Culture & Events
35 happenings around the books and games: the conventions, magazines and societies where fans gathered, the panics and lawsuits, and the legends born inside online worlds.
Weird Tales
"The Unique Magazine": a cheap Chicago pulp that gave the world Cthulhu, Conan and Jirel of Joiry, and invented sword-and-sorcery between lurid covers.
The Inklings
A loose circle of Oxford friends who read unfinished manuscripts aloud over beer and pipe smoke — and in doing so midwifed Middle-earth and Narnia.
PLATO
A University of Illinois teaching computer whose glowing orange plasma screens hosted the first online communities, and, within a year of D&D's release, the first computer role-playing games.
Renaissance Faires
What began in May 1963 as a scrap-lumber fundraiser on a North Hollywood ranch became America's weekend portal to a make-believe Elizabethan village — and a training ground for costumed, participatory fantasy.
"Frodo Lives!"
Scrawled on subway walls and pinned to denim jackets, a two-word slogan announced that a hobbit from an Oxford professor's epic had become a hero of the 1960s counterculture.
The Ace Paperback Affair
In 1965 Ace Books printed The Lord of the Rings without Tolkien's permission for 75 cents a volume — and the fight that followed turned a cult novel into a mass-market sensation.
Society for Creative Anachronism
A May Day 1966 backyard tournament in Berkeley, fought with plywood swords and fencing masks, grew into a worldwide kingdom of knights, heralds and scribes: the Middle Ages "as they ought to have been."
The Mythopoeic Society
Born at a hobbit birthday picnic in Los Angeles in 1967, the Mythopoeic Society turned Inklings fandom into a scholarly tradition — with a journal, an annual conference and a seated-lion award.
Gen Con
Born in a rented Lake Geneva hall with fewer than a hundred wargamers, Gen Con became the largest tabletop gaming convention in North America, where D&D's creators met and Magic: The Gathering debuted.
The Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series
Under a unicorn's-head colophon, Lin Carter dug the forgotten masters of fantasy out of the stacks and put them on drugstore racks — and taught a generation that Tolkien had ancestors.
The Tolkien Rights Saga
In 1969 Tolkien sold the film and merchandising rights to his two great books to pay a tax bill; half a century of studios, lawsuits, renamed monsters, and billion-dollar deals followed.
The Tolkien Society
Founded in 1969 by a retired Oxford graduate who signed herself Belladonna Took, the Tolkien Society made Middle-earth a subject for readers, scholars, and a September pilgrimage to Oxford.
Origins Game Fair
Named for Baltimore, cradle of the commercial wargame, Origins began in 1975 at Johns Hopkins University and became the industry's own convention, home of the Origins Awards and, since 1996, a fixture of Columbus, Ohio.
The Strategic Review & Dragon
TSR's house newsletter The Strategic Review became The Dragon in June 1976, and for 359 print issues it was where D&D players found new classes, monsters, rules answers and the first glimpses of the Forgotten Realms.
World Fantasy Convention & Award
Born over a Halloween weekend in Providence in 1975 under the sign of H. P. Lovecraft, the World Fantasy Convention became the professional's gathering — and its award one of the genre's highest honors.
Dagorhir
In 1977 a Washington, D.C., Tolkien fan who had never heard of D&D or medieval reenactment took Tolkien and a Robin Hood film to a park with foam swords, founding the oldest recorded LARP group and the American boffer battle game.
White Dwarf
Born from a mimeographed newsletter called Owl and Weasel, Games Workshop's White Dwarf was Britain's great roleplaying magazine of the late 1970s and 1980s, source of the Fiend Folio, before becoming the voice of Warhammer.
Appendix N
A one-page reading list at the back of the 1979 Dungeon Masters Guide, "Inspirational and Educational Reading," turned out to be the family tree of Dungeons & Dragons, and a syllabus for everyone who followed.
The Gygax–Arneson Disputes
Who invented Dungeons & Dragons? The question sent Dave Arneson to court against Gary Gygax and TSR in 1979, ended in a 1981 settlement naming both men co-creators, and has divided fans ever since.
The Satanic Panic & D&D
In the 1980s a moral panic over imagined Satanic cults swept up Dungeons & Dragons, casting a game of dice and imagination as a gateway to the occult, suicide and murder. Every serious investigation found nothing.
Mazes and Monsters
Rona Jaffe's 1981 novel about college gamers lost in a fantasy game, and the 1982 CBS film that gave Tom Hanks his first lead role, fixed the image of the deluded, dangerous roleplayer in the public mind.
BBS Door Games
Before the web, hobbyists ran dial-up bulletin boards from spare bedrooms, and their users logged in each night to spend a ration of turns slaying dragons, trading across galaxies and flirting at the inn.
Dragon Con
Born in 1987 from an Atlanta gaming club and a bulletin board run on a Dragon computer, Dragon Con grew into a Labor Day takeover of downtown Atlanta by tens of thousands of fans in costume.
Challenge Runs, Speedruns & the Souls Community
Players who had already beaten the game invented new ways to lose: finishing RPGs at level one, without being hit, blindfolded, in minutes, or under self-imposed rules of permadeath, and turned it into a spectator sport.
The Assassination of Lord British
In a 1997 Ultima Online beta test, a player called Rainz killed Richard Garriott's supposedly immortal avatar, Lord British, with a fire field spell: online gaming's first great lesson in what players will do.
The Open Game License
In 2000 Wizards of the Coast opened the rules of Dungeons & Dragons to rival publishers under a perpetual license; in January 2023 a leaked attempt to replace it provoked the largest fan revolt in the game's history.
Virtual Economies, Gold Farming & the GDP of Norrath
When an economist calculated in 2001 that EverQuest's Norrath had a per-capita GNP between Russia's and Bulgaria's, he revealed that fantasy worlds had grown real economies, with labor, inflation and sweatshops.
Virtual Tabletops
Fantasy Grounds, Roll20, Foundry and D&D Beyond moved the map, the dice and the character sheet onto the screen, and when the pandemic closed the kitchen tables of 2020, virtual tabletops kept the hobby playing.
BlizzCon
Blizzard Entertainment's own convention in Anaheim, where tens of thousands of fans in orc armor and night-elf ears gather to hear the next expansion announced, cheer esports finals and, occasionally, boo.
Leeroy Jenkins
A 2005 World of Warcraft video in which one player ignores a painstaking battle plan, charges in shouting his own name and gets his whole group killed became gaming's most famous battle cry, and was probably staged.
The Corrupted Blood Incident
In 2005 a raid boss's blood curse escaped its dungeon via players' pets and swept World of Warcraft's cities, leaving streets white with bones and handing epidemiologists an accidental pandemic to study.
The Oblivion ESRB Re-rating
Six weeks after release, the ESRB bumped Bethesda's Oblivion from Teen to Mature over its gore and a fan-made topless mod, a clash that pitted a modding-friendly RPG against a nervous ratings system.
The Actual-Play Boom
From Penny Arcade's podcast table in 2008 to Critical Role, The Adventure Zone and Dimension 20, people watching and listening to other people play roleplaying games became one of the most popular forms of online entertainment.
Crowdfunding & the Kickstarter Era
From 2012 onward, Kickstarter and its rivals turned players into publishers' patrons: tabletop games became the platform's powerhouse category, funding everything from indie zines to Gloomhaven, Frosthaven and a record-breaking Sanderson RPG.
Critical Role
A home game among Los Angeles voice actors went live on Twitch in March 2015 and became the most influential actual-play show ever made, spawning a media company, a record Kickstarter and an Amazon animated series.