# The Lantern Hall

> A living museum of fantasy literature and roleplaying games: 638 cross-linked, fact-checked exhibits on the books, tabletop games, computer and console RPGs, MMOs, makers, publishers, genres, creatures and culture of fantasy — from Beowulf and The Hobbit to Dungeons & Dragons, The Bard's Tale, Ultima Online and Baldur's Gate 3.

Every exhibit is available as Markdown by appending `index.md` to its URL. Each includes a "Quick answers" section of question-and-answer pairs taken from its verified data, and a list of sources. `/llms-full.txt` contains the full text of every exhibit.

## Start here

- [Start here: fantasy and RPGs in ten minutes](https://www.lanternhall.org/primer/): what fantasy is, and how board games, wargames, tabletop RPGs, computer RPGs and MMOs differ
- [The Chronicle](https://www.lanternhall.org/chronicle/): the full history in fourteen chapters
- [Timeline](https://www.lanternhall.org/timeline/): 583 dated moments
- [Master index](https://www.lanternhall.org/catalog/): every exhibit A to Z
- [About and sources](https://www.lanternhall.org/about/): research and fact-checking method

## Chronicle chapters

Long-form history, in order.

- [Myth, Epic & Saga](https://www.lanternhall.org/chronicle/ancient-roots/index.md): From clay tablets in Uruk to a Welsh manuscript and Caxton's press, the epics and sagas that gave fantasy its heroes, dragons, dwarves and descents into the dark.
- [Romance, Fairy Tale & the Gothic](https://www.lanternhall.org/chronicle/romance-to-fairy-tale/index.md): Hippogriffs over Ferrara, a fairy queen for Elizabeth, Mother Goose in Paris, haunted castles and the Brothers Grimm: three centuries in which Europe reinvented the marvelous.
- [The Invention of Modern Fantasy](https://www.lanternhall.org/chronicle/victorian-invention/index.md): A Scottish minister's dream-romance, an Oxford don's rabbit hole and William Morris's invented kingdoms: how the Victorians and Edwardians created the fantasy novel.
- [Pulps, Weird Tales & Sword-and-Sorcery](https://www.lanternhall.org/chronicle/pulp-and-weird/index.md): On rough wood-pulp paper, Lovecraft summoned Cthulhu, Howard unleashed Conan, and Leiber, Moore, Smith and Vance built the dark, thrilling fantasy that D&D would play.
- [Tolkien, Lewis & the Inklings](https://www.lanternhall.org/chronicle/inklings-age/index.md): In Oxford college rooms and a pub called the Bird and Baby, Tolkien and Lewis read aloud the books that would define fantasy: The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings and Narnia.
- [The Paperback Boom & the Counterculture](https://www.lanternhall.org/chronicle/paperback-boom/index.md): A pirated Tolkien paperback, a campus craze and a shelf of unicorn-stamped reprints turned fantasy into a mass-market genre, and gave a generation of gamers its reading list.
- [From Kriegsspiel to Dungeons & Dragons](https://www.lanternhall.org/chronicle/from-wargames-to-roleplay/index.md): A Prussian officer's sand table, a novelist's toy cannon and a Minnesota basement dungeon: the 165-year road by which the wargame became the roleplaying game.
- [The Tabletop Golden Age & the Satanic Panic](https://www.lanternhall.org/chronicle/tabletop-golden-age/index.md): From the first AD&D hardcover in 1977 to Second Edition in 1989, roleplaying games became a mass hobby, a publishing empire, a Saturday-morning cartoon, and the target of a moral p
- [Mainframes to Microcomputers: the First Computer RPGs](https://www.lanternhall.org/chronicle/mainframes-to-micros/index.md): How D&D leapt into software: university dungeons on PLATO, text caves, Lord British's Apple II empire, Wizardry's mazes, Rogue's random depths, the Gold Box, and 1992's first textu
- [The Japanese Line: Console RPGs](https://www.lanternhall.org/chronicle/japanese-line/index.md): Japanese designers took Wizardry and Ultima, redesigned them for a game controller and a mass audience, and within fifteen years made the console RPG a worldwide form, from Dragon 
- [Collapse & Renaissance: Cards, Vampires & Baldur's Gate](https://www.lanternhall.org/chronicle/collapse-and-renaissance/index.md): In the 1990s a Seattle card game made millions, a vampire game drew new players to the tabletop, TSR went bankrupt in all but name, and Diablo and Baldur's Gate brought the compute
- [Online Worlds: From MUD1 to World of Warcraft](https://www.lanternhall.org/chronicle/online-worlds/index.md): From a text game on an Essex University mainframe to twelve million World of Warcraft subscribers, fantasy became a place millions shared, with economies, feuds, funerals, and a ru
- [Screens, Sandboxes & the Open Game](https://www.lanternhall.org/chronicle/screens-and-sandboxes/index.md): 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 
- [The New Golden Age](https://www.lanternhall.org/chronicle/new-golden-age/index.md): Since 2014 D&D has reached its greatest popularity. Critical Role made play into entertainment, Elden Ring and Baldur's Gate 3 swept awards, and romantasy topped bestseller lists.

## Guided tours

Curated paths through the collection.

- [Board Game, Wargame, or Roleplaying Game?](https://www.lanternhall.org/tours/board-vs-rpg/index.md): Thirteen specimens, each chosen to show one defining trait: the wargame's armies, the board game's fixed spaces, the gamebook's numbered paragraphs, the tabletop RPG's referee, the
- [Monsters on the Move](https://www.lanternhall.org/tours/monsters-on-the-move/index.md): Thirteen creatures, thirteen journeys: from Mesopotamian dragons and Pliny's basilisk through Tolkien's orcs and Poul Anderson's trolls to dime-store toys, Lovecraftian brain-eater
- [Sword & Sorcery](https://www.lanternhall.org/tours/sword-and-sorcery-lineage/index.md): Twelve stops follow the barbarians, thieves and doomed sorcerers of the pulps from Weird Tales through Frazetta's paperback covers and Appendix N into the dungeon, the cinema and t
- [The Birth of D&D](https://www.lanternhall.org/tours/birth-of-dnd/index.md): A century and a half of play in twelve stops: from a Prussian staff exercise and H. G. Wells's toy cannons through Braunstein and Blackmoor to the white box, and the quarrel over w
- [The Classic Path](https://www.lanternhall.org/tours/the-classic-path/index.md): The patron's own road through fantasy: from The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings to the D&D box, the Bard's Tale, a Bard Games bestiary, Ultima IV's virtues and the shared world of
- [The Computer RPG Lineage](https://www.lanternhall.org/tours/the-crpg-lineage/index.md): Fourteen stops trace the Western computer RPG from university mainframe dungeons through the Apple II classics, the Gold Box and the Infinity Engine to Larian's 2023 triumph.
- [The Japanese Line](https://www.lanternhall.org/tours/the-japanese-line-tour/index.md): Fourteen stops from the American dungeon crawls that inspired Japan's designers through the Famicom classics and the 16-bit golden age to Pokémon, the PlayStation and FromSoftware.
- [The Tolkien Road](https://www.lanternhall.org/tours/the-tolkien-road/index.md): Follow one scholar's reading list forward in time: the Old English and Norse poems Tolkien taught, the Victorian romance that showed him the way, Middle-earth itself, and the games
- [The Women Who Built Fantasy & RPGs](https://www.lanternhall.org/tours/women-who-built-fantasy/index.md): Fourteen stops honor the women who shaped fantasy and its games, from C. L. Moore's Jirel of Joiry in 1934 to Jennell Jaquays's dungeons, Roberta Williams's King's Quest, Rieko Kod
- [Worlds Online](https://www.lanternhall.org/tours/worlds-online/index.md): Fourteen stops trace the shared fantasy world from glowing PLATO terminals and a text game at Essex University through dial-up boards and AOL to Britannia, Norrath, Azeroth and the

## Genres

Definitions and distinctions between fantasy and RPG genres.

