization.

This yearning for freedom crops up in all kinds of unexpected places. You see it in the eyes of motorcyclists when they talk about the road. You taste it in absurdly spicy food meant not to please the palate but to make one feel something. You glimpse it in the half-forgotten dream of space travel or in the stubborn refusal of children to abandon wonder for pragmatism. You also feel it keenly and powerfully in tabletop roleplaying games.

For many of us, RPGs have been a kind of silver key. They’ve opened doors not just to fictional worlds, but to parts of ourselves we feared we’d lost. They’ve let us imagine lives not defined by careers, schedules, or the slow grind of adult compromise. The best roleplaying games recapture something of childhood’s wild creativity, when anything was possible and the laws of reality were made to be bent or broken – when the world could be made anew with a pencil, some dice, and shared imagination.

This connection between fantasy, freedom, and dreams isn’t just thematic but structural. The earliest roleplaying games were dreamlike in their very design. Their dungeons weren’t architectural blueprints; they were symbolic landscapes, more like the underworlds of myth than the ruins of history. Secret doors, teleporting rooms, talking statues, and pools of acid weren’t practical features. They were emblems of mystery, transformation, and risk. They didn’t simulate the world; they enchanted it.

I don’t think this weirdness was an accident. It was a kind of cartography, mapping inner spaces and personal mythologies. Playing D&D in my youth didn’t just feel like being part of a game. It felt like connecting to a hidden tradition, something esoteric and half-occult. It wasn't a gnosis passed from master to pupil but rather photocopies shared in schoolyards and cluttered hobby shops. It was chaotic, yes, but in that chaos lay the promise: you can go anywhere and do anything.

Even if we didn’t fully understand it at the time, I think that’s what many of us in the early days of the Old School Renaissance were trying to reclaim. We wanted not merely older rules, but older visions. We remembered when RPGs weren’t yet respectable. We remembered when they still felt like artifacts from another world, scrawled by strange hands. We remembered when they allowed us to believe, even if for just a few hours, that we could step outside the cage of the everyday, before the world dictated to us what was real and what was merely fantasy.

I do not believe that fantasy, properly understood, is an escape from reality. No, it is an escape to something deeper. It is a return, a recovery, a dream re-entered with eyes open and soul intact. In that sense, every gaming table is an attic and every set of dice a silver key. Whether we’re mapping dungeons, slaying dragons, or simply pretending to be someone else for a while, we are all, in our own way, Randolph Carter, standing once again before the cave in the woods, ready to step through.

Among the Weirdos

Something I find myself reflecting on more and more as I grow older is just how odd so many of the people I gamed with in my youth were. I mean that in the best possible sense. Back in the late '70s and early '80s, there weren't as many organized outlets for people with niche interests as there are nowadays. If you were into, say, The Lord of the Rings or Star Trek – or if you liked history or mythology or miniature soldiers or even if you read books no one else in your school had heard of, there just weren’t many places you could go to find like-minded souls.

Because of that, my early memories of entering the hobby are filled with eccentrics and enthusiasts, each one weird in his own particular way. I remember, for example, a guy who constantly insisted that "there was no such thing as a 'broadsword' during the Middle Ages." I already told you about Bob. And then there was me, who spent his spare time obsessing over ancient alphabets and cobbling together imaginary languages for the fun of it. Somehow, we all got along – or at least, we all put up with each other long enough to play D&D or Traveller or whatever.

It’s hard to overstate how formative that was for me. For example, I was introduced to Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard by older roleplayers I met at Strategy & Fantasy World. I would listen to people talk about chanbara films, Napoleonic tactics, and Norse mythology, all while hanging out in game stores and at library games days. I was introduced to a lot of different things simply because the then-new hobby of roleplaying attracted a very wide group of players with varied interests and everyone congregated in the same places.

As I've said repeatedly over the last couple of weeks, we didn’t always get along. In fact, we argued and, sometimes, we seemed to barely speak the same language. However, in those days, I often had no choice but to associate with people outside my immediate circle of comfort and taste and, because of that, I learned things. More than that, I grew.

Phil Dutré recently summed this up perfectly:

It’s also telling that gaming-at-large has become largely siloed and compartmentalized. In the 70s/80s/even 90s wargaming/roleplaying/boardgaming was still considered one big hobby (with a lot of crossovers), and one naturally came into contact with all sorts of people interested in various angles.

