Designers & Dragons: The Column
Enter Grimoire Games: 1979-1980
Somewhat ironically, it was Chaosium that offered many gamers of the late '70s their first look at Arduin. They sold the Trilogy direct and may even have gotten it overseas to Games Workshop. Arduin monsters also appeared in the latter two volumes of All the Worlds' Monsters which were likely more widely distributed than Hargrave's self-published books. Although Stafford hadn't felt that Arduin worked as a beginner's game, he was happy to sell it to experienced gamers.
Then, in 1978, a new proponent for Arduin appeared: Jim Mathis, one of Hargrave's Arduin players and the true friend that Hargrave sold his first game to late in the year. Mathis lived in Berkeley and got his new Arduin-publishing company, Grimoire Games, started out of an apartment building on the south side of the UC campus (just two short blocks from where most of these histories have been written, as it happens).
Unfortunately, the early publishing history of Grimoire Games is a little murky from the viewpoint of the 21st century. That's primarily due to several Arduin publications produced by others prior to Grimoire Games entering the scene. Besides the original Arduin Trilogy, printed by Dave Hargrave from 1977-1978, there also appear to have been three sets of illustrated cards that depicted Arduin artifacts, weapons, and monsters that were probably either published or distributed by the International Gamers Association in 1977. Grimoire reprinted all six of these products in later years but without changing the copyrights to reflect the new printings, so when they did so is unclear.
What seems more definite is that Grimoire's first original publication was Arduin Dungeon #1: Caliban (1979), which appeared very early in 1979. It was authored by none other than Dave Hargrave himself. Though he wasn't planning to write any more rules for Arduin, he was happy to design some adventures that showed how his game worked and Caliban was the first.
With its first publication, Grimoire Games also showed off a close connection with the aforementioned International Gamers Association, who was doing distribution for them out of Long Beach while Mathis dealt directly with players from his Berkeley apartment. Through this connection, Grimoire ended up associated with two other Californian "generic FRP" supplements that were also being distributed by IGA: The Manual of Aurania (1977, 1978) and Wizard's Aide (1977). The partnership between Grimoire and IGA, however, was relatively short lived.
Following the publication of Caliban, the rest of 1979 was a great year for Grimoire Games. They published two more Dave Hargrave dungeons, Arduin Dungeon #2: The Howling Tower (1979) and Arduin Dungeon #3: The Citadel of Thunder (1979). None of these were ground-breaking, like the Arduin Grimoires were, but they were tough, competitive adventures of the sort more common at the dawn of the industry.
The Dungeons were already looking more professional than the small-press Grimoires that Hargrave had typed up, then Grimoire Games took the next step: producing a gaming convention.
The result, Grimcon, was held in Oakland, California late in 1979, in conjunction with Hargrave's store, Multiversal Trading Company. Though it featured quite a bit of Arduin (and excluded D&D, at least in its first year), GrimCon was intended to be a general gaming convention. It thus had dual purposes: to help keep Hargrave's game visible and also to remain profitable on its own.
GrimCon I hosted 300 attendees. It was the first in a series that lasted through 1983. Together with DunDraCon and Pacificon, it helped to define San Francisco Bay Area roleplaying in the early '80s. Hargrave himself would later say that the attendance at the GrimCons which reached 1000 attendees within a couple of years was one of the things that kept him in in the RPG industry.
| "[T]he con was under the auspices of Multiversal Trading Company and Grimoire Games who are shall we say rivals in the FRP world with TSR Hobbies." --Larry DiTillio, "System Snobbery", Different Worlds #7 (April/May, 1980) |
Somewhat surprisingly only three more Grimoire Games publications followed before the company disappeared (for the first time): Arduin Dungeon #4 & Overland Adventure: Death Hart (1980), the boxed Arduin Adventure (1980?) and a boxed set of The Arduin Trilogy (1980?).
By those two final, professional, boxed products, Grimoire Games was looking like a gaming company really finding its feet. However, The Arduin Adventure was something more: it marked a whole new direction for Arduin itself.
