New Book - Designers & Dragons from Mongoose

Anything from MGP receives from me a most vigorous, preemptive raspberry.

Here's my full review of the "preview"

I've always thought pretty well of Mongoose; at least they seem to be an aggressive success story in the industry and while I only have two of thier Conan books (Betrayer of Asgard and the Stygia sourcebook) I think they are pretty cool. Unfortunetly it's dead obvious they are out of their depth with this attemp at history.

The book, Designers and Dragons, has available a 7 page preview. I am actually only discussing the prieview here, it was enough for me to see the character of the book.

A history book, in the modern sense, will contain the fruits of carefull scholarship. It will have many references and footnotes in an appendix discussing sources and details. In other words the author will "show the work", behind it. It will also be fact checked. This is when a publisher sends the book to credible readers who will double check, to the extent that they can, the assertions of the book.

Mr. Appelcline and Mongoose Publishing have very obviously done none of these things.

The preview contains several pages discussing the Origin of the Dungeons & Dragons game. As it happens, I'm an archaeologist with an avid interest in that subject and have researched it extensively, including talking with a number of the people involved. So I'm pretty well versed.

There's no question that RPG history owes a great deal to a man named David Wesely, and Appelcline does indeed mention him, or I think it must be him, but Wesely's name is repeatedly misspelled (something a fact checker would have noticead right off)

Imagine a History of the United States starting with Georg Washingtown.

Wesely ran - and still runs from time to time - a game set in a fictional town of Braunstein. Appelcline labels Braunstein as Napoleonic, but then says Dave Arneson - Co Creator of D&D - started running Braunstein and changed it to many types of settings. While Dave did run a Braunstien - he called it Blackmoor - it was Wesely himself who started changing the setting to different locals and set most of his games in a fictional, modern day Banana Republic, not the Napoleonic period.

This may seem like a minor fauxpaux but since nothing is referenced, the reader is left to assume that Appelcline is relaying accurate information.

It gets worse, much worse.

"Various sources describe Arneson visiting Gygax, Gygax visiting Arneson, or the two meeting at GenCon IV (1971)."

This is pure non-sense. All the people directly involved who have said anything about it have told exactly the same story - including, Gygax, Arneson, Kuntz, and Megarry. Megarry and Arneson went to Lake Geneva in late fall of 1972. (November, according to Mr. Kuntz). Megarry went to showcase his Dungeon boardgame and Mr. Arneson went to help him and run "a Blackmoor" for Mr. Gygax. "Other sources", meaning fan speculation and half forgotten comments from third parties, have no credibility in the matter.

This is really basic reasearch 101 stuff. The correct information can be gotten directly by asking the surviving participants or can be found without much trouble using a search engine.

Next we have this lovely sttement:

"Whatever the case, in that 1971 meeting Gygax and Arneson decided to jointly design a game that incorporated their ideas of fantasy realms and individual player characters. They called it ... `The Fantasy Game'."

There is exactly nothing true in any of the above. Gygax asked Arneson for his rules so they could "jointly design" Dungeons and Dragons in the tail end of 1972 after experiencing a delve into Blackmoor Dungeon as a player. They did not put their head together and decide to jointly design a fantasy game in 1971. Far from it, Arneson had been running his RPG for nearly two years before Gygax got involved with the game.


Further - in an interview on the very website that Mr. Appelcline founded and manages www.rpg.net/news+reviews/columns/lynch01may01.html - Gygax emphatically denied that "The Fantasy Game" was ever an actual name for the game. Here's the quote "As an aside, I must laugh at some comment I saw about the name for the game being "The Fantasy Game" until someone "wised me up". Having been employed as an Editor-in-Chief, selecting what game rules and games would be published by Guidon Games since the beginning of 1971, I was well aware of the need to use a working title, the need for some caution in regards using the actual name for a a projected game release. So that's the reason for that bland one on the draft works."

Appelcline seems to cavalierly ignore the information on his own website! "They" never called it "The Fantasy Game" Gygax merely put that on an early draft as a placeholder. Arneson, as it happens, had an entirely different title in mind, but that is another story.