These days roleplayers and wargamers and board gamers almost seem to be different breeds, barely knowing of each other’s hobbies, let alone spending time with one another. My point is that, by having nowhere else to go, the early hobby brought together a lot of us weirdos and we learned stuff from each other. As I explained above, I was introduced to Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard through these people, just as I shared my love of ancient alphabets and languages, while others shared their love of history, mythology, philosophy, etc. I am literally the man I am today because I had no choice but to hang out with people I might otherwise not have. Today, I feel as if too many gamers self-select for people just like themselves in the narrowest senses. That's a shame, because having to learn to get along with people very different is a great way to improve oneself.

I wonder if part of the magic of the early hobby as I experienced it was precisely this unexpected mixing of oddballs. Even in the early 1980s, there simply wasn’t enough critical mass to allow subgroups to splinter off and form their own tightly curated communities. You couldn’t just find “your people” and ignore everyone else. You had to sit down with whoever showed up. The result was often volatile but also suffused with creative ferment. It was a fertile space where ideas, interests, and personalities collided, bearing strange fruit.

Don’t misunderstand. I’m not advocating for forced conviviality. The hobby is broader now and that’s a probably good thing in some respects. However, I do think something was lost when we all retreated to our own silos. When roleplayers stopped hanging out with wargamers and video gamers forgot that tabletop roleplaying even existed and when people began treating the games they play as lifestyle brands rather than as shared endeavors. 

When we stopped being weird together.

In Defense of Bob

His name wasn’t really Bob, but I’m calling him that for the purposes of this post, on the extremely unlikely chance that he’s still out there somewhere. It’s been decades and I doubt he’d even remember me. Still, I don’t want to be cruel; there's already plenty of that online. Moreover, that's not my purpose here.

Bob was a teenager I’d see from time to time at hobby stores and at game days at the local libraries in the early 1980s. Like many of us back then, Bob was awkward, intense, and very passionate about the things he loved. For him, one of those things was World War II.

In those days, this was hardly unusual. I’m not sure people younger than a certain age realize just how omnipresent World War II still was in the cultural imagination of the time, even though it had ended more than three decades beforehand. This was especially so in the years after Vietnam, when America seemed unsure of what to make of its recent history, World War II stood apart. According to its conventional presentation, it was “the Good War,” the one where we knew who the bad guys were. Toy aisles were filled with green army men and gray tanks. TV reruns still showed Combat! and Rat Patrol. There were countless paperbacks, comics, movies, documentaries, and model kits. Nearly everyone had at least one older relative or neighbor who’d been “over there.”

So, Bob’s obsession wasn’t strange, not in context. What was unusual, even among kids interested in World War II, was the depth of his knowledge. Bob didn’t just know the basics. He could name operations and battles most people had never heard of. He knew the names of generals and details about their lives. He could tell you how a Panther tank compared to a Sherman and why Rommel’s tactics in North Africa were studied in military academies around the world. He was, for a teenager, astonishingly well-informed. 

Bob was also socially tone-deaf. He didn’t always know when to stop talking, particularly when the subject was German armor or the Eastern Front. Even back then, people would roll their eyes when Bob launched into another lecture about Stalingrad. Mostly, though, we just let him do his thing. He was weird and so were we. More importantly, he played RPGs. That was enough.

Nowadays, I'm sure Bob would be viewed differently. People might hear him talk about German tanks or Guderian’s campaigns and jump to conclusions. They might assume he was some kind of Nazi sympathizer or apologist. That’s not how I remember him at all. Now, I didn’t know Bob well. I didn't have a window into his soul, but I never once got the impression he admired Hitler or fascism or anything like that. He was just a very nerdy teenager who’d gotten fixated on a complex and highly documented period of history. He liked the minutiae. If anything, he treated World War II the way other kids treated baseball, obsessively reciting rosters and statistics no one else cared about.

Bob was not a threat. He wasn’t trying to smuggle dangerous ideas into the games he played. He was just Bob – one of us. He was weird, annoying, and even brilliant in his own narrow way. I feel like it's important to point this out, not to excuse anyone, but to defend the idea that not every interest held by socially awkward people should be a moral test. Likewise, not every off-note conversation from forty years ago is a sign of hidden malice. We were all a little odd in those days; that’s probably what brought us together.