An Adventure & Other Revisions: 1980-1984
Before the publication of The Arduin Adventure, the Arduin Grimoires depended on the original Dungeons & Dragons game as the foundation of its own mechanics. Now The Arduin Adventure turned Arduin into a a truly standalone game system. This product also fulfilled some of Hargrave's desire for a "new game" that he'd spoken of back in '79. He hadn't wanted to get away from Arduin so much as from D&D. Though the Arduin Adventure game system was still clearly D&D-derived, it was a first step that introduced some new rules, most notably a totally new initiative system called "CF" (or coordination factor). This movement away from D&D was a path that Hargrave would continue walking for the rest of his life.
The Arduin Adventure was notable for one other reason: it was focused on teaching roleplaying to novice gamers, which was ironically what Chaosium had been looking for several years earlier (and what companies like Pacesetter and Yaquinto were working toward around the same time). The general organization of The Arduin Adventure with one and two-page chapters each covering a basic concept was quite innovative and definitely ahead of its time.
| "The old days where everyone was an amateur are gone forever I'm afraid, and for the better, I think. ... The public demands quality now that the novelty has worn off, and rightly so
" -Dave Hargrave, "My Life & Role-Playing", Different Worlds #31 (November, 1983) |
Unfortunately, The Arduin Adventure wasn't that well received by the industry at the time. By 1980 or 1981, a bare-bones not-quite-retroclone of OD&D wasn't that exciting except to Arduin players, of course, who had long needed this skeleton to hang their games upon. If anything the reception has cooled since then. Whereas The Arduin Trilogy is still appreciated and respected for its gonzo imagination and the Arduin Dungeons for their unforgiving nature, The Arduin Adventure is very much an artifact of its time.
The fact that The Arduin Adventure appealed more to existing fans than to new ones might have been one disappointment too many for Grimoire Games. The company was having increasing financial problems by that time. It'd never had the cash to advertise, which kept Arduin from reaching a particularly large audience. Now, the well was entirely dry, and Grimoire Games didn't have the cash to produce new books at all.
At the same time, Hargrave was facing severe financial problems of his own. His problems started in 1980 when the city of Concord zoned The Multiversal Trading Company out of business. This caused a loss in the thousands of dollars for Hargrave and eventually required him to file for personal bankruptcy in 1982. It was after this that Hargrave left the Bay Area for northern California.
In April of 1982 amidst this financial turmoil for both Grimoire and Hargrave GrimCon was officially incorporated as "GrimCon, Inc." with shareholders including Hargrave, Mathis, and others. It helped to isolate the potentially profitable convention from the financial woes of its parents. Sadly, this wasn't enough to save the convention, which lasted for just one more year. GrimCon V, the last in the series, ran in Oakland in 1983.
Miraculously, Hargrave kept writing during this period, as a form of escape. He did work on a thirteen-part Arduin campaign called "The Heart of Darkness", a superhero RPG called "Glory Wars", and a WWII aerial combat game called "Sky Tigers". More notably, he was working on "Arduin, Bloody Arduin", a revamp of the Arduin game system that would take it even further from its D&D roots.
Unfortunately, "Arduin, Bloody Arduin" faced some challenges based on the fact that Hargrave was an "intuitive" designer. He knew what worked. This resulted in great game sessions in which he was able to combine his gaming intuition with an innate talent for telling stories. The flipside of this was that Hargrave didn't have the knack for the systematic organization that was increasingly required for successful game publication. His somewhat piecemeal Grimoires the obvious result of this design style weren't something that could continue to succeed as the industry matured throughout the '80s.
Some of Hargrave's friends and players saw these same problems cropping up in the "Arduin, Bloody Arduin" work. Starting around 1982, three of them Mark Schynert, Carolyn Schultz, and Rod Engdahl tried to do something about it. Over the next several years they did what they could to aid Hargrave in organizing what would be his final Arduin publication.
Their work became visible to the public when they prepared a thin 16-page booklet called Revised Arduin: A Primer (1984). Schynert, Schultz, and Engadhl produced the book to introduce the revisions to combat that would appear in "Arduin, Bloody Arduin" most specifically the BF (battle factor) system which simultaneously simplified combat (by introducing a single value that could be precalculated) and made it more realistic (by including factors like training).
Through Grimoire Games, Jim Mathis printed up 100 copies of the booklet. It was given away to interested parties at DunDraCon that year including to Hargrave himself, who hadn't been aware that the booklet was appearing! Schynert and friends also ran several Arduin games at the convention, to support the upcoming revamp to Hargrave's classic game.