- [Action RPGs & Hack-and-Slash](https://www.lanternhall.org/atlas/action-rpg/index.md): Swing the sword yourself: the real-time RPG that began in Japan in 1984, went global with Diablo's click-and-loot, and splits into hack-and-slash, loot chaser and soulslike.
- [Actual Play](https://www.lanternhall.org/atlas/actual-play/index.md): Watching other people play Dungeons & Dragons, and loving it: the podcast and stream genre that turned home games into hit shows, record-breaking Kickstarters and animated series.
- [Arthurian Fantasy](https://www.lanternhall.org/atlas/arthurian-fantasy/index.md): Nine centuries of retelling one story — the sword, the Round Table, the Grail and the fall — from Geoffrey of Monmouth and Malory to T. H. White, Excalibur and Pendragon.
- [Children's & YA Fantasy](https://www.lanternhall.org/atlas/childrens-fantasy/index.md): The door most readers walk through first: Wonderland, Narnia, Earthsea, Prydain and Hogwarts — fantasy written for young readers that has repeatedly redefined the whole genre.
- [Collectible & Trading Card Games](https://www.lanternhall.org/atlas/collectible-card-game/index.md): A game you assemble from a collection you are still building: crack a booster, find a rare, rebuild your deck, and meet a stranger across the table with sixty cards neither of you 
- [Comic Fantasy](https://www.lanternhall.org/atlas/comic-fantasy/index.md): Fantasy played for laughs — from Wonderland's nonsense and Harold Shea's botched spells to Discworld's turtle-borne satire, The Princess Bride and the rules-lawyering of gaming com
- [Cozy Fantasy](https://www.lanternhall.org/atlas/cozy-fantasy/index.md): Fantasy after the quest: an orc mercenary opens a coffee shop, a witch runs a bookshop, and the drama is whether the community will pull together — the gentle genre that boomed in 
- [Dark Fantasy](https://www.lanternhall.org/atlas/dark-fantasy/index.md): Fantasy that has crossed into horror: cursed swords, vampire lords, plague-ridden kingdoms and gods that should not be woken — from Elric and Ravenloft to Diablo and Dark Souls.
- [Dungeon-Crawler Board Games](https://www.lanternhall.org/atlas/dungeon-crawler-board-game/index.md): Plastic heroes, cardboard corridors and a door about to open: the board game that stages the dungeon crawl room by room, with one friend playing the evil wizard or the deck itself 
- [Dying Earth](https://www.lanternhall.org/atlas/dying-earth/index.md): The last days of the world, under a swollen red sun: Jack Vance's baroque far future and its kin — Zothique, The Night Land, the Book of the New Sun — whose memorized spells became
- [Fairy-Tale Fantasy](https://www.lanternhall.org/atlas/fairy-tale-fantasy/index.md): Fantasy built from the stuff of Once Upon a Time — Grimm, Perrault and Andersen stretched into novels, turned inside out, and handed back to adults with the teeth left in.
- [Fantasy Adventure Board Games](https://www.lanternhall.org/atlas/adventure-board-game/index.md): The roleplaying game folded into a box: roll, move, draw an encounter card, gain a sword or a spell, and race your friends' heroes toward a crown, a tower or a dragon's hoard befor
- [Fantasy Film](https://www.lanternhall.org/atlas/fantasy-film/index.md): From Méliès's stage-trick fairy tales to Peter Jackson's Middle-earth, fantasy film has always been a race between imagination and effects technology, and for most of a century the
- [Fantasy Television & Animation](https://www.lanternhall.org/atlas/fantasy-television/index.md): From Rankin/Bass hobbits and Saturday-morning Dungeons & Dragons to Game of Thrones and streaming Middle-earth, fantasy television grew from a cartoon ghetto into the most expensiv
- [First-Person Dungeon Crawlers ('Blobbers')](https://www.lanternhall.org/atlas/dungeon-crawler/index.md): Six adventurers, one square at a time, down a wireframe corridor toward something breathing in the dark: the first-person party crawl that players nicknamed the 'blobber'.
- [Gacha & Live-Service RPGs](https://www.lanternhall.org/atlas/gacha-rpg/index.md): The role-playing game as a capsule-toy machine that never closes: free to start, endlessly updated, and paid for one randomized summon at a time.
- [Gamebooks & Interactive Books](https://www.lanternhall.org/atlas/gamebook/index.md): The book that asks what you do next: turn to 214 to open the door, to 87 to flee, with a pencil, two dice and a finger holding your place in case the troll wins.
- [Grimdark](https://www.lanternhall.org/atlas/grimdark/index.md): Fantasy with the heroism burned out: sellswords, torturers and scheming kings in worlds where nobody is honorable and might makes right — named after a Warhammer 40,000 slogan.
- [High / Epic Fantasy](https://www.lanternhall.org/atlas/high-fantasy/index.md): The genre of the map in the front of the book: invented worlds, world-ending threats and quests that span trilogies — Tolkien's legacy, from Morris and Eddison to Jordan and Sander
- [Historical Fantasy](https://www.lanternhall.org/atlas/historical-fantasy/index.md): The past with magic in it: Napoleonic wizards, dragons in the Royal Navy, sorcery in Moorish Spain and Mythic Europe — history reproduced faithfully, save for one impossible thread
- [Interactive Fiction & Text Adventures](https://www.lanternhall.org/atlas/interactive-fiction/index.md): The game made of words: type a command, read the world's reply. From a caver's ARPANET experiment to Infocom's shelf of classics to today's Twine and IFComp scenes, it is the oldes
- [Japanese RPGs (JRPG)](https://www.lanternhall.org/atlas/japanese-rpg/index.md): The console role-playing tradition Japan built out of Wizardry and Ultima: fixed heroes, menu battles, sweeping authored stories, and some of the most beloved music in games.
- [LitRPG & Progression Fantasy](https://www.lanternhall.org/atlas/litrpg/index.md): Novels with character sheets: fiction set in game worlds where stats, levels and loot appear on the page — from Russian LitRPG and Sword Art Online to the runaway success of Dungeo
- [Live-Action Roleplay (LARP)](https://www.lanternhall.org/atlas/larp/index.md): Roleplaying on your feet: players in costume become their characters in a real place and real time, swinging foam swords in a forest or negotiating vampire politics in a hotel ball
- [Low Fantasy](https://www.lanternhall.org/atlas/low-fantasy/index.md): Two genres under one name: magic breaking into our own world, as in E. Nesbit and The Dark Is Rising — and, in gamers' mouths, gritty worlds where magic is rare and a sword wound c
- [Miniatures & Board Wargames](https://www.lanternhall.org/atlas/wargame/index.md): Painted soldiers on sand tables, cardboard counters on hex maps: the game of generals that trained Prussian officers, amused H. G. Wells and, in a Minnesota basement, gave birth to
- [MMORPGs](https://www.lanternhall.org/atlas/mmorpg/index.md): The massively multiplayer online role-playing game: a graphical world shared by thousands at once, where a guild, a raid schedule and a virtual economy can matter as much as the st
- [Monster-Collecting RPGs](https://www.lanternhall.org/atlas/monster-collecting-rpg/index.md): The RPG in which the monsters become the party: find them, befriend or capture them, train them, trade them, and try to catch them all.
- [MUDs (Multi-User Dungeons)](https://www.lanternhall.org/atlas/mud/index.md): A text adventure that many people could inhabit at once: typed commands, prose rooms, strangers typing back. The MUD was the first online world and the direct ancestor of every MMO
- [Myth & Epic](https://www.lanternhall.org/atlas/myth-and-epic/index.md): The bedrock of the whole museum: the myths, sagas and heroic poems — Gilgamesh, Homer, Beowulf, the Eddas — from which every dragon, quest and doomed hero in fantasy was quarried.
- [Mythic Fantasy](https://www.lanternhall.org/atlas/mythic-fantasy/index.md): Modern fiction made from ancient myth — Welsh gods in Prydain, Norse elves in The Broken Sword, Greek witches in Circe, old gods on American highways — and invented mythologies wit
- [Narrative & Story Games (incl. Powered by the Apocalypse)](https://www.lanternhall.org/atlas/narrative-rpg/index.md): Roleplaying games built to tell a particular kind of story: the indie-design movement of the Forge, Dogs in the Vineyard and Apocalypse World, whose 2d6 "moves" spawned hundreds of
- [Old-School Renaissance (OSR)](https://www.lanternhall.org/atlas/old-school-renaissance/index.md): A movement to play roleplaying games the way they were played in the 1970s — deadly dungeons, clever players, rulings not rules — built on legal clones of early D&D and grown into 
- [Open-World RPGs](https://www.lanternhall.org/atlas/open-world-rpg/index.md): See that mountain? You can climb it: the RPG as a whole country to wander, from Ultima's tiled continents to Daggerfall's procedural Britain-sized realm, Skyrim and Elden Ring.
- [Play-by-Mail Games](https://www.lanternhall.org/atlas/play-by-mail/index.md): Strategy by envelope: write your orders on a turn sheet, mail them off, and wait two weeks for a computer printout to tell you whether your fleet survived and which of thirty stran
- [Portal Fantasy](https://www.lanternhall.org/atlas/portal-fantasy/index.md): Through the rabbit-hole, the wardrobe or the amusement-park ride: fantasy in which someone from our world steps into another — from Wonderland and Narnia to the D&D cartoon and ise
- [Roguelikes](https://www.lanternhall.org/atlas/roguelike/index.md): An @ sign, a dungeon that never repeats, and one life: the college-terminal genre named for Rogue, fought over in Berlin in 2008, and reborn as the indie roguelite.
- [Romantasy](https://www.lanternhall.org/atlas/romantasy/index.md): Fae princes, dragon riders and enemies who become lovers: the romance-first fantasy of Sarah J. Maas and Rebecca Yarros that turned BookTok into a bestseller machine in the 2020s.
- [Science Fantasy](https://www.lanternhall.org/atlas/science-fantasy/index.md): Swords and starships, psionics and sorcery, dragons bred on colony worlds: the hybrid of science fiction and fantasy that runs from Barsoom and Pern to Tékumel, Rifts and Final Fan
- [Shared-World & Tie-In Fiction](https://www.lanternhall.org/atlas/shared-world-fiction/index.md): Worlds with many authors: from Lovecraft's circle trading gods and Thieves' World's city of Sanctuary to Dragonlance, Drizzt and the Black Library — where fantasy fiction and gamin
- [Solo & Journaling RPGs](https://www.lanternhall.org/atlas/solo-rpg/index.md): Roleplaying for one: a notebook, a few dice and an oracle that answers 'yes, but…', so that a lone player can explore a dungeon, swear an iron vow or write a vampire's thousand yea
- [Soulslikes](https://www.lanternhall.org/atlas/soulslike/index.md): You died. Pick up your dropped souls, rest at the bonfire, watch the monsters rise again, and try once more: the punishing, cryptic action RPGs that grew from Demon's Souls and Dar
- [Sword & Sorcery](https://www.lanternhall.org/atlas/sword-and-sorcery/index.md): Blood, steel and bad magic: the pulp-born genre of Conan, Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, and Elric — personal adventures at the edge of civilization that gave D&D its rogues and its a
- [Tabletop Roleplaying Games](https://www.lanternhall.org/atlas/tabletop-rpg/index.md): The game in which you play one person, in a world a friend describes, with no board, no fixed ending and no winner — invented in the Midwest in the early 1970s and descended from m
- [Tactical & Strategy RPGs](https://www.lanternhall.org/atlas/tactical-rpg/index.md): The RPG played as a war game: named heroes who grow, die and are remembered, moved square by square across a battlefield where every step and every flank counts.
- [Universal & Generic RPG Systems](https://www.lanternhall.org/atlas/universal-rpg-systems/index.md): One set of rules for every world: Chaosium's Basic Role-Playing, Champions and the Hero System, GURPS, the d20 System, Fate and Savage Worlds — the RPG engines built to play fantas
- [Urban Fantasy](https://www.lanternhall.org/atlas/urban-fantasy/index.md): Fairies in Minneapolis, wizards in Chicago, vampires ruling the night in every city on Earth: fantasy moved to the modern street, from Borderland and War for the Oaks to Shadowrun 
- [Weird Fiction](https://www.lanternhall.org/atlas/weird-fiction/index.md): Tentacles, forbidden geometry and gods that do not care: the uncanny tradition of Machen, Blackwood and Lovecraft's Weird Tales, reborn in the New Weird and at every Call of Cthulh
- [Western Computer RPGs (CRPG)](https://www.lanternhall.org/atlas/computer-rpg/index.md): Dungeons & Dragons translated into code: the computer role-playing game, born on university mainframes in 1975, that runs from Ultima and Wizardry to Baldur's Gate 3.

## Works

Books, tabletop games, computer and console RPGs, MMOs, films and television.