I bring all this up in light of last week's post about my recollections of how odd people of all stripes seem to get along in the hobby of my youth. Back then, the hobby felt – to me anyway – like a patchwork of eccentrics, whether they were metalheads, stoners, bookworms, would-be game designers, history buffs, or, yes, kids like Bob. We didn’t all get along. We didn’t all like the same things. Yet, we shared a love of imaginative play and we didn't care about much of anything else.

Was that everyone's experience back in the day? I highly doubt it, but I also doubt that the worst examples someone could dredge up from those times was typical either. I suspect the truth, as it so often is, lies somewhere in the middle. Judging from the arguments in the comments to last week's post, I suppose I was naive in thinking we could get back to just having fun with RPGs the way I used to as a kid.

I don’t know where Bob is now or what he became. Wherever he is, I hope he has a group of friends with whom he can roll some dice without being judged too harshly for his idiosyncrasies. He deserves that much.

So do we all.

[Alas, comments must now be closed on this post too. —JDM]

Architect of the Modern Imagination

E. Gary Gygax died on March 4, 2008, at the age of 69. Just over three weeks later, this blog published its first post. That was no coincidence.

Though I’d begun reflecting seriously on old school Dungeons & Dragons in late 2007, shortly before I joined the ODD74 forums, it was Gygax’s death that galvanized me. His demise marked the end of an era and, for me, the beginning of a personal project to explore, celebrate, and better understand the legacy of the game he helped bring into the world.

Today would have been his eighty-seventh birthday. In light of that, I want to pause and remember the life of a man who, though I never met him, profoundly shaped my own. More than that, he shaped the lives of millions, often in ways so pervasive we no longer recognize their origin.

Volumes have been written about Gygax's career, his eccentricities, his talents, and his failings. Seventeen years later and more than half a century since the release of Dungeons & Dragons, it’s time to say something both bold and, I believe, undeniably true: Gary Gygax was one of the most consequential cultural figures of the 20th century.

That may sound hyperbolic, even to readers of this blog. Gygax didn’t lead a nation, win a war, or cure a disease. What he did do was co-create a game that fundamentally reshaped the imaginative landscape of the modern world. Just as significantly, he popularized it. Through passion, persistence, and a gift for theatrical self-promotion, he took a niche idea, half rooted in wargaming, half in pulp fantasy, and gave it structure, rules, and language. He turned it into something accessible, repeatable, and endlessly expandable. He turned it into Dungeons & Dragons.

In this, Gygax's closest analog is probably Walt Disney. Neither man invented his medium. Animated film predates Disney, just as fantasy games predate D&D. However, both men synthesized their influences into a new form and then made it a fixture of mainstream culture. Disney did it with cartoons. Gygax did it with dungeons, dragons, and rulebooks put together in his kitchen.

From that small seed, a global phenomenon grew.

If that seems overstated, consider where we are in 2025. Playing Dungeons & Dragons is no longer a fringe entertainment. It is a cornerstone of pop culture. It’s referenced in popular films and prestige television. It inspires bestselling novels, hit video games, and streaming series. Its influence is everywhere, from the language of "hit points" and "levels" to the way we talk about our personalities in the shorthand of alignment. "I'm a chaotic good introvert," someone might say, without either irony or the need for explanation.

None of that was inevitable. Without Gygax, it’s possible that some form of roleplaying game would have come into being, but would it have appeared in 1974? Would it have spread as quickly or inspired so many imitators? Would the worlds of gaming and fantasy fiction look anything like they do today?

Gary Gygax’s true legacy is more than a single game. It’s a mode of thinking, a grammar of imagination. It’s the idea that you don't have to be content with simply reading about fantasy adventures; you can go on one yourself. He gave us the tools to build our own worlds, to share them with friends, and to lose ourselves in collective acts of creativity.

That’s not a footnote to cultural history. That is cultural history.

So yes, Gary Gygax deserves to be remembered and indeed celebrated as a visionary, a pioneer, and one of the key figures in shaping how we imagine and play in the modern age.

Happy birthday, Gary. You didn’t just help us imagine new worlds. You showed us how to make them.

Kumbaya

As you’ve probably guessed from the kinds of posts I’ve been writing lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about how the hobby has changed, not just since I was young, but in more recent years, too.

