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The thing that people forget about encyclopaedias is they weren’t just alphabetical listings of factoids. The really good ones contained sections of essays and theses. They were scholarly works of argument and depth that went beyond mere catalogues, and used more than just hyperlinks to place their knowledge in a context of time and place. I’d forgotten this as well, but the wonderful style of my old Funk and Wagnalls came flooding back to me when I picked up Shannon Appelcline’s history of the roleplaying industry, Designers and Dragons.
The book is encyclopaedic in every sense of the word, right down to the old-school leather binding that makes you imagine sliding it out of a creaking shelf in the back of a dusty old library. It’s a beautiful thing to behold but without being showy; the leather is there to preserve the book for decades, and the black matte front is adorned only with a silvered title, the author’s name and the book’s purpose: “A History of the Roleplaying Game Industry”. If this book was any classier, it would be smoking a pipe over a snifter of brandy.
The interior is just as classy, and I don’t just mean the crisp, linen-white paper, the elegant black and white layout or the simple black and white cover scans. The book also has an elegant writing style and format: informed, literary, authoritative, exacting. Some might say a little dry, but only as dry as the subject matter demands. Despite the exhaustive drive to be an accurate and complete chronicler of every product and facet, Appelcline avoids being dreary or stuffy.
And he most certainly is an accurate and complete chronicler. Starting from the wargaming roots of the early 70s, he traces the development of gaming right up until last year, covering, as far as I can tell, every roleplaying product released in America, and certainly every significant one published in English. Cleverly, he does this company by company, so as to keep his chronologies clearer and thematically grouped. This also produces the essay style mentioned above: the book is a collection of sixty long chapters, with each one covering the origins, history, and in many cases demise of an individual company or cluster of companies. This means the timelines overlap across the book as a whole, but at the same time ensures each chapter is its own self-contained story, adding to readability and focus. The overlap issue is solved by having each chapter end with directions on what to read next, to follow certain chronologies of artist, or company, or gaming trends, and by breaking the book up into parts which reflect large time eras and trends.
Meanwhile, making each chapter about a single company also allows Appelcline to develop a theme. Each essay is, in some way, a story of the creative and driven designers behind the company and its works, and the dragons they and their company faced, be those winged beasts be bad luck, bad guesses, bad decisions, bad people or just some moments of bad design. Appelcline is never critical himself, remaining the appropriately neutral historian, but he is scrupulously fair and covers bad press and bad reactions when he needs to. He also finds time for fun, too, and whimsy, capturing the strange details and odd moments that so often appear in the twists and turns of design and publishing. This is possible because the foundation of the book’s research is interviews, personal quotes and stories from the people involved, and many of these quotes appear in the book as well. This adds a much more personal and human touch to each chapter, and improves readability a great deal.
It’s not entirely flawless. Most obvious is the lack of an index. In a work of this size, coverage, depth and complexity – and a work this definitive and foundational - not being able to search by author or work is a terrible omission. I imagine this work could be – and should be – the fundamental resource for the next fifty years or so, and it would really help its utility to be more easily plumbed for the factoid you need.
Of course, you may not want a reference book for writing your own analyses of roleplaying games, which brings up the other possible flaw of the book: it is perhaps too detailed and too expansive. For all the work Appelcline does to make it readable and accessible, I can’t imagine anyone wanting this book for anything but the least casual read. It’s too austere and unillustrated to be a coffee-table book and it’s too heavy to read on the train. It is fundamentally a reference book not a reading book. Unless you are an obsessive collector (and indeed, our hobby does have a large share of those) or an actual academic or amateur historian, this is an encyclopaedia you will probably rarely reference, and perhaps, like any encyclopaedia, read even less.
This is, however, also the book’s great virtue. The fact that I think the average gamer would have no interest in knowing much of the content is, in turn, undeniable proof of the depth of the research and the width of the content. A book that is so extensive in its field it goes beyond a sense of general utility is, in the academic world, a sign of mastery of the discipline. This is, then, the definitive and absolute history of the roleplaying game industry, and you should accept no substitutes. Of course, there are no pretenders to the throne because nothing else comes close, or has ever come close, and probably will not for another fifty years. It might not deserve to be on your bookshelf, but, to quote Indiana Jones, it does deserve to be in a museum.
Style: Five stars.
Substance: Four stars. (one off the lack of an index)
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