Here's yet another unchecked and unsited "fact": We all know - at least those who have seen the circa 90 page reformatted versions of the 3 LBB's - that Gygax's figure of 150 typewritten pages (or 300 !! as claimed in his Dragon #7 article) for the final playtest manuscript of D&D is an um... overestimate - yet Appelcline states it as simple fact without citing any source or giving any hint it might be otherwise.

That nearly ends the preview and its enough for me to shake my head in wonder at what can be published as history with a straight face and a less than inexpensive pricetag. This book doesn't even meet the most basic standards of journalism, let alone historical inquiry.

I imagine there might be a lot of good information in the book, particularly as it gets closer to the present, but with such sloppy scholarship and lack of decent references, who's to know what parts can be trusted?

I don't see this as any form of contempt; it is more like shoddy reporting and research. I would call this as simply Mongoose being Mongoose. Which means they more than likely heard about the Gygax movie and did their usual move where they put a similar but inferior product out. Think of Mongoose as The Asylum of the RPG world.

Have one from me as well. A nice, detailed review with some very specific examples.

Agreed. I'd love an "inside look" on the early days from an industry perspective (compared to my own player perspective) but apparently this book isn't that at all.

I had a chance to read several of the chapters before they went to press, and they were well-written, well-edited, and pretty thoroughly researched. I'll be very disappointed to hear that Mongoose screwed up what was a very good history, at the least, if not an excellent one :/

Shannon -- welcome to the boards and thanks for your perspective on the book.

We do have some scholars who take their history of OD&D and it's roots quite seriously, and it's too bad that some discussions on the early days couldn't have happened here on these boards before the book went to press, but I can certainly see why you made some of the decisions you did in its creation.

I'm pretty open-minded (as I believe most of the posters here are) and will give the book a look-over at my local game store if I can find a copy there, then I'll decide. I'll confess that the early OD&D years are the ones I find most interesting and it's distressing if there are too many "grey area" sections there, but the rest of the book may make its purchase worthwhile. And the fact-checker names you cite are certainly ones whom I recognize and respect, which is a huge point in your favor.

Still sounds kind of expensive. I'm interested more in content than a collectable.

Heh, may not be ideal circumstances, but welcome to the forum (seriously)

Before I respond specifically, I want to be clear that my hope is constructive, in that in this day and age, corrected and expanded editions are fairly easy to produce. I would hope that the something like that will happen in this case.

Second is that I can really only speak to the preview. It seems likely that a similar approach is taken in the rest of the book, but I can't know that, and I would assume that other sections are, at least, more accurate.



That's no excuse. None. Narrative histories are very common and popular, have been for years. They are nonetheless referenced extensively, just like any other kind of history. All you have to do is put a little number at the end of a sentence or paragraph that links to a key in the back of the book. I'm sure you must have this kind of info in your notes. Put it in the book. Otherwise it's nothing more than hearsay.



Then for heaven's sake "show the work". Give us the source info. If you really have that level of intensive research why would you hide it!? I'm not really doubting what you are saying Shannon, particularly as I recognize the sources you were drawing on, but you are leaving other researchers with no way to evaluate your work or statements, which creates two problems. 1) The reader must rely solely on your interpretation/presentation of the facts, and 2) Your work cannot be cited by any other researcher when it is not demostrably grounded in original source material; "just cause I say so" even though it may be perfectly right, won't fly and makes what could be an important contribution to history, nearly useless to historians. Even Wikipedia expects you to do that much.



Ah well, two slightly different issues:
1) Was Gary's first Blackmoor game at a Gencon
and
2) What was the year?

So as I said, there is no disagreement among the persons directly involved (excepting that I'm not aware of Terry Kuntz, ever commenting on the matter) who have said it was a personal trip, to L. Geneva, not a gencon. What other "TSR" people who were not there may have said is just background noise. Historians must know how to prioitize and evaluate sources, and if there were questions, despite what Gygax and Arneson have said on the matter, why not track down either of the Kuntz's or Dave Megarry?