- [A Court of Thorns and Roses](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/a-court-of-thorns-and-roses/index.md): A human huntress kills a wolf and is carried off to the faerie realm of Prythian: Sarah J. Maas's series of High Fae courts and slow-burning romance became the engine of the romant
- [A Song of Ice and Fire](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/a-song-of-ice-and-fire/index.md): A war of noble houses on a continent where winters last for years and the dead are stirring: George R. R. Martin's unfinished epic remade fantasy as political history and conquered
- [Advanced Dungeons & Dragons](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/advanced-dungeons-and-dragons/index.md): Gary Gygax's three hardcovers of 1977–79 turned D&D's scattered booklets into an exhaustive, tournament-ready rulebook — the orange-spined canon of the 1980s boom.
- [Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, 2nd Edition](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/dnd-2nd-edition/index.md): The 1989 rebuild of AD&D that tidied Gygax's rules, banished demons and assassins, gave the world THAC0, and launched Ravenloft, Dark Sun and Planescape; later the invisible engine
- [Akalabeth: World of Doom](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/akalabeth/index.md): A Texas teenager's Apple II hobby game, sold in Ziploc bags at a ComputerLand: ten quests from Lord British, a wireframe dungeon in true perspective, and the unofficial first chapt
- [Alice's Adventures in Wonderland](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/alices-adventures-in-wonderland/index.md): A bored girl follows a waistcoated White Rabbit down a hole into a world of shrinking potions, a grinning cat, a mad tea party and a queen who wants everyone's head.
- [Apocalypse World](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/apocalypse-world/index.md): Vincent and Meguey Baker's post-apocalyptic game of 'moves' and a two-dice roll that rarely just succeeds or fails — the seed of the Powered by the Apocalypse movement.
- [Ars Magica](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/ars-magica/index.md): Jonathan Tweet and Mark Rein·Hagen's 1987 game of wizards in a medieval Europe where every legend is true — and where a spell is built like a Latin sentence, verb plus noun.
- [Asheron's Call](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/asherons-call/index.md): Turbine's seamless island of Dereth let players walk a whole continent without a loading screen, swear fealty to one another, and follow a story that advanced every month for fifte
- [Avatar](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/avatar-plato/index.md): PLATO's most popular game: a multiplayer, first-person dungeon crawl begun by two junior-high students, where parties explored together, chatted in real time and logged more than a
- [Baldur's Gate](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/baldurs-gate/index.md): An orphan from the library-fortress of Candlekeep discovers the blood of a dead god of murder in their veins, and BioWare's debut RPG brings the computer role-playing game roaring 
- [Baldur's Gate 3](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/baldurs-gate-3/index.md): A mind flayer tadpole behind your eye, a camp full of beautiful liars, and a twenty-sided die deciding everything: Larian's Baldur's Gate 3 turned fifth-edition D&D into the most c
- [Baldur's Gate II](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/baldurs-gate-ii/index.md): Imprisoned and dissected by the elven mage Jon Irenicus, the child of Bhaal breaks out into the merchant city of Athkatla, and BioWare builds one of the richest party RPGs ever mad
- [Beowulf](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/beowulf/index.md): A hero tears the arm off a man-eating monster, dives into a haunted mere to kill its mother, and dies fifty years later fighting a dragon woken by a stolen cup.
- [Blackmoor](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/blackmoor/index.md): In a Twin Cities basement in 1971, Dave Arneson sent his wargaming friends beneath a model castle to hunt monsters and gold — and invented the dungeon adventure.
- [Blades in the Dark](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/blades-in-the-dark/index.md): John Harper's game of scoundrels in a ghost-haunted industrial city, where position and effect frame every risk, clocks track every danger and flashbacks let the crew plan after th
- [Braunstein](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/braunstein/index.md): A Minnesota wargame in which nearly twenty players were each handed a single townsperson to play — and started talking, scheming and dueling instead of fighting the battle.
- [Call of Cthulhu](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/call-of-cthulhu-rpg/index.md): Sandy Petersen's 1981 game swapped heroes for librarians and private eyes, loot for clues, and hit points for a Sanity score that drains away as investigators glimpse the truth of 
- [Chainmail](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/chainmail/index.md): A medieval miniatures wargame from Lake Geneva whose 14-page Fantasy Supplement let Tolkien-reading wargamers field heroes, wizards, elves and dragons — and gave Dungeons & Dragons
- [Choose Your Own Adventure](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/choose-your-own-adventure/index.md): Bantam's 1979 paperback series that spoke to its readers as 'you' and let them pick the page — 184 books and more than 250 million copies that taught a generation that stories coul
- [Chrono Trigger](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/chrono-trigger/index.md): Square's 1995 time-travel epic, made by a 'Dream Team' from the rival Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest camps, in which a boy, a princess and an inventor cross millions of years to st
- [Colossal Cave Adventure](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/colossal-cave-adventure/index.md): A caver's memory of Kentucky's Mammoth Cave, mixed with a D&D campaign and a little magic, became the first famous text adventure and the namesake of a whole genre: XYZZY.
- [Conan the Barbarian](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/conan-the-barbarian-film/index.md): John Milius's brutal, near-wordless epic of revenge: Schwarzenegger's Cimmerian, a Frazetta-painted Hyborian Age, a snake cult, the Tree of Woe, and Basil Poledouris's thundering c
- [Conan the Cimmerian](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/conan-the-cimmerian/index.md): A black-haired barbarian from the northern hills is thief, pirate, mercenary and king in a lost prehistoric age of decadent cities and ancient sorceries — the hero who founded swor
- [Dark Age of Camelot](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/dark-age-of-camelot/index.md): Three kingdoms rise from the ruins of Arthur's Britain and go to war forever: Mythic's Dark Age of Camelot made faction warfare over keeps and relics the reason to log in.
- [Dark Souls](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/dark-souls/index.md): An undead pilgrim, a dying age of fire, and a single interlocking kingdom of castles, sewers and cathedrals that fold back on themselves: Dark Souls made 'prepare to die' a promise
- [Dark Sun](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/dark-sun/index.md): TSR's most savage setting: a waterless world where magic kills the land, metal is rarer than gold, tyrant sorcerer-kings rule the last cities and every living thing has psychic pow
- [Darkest Dungeon](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/darkest-dungeon/index.md): Your ancestor dug too deep. Now you must send doomed mercenaries into the ruins beneath the family estate, and watch them crack under the strain as a gravel-voiced narrator reminds
- [Demon's Souls](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/demons-souls/index.md): A failing Sony–FromSoftware project, rescued by a director who had nothing to lose, became a cruel, fog-shrouded kingdom of five worlds and one hub, and the seed of the entire soul
- [Descent: Journeys in the Dark](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/descent-journeys-in-the-dark/index.md): Fantasy Flight's big-box dungeon crawl: up to four heroes against an Overlord who spends threat to spring traps and summon monsters from a hand of dirty tricks.
- [Diablo](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/diablo/index.md): A roguelike dungeon crawl turned real-time over a weekend, Diablo sent players 16 levels down beneath a haunted cathedral, clicking through demons and loot, and invented the modern
- [Diablo II](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/diablo-ii/index.md): Blizzard North's 2000 sequel chased a possessed hero across deserts, jungles and Hell, and its skill trees, rune-socketed loot and Battle.net economy made it the model every action
- [Discworld](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/discworld/index.md): A flat world riding through space on a giant turtle began as a parody of sword-and-sorcery and became, over 41 novels, the funniest and most humane long-form satire in fantasy.
- [Divinity: Original Sin II](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/divinity-original-sin-2/index.md): Shipped to an island prison as a Sourcerer, you and three companions can talk to animals, ignite poison clouds, betray each other in co-op and decide the fate of the gods: Larian's
- [dnd](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/dnd-plato/index.md): Named for the letters D and D, this PLATO dungeon sent players down the multi-level Whisenwood Dungeon after an Orb guarded by a dragon, arguably the first boss in video games.
- [Dragon Age: Origins](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/dragon-age-origins/index.md): BioWare's own answer to Baldur's Gate: six origin stories, a blighted kingdom, a circle of sharp-tongued companions, and a war against the darkspawn in which every hard choice is y
- [Dragon Quest](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/dragon-quest/index.md): A lone descendant of the hero Erdrick sets out from Tantegel Castle to face the Dragonlord: Yuji Horii's streamlined Famicom RPG, drawn by Akira Toriyama and scored by Koichi Sugiy
- [Dragon Slayer](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/dragon-slayer/index.md): Real-time sword fights in a maze where your own house can be pushed around the dungeon: Nihon Falcom's 1984 hit that helped invent the Japanese action RPG and launched a sprawling 
- [Dragonlance](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/dragonlance/index.md): A world built to tell one epic story at once as game modules and novels: Krynn, its three moons of magic, its kender and draconians, and the War of the Lance that made TSR a fictio
- [Dragonlance Chronicles](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/dragonlance-chronicles/index.md): The novels that turned a D&D adventure campaign into a bestselling fantasy trilogy, with Raistlin, Tanis and Tasslehoff playing the party, and made game-born fiction a publishing g
- [Dragonriders of Pern](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/dragonriders-of-pern/index.md): On a colony world that has forgotten its origins, telepathic dragons and the riders bonded to them at hatching burn a deadly spore called Thread out of the sky.
- [Dungeon Crawl Classics Role Playing Game](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/dungeon-crawl-classics/index.md): Goodman Games' love letter to Appendix N: a gonzo sword-and-sorcery RPG where heroes begin as doomed peasants, spells mutate their casters, and the dice chain runs from d3 to d30.
- [Dungeon Crawler Carl](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/dungeon-crawler-carl/index.md): Earth is demolished for an alien game show, and a man in his boxer shorts and his ex-girlfriend's prize-winning cat must fight down through an 18-level dungeon: Matt Dinniman's Lit
- [Dungeon Master](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/dungeon-master/index.md): FTL's 1987 Atari ST landmark: a first-person dungeon crawl that ran in real time, let you grab objects with the mouse, and made you draw spells from runes while monsters shuffled t
- [Dungeon World](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/dungeon-world/index.md): Classic dungeon fantasy — fighters, wizards, thieves and hit points — rebuilt on the Apocalypse World engine, where every roll moves the story and the GM is told to 'draw maps, lea
- [Dungeon!](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/dungeon-board-game/index.md): A race through a six-level dungeon for monsters and gold, designed by one of Dave Arneson's Blackmoor players — the first dungeon-crawling board game, and a perfect foil for the RP
- [Dungeons & Dragons](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/dungeons-and-dragons-cartoon/index.md): Six kids ride a haunted roller coaster into the Realm, receive class-based magic weapons from a riddling Dungeon Master, and spend three seasons dodging Venger and Tiamat on CBS.
- [Dungeons & Dragons](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/original-dungeons-and-dragons/index.md): Three little booklets in a woodgrain box, hand-assembled in Lake Geneva in January 1974: the first published roleplaying game, and the template for every tabletop and computer RPG 
- [Dungeons & Dragons 3rd Edition](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/dnd-3rd-edition/index.md): Wizards of the Coast's rebuild of D&D around one rule — roll a d20, add modifiers, beat a number — released alongside an open license that let anyone publish for it.
- [Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/dnd-4th-edition/index.md): D&D's boldest redesign: every class built from at-will, encounter and daily powers, tactical grid combat as the centerpiece, and a rules engine balanced like a precision instrument
- [Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/dnd-5th-edition/index.md): The edition that made Dungeons & Dragons mainstream: a lighter rules set built on advantage and disadvantage, carried by actual-play shows and pandemic-era virtual tables to record
- [Dungeons & Dragons Basic Set](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/dnd-basic-set/index.md): The boxed doorway into D&D for millions: a blue book in 1977, a red-bordered book with Keep on the Borderlands in 1981, and Larry Elmore's dragon-slaying red box in 1983.
- [Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/honor-among-thieves/index.md): A bard, a barbarian and a crew of misfits pull a heist across the Forgotten Realms in the warm, funny D&D movie fans had waited forty years for.
- [Dwarf Fortress](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/dwarf-fortress/index.md): Two brothers, one text screen of smiley faces, and a simulation deep enough to track every dwarf's liver and grudges: Dwarf Fortress generates whole histories, then lets you watch 
- [Earthdawn](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/earthdawn/index.md): FASA's post-apocalyptic high fantasy: after centuries sealed underground from soul-eating Horrors, the peoples of Barsaive open their doors and rediscover a scarred world.
- [Earthsea](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/earthsea/index.md): A proud island boy with a gift for magic goes to wizards' school, looses a shadow on the world, and must learn its true name — Ursula K. Le Guin's archipelago of balance and naming
- [Elden Ring](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/elden-ring/index.md): FromSoftware opened the Souls formula onto a vast, haunted open world, George R. R. Martin wrote its ancient myths, and thirty million players rode out across the Lands Between to 
- [Empire of the Petal Throne](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/empire-of-the-petal-throne/index.md): A linguistics professor's decades-old invented world — alien empires, underworld cities, gods and a full constructed language — published by TSR in 1975 as the first roleplaying ga
- [Epic of Gilgamesh](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/epic-of-gilgamesh/index.md): A tyrant king, a wild man shaped from clay, a monster in a cedar forest and a doomed quest for immortality: the oldest great adventure story on Earth.
- [EverQuest](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/everquest/index.md): Sony's 3D world of Norrath turned the text MUD into a nightly obsession: camped spawns, corpse runs, forty-player raids, and a player base so hooked it nicknamed the game EverCrack
- [Excalibur](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/excalibur-film/index.md): John Boorman's gleaming, blood-soaked retelling of Malory: chrome armor, green-lit forests, Wagner and "O Fortuna," and the whole Arthurian cycle from sword to barge in 140 minutes
- [Eye of the Beholder](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/eye-of-the-beholder/index.md): Westwood's 1991 descent beneath Waterdeep married the real-time, step-by-step dungeon of Dungeon Master to official AD&D rules, and gave PC owners the VGA dungeon crawl they had be
- [Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/fafhrd-and-the-gray-mouser/index.md): A towering northern barbarian and a small, sardonic thief in gray drink, brawl, steal and wisecrack through fifty years of adventures in Lankhmar, the fantasy genre's great rotten 
- [Fighting Fantasy](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/fighting-fantasy/index.md): The 1982 Puffin paperbacks that put a dungeon, a pair of dice and a character sheet in a schoolchild's pocket, selling some 20 million copies and turning a generation of readers in
- [Final Fantasy](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/final-fantasy/index.md): Square's 1987 all-or-nothing gamble: four Warriors of Light, four darkened crystals, and a time loop, built by a small team out of Wizardry, Ultima and D&D — and the first chapter 
- [Final Fantasy VI](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/final-fantasy-vi/index.md): Square's 1994 16-bit masterpiece: an empire strip-mining magic from captive Espers, a clown who becomes a god, an opera, and a world that actually ends halfway through.
- [Final Fantasy VII](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/final-fantasy-vii/index.md): Square's leap to CD and 3D, Final Fantasy VII followed a spiky-haired mercenary from the Mako reactors of Midgar to the edge of the Lifestream, and brought the Japanese RPG to a ma
- [Final Fantasy XI](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/final-fantasy-xi/index.md): Square staked its flagship series on an online world: one Vana'diel shared by Japanese, American and European players on PlayStation 2 and PC, and quietly the most profitable Final
