Between the d20 System and Skyrim, fantasy reached the mainstream: Peter Jackson's Oscars, HBO's Westeros, open worlds, Dark Souls, a split in D&D, the old-school revival, and the first Kickstarter fortunes.
In August 2000, at Gen Con in Milwaukee, Wizards of the Coast released the Player's Handbook for the third edition of Dungeons & Dragons. The word "Advanced" was gone. So were THAC0 and descending armor class, replaced by a single rule for nearly everything: roll a twenty-sided die, add modifiers, and try to meet or beat a target number. The bigger change was in the license. Anyone, including Wizards' competitors, could now publish material using the game's core mechanics, free of charge. That December a Hollywood Dungeons & Dragons film opened and flopped. A year later, Peter Jackson's The Fellowship of the Ring opened and succeeded on a huge scale. Over the next fourteen years, fantasy moved from the margins to the center of popular culture, and its fans gained new ways to make it themselves.
The open door
D&D 3rd Edition was designed by Jonathan Tweet, Monte Cook, and Skip Williams, the first major revision under Wizards' ownership after the collapse told in Collapse & Renaissance: Cards, Vampires & Baldur's Gate. It replaced the patchwork of subsystems with one unified d20 mechanic, added skills and feats, and removed most race-based class restrictions. The business strategy behind it was just as important. Wizards' vice president Ryan Dancey argued that D&D would be strongest if it became the common standard for the whole hobby, and the company released the core rules as a System Reference Document under the Open Game License. A separate d20 System Trademark License allowed third parties to put a "d20" logo on compatible products.
A flood of third-party products followed. Dozens of publishers, some very small, released adventures, settings, and sourcebooks, and the "d20 boom" of 2000–2003 packed shelves with more material than the market could absorb. Many of those companies collapsed in the glut that followed. Wizards released a revised edition, 3.5, in July 2003. But the license could not be revoked, and a publisher with its own ideas could build on the rules without Wizards' permission. That turned out to be important five years later.
Computers took the rules as well. BioWare's Neverwinter Nights (June 2002) used Third Edition rules and came with the Aurora toolset. Players built thousands of their own modules, and fans ran persistent online worlds on private servers, the digital descendant of the AOL game of the same name. Obsidian Entertainment, founded in 2003 by Feargus Urquhart and other former Black Isle staff as Interplay was collapsing, made its sequel in 2006.
Middle-earth at the multiplex
The success of fantasy on screen came from New Zealand. Peter Jackson, a director then best known for low-budget horror comedies and Heavenly Creatures, persuaded New Line Cinema to film all three volumes of The Lord of the Rings at once. The Fellowship of the Ring opened on December 19, 2001. The conceptual art was by Alan Lee and John Howe, the leading Tolkien illustrators of the preceding decades, and the Weta companies built everything from chain mail to the digital Gollum. The Two Towers (2002) and The Return of the King (2003) followed, and on February 29, 2004, The Return of the King won all eleven Academy Awards for which it was nominated, including Best Picture, tying the record held by Ben-Hur and Titanic. Tolkien's books, read for decades by fans since the paperback era, sold millions of new copies.
Other adaptations followed quickly. The Harry Potter films (2001–2011) ran alongside the final books; Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows was published in July 2007. A film of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe arrived in December 2005. Jackson returned to The Hobbit with a trilogy (2012–14). Television was more significant still. On April 17, 2011, HBO premiered Game of Thrones, adapted from George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire. The fifth novel, A Dance with Dragons, appeared that July. The series' mix of politics, sex, and sudden death reached a very large audience and made grim, morally gray fantasy mainstream television. Many viewers who had never considered themselves fantasy fans were now watching dragons on Sunday nights.
The films also created a market for games. Games Workshop launched The Lord of the Rings Strategy Battle Game alongside Fellowship in 2001, with miniatures sculpted from the film designs, and it brought a new generation of customers into the company's shops. Decipher released a film-based trading card game in 2001 and a roleplaying game in 2002, and Wizards of the Coast published a Harry Potter trading card game from 2001. Electronic Arts held the licenses for most of the film tie-in video games. Beyond the licensed products, the films changed how fantasy looked. Jackson's worn, practical props, Howe's and Lee's architecture, and Howard Shore's leitmotif-driven score influenced a decade of fantasy games, book covers, and television productions.