In my younger days, what bound us together wasn’t ideology or identity or even agreement. It was something much simpler and, I think, more powerful: a shared love of fantasy, science fiction, horror, and roleplaying games. We didn’t always see eye to eye. We didn’t always get along, but we read the same dog-eared books (gaming and otherwise), argued about alignment and racial level limits, and gathered around the same tables to roll dice. That was enough.

We were a ragtag lot, diverse not so much in the narrow, contemporary demographic sense (though that too, to a degree), but in personality, taste, and temperament. There were the older, bearded guys who got their start with Tactics; the teenagers who smelled like patchouli and wore jackets covered in band patches; the metalheads, the comic book obsessives, the Tolkien scholars-in-training, the stoners, the would-be novelists, and that one guy who knew way too much about the Wehrmacht’s order of battle in 1944 and wouldn’t stop bringing it up. Somehow, we all managed to coexist – or at least we played together and that, I think, is its own kind of getting along.

What I find disheartening now is how often that spirit seems absent. There’s a growing impulse, coming from multiple directions, to draw hard lines about what’s acceptable to play, read, like, or even talk about without a disclaimer. I’m not talking about politics, at least not primarily. I mean the way taste itself is increasingly treated as a moral signal. “You still play Empire of the Petal Throne? What’s wrong with you?” Or: “You’re using Mörk Borg? That’s not real old school.” I’ve heard both this year, more than once, along with others, just as silly.

There’s nothing wrong with preferences. No one should be shamed or pressured into liking what they don’t like. That was true in 1982 and it’s true now. Back then, plenty of people I knew scoffed at Arduin or rolled their eyes at RuneQuest. I’m not going to pretend we didn’t argue fiercely about whether, for example, spell slots or spell points were “better.” That kind of good-natured rivalry was part of the fun. Even now, I enjoy lobbing the occasional jab in the direction of certain games or game mechanics. I’m not claiming the moral high ground.

However, I think there’s a difference between ribbing your friend for liking Rolemaster and declaring that certain games, creators, or communities are beyond the pale and that merely engaging with them puts you under suspicion. That’s not rivalry. That’s excommunication. It's coming from all sides. Depending on who's speaking, the OSR is either a toxic boys' club of crypto-fascists or a co-opted safe space for woke poseurs who don’t really “get” old games. Try saying that not every game choice is a political act and that maybe you just like what you like and you’ll find yourself viewed with suspicion by both camps.

It's exhausting and, frankly, it's absurd.

When I was a kid, the fact that someone played Chivalry & Sorcery instead of AD&D might earn a few barbs, but no one was exiled. No one cared whether you thought the best sci-fi RPG was Traveller, Space Opera, or Universe (even though it's obviously Traveller). If you were into Tunnels & Trolls, sure, we might’ve thought you were a little weird, but you were our kind of weird. You were one of us. You knew where the lavatories were on the USS Enterprise. You could quote Monty Python and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy from memory. You subscribed to Dragon and read every page, even the fiction. You liked pretending to be a wizard or a starship captain or a mutant with a laser rifle. That was enough.

I miss that.

I’m not arguing that we all need to agree. We never did and, honestly, that was part of the joy – the clashes, the rivalries, the heated debates about initiative systems and critical hits. There’s a difference in my opinion between spirited disagreement and gatekeeping disguised as virtue. The hobby is big, messy, and contradictory. It always has been; that’s part of what makes it beautiful.

We could all stand to be a little more charitable, a little less quick to sort people into boxes, a little more willing to extend the benefit of the doubt. Curiosity, not conformity, is what brought most of us here in the first place.

When you strip away the noise, we’re all still what we’ve always been – Weirdos.

[Comments are now closed. Don't worry: there will be several new posts coming in the days to come that I am sure were generate just as many arguments. —JDM]

Stuck

If you’d told my younger self that, by middle age, Star Wars, Star Trek, Dungeons & Dragons – all the things I loved as a boy – would not only still exist but would be huge entertainment "brands," I doubt I’d have believed you. I certainly wouldn’t have believed I’d no longer care about them. Worse, I never would have imagined I’d feel repulsed by what they’ve become.

And yet, here we are.