- [Final Fantasy XIV](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/final-fantasy-xiv/index.md): Square Enix's second online Final Fantasy launched so broken the company apologized, replaced its leaders and dropped a moon on its own world. Rebuilt as A Realm Reborn, it became 
- [Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon and the Blade of Light](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/fire-emblem/index.md): The 1990 Famicom game in which Prince Marth leads an army across a grid-map war — and every soldier who falls stays dead. It made the tactical RPG a genre in Japan.
- [Forgotten Realms](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/forgotten-realms/index.md): A Canadian librarian's childhood story-world that became Dungeons & Dragons' home address: Waterdeep, Elminster, Drizzt, and the Sword Coast of Baldur's Gate.
- [Fourth Wing](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/fourth-wing/index.md): A frail scholar is forced into a brutal war college where cadets bond with dragons or die trying: Rebecca Yarros's Fourth Wing turned romantasy into the biggest phenomenon in 2020s
- [Game of Thrones](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/game-of-thrones-tv/index.md): HBO's eight-season adaptation of George R. R. Martin's saga put dragons, incest and beheadings on prestige TV and won more Emmys than any drama before it.
- [Gauntlet](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/gauntlet/index.md): Four friends, four joysticks, one Warrior who needs food badly: Atari's 1985 arcade dungeon crawl turned D&D's party into a coin-fed, cooperative stampede through monster-filled ma
- [Gloomhaven](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/gloomhaven/index.md): Isaac Childres's colossal campaign dungeon crawl: cooperative mercenaries, hand-management combat with no dice, and a legacy world of sealed boxes that changes as the story unfolds
- [Gormenghast](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/gormenghast/index.md): A crumbling castle the size of a country, bound by meaningless ritual, where a scheming kitchen boy named Steerpike climbs toward power — fantasy without a single spell.
- [Grimms' Fairy Tales](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/grimms-fairy-tales/index.md): Two German philologists gather Snow White, Hansel and Gretel, Rapunzel and Rumpelstiltskin — and fix the dark forest, the witch's house and the wicked stepmother in the world's ima
- [Guild Wars](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/guild-wars/index.md): Three ex-Blizzard veterans bet that players would buy an online RPG without paying monthly. Guild Wars won the bet with instanced adventures, an eight-skill bar built like a card d
- [GURPS](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/gurps/index.md): Steve Jackson's 1986 'Generic Universal RolePlaying System' — one set of 3d6 rules for knights, starship pilots and time travelers alike, built character by character from a budget
- [Harry Potter](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/harry-potter/index.md): An orphan learns on his eleventh birthday that he is a wizard: J. K. Rowling's seven-book school story became the best-selling book series in history and the foundation of a global
- [Heroes of Might and Magic](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/heroes-of-might-and-magic/index.md): New World Computing's 1995 turn-based fantasy strategy game, in which heroes lead stacks of mythical creatures across a map of mines, castles and treasure — the start of one of PC 
- [HeroQuest](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/heroquest/index.md): The 1989 Milton Bradley and Games Workshop box that turned a kitchen table into a dungeon, with four heroes, plastic monsters, skull-and-shield dice and a friend playing the evil w
- [His Dark Materials](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/his-dark-materials/index.md): A girl, her shape-shifting daemon and a war against the Authority himself: Philip Pullman's trilogy rewrote Paradise Lost for young readers and became the most intellectually ambit
- [Hydlide](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/hydlide/index.md): The knight Jim crosses the open fields of Fairyland to rescue Princess Ann from the demon Varalys, pausing to let his health regenerate: the 1984 action RPG that seeded a mechanic 
- [Icewind Dale](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/icewind-dale/index.md): A caravan-guard job in the frozen north turns into a war against a demon and his giants, as Black Isle strips the Infinity Engine down to its bones: six heroes you roll yourself, a
- [Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/jonathan-strange-and-mr-norrell/index.md): Two rival magicians restore English magic during the Napoleonic Wars, in a vast, footnoted mock-history written in the manner of Austen and Dickens: Susanna Clarke's debut made fan
- [King Arthur Pendragon](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/king-arthur-pendragon/index.md): Greg Stafford's 1985 roleplaying game casts players as knights of Arthur's Britain — and rolls dice for their chastity, pride and mercy as well as their sword arms, across generati
- [King's Quest](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/kings-quest/index.md): Sir Graham walks into a storybook: Roberta Williams's animated fairy-tale adventure, built to show off IBM's PCjr, where you steer a knight behind trees and in front of castles in 
- [Kriegsspiel](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/kriegsspiel/index.md): A Prussian officer's training game of painted blocks, staff maps and an all-seeing umpire — the 19th-century ancestor of every referee who has ever said "roll for it."
- [Labyrinth](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/labyrinth-film/index.md): Jim Henson's goblin fairy tale: a teenage girl, thirteen hours, a maze of talking doors and Escher staircases, and David Bowie's glittering, menacing Goblin King.
- [Le Morte d'Arthur](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/le-morte-darthur/index.md): A knight-prisoner distills the sprawling French romances into one English saga — the sword from the stone, the Round Table, the Grail quest, Lancelot and Guinevere, and the last ba
- [Legend of the Five Rings](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/legend-of-the-five-rings/index.md): A samurai epic whose story was written by its players: a collectible card game and roleplaying game in which tournament winners decided the fate of Rokugan's clans.
- [Legend of the Red Dragon](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/legend-of-the-red-dragon/index.md): Seth Robinson's 1989 text-based dragon hunt for dial-up bulletin boards: a few forest fights a day, a flirt with Violet at the Inn, and a village of callers racing to slay the Red 
- [Lineage](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/lineage/index.md): A 2D feudal war of castles and blood pledges, adapted from a Korean comic, that rode the PC-bang boom to millions of subscribers and made NCSoft one of Asia's great game companies.
- [Little Wars](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/little-wars/index.md): H. G. Wells turned a nursery floor into a battlefield: toy soldiers, spring-loaded guns firing wooden dowels, and a rulebook that ends by calling real war "a blundering thing."
- [Lone Wolf](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/lone-wolf/index.md): Joe Dever's 1984 gamebook saga, in which a single reader-hero survives the massacre of his order and grows, book by book, from novice warrior-monk into the Grand Master of the Kai.
- [Magic: The Gathering](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/magic-the-gathering/index.md): Richard Garfield's card game of dueling wizards invented a genre overnight: collect random cards, build a deck, tap lands for mana and fight across five colors of magic.
- [Malazan Book of the Fallen](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/malazan-book-of-the-fallen/index.md): Ten enormous novels of gods, soldiers and ruined empires, born at a roleplaying table: Steven Erikson's Malazan is epic fantasy's most demanding, and for its admirers most rewardin
- [Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/memory-sorrow-and-thorn/index.md): A kitchen boy, three legendary swords and an immortal people nursing an ancient grievance: Tad Williams's trilogy took the Tolkien template seriously enough to argue with it, and i
- [Meridian 59](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/meridian-59/index.md): A first-person 3D world opened to the internet a year before Ultima Online, Meridian 59 pioneered the flat monthly fee, guild politics and player justice, then refused to die for t
- [Middle-earth Role Playing](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/middle-earth-role-playing/index.md): The first full Tolkien roleplaying game: Iron Crown's percentile-dice take on Middle-earth, set in the age of the Witch-king, with maps and Angus McBride paintings that became a ge
- [Might and Magic Book One](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/might-and-magic/index.md): Jon Van Caneghem's 1986 debut, written almost single-handedly over three years and sold from his apartment: a vast first-person world whose knights-and-dragons surface hides a scie
- [Mistborn](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/mistborn/index.md): What if the Dark Lord won? Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn begins a thousand years into the Lord Ruler's reign, with a heist crew of metal-burning magicians, and grows into a multi-er
- [Mörk Borg](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/mork-borg/index.md): A doom-metal album of a roleplaying game: a tiny, ferociously designed rulebook about a world that is ending, where characters are wretches and a secret calendar counts down to obl
- [MUD1](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/mud1/index.md): Two Essex students turned the solitary text adventure into a shared world: MUD, where strangers met, fought and cooperated in real time on the way to Wizard rank, the seed of every
- [NetHack](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/nethack/index.md): The open-source roguelike first released in 1987 and still maintained decades later: descend some fifty procedurally generated levels, retrieve the Amulet of Yendor, and die in a t
- [Neverwinter Nights](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/neverwinter-nights-aol/index.md): From 1991 to 1997, AOL subscribers dialed into a shared Forgotten Realms city built on SSI's Gold Box engine — the first online role-playing game with graphics, and the seed of the
- [Neverwinter Nights](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/neverwinter-nights/index.md): BioWare hands players the Dungeon Master's screen: a D&D campaign in plague-struck Neverwinter, plus the tools to build worlds of their own and run them live for friends online.
- [Old-School Essentials](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/old-school-essentials/index.md): Gavin Norman's crisp reorganization of 1981 Basic/Expert D&D: the old rules, unchanged in spirit, laid out so every topic fits on a page or a spread you can find at the table.
- [One Thousand and One Nights](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/one-thousand-and-one-nights/index.md): A queen tells a murderous king a story every night and stops at dawn on a cliffhanger — and inside her tales come jinn in bottles, flying carpets, ghouls and Sinbad's roc.
- [Orlando Furioso](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/orlando-furioso/index.md): Charlemagne's greatest knight goes mad for love while a woman warrior, a flying hippogriff, a ring of invisibility and a trip to the Moon run riot through Renaissance Italy's wilde
- [Path of Exile](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/path-of-exile/index.md): A small New Zealand studio built the dark successor to Diablo II that fans wanted: exiles on a cursed coast, a passive tree of well over a thousand nodes, and an economy with no go
- [Pathfinder Roleplaying Game](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/pathfinder-rpg/index.md): Paizo's open-licensed heir to D&D 3.5: the 'edition 3.75' that kept an older engine alive, built a rich world called Golarion and, for a time, outsold Dungeons & Dragons itself.
- [pedit5](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/pedit5/index.md): A 1975 dungeon hidden in a lesson slot on the University of Illinois' PLATO network: one level, twenty-five monsters, and one of the earliest surviving computer role-playing games.
- [Phantastes](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/phantastes/index.md): A young man wakes to find his bedroom dissolving into a forest and wanders a dreamlike Fairy Land of malevolent trees, a haunting shadow and a marble lady he sings to life.
- [Phantasy Star](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/phantasy-star/index.md): Sega's 1987 answer to Dragon Quest: a heroine named Alis, a talking cat, three planets, and full-screen 3D dungeons that the Famicom could not match — science fantasy on a four-meg
- [Pillars of Eternity](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/pillars-of-eternity/index.md): Veterans of Black Isle asked fans to fund the kind of isometric RPG publishers had abandoned, raised almost $4 million, and built a new world of soul-reading Watchers in the style 
- [Planescape](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/planescape/index.md): TSR's philosophical multiverse: a ring-shaped city of portals ruled by the silent Lady of Pain, where belief can reshape reality and factions argue about the meaning of existence.
- [Planescape: Torment](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/planescape-torment/index.md): An immortal amnesiac wakes on a mortuary slab in Sigil, a floating skull at his side and instructions tattooed on his back, and asks the question the whole game is built on: what c
- [Pokémon Red and Green](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/pokemon-red-and-green/index.md): Satoshi Tajiri turned a childhood of insect collecting into a Game Boy RPG about catching and trading 151 monsters, and the 1996 release became the seed of the most lucrative franc
- [Pool of Radiance](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/pool-of-radiance/index.md): SSI's 1988 adventure in the ruined city of Phlan was the first computer role-playing game built on the full Advanced Dungeons & Dragons rules, and the engine behind a golden shelf 
- [Ravenloft](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/ravenloft/index.md): A vampire count, a castle drawn in dizzying isometric maps, and a fortune told in cards: the 1983 module that taught Dungeons & Dragons to be afraid, and grew into a whole Demiplan
- [Rifts](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/rifts/index.md): Palladium's kitchen-sink epic: a future Earth torn open by ley-line energy, where power-armored soldiers, dragons, cyborgs and wizards collide on a continent-sized battlefield.
- [Rogue](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/rogue/index.md): An @ sign descends through randomly generated dungeons drawn in ASCII, one life only, toward the Amulet of Yendor: the college-terminal obsession that named an entire genre.
- [Rolemaster](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/rolemaster/index.md): Born from a college Middle-earth campaign, Iron Crown's Rolemaster traded D&D's abstractions for percentile rolls, towering attack tables and critical-hit charts describing wounds 
- [RuneQuest](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/runequest/index.md): Chaosium's 1978 answer to D&D: no classes, no levels, percentile skills that improve as you use them, hit locations for every blow — and the mythic Bronze Age world of Glorantha.
- [RuneScape](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/runescape/index.md): Two brothers' Java game, launched from a family home in Nottingham, became a free online world in a browser tab and the MMO with the most users on Earth.
- [Secret of Mana](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/secret-of-mana/index.md): Square's 1993 real-time adventure for three friends at once: a boy pulls a rusted sword from a stone, and a hero, a girl and a sprite set out to stop an empire raising a flying for
- [Shadowrun](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/shadowrun/index.md): FASA's 1989 game fused cyberpunk and high fantasy: in 2050, magic has returned, dragons run corporations, and elf hackers and troll street samurai take deniable jobs in the shadows
- [Stranger Things](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/stranger-things/index.md): The Duffer Brothers' 1980s horror saga opens with four boys playing Dungeons & Dragons, and names its monsters after the game.
- [Sword Art Online](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/sword-art-online/index.md): Ten thousand players log into a virtual-reality MMORPG and discover they cannot log out, and that dying in the game kills them: Reki Kawahara's light novels turned the MMO into a g
- [Talislanta](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/talislanta/index.md): 'No Elves!' promised the ads: Stephan Michael Sechi's 1987 roleplaying game swapped Tolkien's races for a Vancian bazaar of sorcerers, beast-folk and ruined sky-cities.
- [Talisman](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/talisman/index.md): Games Workshop's 1983 race to the Crown of Command: roll a die, walk a ring of perilous spaces, draw adventure cards and grow your hero until you are strong enough to reach the cen
- [The Atlantean Trilogy](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/the-atlantean-trilogy/index.md): Three books that rebuilt Dungeons & Dragons for the drowned world of Atlantis — a magic-and-alchemy grimoire, an atlas of lost continents, and a bestiary — from the tiny Bard Games
- [The Bard's Tale](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/the-bards-tale/index.md): Mangar the Dark has locked Skara Brae in eternal winter, and only a bard, a few rogues and some junior magic users stand in his way: the Commodore 64 dungeon crawl that out-sold ev
- [The Belgariad](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/the-belgariad/index.md): A farm boy named Garion learns he is the heir to a prophecy millennia in the making: David Eddings's five-book quest was built deliberately to give fantasy readers exactly what the
