Designers & Dragons: The Column
6. Players Made Up Their Own Stuff
Perhaps it's because they were brought up to understand that the rules were guidelines, and perhaps it's because not much had yet been released into the RPG market, but for whichever reason the early RPGers of the '70s made up a lot of their own stuff. As we've already seen, they happily house-ruled D&D to the point where it developed into totally new games. They wrote their own dungeons, they created their own monsters, and (perhaps most notably) they explored their own worlds.
The early RPG companies clearly recognized this tendency. That's why TSR so famously told Judges Guild in 1976 that no one would be interested in supplements. It's why GDW didn't bother with a setting when they created Traveller (1977).
Flying Buffalo was a rare exception that started putting out adventures for their own Tunnels & Trolls (1975) almost immediately. However, for D&D, it was not TSR but other companies that led the way — including Wee Warriors (in 1975) and Judges Guild (in 1976). Even when TSR got involved, they published GM tools meant to complement creativity — such as the original Geomorphs (1976-1977) and several pregenerated lists of monsters & treasure (1977-1978).
There were a lot of third-party supplements under the bridge before TSR finally decided that players might be willing to buy some made-up stuff from them. Thus they eventually began to publish adventures, starting with G1: Steading of the Hill Giant Chief (1978), and settings, starting with World of Greyhawk (1980).
And then it was the start of a whole new era ...
7. Players Published Professional Content Too
Players weren't just creating their own stuff, however. The line between players and professional designers was very fuzzy in those early days, and thus average players were writing stuff for publication too. This was the most obvious in the various gaming magazines.
Judges Guild was probably the publisher that most frequently distributed the writings of entirely average D&D players. This came about largely through their magazines, The Dungeoneer (1976-1980) and The Judges Guild Journal (1976-1980). In the earliest days of the Journal, players wrote up their ideas for "Omniscient Opinions". Some additional player content appeared thanks to contests, such as a dungeon design contest which generated extensive material for Judges Guild Journal #12 (December/January, 1978/1979) and Judges Guild Journal #13 (February/March, 1979). Over in Dungeoneer, player content appeared through multiple columns, such as "Monster Matrix", "Booty Bag", and the trap-filled "Nose Wet? or No Sweat!". Many other player "articles" were little more than letters that might contain a single item, some random tables, or even a very extensive discussion of enchanting magic items.
Perhaps it's not a surprise that Judges Guild published so much player content; printing as much content as they could as quickly as they could seemed to be their core business strategy. Quality might have been variable, but the same was true of much of the RPG industry at the time.
Even publishers less focused on producing content in volume provided many opportunities for "amateur" players to contribute. Thus, White Dwarf had "Treasure Chest", full of magic items (1977-1986), and occasional other articles like Brian Asbury's "The Asbury System" — a new XP system that gave experience for spell-casting, skills, and more. Don Turnbull's "Fiend Factory" (1978-1986) also contained player content and went on to much greater renown. When Metagaming produced their Interplay magazine (1981-1982), they subtitled it "The Metagamer Dialogues", with the idea being that it'd be full of player content too.
The greatest sign that players could easily become published designers in the '70s was the way in which very small press companies were so easily created in the time. Many of the earliest designers — including Dave Hargrave, Kevin Siembieda, and Ken St. Andre — got into the business simply because they'd written up something cool and they were encouraged to publish it.
As ever, we can see the end of this early RPG trend right around 1980. That's when Judges Guild started discriminating between different sorts of writers by creating variable pay schedules. They offered amateurs $2-8 per full page of copy while they were giving pros $5-20. Of course, all of those rates were pretty low. To put them in perspective, full page ads were going for from $192 for black & white to $240 for the pseudo-color at the Judges Guild.
Today the barriers of entry into the RPG industry have gone way down with the advent of PDFs, but nonetheless the line between players and designers seems much more rigid than it was so briefly in the late '70s.
8. Companies Didn't Know What to Publish
Perhaps it's good that players were so able to produce publishable content in those early days, because to a large extent, the RPG publishers of the '70s had no idea what would be successful and what wouldn't be in the entirely new RPG industry. Thus, the sort of thing being produced varied widely from company to company.
D&D (1974)
Boot Hill (1975)
Empire of the Petal Throne (1975)
En Garde! (1975)
Tunnels & Trolls (1975)
Bunnies and Burrows (1976)
Knights of the Round Table (1976)
Metamorphosis Alpha (1976)
Monsters! Monsters! (1976)
Starfaring (1976)
TSR published a very early adventure, "The Temple of the Frog", in Blackmoor (1975). However, they apparently thought little of the form because they didn't return to it until G1: Steading of the Hill Giant Chief (1978). Meanwhile, Wee Warriors happily published adventures beginning with Palace of the Vampire Queen (1976), as did Judges Guild, beginning with Tegel Manor (1977).
Judges Guild was pioneering campaign settings with the City State of the Invincible Overlord Playing Aid (1977) and The First Fantasy Campaign (1977), while TSR didn't mimic this sort of supplement themselves until The World of Greyhawk (1980). Chaosium published the first monster book with All the Worlds' Monsters (1977), though in this case TSR probably already had their Monster Manual (1977) in production.
The examples go on. No one had decided what was successful and what wasn't, and thus everything might be.