Plenty of commentators have observed a phenomenon sometimes called “stuck culture” and I think that captures part of my malaise. Contemporary pop culture seems either unable or unwilling to move on from the past. Instead, it recycles, reboots, and repackages the same "intellectual properties" – a phrase I feel unclean even typing – over and over again, as though what we truly need is just one more sequel, one more origin story, one more “gritty reimagining” of a once-beloved character or setting.

This cultural stagnation is especially glaring in the realm of the nerds, where hobbies were once defined by originality and creativity. Now? They're more often defined by compulsive repetition and the embalmed echoes of past glories.

Don’t misunderstand me: there’s nothing wrong with nostalgia. Remembering the things that once brought us joy is natural, even humanizing. However, there’s a difference, in my opinion, between nostalgia and necromancy. So much of popular culture today, particularly nerd culture, feels like it’s reanimating corpses. Bigger budgets, flashier effects, and algorithmic polish don’t bring these creations back to life. They only parade them around, lifeless and hollow, like mummified icons. The result isn’t a return to something vital or real. Instead, it’s a grotesque simulacrum, stripped of its original context, meaning, and soul.

In the age of content algorithms, our past preferences become templates for future production. Innovation is replaced by optimization – and what’s being optimized isn’t storytelling or artistry, but you. Or rather, your predictable patterns of engagement. If you once loved, say, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, they'll feed you a dozen pale imitations, each more toothless, more risk-averse, and more emotionally flat than the last. If you liked elves and dungeons in 1982, the machine will churn out endless corporate flavors of the same, carefully drained of the strangeness and wonder that once made them sing.

This is apparent even in roleplaying games. There was a time when RPGs were gloriously, sometimes chaotically, diverse. Every few months brought some new idea, some strange world, some half-baked but fascinating mechanic. Some of it was brilliant, some of it was garbage, but all of it felt alive. Today? Most major RPG products are variations on a narrow set of tropes established decades ago. Even the Old School Renaissance, of which I count myself a part, often falls prey to the same trap: remaking, rehashing, repeating.

So when did creativity give way to caretaking? When did our hobby stop being about imagining new worlds and become a museum of preserved brands?

It wasn’t always this way. Nerd subcultures were once genuinely weird – offputting, insular, and proudly obscure. They were difficult to access and defiantly uncool and that very inaccessibility acted as a crucible, forging originality and independence. But the rise of the Internet, and especially social media. has flattened all subcultures. Everything is now accessible, marketable, and smoothed out for mass consumption. Because nerds were among the earliest adopters of these technologies, nerd culture may have suffered the most from this transformation.

The result is a creeping homogenization. “Fantasy” now means elves and dragons. “Sci-fi” means space wizards. Every new game must have a "brand identity," a "product roadmap," a social media presence. Anything that doesn’t fit the mold is quietly ignored, regardless of how original or inspired it might be.

What we’re losing in this cycle of endless recycling isn’t just novelty but meaning. The worlds we once explored, whether in a galaxy far, far away or deep beneath a ruined castle, mattered because they were new. They challenged our imaginations. They opened doors we didn’t even know were there. When everything becomes a remix of a remix, that sense of discovery is lost. That may be the real tragedy – not simply that nerd culture has changed, but that it has ceased to move on. It no longer dares to venture into the unknown. It circles the same drain, hoping that the next familiar logo will somehow rekindle the old spark.

But it won’t. It can’t.

The antidote to stuck culture isn’t rage and it isn’t despair. It’s refusal. Refusal to let our cultural memory be mined for spare parts. Refusal to accept brand management in place of imagination. Refusal to mistake familiarity for worth.

There are still creators out there doing strange, beautiful, uncompromising work. There are still games being written, books being published, ’zines being assembled that don’t give a damn about algorithms or intellectual property portfolios. Seek them out. Support them. Better yet, make your own.

Let the past be the past, not a franchise.

Smoke Rings and Sorcery: An Ode to Wormy

Among the many delights of flipping through issues of Dragon magazine from my youth is getting the chance to see Dave Trampier's Wormy comic strip once again. Long before I was conscious of the names of any of the artists who appeared in my favorite RPG products, I knew Wormy. Even among the clutter of rules variants, advertisements, fiction, and the occasionally bombastic editorials that defined Dragon during the years when I most avidly read it, Wormy stood out, in large part because it was so strange. It was a peculiar, beautiful little world unto itself, filled with pool-playing dragons, cigar-chomping ogres, and an imp who spoke with the laid-back confidence of a veteran hustler. It was, in short, utterly unlike anything else in the pages of Dragon and it fascinated me – in large part because I didn't fully understand it or its continuing storyline, having picked it up many issues after it first began.