- [The Black Onyx](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/the-black-onyx/index.md): A Dutch-born programmer in Japan built Japan an RPG from scratch: a first-person party crawl beneath Utsuro, a town under eternal night, that taught a nation what hit points were.
- [The Broken Sword](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/the-broken-sword/index.md): A human child stolen by elves, a changeling left in his place, and a cursed sword that must kill whenever it is drawn — Poul Anderson's pitiless Norse tragedy of 1954.
- [The Chronicles of Amber](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/the-chronicles-of-amber/index.md): An amnesiac wakes in a New York clinic and discovers he is Prince Corwin of Amber, heir to a family of feuding immortals who can walk between infinite worlds.
- [The Chronicles of Narnia](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/the-chronicles-of-narnia/index.md): Four evacuee children step through a wardrobe into a land of talking beasts, a witch's endless winter and a great lion — the most famous doorway in fantasy.
- [The Chronicles of Prydain](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/the-chronicles-of-prydain/index.md): An Assistant Pig-Keeper who dreams of heroism chases an oracular pig into a war against the Death-Lord — Lloyd Alexander's Welsh-myth epic for young readers.
- [The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/the-chronicles-of-thomas-covenant/index.md): A leper who refuses to believe in the magical world that hails him as its savior: Stephen R. Donaldson's ten-novel epic turned the Tolkien quest inside out with a protagonist reade
- [The Dark Is Rising](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/the-dark-is-rising/index.md): On his eleventh birthday, the seventh son of a seventh son learns he is the last of the Old Ones, immortal servants of the Light in a war against the Dark that runs through British
- [The Dying Earth](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/the-dying-earth/index.md): Under a red sun that may go out any day, decadent wizards hoard a few surviving spells that vanish from their minds the moment they are cast — Jack Vance's jeweled far-future fanta
- [The Eddas](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/the-eddas/index.md): Two medieval Icelandic books preserve the Norse cosmos — Odin, Thor, the World Tree, Ragnarök — and a list of dwarf names Tolkien lifted straight into The Hobbit.
- [The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/the-elder-scrolls-daggerfall/index.md): Bethesda's 1996 sequel to Arena built a procedurally generated realm the size of Great Britain, with 15,000 places to go, custom classes, vampirism, bank loans and a plot with mult
- [The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/the-elder-scrolls-morrowind/index.md): Bethesda's handcrafted alien island of giant mushrooms, silt striders and a sleeping god-villain, Morrowind shipped with its own construction kit and turned The Elder Scrolls into 
- [The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/the-elder-scrolls-oblivion/index.md): The emperor dies in a sewer, the gates of a demon realm open across a green and golden province, and the player walks out into Cyrodiil free to ignore it all: Oblivion was the firs
- [The Elder Scrolls Online](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/the-elder-scrolls-online/index.md): The whole of Tamriel online: three alliances war for the Ruby Throne while a Daedric prince tries to drag the world into his realm. A lukewarm subscription MMO at launch, ESO becam
- [The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/the-elder-scrolls-skyrim/index.md): Dragons return to a cold, Norse-flavored province at civil war, and the player, the last Dragonborn, can shout them out of the sky, or ignore destiny and wander off: Skyrim became 
- [The Elder Scrolls: Arena](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/the-elder-scrolls-arena/index.md): Bethesda's 1994 gladiator game that became something else entirely: a first-person RPG spanning all of Tamriel, with procedurally generated wilds, a day-night cycle, and the first 
- [The Elric Saga](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/elric-of-melnibone/index.md): An albino sorcerer-emperor, sickly without drugs and a demon-sword that drinks souls, betrays everyone he loves in a cosmic war between Law and Chaos.
- [The Faerie Queene](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/the-faerie-queene/index.md): Knights of Holiness, Temperance and Chastity ride through a Faerie Land of dragons, witches, false wizards and an iron man in Elizabethan England's great allegorical romance.
- [The Fantasy Trip](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/the-fantasy-trip/index.md): Steve Jackson's pocket-sized answer to D&D: a $2.95 bag of hex-map arena combat that grew into a full RPG with point-bought characters — then vanished for decades and came back.
- [The Farseer Trilogy](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/the-farseer-trilogy/index.md): A royal bastard trained as a court assassin tells his own story of loyalty and loss: Robin Hobb's first-person epic traded battlefield spectacle for intimate, often painful charact
- [The First Law](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/the-first-law/index.md): A barbarian who has killed too many men, a crippled torturer with a sense of humor, and a vain young nobleman: Joe Abercrombie's trilogy made cynicism fun and became a founding tex
- [The Hobbit](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/the-hobbit-1977-film/index.md): Rankin/Bass's 78-minute NBC cartoon of Tolkien's first novel: watercolor goblins, a folk-ballad theme, and the first Middle-earth most American children ever saw.
- [The Hobbit](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/the-hobbit/index.md): A comfortable, pipe-smoking hobbit is hired as a burglar by thirteen dwarves and walks out of his round green door into the adventure that invented modern fantasy's map.
- [The Icewind Dale Trilogy](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/the-icewind-dale-trilogy/index.md): A drow ranger with two scimitars and a panther, invented on the spot in a TSR marketing meeting, became Dungeons & Dragons' most famous fictional hero and the star of a saga still 
- [The Keep on the Borderlands](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/the-keep-on-the-borderlands/index.md): A fortified keep on the edge of civilization, a ravine honeycombed with monster lairs, and a DM's primer in the margins — the adventure that introduced a generation to D&D.
- [The King of Elfland's Daughter](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/the-king-of-elflands-daughter/index.md): The lord of a small mortal vale marries an elf princess, and learns that Elfland's timeless beauty and the fields we know cannot easily share a home.
- [The Kingkiller Chronicle](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/the-name-of-the-wind/index.md): An innkeeper who was once the most famous wizard, musician and killer alive tells his story over three days: Patrick Rothfuss's lyrical debut became a modern classic, and its seque
- [The Last Unicorn](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/the-last-unicorn/index.md): A unicorn learns she may be the last of her kind and sets out, with a failed magician and a weary outlaw's cook, to find where the Red Bull has driven all the others.
- [The Legend of Vox Machina](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/the-legend-of-vox-machina/index.md): A crowdfunded cartoon about a crew of foul-mouthed D&D heroes. Critical Role's voice actors turned a home game into an Amazon series.
- [The Legend of Zelda](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/the-legend-of-zelda/index.md): Nintendo's 1986 open-ended quest through Hyrule, in which a boy named Link pieces together the Triforce of Wisdom — the game that taught consoles to explore, save, and keep secrets
- [The Lord of the Rings](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/the-lord-of-the-rings-1978-film/index.md): Ralph Bakshi's rotoscoped 1978 epic: Black Riders traced from live actors, a painted Middle-earth, and a story that stops halfway because the studio dropped the words "Part One."
- [The Lord of the Rings](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/the-lord-of-the-rings/index.md): A hobbit carries the Dark Lord's ring across a dying world to destroy it — the twelve-year epic that defined high fantasy and handed the tabletop and computer RPG their races, rang
- [The Lord of the Rings film trilogy](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/lord-of-the-rings-film-trilogy/index.md): Peter Jackson shot all three films at once in New Zealand, and turned Tolkien's unfilmable epic into a $3 billion, 17-Oscar landmark.
- [The Lord of the Rings Online](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/the-lord-of-the-rings-online/index.md): Start in Bree just after Frodo leaves, trail the Fellowship across Eriador, down into Moria and on to the Black Gate: Turbine's online Middle-earth let thousands walk Tolkien's roa
- [The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/the-rings-of-power/index.md): Amazon's hugely expensive Second Age epic follows Galadriel, Elrond and a disguised Sauron through the forging of the Rings of Power.
- [The Mabinogion](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/the-mabinogion/index.md): Shape-shifting magicians, a woman made of flowers, a severed head that talks for eighty years and Arthur's earliest prose adventure: the dream-logic storytelling of medieval Wales.
- [The Neverending Story](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/the-neverending-story/index.md): A lonely boy steals a book, reads himself into the dying land of Fantastica, and discovers that its fate depends on him: Michael Ende's two-color novel about the danger and necessi
- [The Odyssey](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/the-odyssey/index.md): A cunning veteran spends ten years trying to sail home, outwitting a one-eyed giant, a witch, the Sirens and the dead — the template for every wandering adventure since.
- [The Once and Future King](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/the-once-and-future-king/index.md): The Wart learns to be a king by being turned into a fish, a hawk, an ant and a goose — T. H. White's funny, heartbroken retelling of Malory for the century of world wars.
- [The One Ring Roleplaying Game](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/the-one-ring-rpg/index.md): A Middle-earth roleplaying game built around hope, weariness and the long road: custom dice bearing the Eye of Sauron and Gandalf's rune, and rules that make journeys as dangerous 
- [The Princess Bride](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/the-princess-bride/index.md): A farm boy, a princess, a giant, a vengeful Spanish swordsman and a Sicilian genius tumble through a fairy tale that William Goldman claims merely to have abridged.
- [The Silmarillion](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/the-silmarillion/index.md): Tolkien's lifelong book of the Elder Days — the making of the world, the theft of three holy jewels and the long doom of the elves — published by his son four years after his death
- [The Stormlight Archive](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/the-stormlight-archive/index.md): A storm-scoured world of spren, shardblades and oath-bound knights: Brandon Sanderson's ten-book epic is the biggest new fantasy series of its era, and a bridge between novels, cro
- [The Sword of Shannara](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/the-sword-of-shannara/index.md): A law student's seven-year homage to Tolkien that became the first fantasy novel on the New York Times trade paperback bestseller list, and proved epic fantasy could be a mass-mark
- [The Well at the World's End](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/the-well-at-the-worlds-end/index.md): A king's youngest son rides out of his quiet valley in search of a legendary well whose water grants long life — the quest romance, set in a world wholly invented, that taught Tolk
- [The Wheel of Time](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/the-wheel-of-time/index.md): Fourteen volumes, two authors and 23 years: Robert Jordan's saga of the Dragon Reborn defined the doorstopper epic of the 1990s and was finished by Brandon Sanderson after Jordan's
- [The Witcher](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/the-witcher/index.md): A Polish studio's first game revived Andrzej Sapkowski's white-haired monster hunter as an amnesiac in a plague-ridden city, and taught the world that a fantasy RPG could be about 
- [The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/the-witcher-3/index.md): Geralt of Rivia crosses a war-torn land in search of his adopted daughter, and every village has a monster, a grudge and a story worth hearing. Its side quests set the standard for
- [The Witcher Saga](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/the-witcher-saga/index.md): A mutant monster hunter-for-hire and the child of destiny he cannot escape: Andrzej Sapkowski's Polish saga became, through CD Projekt Red's games, one of the most-played fantasy w
- [The Worm Ouroboros](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/the-worm-ouroboros/index.md): The lords of Demonland wage a war of magnificent pride against the sorcerer-king of Witchland — and when they win, they ask the gods to let it all begin again.
- [Thieves' World](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/thieves-world/index.md): Robert Asprin's squalid city of Sanctuary, where a crowd of famous fantasy writers shared one setting and one rulebook, invented the shared-world anthology and walked straight onto
- [Three Hearts and Three Lions](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/three-hearts-and-three-lions/index.md): A Danish engineer fighting the Nazis wakes in a world of chivalric romance, where he is a legendary paladin and a troll's severed hand crawls back to its body.
- [Tomb of Horrors](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/tomb-of-horrors/index.md): Gary Gygax's deliberately merciless dungeon of false doors, sphere-of-annihilation mouths and gloating riddles, built to humble players who boasted their characters could survive a
- [Tunnels & Trolls](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/tunnels-and-trolls/index.md): A Phoenix librarian found the D&D rules baffling and wrote his own in 1975 — cheaper, funnier, six-sided-dice-only, and soon playable alone in a pioneering run of solo adventures.
- [Ultima](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/ultima-i/index.md): A teenager's Apple II epic in which a stranger from another world crosses Sosaria's four continents, rescues princesses, becomes a space ace and travels back in time to shatter Mon
- [Ultima III: Exodus](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/ultima-iii-exodus/index.md): The first Ultima from Origin Systems sends a party of four against Exodus, spawn of Mondain and Minax, with animated tiles, tactical battles, a musical score, and a villain defeate
- [Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/ultima-iv/index.md): The RPG that asked players to become good rather than merely strong: no dark lord to slay, only eight virtues to live by, a cloth map, a metal ankh, and the Codex waiting at the bo
- [Ultima Online](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/ultima-online/index.md): Richard Garriott's Britannia turned into a living, lawless shared world: thousands of players building houses, running shops, and killing one another. UO popularized the MMORPG and
- [Ultima Underworld: The Stygian Abyss](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/ultima-underworld/index.md): A tiny New England studio's 1992 'dungeon simulation' let players look up, jump, swim and fight in a texture-mapped 3D Abyss beneath Britannia — and changed first-person games fore
- [Ultima VII: The Black Gate](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/ultima-vii/index.md): Origin's 1992 murder mystery in a Britannia where you could bake bread, change a baby, and follow a smiling cult to the door of an invading god — the most richly simulated world of
- [Vampire: The Masquerade](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/vampire-the-masquerade/index.md): White Wolf's gothic-punk game of undead politics and inner monsters, where players are the vampires and the true enemy is the Beast inside.
- [Warhammer Fantasy Battle](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/warhammer-fantasy-battle/index.md): Games Workshop's 1983 rules for pitting whole armies of painted metal miniatures against each other — the wargame that built the grim Old World and a global hobby empire.
- [Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/warhammer-fantasy-roleplay/index.md): Games Workshop's 1986 roleplaying game swapped heroic dungeon-delving for rat catchers, plague, cults and mud — a grim, darkly funny Old World where Chaos hides next door.
- [Warhammer Quest](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/warhammer-quest/index.md): Games Workshop's cooperative dungeon crawl: four heroes, a deck that builds the dungeon as they explore, and a random event on every unlucky roll — no game master required.
- [Willow](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/willow-film/index.md): George Lucas's fairy-tale epic, directed by Ron Howard: a Nelwyn farmer, a stolen baby, a roguish swordsman, brownies, a two-headed dragon, and the first digital morph in a feature
- [Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/wizardry/index.md): Six adventurers, a ten-level maze drawn in green lines, graph paper in the box, and no saving below ground: the Apple II dungeon crawl that defined the party-based computer RPG in 
- [World of Greyhawk](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/world-of-greyhawk/index.md): Gary Gygax opened his own Greyhawk campaign to the world in 1980: a gazetteer of feuding kingdoms, a vast color map of the Flanaess, and D&D's first official home.
- [World of Warcraft](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/world-of-warcraft/index.md): Blizzard took the grind out of EverQuest, poured in quests, cartoon color and Warcraft lore, and built the online world that twelve million people paid to live in and that is still
- [Zork](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/zork/index.md): West of a white house, in an open field, lies the Great Underground Empire: MIT's witty, sarcastic answer to Adventure, home of the lurking grue and the best-selling text adventure