Publishing supported the expansion. Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (2004) was a literary success. In 2006 Joe Abercrombie's The Blade Itself helped define what readers came to call grimdark, and Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn showed the appeal of a carefully defined magic system. Patrick Rothfuss's The Name of the Wind (2007) became a bestseller. After Robert Jordan died on September 16, 2007, with The Wheel of Time unfinished, his widow and editor, Harriet McDougal, chose Sanderson to complete it. A Memory of Light appeared in January 2013, and Sanderson's own Stormlight Archive had begun in 2010 with The Way of Kings.
The sandbox worlds
On computers, Bethesda took the open world into the mainstream. The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind (May 2002, with an Xbox version that June) replaced the procedural vastness of Daggerfall with a handcrafted alien island of giant mushrooms and ash storms, and it was supported by a construction set that let players make their own changes. Oblivion (March 2006), directed by Todd Howard, had voiced characters, a daily routine for every townsperson, and high-definition forests on the new Xbox 360. It also marked two changes in the business. In April 2006 Bethesda sold a set of horse armor as downloadable content for $2.50, and it became a byword for paid add-ons. That May, after a modder produced a nude patch and reviewers noted the game's gore, the ESRB changed Oblivion's rating from T to M. The re-rating raised new questions about how far publishers were responsible for content that players could unlock or add.
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim followed on November 11, 2011. It combined Norse-inflected landscapes, returning dragons, and shouts in a dragon language into what became a staple of popular culture. Its line about "an arrow in the knee" became a meme within weeks. Howard said in 2016 that it had sold 30 million copies, and by 2023 that figure was 60 million. It was released on nearly every platform over the following years. The open-world RPG, a place to live in rather than a story to complete, had become one of the most commercially important forms in games.
Stories with consequences
A second group of studios concentrated on story. BioWare followed Neverwinter Nights with Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic (2003), Jade Empire (2005), and Mass Effect (2007), refining a formula of companion characters, moral choices, and cinematic conversations. In October 2007 Electronic Arts announced its acquisition of the studio. Dragon Age: Origins (November 2009) was presented as the spiritual successor to Baldur's Gate, a dark fantasy with tactical party combat, origin stories that varied by race and class, and companions who might leave or turn against the player. Peter Molyneux's Fable (2004), from Lionhead, offered a simpler morality system in which the hero's appearance changed with good and evil deeds.
In Poland, a video game distributor made a larger bet. CD Projekt, co-founded by Marcin Iwiński, had been localizing Western RPGs, including Baldur's Gate, for Polish players, and in 2002 it founded a development studio, CD Projekt Red. Its first game, The Witcher (October 2007), used BioWare's Aurora engine and adapted Andrzej Sapkowski's Witcher saga, the novels mentioned in Collapse & Renaissance: Cards, Vampires & Baldur's Gate. Its choices were morally ambiguous and their consequences often appeared only hours later. The Witcher 2 (May 2011) raised its technical standards. A relatively small Central European studio could now compete with large North American ones.
Prepare to die
The most influential design of the period came from Tokyo. FromSoftware, a mid-sized developer known for the King's Field and Armored Core series, gave director Hidetaka Miyazaki a troubled project that became Demon's Souls (PlayStation 3, February 2009 in Japan). It was hard and deliberately obscure. Its world was hostile, and it was told through item descriptions and ruins rather than cutscenes. Players could leave warnings for one another and briefly appear in each other's games. Sony executives reportedly doubted it at first, but it developed a strong word-of-mouth following. Dark Souls (September 2011) connected its kingdom of Lordran into one continuous world and made the bonfire checkpoint famous. The soulslike genre and the challenge-run and speedrunning communities that formed around it grew from these games.