Wormy's debut (in issue #9, September 1977) occurred when Dragon was still very much in its formative years. Indeed, the hobby of roleplaying itself was barely out of its own infancy and TSR’s flagship magazine was still trying to figure out what kind of publication it wanted to be. Early issues mixed game material with essays, fiction, and humor. Comics became a regular feature before long, with J.D. Webster's Finieous Fingers being one of the more well-known of the bunch, even though it ended its run about a year before I started reading Dragon. But Wormy stood out as something different. It was never simply an in-joke for gamers nor a gag strip loosely inspired by fantasy tropes. Instead, it presented a fully realized fantasy world rendered in lush color and with a distinct artistic sensibility.

What immediately set Wormy apart was, of course, Trampier’s art. Nowadays, we all celebrate Trampier from his iconic work on the AD&D Player’s Handbook and the Dungeon Master’s Screen. His style is clean, expressive and rich in texture and character. Wormy carried those same qualities into serialized comic form, but with an added flourish of visual wit and playfulness. The strip was never slapdash or haphazard. Trampier’s panels were packed with detail, his character designs expressive, his linework confident. Each page was a feast for the eyes and even when the plot meandered a bit (as it regularly did), the visuals carried the reader along to such an extent that he didn't care. I know I didn't, even though, as I said, it wasn't always clear to my younger self just what was happening in many installments.

The tone of the strip is one of its greatest charms. Wormy is unquestionably fantasy, but it’s fantasy as seen through a haze of cigar smoke and the low hum of a barroom pool table. Its characters speak in a colloquial American idiom that lends the strip a grounded, personable quality. One never gets the sense that Wormy or Ace or the ogres and trolls with whom he shares his world are interested in epic quests or noble deeds. They’re more likely to be plotting a scam, hustling a demon, or arguing about who’s buying the next round. This sense of the fantastical-as-everyday-life gives Wormy much of its charm and humor, not to mention its distinctiveness from the other comics that appeared alongside it in Dragon. 

In this, Wormy mirrors the culture of early roleplaying itself. The early hobby, as reflected in the pages of Dragon, was a strange admixture of wargamers, fantasy and science fiction fans, history buffs, and countercultural weirdos. This was a time before fantasy had hardened into genre orthodoxy, when anything could happen and often did. The world Trampier presented in Wormy feels like a campaign gone delightfully off the rails: a sandbox setting where the players long ago stopped caring about the dungeon and are now embroiled in a decades-long tavern brawl. For me, that was a big part of what I found so compelling about Wormy. It was so unlike my then-narrow conception of "fantasy" that I couldn't help but keep reading.

Over time, Trampier introduced a larger story into the strip. There were plots and schemes in motion and strange characters lurking just out of frame. Readers were teased with glimpses of the larger world beyond Wormy’s abode and the smoky dens of the trolls. Then, just as suddenly as it had begun, Wormy vanished. Trampier’s final installment appeared in Dragon #132 (April 1988), ending mid-story. He never offered a public explanation. Other than the following, which appeared in issue #136 (August 1988), TSR never provided an explanation for what had happened:

Wormy, along with its creator, David Trampier, vanished without a trace.

This abrupt disappearance only deepened the comic strip’s allure. In the years that followed, fans spun wild theories: Was Trampier dead? Had he severed all ties with the gaming world? Or was it something darker? For decades, the mystery endured, unanswered. Then, in 2002, word emerged that Trampier was alive, living a quiet life in southern Illinois as a taxi driver. He had steadfastly declined all invitations to return to art or gaming until 2014, when he agreed to showcase some of his original artwork at a local Illinois game convention. Tragically, just three weeks before the event, he died suddenly at age 59.

In hindsight, Wormy feels like a microcosm of an entire era in fantasy gaming, a time that was raw, personal, and unapologetically chaotic. The strip was a labor of love, brimming with anarchic energy, improvisational flair, and unfiltered creativity. Like the Dragon magazine of its heyday, Wormy was gloriously messy, fiercely idiosyncratic, and utterly brilliant in its refusal to conform or explain itself.