Judges Guild probably offers the best example of how bizarre some of the publications of the late '70s were — at least to our eyes decades later. At GenCon IX, Judges Guild began offering "subscriptions", which would provide players with material every couple of months ($12 for six packets). These subscription "issues" were "published" as envelopes contained stacks of cardstock sheets, small booklets, and other looseleaf material. The first subscription envelope thus contained several maps, a 12-page booklet, a one-page reference, and Issue "J" of Judges Guild Journal (December/January, 1976/1977).
Slowly, companies figured out what to publish, and the production of the industry became more homogeneous. TSR produced adventures and settings, and Grimoire Games added dungeons to their Arduin line. Even those strange Judges Guild subscriptions started to look more like what was being produced by the rest of the industry: the envelopes full of stuff were later published under cover sheets to identify them as single products ("installment L" thus became Tegel Manor and "Installment M" became Modron), then around 1981 many of those supplements that still featured separate maps and booklets were instead combined into singular one-stop books.
9. There Were No Editions as We Know Them
Even in the first years of the industry, some of the earliest RPGs were published multiple times. Tunnels & Trolls went through five printings from 1975 to 1979 and Boot Hill went through two during that same period. RuneQuest quickly revved from its original publication (1978) to what would become widely known as "RuneQuest II" (1979). Even GDW's En Garde went through two iterations (1975, 1977).
En Garde may have been the first RPG to use the word edition — proclaiming its second printing as a "revised edition". However, neither it — nor most of the other reprints of the '70s — were what we would today recognize as editions. New printings might be revised, refined, or reformatted. Errata might be incorporated into the games. However, this was nothing like the big revamps seen starting in the late '80s. Even today you can look back at Tunnels & Trolls first through fourth edition (1975-1977) — to use our modern vernacular — or even much later products like Call of Cthulhu first through third edition (1981-1986) and say, "Those were all basically the same game".
The exception for the period might have been D&D, which certainly evolved throughout the '70s, but the reaction of the community as a whole to these changes proves the general rule.
D&D started, of course, with the OD&D 3-book set (1974), which was supplemented by four additional books (1975-1976). These were followed by what today we might call a new edition: the Holmes Dungeons & Dragons Basic Set (1977), which was really just an introduction to OD&D. When the Monster Manual (1977) was released that same year, it was called Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, but it was freely used with OD&D and Basic Set by players at the time. The Players Handbook (1978) and the Dungeon Masters Guide (1979) eventually proved to be a (somewhat) different system than OD&D — but where would you say the editional lines lie, when the evolution from one product to the next was so gradual?
Looking in the magazines and journals of the time, it's obvious that players didn't see much difference at all. As late as 1980, most magazine articles just used the words D&D without trying to identify what they meant beyond that, because it was all just one game. There were no editions.
In 1980, things would start to change. That's when Tunnels & Trolls — which had already been heavily revised for its "fifth edition" (1979) — started carrying the text "completely revised and re-illustrated". And it had been changed notably under fifth-edition editor Liz Danforth. That's also when the Tom Moldvay Dungeons & Dragons Basic Set (1980) appeared, which was more obviously not the same game as either OD&D and Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. And finally, it's when Metagaming revamped Melee (1977) and Wizard (1977) as The Fantasy Trip (1980).
From there, the first edition wars were just around the corner.
10. Centralization Was Poor
The final thing striking thing about gaming in the '70s — the final thing that the modern gamer wouldn't even consider — is how poor centralized it was. When people talk about entering the gaming field in the '70s, or about finding a new game, they often talk about a long-distance personal connection. Greg Stafford of the SF Bay Area was mailed D&D by a friend in Milwaukee. Lee Gold, who lived in LA, got D&D from friends in San Francisco. Conan La Motte, then at UC San Diego, picked up his copy in Los Angeles.
So many of these games came from personal connections because no game store carried everything. Small distributors like Armageddon covered very geographically limited areas (in this case the San Francisco Bay Area). Others, like Zocchi Distributors, tried to offer many things to all peoples, but they were a far cry from companies like Alliance of the modern day.
One of the consequences of a poorly integrated web of RPG commerce is that companies would often pick up and sell products from other publishers. The most notable of these are probably Games Workshop — who distributed lots of RPGs to the UK — and Judges Guild — who sold an extensive catalog of RPG books and miniatures to their members. However, you'd frequently see such deals on a smaller scale too. If TSR hadn't picked up Wee Warriors' books, it's likely that they would never have been seen outside of California. Similarly, Chaosium sold the self-published Arduin Grimoires (1977-1978) until they were reprinted by Grimoire Games.
Because of the poor centralization, gameplay style varied tremendously in geographically remote enclaves. Some have written about how the game variants were more outlandish in California than in the Midwest — perhaps because of the increased distance from the hub of roleplaying about the Great Lakes. It's in that sort of environment that a gonzo game like Arduin could appear. Similarly, Lee Gold wrote about "high entropy" games in San Francisco and Boston, comparing it to the "low entropy" games of Southern California.
Conventions in those days were pretty local affairs, and so they tended to support the balkanization of the community. However APAs (and to a lesser extent, letter columns in professional magazines) jumped overs these local barriers — giving ideas about roleplaying one of the few conduits to jump from community to community. Thus the importance of the Southern Californian Alarums and Excursions (1975-Present), the Massachusetts Wild Hunt (1976-1994), and others can't be overstated.
Today, the role of APAs is largely taken over by the internet, which has done considerably to homogenize gaming (and the world). However, that process was already starting in the '80s, as distribution of products and information alike began to improve.
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