Games made by very small teams also found audiences. Tarn Adams and his brother Zach released the first alpha of Dwarf Fortress on August 8, 2006. It was a roguelike world simulation of such depth that its stories of fortresses collapsing through flooding, madness, or demons spread widely online. Grinding Gear Games' free-to-play Path of Exile (October 2013) took over the mantle of Diablo II for many players after Blizzard's Diablo III (May 2012) launched with connection errors and a real-money auction house that was shut down in March 2014. MMORPGs changed too: Final Fantasy XIV failed on its 2010 launch and was rebuilt, under producer Naoki Yoshida, as A Realm Reborn (August 2013), one of the most successful relaunches in the industry. The Elder Scrolls Online arrived in April 2014.
Edition war and the old school
At Wizards, meanwhile, the open license had created a competitor. D&D 4th Edition (June 2008) was a rigorous, tactical redesign built around grid combat and powers for every class, and critics said it resembled the MMORPGs. Wizards replaced the Open Game License for new material with a more restrictive Game System License. Paizo, a Seattle-area company that had published Dragon and Dungeon magazines under license until 2007, chose not to follow. With Jason Bulmahn as lead designer, it ran a public beta test beginning in August 2008 and released the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game at Gen Con in August 2009, an updated version of 3.5 published under the OGL. Many longtime players followed. In the second quarter of 2011 the trade publication ICv2 ranked Pathfinder ahead of D&D in hobby-store sales, though ICv2's retailer surveys were unscientific and the ranking went back and forth.
Other players went further back. The Old-School Renaissance, or OSR, used the OGL to publish "retro-clones" that reconstructed out-of-print rules: OSRIC (2006) for first-edition AD&D, Labyrinth Lord (2007) for the Basic line, and Swords & Wizardry (2008) for the original white box. Blogs such as James Maliszewski's Grognardia promoted a style of play centered on lethal dungeons, sandboxes, and player ingenuity rather than character builds. Lamentations of the Flame Princess (2010) and Goodman Games' Dungeon Crawl Classics (2012), which explicitly drew on Appendix N, gave the movement its own products. The founders died in these years: Gary Gygax on March 4, 2008, and Dave Arneson on April 7, 2009.
The independent design scene took another direction, toward narrative games. Developed in the online community around the Forge, Vincent Baker and Meguey Baker's Apocalypse World (2010) built its rules around "moves" triggered by what players describe, and it asked the game master to "play to find out what happens." Dungeon World (2012), by Sage LaTorra and Adam Koebel, adapted those rules to classic dungeon fantasy. It was funded on a new website.
Kickstarter and the crowd
Kickstarter launched on April 28, 2009. In February 2012 Double Fine asked for $400,000 to make an adventure game and raised about $3.3 million. Within weeks Brian Fargo raised about $2.9 million for Wasteland 2, the sequel to the game described in Mainframes to Microcomputers: the First Computer RPGs. That autumn Obsidian's Project Eternity, which became Pillars of Eternity, raised about $3.98 million with a promise to return to the Infinity Engine style, and in 2013 inXile's Torment: Tides of Numenera raised about $4.19 million. Larian Studios of Belgium, led by Swen Vincke, raised about $944,000 in 2013 for Divinity: Original Sin, released in June 2014. The genre that publishers had abandoned in the late 1990s was now being funded directly by its players, and many of them had played the original games as children.
The tabletop hobby used the same method: Reaper's Bones miniatures raised about $3.4 million in 2012, and Monte Cook's Numenera more than $500,000. Crowdfunding became the normal way to launch an independent game. The same year, Roll20 funded one of the first widely used browser-based virtual tabletops. Wizards, meanwhile, listened to its players. On May 24, 2012, it opened a public playtest of the next edition, called "D&D Next," and tens of thousands of players took part. Players also began watching one another play: the Acquisitions Incorporated podcasts, begun in 2008 with the creators of Penny Arcade, drew large audiences and were the first sign of a new form of entertainment.
What came next
By 2014 the conditions for a boom were in place. A generation raised on Harry Potter, World of Warcraft, and Jackson's films had reached adulthood with spending money and streaming habits, and Wizards had a simpler new edition ready. Less than a year after that edition's release, a group of voice actors in Los Angeles began broadcasting their weekly D&D game on the internet. The final chapter, The New Golden Age, follows what happened next.