## Makers

Authors, designers, programmers and artists.

- [Akira Toriyama](https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/akira-toriyama/index.md): The creator of Dragon Ball whose rounded, joyful designs gave Dragon Quest its heroes and its grinning Slime, turning Japan's first great console RPG into a national phenomenon.
- [Alan Lee](https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/alan-lee/index.md): The quiet English watercolorist whose misty, melancholy Middle-earth became the definitive illustrated Tolkien, and then, through Peter Jackson's films, the Middle-earth most of th
- [Andrew C. Greenberg](https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/andrew-greenberg/index.md): The Cornell student who began a dungeon game in 1978, co-created Wizardry with Robert Woodhead, lent his reversed first name to its villain Werdna, and later became a patent attorn
- [Andrew Gower](https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/andrew-gower/index.md): The Cambridge programmer who wrote RuneScape in Java from his family's home in Nottingham, turning a free browser game into one of the most-played MMORPGs ever made.
- [Andrzej Sapkowski](https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/andrzej-sapkowski/index.md): The Łódź sales rep who entered a magazine contest in 1986 with a story about a mutant monster hunter, Geralt of Rivia, and ended up with one of the most successful fantasy franchis
- [Anne McCaffrey](https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/anne-mccaffrey/index.md): The creator of Pern, whose telepathic, fire-breathing dragons and their bonded riders made her the first woman to win a Hugo for fiction — and filled bookshelves, computer screens 
- [Brad McQuaid](https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/brad-mcquaid/index.md): The shareware programmer who became EverQuest's producer and co-designer, walked Norrath as the avatar Aradune, and spent his later career chasing the hardcore, group-driven MMO he
- [Brandon Sanderson](https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/brandon-sanderson/index.md): The prolific architect of the Cosmere, author of Mistborn and The Stormlight Archive, finisher of The Wheel of Time, and the writer whose 2022 Kickstarter raised $41.7 million for 
- [Brian Fargo](https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/brian-fargo/index.md): The Interplay founder who produced The Bard's Tale and Wasteland, backed Blizzard, Black Isle and Baldur's Gate, and later led the Kickstarter revival of the old-school computer RP
- [C. L. Moore](https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/c-l-moore/index.md): A bank secretary in Indianapolis who hid behind her initials and wrote Jirel of Joiry — the first great woman warrior of sword and sorcery — into the pages of Weird Tales in 1934.
- [C. S. Lewis](https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/c-s-lewis/index.md): Oxford don, Christian apologist and Tolkien's closest literary ally, who sent four children through a wardrobe into Narnia and made the portal fantasy a staple of childhood.
- [Chris Avellone](https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/chris-avellone/index.md): The Dungeon Master turned Black Isle designer who wrote Planescape: Torment, an RPG that begins where most games end, and became the most sought-after writer in the CRPG revival.
- [Christopher Tolkien](https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/christopher-tolkien/index.md): J. R. R. Tolkien's youngest son, first reader and mapmaker, who spent nearly half a century turning his father's boxes of drafts into The Silmarillion and the twelve-volume History
- [Clark Ashton Smith](https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/clark-ashton-smith/index.md): The self-taught poet of Auburn, California, whose jeweled tales of Zothique, Hyperborea and Averoigne gave the pulps their most decadent sorcerers — and gave D&D the setting of Cas
- [Dave Arneson](https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/dave-arneson/index.md): The Minnesota wargamer whose Blackmoor campaign of 1971 put single heroes, dungeons and hit points on the table, and who co-created Dungeons & Dragons with Gary Gygax.
- [David Brevik](https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/david-brevik/index.md): The roguelike fan who dreamed up Diablo, named it after a California mountain, and, at Blizzard's urging, turned a turn-based dungeon crawl into the real-time click-and-loot game t
- [David Eddings](https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/david-eddings/index.md): Author, with his uncredited and later credited wife Leigh, of The Belgariad: a five-book farm-boy-to-king quest that became one of the most widely read gateway epics of the 1980s.
- [David Wesely](https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/david-wesely/index.md): The Minnesota physics student and miniatures referee whose Braunstein games of 1969 handed players individual roles instead of armies, and accidentally invented the roleplaying ses
- [Don Woods](https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/don-woods/index.md): The Stanford hacker who found Will Crowther's cave game on the ARPANET in 1977 and, with a dragon, a pirate and a 350-point score, turned it into the Adventure that conquered every
- [Donald A. Wollheim](https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/donald-a-wollheim/index.md): The Ace Books editor whose unauthorized 1965 paperback of The Lord of the Rings detonated the Tolkien boom, and who went on to found DAW Books, arguably the first mass-market house
- [E. R. Eddison](https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/e-r-eddison/index.md): A Board of Trade mandarin who wrote Jacobean-voiced epics of warring lords by night — The Worm Ouroboros most famously — and was an occasional guest of Tolkien and Lewis's Inklings
- [Ed Greenwood](https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/ed-greenwood/index.md): A Toronto library clerk whose boyhood story-world grew, through years of Dragon magazine articles and a famously detailed home campaign, into the Forgotten Realms, D&D's most endur
- [Edward Packard](https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/edward-packard/index.md): A lawyer whose bedtime stories for his children became the second-person branching book, first as Sugarcane Island and then as Bantam's Choose Your Own Adventure, which sold more t
- [Feargus Urquhart](https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/feargus-urquhart/index.md): The Interplay tester who built Black Isle Studios, shepherded Fallout, Baldur's Gate and Planescape: Torment to market, then founded Obsidian Entertainment and kept the classic CRP
- [Frank Frazetta](https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/frank-frazetta/index.md): The Brooklyn painter whose muscular, storm-lit Conan covers of the 1960s taught the world what sword and sorcery should look like, and whose shadow falls across every barbarian sin
- [Frank Mentzer](https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/frank-mentzer/index.md): The TSR designer behind the 1983 "Red Box" and its four sequels, the BECMI sets that took D&D characters from first level to immortality, and founder of the RPGA.
- [Fritz Leiber](https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/fritz-leiber/index.md): The actor's son who invented Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, coined the phrase 'sword and sorcery', and designed a Lankhmar wargame in 1937 that TSR published four decades later.
- [Gary Gygax](https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/gary-gygax/index.md): The Lake Geneva insurance underwriter and wargamer who co-created Dungeons & Dragons, co-founded TSR, and wrote the rulebooks that taught a generation how to be a Dungeon Master.
- [Georg von Reisswitz](https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/georg-von-reisswitz/index.md): A Prussian father and son whose sand table, porcelain-tile cabinet and 1824 rulebook created Kriegsspiel, the first wargame used to train real officers and the distant ancestor of 
- [George MacDonald](https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/george-macdonald/index.md): The Scottish minister-turned-fantasist whose Phantastes and goblin-haunted mountains taught C. S. Lewis, Tolkien and Lewis Carroll what a fairy tale for grown-ups could be.
- [George R. R. Martin](https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/george-r-r-martin/index.md): The Bayonne dockworker's son, chess tournament director and TV writer whose A Song of Ice and Fire became Game of Thrones, and who wrote the ancient mythology behind FromSoftware's
- [Glenn Wichman](https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/glenn-wichman/index.md): The Santa Cruz student who dreamed of designing board games, co-designed Rogue with Michael Toy, gave it its name, and later drew the Macintosh version's graphics in exchange for a
- [Greg Stafford](https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/greg-stafford/index.md): The founder of Chaosium and creator of Glorantha, a mythic world he began imagining as a college freshman in 1966, who later considered his Arthurian RPG King Arthur Pendragon his 
- [Greg Zeschuk](https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/greg-zeschuk/index.md): The D&D-loving medical graduate who co-founded BioWare in his Edmonton basement, co-ran it for seventeen years, then traded role-playing games for wild-fermented beer.
- [H. G. Wells](https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/h-g-wells/index.md): The author of The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds, who also wrote Little Wars (1913), the first published rules for hobby wargaming with toy soldiers.
- [H. P. Lovecraft](https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/h-p-lovecraft/index.md): A reclusive Providence gentleman who died nearly unknown, then became the patron saint of cosmic horror — and, through Call of Cthulhu, the reason tabletop characters go insane.
- [Henk Rogers](https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/henk-rogers/index.md): The Dutch-born New Yorker who followed love to Japan, introduced Japanese players to the dungeon RPG with The Black Onyx in 1984, and then crossed the Iron Curtain to win Tetris fo
- [Hidetaka Miyazaki](https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/hidetaka-miyazaki/index.md): The Oracle account manager who changed careers at 29 after playing Ico, rescued a failing project called Demon's Souls, and built the Souls games and Elden Ring into a genre of the
- [Hironobu Sakaguchi](https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/hironobu-sakaguchi/index.md): The would-be rock musician who skipped classes to play Wizardry, bet his career on an RPG he called Final Fantasy, and led Square's series from 1987 to the heights of Final Fantasy
- [Ian Livingstone](https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/ian-livingstone/index.md): The co-founder of Games Workshop and first editor of White Dwarf who co-created Fighting Fantasy, wrote Deathtrap Dungeon, and later chaired Eidos during the Tomb Raider years.
- [Isaac Childres](https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/isaac-childres/index.md): A physics PhD who gave up the lab to self-publish board games, then crowdfunded Gloomhaven, a massive campaign dungeon crawl that spent more than five years as BoardGameGeek's top-
- [J. Eric Holmes](https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/john-eric-holmes/index.md): The Los Angeles neurology professor who turned D&D's scattered original booklets into the 1977 Basic Set, the first edition written to teach newcomers how to play.
- [J. K. Rowling](https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/j-k-rowling/index.md): The single mother who drafted a boy wizard's first adventure in Edinburgh cafés and saw Harry Potter become the best-selling book series in history, then a film, game and theme-par
- [J. R. R. Tolkien](https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/j-r-r-tolkien/index.md): An Oxford philologist who invented languages, then a world for them to be spoken in — and, with The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, supplied the elves, dwarves, orcs and halfling
- [Jack Vance](https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/jack-vance/index.md): A sardonic Californian stylist whose Dying Earth, written aboard a wartime merchant ship, gave Dungeons & Dragons its spell-memorizing wizards — and whose name, scrambled, became t
- [Jake Song](https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/jake-song/index.md): The KAIST-trained programmer who co-founded Nexon, built Kingdom of the Winds, then designed Lineage, the online world that made South Korea the capital of the MMORPG.
- [James Ohlen](https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/james-ohlen/index.md): The comic-shop Dungeon Master whose waiting-listed D&D campaigns got him hired at BioWare, where he led the design of Baldur's Gate and a string of the studio's most beloved RPGs.
- [Jason Bulmahn](https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/jason-bulmahn/index.md): A Milwaukee architecture graduate turned Dragon magazine editor who, when D&D moved to 4th Edition, led Paizo's reworking of the 3.5 rules into Pathfinder, for years D&D's closest 
- [Jean Wells](https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/jean-wells/index.md): TSR's first woman designer, who launched Dragon's long-running "Sage Advice" column and wrote Palace of the Silver Princess, the module TSR famously destroyed on the day of its rel
- [Jeff Perren](https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/jeff-perren/index.md): The Lake Geneva wargamer whose four pages of medieval miniatures rules became Chainmail, the 1971 game whose fantasy supplement was the launching pad for Dungeons & Dragons.
- [Jennell Jaquays](https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/jennell-jaquays/index.md): The designer and artist whose looping, many-pathed dungeons, from Caverns of Thracia to Quake III Arena's arenas, taught two industries how to build spaces worth exploring.
- [Jeremy Crawford](https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/jeremy-crawford/index.md): D&D's longtime chief rules designer: co-lead of 5th Edition, author of Sage Advice, lead designer of the 2024 Player's Handbook, and later Game Director of Critical Role's Darringt
- [Joe Abercrombie](https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/joe-abercrombie/index.md): The freelance film editor and lifelong gamer whose First Law trilogy, with its torturer, berserker and preening swordsman, made him the self-styled "Lord Grimdark" of 21st-century 
- [Joe Dever](https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/joe-dever/index.md): A session bassist and Public Image Ltd road manager who won America's AD&D championship, then turned his home campaign world of Magnamund into Lone Wolf, one of the best-selling ga
- [John Harper](https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/john-harper/index.md): A Seattle designer and graphic artist whose free one-shot Lady Blackbird charmed the indie scene and whose Blades in the Dark, a game of scoundrels in a haunted industrial city, fo
- [John Howe](https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/john-howe/index.md): The Canadian illustrator and armor enthusiast whose dragons, wizards and grim fortresses helped design Peter Jackson's Middle-earth, and later Amazon's Second Age.
- [Jon Van Caneghem](https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/jon-van-caneghem/index.md): The UCLA-trained programmer who spent three years writing Might and Magic almost alone, shipped it from his apartment, and built New World Computing into the home of Might and Magi
- [Jonathan Tweet](https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/jonathan-tweet/index.md): The co-creator of Ars Magica and the surreal Over the Edge who led the design of Dungeons & Dragons 3rd Edition, rebuilding the game around a single d20 roll and opening its rules 
- [Josh Sawyer](https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/josh-sawyer/index.md): The history major who went from Black Isle web designer to Icewind Dale II lead, directed Fallout: New Vegas, and talked Obsidian into the Kickstarter that became Pillars of Eterni
- [Julian LeFay](https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/julian-lefay/index.md): The Danish musician-turned-programmer called the "Father of The Elder Scrolls," who engineered Arena and led Daggerfall, the vast procedurally built worlds from which Morrowind and
- [Ken St. Andre](https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/ken-st-andre/index.md): The Phoenix librarian who read the D&D rules in 1975, decided they made no sense, and wrote Tunnels & Trolls, the second roleplaying game ever published and the first built for sol
- [Koichi Sugiyama](https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/koichi-sugiyama/index.md): The classically trained television composer who wrote Enix a fan letter about a shogi game, then scored Dragon Quest and for thirty-five years gave the series its fanfares, overtur
- [Larry Elmore](https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/larry-elmore/index.md): The Kentucky painter who joined TSR in 1981 and gave 1980s Dungeons & Dragons its heroic face: the Red Box dragon, the Dragonlance companions, and a thousand distinct wyrms.
- [Lewis Carroll](https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/lewis-carroll/index.md): An Oxford mathematician who told a story on a river trip and invented Wonderland, the looking-glass world and the vorpal blade that still decapitates monsters in Dungeons & Dragons
- [Lin Carter](https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/lin-carter/index.md): The fan-turned-editor who, as curator of the Ballantine Adult Fantasy line, rescued Dunsany, Morris and Clark Ashton Smith from obscurity and built the first paperback canon of fan
- [Lloyd Alexander](https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/lloyd-alexander/index.md): A Philadelphia writer who fell in love with Wales as a wartime soldier and turned the Mabinogion into Prydain — Taran the Assistant Pig-Keeper, the Horned King and the Black Cauldr
- [Lord Dunsany](https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/lord-dunsany/index.md): An Anglo-Irish peer who wrote with a quill in a castle, invented his own gods in 1905 and taught Lovecraft, Tolkien and Le Guin that fantasy could sound like scripture.
- [Lorraine Williams](https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/lorraine-williams/index.md): The Buck Rogers heiress and hospital administrator who took control of TSR from Gary Gygax in 1985, presided over AD&D's second edition and its setting boom, and sold the failing c
- [M. A. R. Barker](https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/m-a-r-barker/index.md): The University of Minnesota linguist who spent decades building the alien, non-European world of Tékumel, and in 1975 published it through TSR as Empire of the Petal Throne.
- [Marcin Iwiński](https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/marcin-iwinski/index.md): The Warsaw teenager who sold copied Western games at a market stall, co-founded CD Projekt with $2,000, and gambled the company on a video game of Andrzej Sapkowski's Witcher saga.
- [Margaret Weis](https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/margaret-weis/index.md): A TSR book editor who, with Tracy Hickman, rescued a stalled tie-in novel and turned Dragonlance into the fantasy bestseller that made game fiction a genre of its own.
- [Mark Rein·Hagen](https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/mark-rein-hagen/index.md): The co-creator of Ars Magica who, on a road trip to Gen Con in 1990, came up with Vampire: The Masquerade and launched the gothic-punk World of Darkness that took roleplaying beyon