Those 100 booklets were the last publications that Grimoire was ever able to afford on its own. It was the end of the company, as least as it existed in the '80s. Somewhere around this time Mathis left the Bay Area too, relocating first to El Cajon (near Los Angeles), then to San Diego where he'd still be when he reenters this story ten years down the line. He kept selling Grimoire Games' products for a few years, but by the late '80s or so Grimoire Games was a company of the past.
The work that Hargrave's friends were doing to produce a better organized manuscript of "Arduin, Bloody Arduin" came to an end a short time later, around 1986. Hargrave had never taken to editing well and eventually threw up his hands and decided that he was going to produce "Arduin, Bloody Arduin" on his own or not at all.
Dragon Tree & The Last of Grimoire Games: 1984-1993
While writing his second "My Life & Role-Playing" for Different Worlds #31 (November, 1983), Hargrave announced, "I have let it be known that I will be available for projects outside of my traditional Grimoire Games label." This decision would soon lead to a new publisher not just for Hargrave, but for Arduin as well.
It was Mary Ezzell of Dragon Tree Press who following some initial discussions suggested that Hargrave create a new continent in their own campaign setting, the World of Delos. Hargrave (and Mathis) countered with the suggestion that this new material instead bear the Arduin name. Though Grimoire continued trying to raise money over the next several years hoping to publish books like "Arduin, Bloody Arduin" they were not successful, and thus Dragon Tree became the de facto Arduin publisher.
The result was five more Grimoires, from Arduin Grimoire Vol. IV: The Lost Grimoire (1984) to Arduin Grimoire Vol. VIII: The Winds of Chance (1988). These new books had some rules, but focused more on the setting of Arduin itself. They were also more generic than some of the earlier Arduin works, and thus could more easily be used in a variety of settings.
| "I want the world to know it was me. Mary. Who had the idea for publishing this and sat on the floor of Dave's mountain redwood house under his lavender silk Phraint banner chanting 'We want a new Grimoire' till he agreed." -Mary Ezzell, The Arduin Grimoire Vol. IV: The Lost Grimoire (1984) |
Dave Hargrave died on August 29, 1988 at the young age of 42. This brought Dragon Tree's new Arduin production to a sudden end though they'd keep the books in print for decades. It also brought Arduin back to Grimoire Games, who as it turned out had one more book in them.
Jim Mathis got the ball rolling by asking Mark Schynert who he'd worked with when printing up Revised Arduin to complete (and organize!) the unfinished "Arduin, Bloody Arduin" manuscript. This was a fairly monumental task, as Schynert had to wade through the reams of paper that composed the manuscript. At times he had to deal with duplicated content, different annotations from different times on the same manuscript pages, and other outright contradictions. Eventually, Schynert was able to put together a complete and coherent book.
However, there was still the problem of finances, as Grimoire Games remained unable to pay for printing. Enter Michael Sloan of Berkeley Games Distribution a Californian games distributor that we've already met briefly. He put up the cash to print the manuscript in return for a share in its profits. The result was a two-book set called The Compleat Arduin (1993).
At 450 total pages, The Compleat Arduin was the largest-ever Arduin release. It was clearly based upon the original rules as they'd developed through The Arduin Adventure and Revised Arduin: A Primer but polished and reorganized.
In some ways, it wasn't exactly what Hargrave would have produced. He'd wanted to keep the old D&D system in parallel with any updates, and he would have resisted simplifications of the sort that Schynert made as he polished the rules. The Compleat Arduin also contained considerably less background than Hargrave might have liked, but that was primarily a question of economics the two-book set was already big enough. Despite all of that (or perhaps because of it) the books were generally well-received as both the first fully coherent set of Arduin rules and (much as Hargrave's original books) as a great source of ideas.
Unfortunately, that didn't translate into financial success. Part of that was due to cost. At $42 for the two-book set (or $62 in today's dollars), the game was on the high end for a roleplaying system. However, the bigger problem was that The Compleat Arduin was a game whose time was already past primarily due to the fact that it had been over a decade in genesis. If it'd been released in the late '80s, it would have been in the company of systems like Megatraveller (1987) and AD&D Second Edition (1989) polished revisions of primordial games. Instead, released in the early '90s, The Compleat Arduin had to contend with games like Vampire: The Masquerade (1991), which totally shook up the way players looked at RPGs.