The year they decided to write D&D is trickier and should not be set in stone, so to speak, without caveates, and if you knew that, why in the world did you cite 1971!? 1972 is the far more likely date as given by both Gygax and Arneson in numerous instances and the date to which everything seems best to fit, including, for ex when when John Snider entered the service and the dates of play given in Rob Kuntz recollection of the matter.



Fair enough; I'll grant that semantics could be at play here. I'd argue that readers would reasonably conclude from your sentence that "The Fantasy Game" was Gygax and Arneson's original intended name, which would not be true.

Of course, since you don't give any references, there is no way for the interested but uniformed reader to check without embarking on a reasearch quest themselves. (Just in case you hadn't noticed I'm pushing hard for you to add references to the book)

In most cases people will trust what they think they have just learned and happily repeat the misinformation.


Yep, and here is another:

www.theweem.com/2010/08/23/weem-interviews-gary-gygax-2001-part-1-of-2/

and another

www.rpgconsortium.com/articles/article.cfm?id=320

Any of which you could have cited and simply written, "According to Gygax", as should be done and can still be done in any revision, instead of simply stating 150 pages as established and unsourced fact. In fact, the 3LBB's are 150 6" x 9" booklet pages, and that may well be why Gygax is remembering that number, but a 150 typewritten page manuscript, even had it been illustrated, is almost certainly not the case.

Why does this matter? It has been reported, and is likely true, that at least one of Gygax's "second expansion" manuscripts still exists. If the page count, as I suspect, is no where near 150, then anyone relying solely on your book would assume that there must be an even bigger missing manuscript or that pages must be missing, when that is not the case. Sourcing and attributing facts is important.



Right, all of which is all the more reason to use a careful comparative methodolgy, trace every verifyable fact of record you can and be meticulous with what you put in print. There is a much higher standard to authoritative history than casual web posts, and given that you are talking about the formative period and the hobby's seminal work, it is more important to be as careful and transparent as possible. The entire rest of the book hangs on that.

Shannon, you've clearly put a lot of effort into this and it is definetly a worthwhile undertaking, but if you really want your work to shine and be considered reliable, you are going to have to up the standards and revise the book. I hope you do.

OK, I lied. One more thing. I just pulled 5 random history books off of my shelf:

A History of Wales, by John Davies (Penguin, 1993)
Asimov's Chronology of the World, by Isaac Asimov (HarperCollins, 1991)
The House of Medici: Its Rise and Fall, by Chris Hibbert (Morrow Quill, 1980)
A History of Ireland, by Peter and Fiona Somerset Fry (Barnes & Noble, 1993)
The United States: Becoming a World Power, Sixth Edition, Volume II (Prentice-Hall, 1987)

Those span the spectrum from serious to casual to high school text book. Not a one of them has the references and footnotes which aldarron thinks are a requirement of any modern history book. Only one has a bibliography at all, while two others list further reading. One has end notes, but they're almost entirely details, with a handful being citations.

Designers & Dragons is a well-researched and well-fact-checked book. More of that "work" is shown in the list of books, web sites, magazines, and fact checkers at the end of the book than appears in 4 out of 5 history books I picked off my shelf. It surely has some errors which have fallen through the gaps of my and my fact-checker's knowledge, but everything has been done to minimize that.

Hopefully you haven't been chased away from the boards.

I think that in general we enjoy a somewhat relaxed form of discussion and I doubt that aldarron intended his words to be an actual attack per se but instead an analysis of what he has seen. Aldarron has done extensive research into some of the early days and is certainly a qualified scholar on the topic, and to me he ranks up there with many of the other qualified scholars who did your fact-checking.

And please keep in mind that most of our impressions are based on only a small preview and not the entire text. Hopefully once folks get a chance to read the whole thing we can get some additional reviews.

I'm pleased to report that my dear wife gave me a copy of Designers & Dragons for my birthday, so I'll get a chance to check out Shannon's final product much sooner than I had thought I would!

Thanks Marv!