- [Matt Dinniman](https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/matt-dinniman/index.md): The pet-show portrait artist who started posting a story about a man, his ex-girlfriend's cat and an alien game-show dungeon on Royal Road, and made Dungeon Crawler Carl LitRPG's f
- [Matthew Mercer](https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/matthew-mercer/index.md): The voice actor behind Critical Role's Dungeon Master screen, whose decade of livestreamed campaigns turned watching D&D into mass entertainment and made him the most recognizable 
- [Mervyn Peake](https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/mervyn-peake/index.md): A painter and illustrator born in China who built Gormenghast, a crumbling castle-world of ritual, shadow and grotesques, and proved that fantasy could be gothic, magicless and utt
- [Michael Cranford](https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/michael-cranford/index.md): The Southern California programmer who designed and coded The Bard's Tale, the best-selling computer RPG of the 1980s, then walked away from games to become a professor of ethics.
- [Michael Ende](https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/michael-ende/index.md): German author of The Neverending Story, a novel about a boy who reads himself into the dying land of Fantastica, and of Momo; he famously disowned the 1984 film that made his story
- [Michael Moorcock](https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/michael-moorcock/index.md): The prodigious London editor, musician and anti-Tolkien firebrand who created Elric of Melniboné and the cosmic war of Law and Chaos that D&D wrote into its alignment system.
- [Michael Toy](https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/michael-toy/index.md): The Santa Cruz student programmer who coded Rogue's randomly built Dungeons of Doom, carried it to Berkeley and into BSD Unix, co-founded A.I. Design to sell it, and later helped s
- [Mike Mearls](https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/mike-mearls/index.md): A d20 freelancer who rose through Wizards of the Coast to lead D&D's design, helped build 4th Edition, and co-led the fifth edition that brought Dungeons & Dragons its largest audi
- [Monte Cook](https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/monte-cook/index.md): A Planescape stalwart who wrote the 3rd Edition Dungeon Master's Guide, helped prove that game books could sell as PDFs, and later crowdfunded the far-future science fantasy Numene
- [Nobuo Uematsu](https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/nobuo-uematsu/index.md): The self-taught pianist from Kōchi who took a side job writing tunes for Square in 1986 and became the voice of Final Fantasy, from the NES prelude to One-Winged Angel and the conc
- [Patrick Rothfuss](https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/patrick-rothfuss/index.md): Wisconsin author of The Name of the Wind, the lyrical first-person legend of the musician-arcanist Kvothe, whose long-awaited conclusion, The Doors of Stone, remains unpublished.
- [Peter Adkison](https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/peter-adkison/index.md): A Boeing systems analyst who started Wizards of the Coast in his basement, asked Richard Garfield for a cheap convention game, got Magic: The Gathering, and used the proceeds to bu
- [Peter Jackson](https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/peter-jackson/index.md): The self-taught New Zealand director who went from backyard splatter comedies to filming all of The Lord of the Rings at once, winning Best Picture and making high fantasy a blockb
- [Peter S. Beagle](https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/peter-s-beagle/index.md): A Bronx-born prodigy who wrote his first novel at nineteen, wrote The Last Unicorn, and co-wrote the screenplay for Ralph Bakshi's 1978 animated Lord of the Rings.
- [Philip Pullman](https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/philip-pullman/index.md): The Oxford schoolteacher who rewrote Paradise Lost for young readers as His Dark Materials, giving every human a daemon and fantasy one of its fiercest arguments with Narnia.
- [Poul Anderson](https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/poul-anderson/index.md): A physics graduate of Danish descent who wrote hard science fiction and saga-dark fantasy with equal skill — and whose Three Hearts and Three Lions handed D&D its paladin, its rege
- [R. A. Salvatore](https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/r-a-salvatore/index.md): The former bouncer who auditioned for TSR's second Forgotten Realms novel, invented a scimitar-wielding dark elf named Drizzt on a whim, and turned him into the most famous charact
- [Ralph Bakshi](https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/ralph-bakshi/index.md): The Brooklyn-raised maverick of adult animation who rotoscoped Tolkien onto the big screen in 1978, made fantasy films with Frank Frazetta, and inspired a teenage Peter Jackson to 
- [Raph Koster](https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/raph-koster/index.md): The poet-turned-MUD-wizard who led the design of Ultima Online, directed Star Wars Galaxies, and wrote A Theory of Fun, the book that taught a generation of designers why play matt
- [Ray Muzyka](https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/ray-muzyka/index.md): The Edmonton family doctor who co-founded BioWare, ran it as CEO through Baldur's Gate, Knights of the Old Republic and Mass Effect, then left games for a 'third career' in impact 
- [Rebecca Heineman](https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/rebecca-heineman/index.md): The self-taught hacker who won America's first national video game championship, co-founded Interplay, designed The Bard's Tale III and Dragon Wars, and spent four decades as a mas
- [Rebecca Yarros](https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/rebecca-yarros/index.md): The romance novelist who pitched five ideas for a new romantic-fantasy line and got to write the third, Fourth Wing, a dragon-rider war-college saga that became the publishing phen
- [Reki Kawahara](https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/reki-kawahara/index.md): The Japanese light novelist who, rather than cut a manuscript down to a contest's page limit, posted Sword Art Online on his own website, and ended up defining the trapped-in-a-gam
- [Richard Bartle](https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/richard-bartle/index.md): The Essex student who co-wrote MUD1, gave it points, puzzles and the long climb to Wizard, and then spent four decades explaining why people play online worlds, from the Bartle tax
- [Richard Garfield](https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/richard-garfield/index.md): A combinatorics PhD student who crossed a fantasy card duel with baseball-card collecting and created Magic: The Gathering, the first collectible card game.
- [Richard Garriott](https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/richard-garriott/index.md): The astronaut's son who sold his first RPG in Ziploc bags, ruled Britannia as Lord British through the Ultima series, built a castle with secret passages outside Austin, and in 200
- [Rieko Kodama](https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/rieko-kodama/index.md): Sega's "First Lady of RPGs," who drew Phantasy Star's heroine Alis in 1987, directed Phantasy Star IV, produced Skies of Arcadia, and spent 38 years at Sega shaping its role-playin
- [Rob Pardo](https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/rob-pardo/index.md): The Dungeon Master and EverQuest raider who became Blizzard's design chief, steering Warcraft III and World of Warcraft into the mainstream before leaving to found Bonfire Studios.
- [Robert Asprin](https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/robert-asprin/index.md): The prankish fan and comic novelist who dreamed up Thieves' World, the anthology city of Sanctuary where a dozen authors shared one sword-and-sorcery setting, and invented the mode
- [Robert E. Howard](https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/robert-e-howard/index.md): A young Texan who typed furiously for the pulps from a small oil town and created Conan the Cimmerian — the barbarian from whom sword and sorcery, the fighter class and a thousand 
- [Robert J. Harris](https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/robert-j-harris/index.md): A St Andrews Latin scholar who, after his first weekend of D&D, turned a schoolboy game about becoming headmaster into Talisman, Games Workshop's 1983 magical quest game, and later
- [Robert Jordan](https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/robert-jordan/index.md): The Vietnam helicopter gunner turned nuclear engineer who wrote Conan pastiches for Tor, then spent the rest of his life on The Wheel of Time, a fourteen-volume epic finished after
- [Robert Woodhead](https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/robert-woodhead/index.md): The Sir-Tech co-founder who co-created Wizardry with Andrew Greenberg, lent his reversed name to the Mad Overlord Trebor, then wrote early Mac antivirus software and co-founded the
- [Roberta Williams](https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/roberta-williams/index.md): The Colossal Cave fan who drew Mystery House's pictures by hand, co-founded Sierra On-Line, turned fairy tales into King's Quest, and four decades later came back to remake the cav
- [Robin Hobb](https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/robin-hobb/index.md): The Alaska-raised writer who, after a critically admired but modest career as Megan Lindholm, became Robin Hobb in 1995 and wrote the Farseer books, epic fantasy told from inside o
- [Roger Zelazny](https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/roger-zelazny/index.md): A poet-turned-novelist who worked for Social Security by day, won Hugos by night, and wrote The Chronicles of Amber — a multiverse of Shadow worlds that inspired Gygax's Appendix N
- [Roy Trubshaw](https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/roy-trubshaw/index.md): The University of Essex student who, in the autumn of 1978, wrote the first multi-user dungeon on a DEC-10, naming it MUD in tribute to the Dungeon version of Zork and opening the 
- [Rusty Rutherford](https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/rusty-rutherford/index.md): The University of Illinois programmer who, a few months after discovering Dungeons & Dragons, hid a one-level dungeon in a spare PLATO file slot called pedit5 and made one of the v
- [Sandy Petersen](https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/sandy-petersen/index.md): The zoology student turned designer who brought H. P. Lovecraft's mythos to roleplaying with Call of Cthulhu (1981), then built many of Doom's levels and co-designed Age of Empires
- [Sarah J. Maas](https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/sarah-j-maas/index.md): The New Yorker who began posting an assassin-Cinderella story online at sixteen and grew into the best-selling queen of romantasy with Throne of Glass, A Court of Thorns and Roses 
- [Satoshi Tajiri](https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/satoshi-tajiri/index.md): The boy the neighborhood called "Dr. Bug," who turned insect collecting and the Game Boy link cable into Pokémon, the monster-catching RPG behind one of the world's most lucrative 
- [Shigeru Miyamoto](https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/shigeru-miyamoto/index.md): Nintendo's master designer, who turned boyhood explorations of the Kyoto countryside into The Legend of Zelda and shaped the action RPG while professing a dislike of stats-driven R
- [Shouzou Kaga](https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/shouzou-kaga/index.md): The Intelligent Systems designer who fused war games with role-playing to create Fire Emblem, gave its soldiers permanent deaths worth mourning, and later went his own way with Tea
- [Sir Thomas Malory](https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/thomas-malory/index.md): A 'knight prisoner' of the Wars of the Roses who gathered the sprawling French Arthurian romances into Le Morte d'Arthur, the book every later Camelot — from Tennyson to Pendragon 
- [Snorri Sturluson](https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/snorri-sturluson/index.md): The Icelandic chieftain, poet and lawspeaker whose Prose Edda preserved the Norse gods, dwarves and Ragnarök for Tolkien, D&D and every game that ever sent a hero to Valhalla.
- [Starr Long](https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/starr-long/index.md): The theater-trained game tester who rose at Origin Systems to direct Ultima Online, took the in-game name Lord Blackthorn, and spent decades as Richard Garriott's producing partner
- [Stephan Michael Sechi](https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/stephan-michael-sechi/index.md): A musician turned game designer who co-founded Bard Games on $600 a partner, built the antediluvian Atlantean Trilogy, then gave the hobby Talislanta, a Vance-haunted world without
- [Stephen Baker](https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/stephen-baker/index.md): A Games Workshop alumnus who moved to Milton Bradley and designed HeroQuest, the 1989 box of plastic heroes and monsters that put the dungeon crawl on toy-shop shelves, then Space 
- [Stephen R. Donaldson](https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/stephen-r-donaldson/index.md): Creator of Thomas Covenant, a bitter, leprous unbeliever transported to a fantasy Land he refuses to accept, whose ten-novel chronicle made 1970s epic fantasy darker, stranger and 
- [Steve Jackson](https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/steve-jackson-uk/index.md): The British co-founder of Games Workshop who, with Ian Livingstone, created Fighting Fantasy and wrote The Citadel of Chaos, Creature of Havoc and the four-part Sorcery! epic.
- [Steve Jackson](https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/steve-jackson-us/index.md): The Texas designer of Ogre, Melee and The Fantasy Trip who founded Steve Jackson Games, created GURPS and Munchkin, and won a landmark free-speech case against the U.S. Secret Serv
- [Steve Perrin](https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/steve-perrin/index.md): The Bay Area medievalist and lead designer of RuneQuest (1978), whose skill-based percentile system became the engine of Chaosium's games from Call of Cthulhu to Stormbringer.
- [Steven Erikson](https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/steven-erikson/index.md): Canadian archaeologist whose ten-volume Malazan Book of the Fallen grew out of an AD&D and GURPS campaign run with his friend Ian Cameron Esslemont, and became epic fantasy's most 
- [Susan Cooper](https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/susan-cooper/index.md): A former Sunday Times reporter who heard Tolkien lecture at Oxford and went on to write The Dark Is Rising, five books in which the Old Ones, Arthurian legend and Welsh myth wake i
- [Susanna Clarke](https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/susanna-clarke/index.md): The cookbook editor who spent ten years of early mornings writing Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, a footnoted Regency epic of English magic that won the Hugo, and later Piranesi, a 
- [Swen Vincke](https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/swen-vincke/index.md): The Ghent computer-science graduate who founded Larian Studios in 1996, spent two decades on the Divinity games, and then led Baldur's Gate 3 to a clean sweep of the year's biggest
- [T. H. White](https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/t-h-white/index.md): A lonely, brilliant schoolmaster and falconer who retold Malory as The Once and Future King — giving the world Wart, a befuddled Merlyn who lives backward in time, and the musical 
- [Tad Williams](https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/tad-williams/index.md): Author of Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn, the doorstop trilogy that showed George R. R. Martin what epic fantasy could still do, and of Otherland, a four-volume saga set inside virtual 
- [Tarn Adams](https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/tarn-adams/index.md): The Stanford-trained mathematician who quit academia to spend his life, with his brother Zach, on Dwarf Fortress, a procedurally generated fantasy that simulates everything from wo
- [Terry Brooks](https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/terry-brooks/index.md): The Illinois lawyer whose Tolkien-shaped debut, The Sword of Shannara, launched Del Rey Books in 1977 and proved that epic fantasy could be a mass-market genre rather than a one-bo
- [Terry Pratchett](https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/terry-pratchett/index.md): The satirist who put a flat world on four elephants and a turtle, then used it for 41 Discworld novels that skewered sword and sorcery, then everything else, selling more than 100 
- [The Brothers Hildebrandt](https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/the-brothers-hildebrandt/index.md): Twin painters from Detroit whose glowing, storybook Tolkien calendars of the 1970s showed a generation what Middle-earth looked like, and who painted Star Wars in thirty-six hours.
- [Todd Howard](https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/todd-howard/index.md): The Pennsylvania business major who talked his way into Bethesda in 1994 and went on to lead Morrowind, Oblivion, Skyrim and Fallout, making the vast open-world RPG a mass-market b
- [Tom Moldvay](https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/tom-moldvay/index.md): The TSR designer who rewrote the D&D Basic Set in 1981 and co-wrote The Isle of Dread and Castle Amber, some of the most widely played adventures of the D&D boom.
- [Tracy Hickman](https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/tracy-hickman/index.md): The Utah designer who co-wrote the gothic D&D module Ravenloft with his wife Laura and, with Margaret Weis, turned Dragonlance into a bestselling saga of novels and adventures.
- [Ursula K. Le Guin](https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/ursula-k-le-guin/index.md): An anthropologist's daughter who sent a boy named Ged to a school for wizards in 1968 and made true names, balance and the shadow within into the deepest magic in fantasy.
- [Vincent Baker](https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/vincent-baker/index.md): The indie designer and Forge theorist behind Dogs in the Vineyard and, with Meguey Baker, Apocalypse World, whose 'moves' became Powered by the Apocalypse, the most imitated RPG en
- [Will Crowther](https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/will-crowther/index.md): The BBN network engineer and Kentucky caver who turned his survey maps of Mammoth Cave into Colossal Cave Adventure, the text game that invented the adventure genre and seeded the 
- [William Goldman](https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/william-goldman/index.md): Two-time Oscar-winning screenwriter who hid a fairy tale inside a fake abridgment and gave the world The Princess Bride, first as a 1973 novel and then as Rob Reiner's 1987 cult fi
- [William Morris](https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/william-morris/index.md): Wallpaper designer, saga translator, socialist and printer who, in his last years, wrote the first fantasy novels set in wholly invented worlds — and handed the idea to Tolkien and
- [Yoshitaka Amano](https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/yoshitaka-amano/index.md): The Japanese painter whose ethereal, Art Nouveau-tinged watercolors gave Final Fantasy its dreamlike identity, and whose calligraphic logos still crown every numbered entry.
- [Yuji Horii](https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/yuji-horii/index.md): The Shōnen Jump writer who won an Enix programming contest, saw Wizardry at a Macworld show, and distilled the Western computer RPG into Dragon Quest, the game that taught Japan to