Sloan sold somewhere less than half of the run of The Compleat Arduin and had to remainder the rest, taking a loss. Though Schynert asked for submissions for a new line of Arduin releases at the end of The Compleat Arduin, they'd never come to be. In the end The Compleat Arduin was just a single (massive and impressive) release from a company that had already moved on.
Arduin After Grimoire Games: 1993-Present
For the next several years, Arduin was largely neglected other than the books kept in print by Dragon Tree Press. Then, around 1998, Grimoire Games sold its rights to Arduin to Emperors Choice Games. It took four years (and a disastrous partnership with cybergames.com who is discussed more in the Hero Games history), but eventually Emperors Choice started publishing Arduin material of their own.
Their publication kicked off with Arduin Grimoire Vol. IX: End War (2002), the final Arduin Grimoire, which included content from Hargrave, Schynert, and others. Emperors Choice has since reprinted all of the Grimoire and Dragon Tree books. When reprinting a compilation of the Arduin Dungeons in Vault of the Weaver (2006), Emperors Choice also included "Heart of Darkness", that 13-part campaign that Hargrave was working on 25 years earlier.
Emperors Choice has also printed two massive Arduin books all their own. World Book of Khaas: The Legendary Lands of Arduin (2004) is a huge 865-page look at Arduin, while Arduin Eternal (2009) is a largely new game system the third major version of the Arduin rules and also a mammoth book at 822 pages.
Emperors Choice may receive a history of their own in the future, but for the moment one other event is worth noting in this history of Grimoire Games and its various precursors and successors. In 2003, following Emperors Choice's reprinting of the Dragon Tree Grimoires, Emperors Choice sued Dragon Tree Press, who they believed no longer had the rights to keep those same Grimoires in print. Dragon Tree Press counter-sued, with the core issue being who owned the copyrights to Grimoires IV-VIII.
In the end, the case was settled out of court. Dragon Tree sold the right to reprint their Grimoires, but have continued selling their existing stock and also will regain the rights if Emperors Choice stops printing the books.
For the moment, it is thus Emperors Choice who is carrying the Arduin banner into the 21st century. However, even if they fall by the wayside at some point, there is still another publisher willing to continue forward with the small-press game that Dave Hargrave created decades ago and that Grimoire Games published for a short time.
Links of Note
The following links will be of interest for folks interested in more on Arduin:- Dragon Tree Press' Arduin Grimoires
- Emperors Choice's Arduin Product Lines
- Free download of The Compleat Arduin (PDFs)
What to Read Next
The following histories (mostly found in Designers & Dragons) contain more information on some of the topics in this article:
- For the almost-first publisher of Arduin, read Chaosium (pages 82-96).
- For other game companies in the San Francisco Bay Area, read Chaosium including the mini-histories of Different Worlds Publishing, Wizard's Attic, and Impressions Advertising & Marketing (pages 82-96), the first and latest incarnations of Hero Games (pages 145-154), SkyRealms Publishing (pages 201-202), R. Talsorian (pages 207-214), Green Knight Publishing (pages 356-358), and Issaries (pages 360-363). Many more game companies existed in southern California.
- For other companies publishing games that started out as the original D&D, read Gamelords (pages 129-132), Midkemia Press (article #13), and Palladium Books (pages 155-163).
- For other companies trying to produce games for newcomers in the early '80s (like The Arduin Adventure), read the histories of Pacesetter (pages 197-199) and Yaquinto (pages 164-165).
- For a similar legal disagreement between two publishers following the death of a setting's creator, read Columbia Games (pages 181-185) including the mini-history of Kelιstia Productions.
Special Thanks
Thanks to Brian Collins, Mary Ezzell, Leonard Heid, Steve Perrin, Donald Reents, Mark Schynert, and Greg Stafford for reading over this article and/or offering comments.
I've currently got many irons in the fire and am looking into several companies spinning off this one, such as Chessex, Dragon Tree Press, and Emperors Choice. I've also got a few more top ten lists running around my head. So, next month expect to see ... one of those.
In the meantime, I invite you to join the Designers & Dragons facebook page to make sure you get all the latest updates on articles, books, etc. And finally, if you like board games too, take a look at my new board game blog, Mechanics & Meeples.
