When pop culture fandoms heat up, collectors begin to come out of the woodwork. Not speculators, mind you, like the pie-eyed, self-styled investor class that has glommed onto trading card games like Magic: The Gathering and Disney Lorcana. No, I’m talking about real collectors in search of rare artifacts, often from early on in the history of a given fandom.
Fans of Dungeons & Dragons are no different in this regard. In fact, the market for rare D&D books and ephemera has been hot as hell going on a decade now. The original, TSR-published “brown box” version of D&D? Even a busted-up old copy will run you close to $13,000 today on eBay. Some items are so obscure, so singular that their very existence is in question. That’s the case for the rare first draft of Dungeons & Dragons, which will be reproduced for the first time ever in a new book, The Making of Original Dungeons & Dragons: 1970-1977. Polygon sat with the project lead, senior game designer at Wizards of the Coast Jason Tondro, to learn more.
Tondro said that the book begins by telling the story of D&D’s co-creators, Dave Arneson and Gary Gygax. It details how Gygax, with his focus on combat made clear after the publication of a game called Chainmail, was introduced to Arneson and an early version of his own game, a proto-RPG campaign called Blackmoor. After an initial playtest of Blackmoor in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, the pair began a correspondence.
“Gygax writes to Arneson,” Tondro said, “and we reproduce this letter in the book, where he [tells] Arneson, ‘Send me everything you have on Blackmoor so I can write it up!’ And Arneson does send him game notes for the Blackmoor campaign. But that’s what they are, game notes. And so Gygax has to work this into a publishable manuscript, and he has to create a lot of new material. And so he sits down at his typewriter, and he types out a 50-page first draft of Dungeons & Dragons.”
The Making of Original Dungeons & Dragons, Tondro said, will include that first draft — all 50 pages — in its entirety. And it will also include the second draft, which may actually be the more interesting document.
“He and Arneson make notes on it,” Tondro said, “and they expand it until it’s about 100 pages. We have that, and we reproduce that — in complete — for the first time ever. The first drafts of Dungeons & Dragons, written on Gygax’s typewriter! So this is really the reason that this book exists.”
“Very few people alive today have ever even seen it, if they even know it exists,” Tondro said. But the document’s story doesn’t end there. “Once that manuscript existed, it was kind of passed around. Gygax sent a copy to [Arneson], who then shopped it around the Twin Cities and his gaming group. People started making notes on it, and changes started to happen. Not all those changes got back to Gygax, so what you have is kind of variant versions of the first draft spreading out. And we reproduced a couple of those where they differ from the first draft.”
Throughout the nearly 600 pages of this book, the evolution of this early D&D manuscript will be interpreted by New York Times bestselling author and historian Jon Peterson, whose Game Wizards: The Epic Battle for Dungeons & Dragons remains the definitive modern history of the early years of D&D. That manuscript of that first draft, with its 50-page expansion making it into a second? Turns out it’s Peterson’s.
“Jon has a one-in-a-million, world-class archive of these original documents,” Tondro said. “He felt it was his responsibility to share it with the world. He came to us. This book was his idea. He said, ‘Look, we’ve got this first draft of D&D. Your 50th anniversary is coming up. […] The world needs to see it!’ And he is right.”
But where did it come from? Polygon reached out to Peterson about the provenance of that document, which survives as a mimeographed copy of the hand-annotated original.
“No comment” is all he said.
The Making of Original Dungeons & Dragons: 1970-1977 arrives in stores on June 18 as a physical product. According to Wizards, no digital versions of any kind will be made. Pre-orders for the $99.95 hardcover book are now available.