As the hobby grows ever more polished and commercialized, Wormy stands as a vibrant reminder of its roots, a time when oddballs and iconoclasts like Trampier defined its spirit. More than a relic, Wormy embodies the untamed passion and fearless imagination of those who dared to be unapologetically strange. It captures a moment when the heart of gaming pulsed with individuality, free from the gloss of corporate agendas.

Whenever I leaf through old issues of Dragon, I find myself missing Wormy – not just the comic, but what it stood for: the spirit of unfiltered creativity, the joy of irreverence, and the beautiful imperfections of a world made by and for dreamers. In remembering Wormy, we remember that the true magic of roleplaying lies not in polished production values or grand designs, but in the bold, eccentric, and often messy adventures we undertake with one another .

The Paradox of Popularity

A family member recently returned from an extended trip abroad and our conversation about her experiences got me thinking about the strange (and, in fact, melancholy) fate of popular tourist destinations. Travelers seek these places out because they're unusual, striking, even mysterious. They promise something rare or difficult to find elsewhere. However, the act of going there, especially in large numbers, begins to erode the very qualities that made them appealing in the first place. A scenic, secluded village becomes a commercialized maze of souvenir shops. A beautiful natural site is hemmed in by railings, signage, and crowds. A place that once felt secret or sacred now feels almost contrived, curated, or even artificial.

Whether we like it or not, popularity changes things.

This paradox – the destruction of uniqueness through attention – is not limited to travel. Grumpy old man that I am, I’ve long wondered if the same thing hasn’t happened to our shared hobby of roleplaying, especially in recent years.

When I first discovered Dungeons & Dragons over the Christmas break of 1979, the game was still pretty obscure, though it had become a little less so in the aftermath of the disappearance of James Dallas Egbert III in August of that same year. The blue rulebook I rescued from the hall linen closet had almost the air of a grimoire. What advice it offered me as a newcomer was sparse and scattered across its 48 pages, requiring careful study and a lot of inference. Most people I knew at the time had never heard of a "roleplaying game" and, thanks to the aforementioned "steam tunnels incident," those who had regarded it with a combination of confusion and mild suspicion. Because of this, there was a strong feeling among my friends and I that we were discovering something odd and special. Gathering in one another's basements, we did our best to piece together an understanding of this new hobby from obscure rulebooks, rumors, and the occasional older kid who claimed to know how it all worked. The end result was messy, anarchic – and thrilling.

Over the decades, especially in the last few years, RPGs seem to have become much more mainstream. Celebrities openly talk about playing them. Big box stores carry them. There’s an abundance of support material, both official and unofficial. Rules are more clearly presented. The art is slick. Everyone seems to have a better idea of what a roleplaying game is. Dungeons & Dragons is now a brand name in every sense. On the whole, this is a good thing: more people are playing, and that means a larger pool from which to draw new players. But I’d be lying if I said the hobby still feels quite the same as it did before it achieved its current level of popularity.

What was once a secret door into another world is now a well-lit, signposted thoroughfare. The sense of personal discovery, the need to make rather than simply consume, feels less urgent. Much of the weirdness, the danger, the raw possibility that drew me in has been sanded down in exchange for broader appeal. It's easier than ever to play, but in some ways harder to find that old spark that made it feel so alive.

I don’t mean this simply as a condemnation, but rather as a recognition of the very real cost of popularity. Something rare becomes common; something personal becomes cultural property. There’s nothing sinister in this, only inevitable change. The same pattern plays out again and again, whether in travel, music, or games. Once you’ve found something wonderful, it’s only a matter of time before others find it too and the thing begins to change, often to the point that it's no longer the thing you fell in love with in the first place.

For those of us who remember the early days (or who simply seek to emulate them), it can feel like returning to a once-sleepy village only to find it transformed into a bustling tourist trap. The outlines are familiar, but the mood has shifted. The magic isn’t gone entirely, of course, but it’s harder to reach, buried beneath the noise and polish.

Still, it can be found. In a quiet moment around the table. In a forgotten module pulled from a forgotten shelf. In the laughter of friends lost in a world of their own making. The secret may no longer be hidden, but the joy of discovery remains – for those willing to look past the railings and the signage.