## Publishers and studios



- [Ace Books](https://www.lanternhall.org/houses/ace-books/index.md): The New York paperback house of back-to-back Ace Doubles whose unauthorized 1965 Lord of the Rings lit the Tolkien boom, and which later launched Thieves' World and, in 2024, Dunge
- [Avalon Hill](https://www.lanternhall.org/houses/avalon-hill/index.md): The Baltimore company that turned the wargame into a consumer product with hex maps and cardboard counters, and whose board Outdoor Survival supplied the wilderness maps of the fir
- [Ballantine Books](https://www.lanternhall.org/houses/ballantine-books/index.md): Ian and Betty Ballantine's New York paperback house that won the 1965 Tolkien war, invented the Adult Fantasy shelf and spun off Del Rey, turning a cult professor's romance into a 
- [Bantam Books](https://www.lanternhall.org/houses/bantam-books/index.md): The mass-market paperback giant that published every original Choose Your Own Adventure book, 184 titles that let a generation pick the page, and later launched George R. R. Martin
- [Bard Games](https://www.lanternhall.org/houses/bard-games/index.md): A tiny company started by three friends with $600 apiece that turned house-ruled D&D into the Compleat books and the Atlantean Trilogy, then gave the hobby Talislanta.
- [Bethesda Softworks](https://www.lanternhall.org/houses/bethesda-softworks/index.md): A Maryland sports-game shop that stumbled into Tamriel: Bethesda turned The Elder Scrolls into the defining open-world fantasy RPG series, from Arena's endless dungeons to Skyrim's
- [BioWare](https://www.lanternhall.org/houses/bioware/index.md): Three doctors in Edmonton built the Infinity Engine, revived AD&D on the PC with Baldur's Gate, and made the companion-driven story RPG the defining Western form for two decades.
- [Black Isle Studios](https://www.lanternhall.org/houses/black-isle-studios/index.md): Interplay's in-house RPG division, named for a Scottish peninsula, which made Fallout 2, Planescape: Torment and Icewind Dale and put its name on BioWare's Baldur's Gate games.
- [Blizzard Entertainment](https://www.lanternhall.org/houses/blizzard-entertainment/index.md): Three UCLA graduates' port shop that became the house of Warcraft and Diablo, and then built World of Warcraft, the online fantasy world that took the MMORPG mainstream.
- [CD Projekt / CD Projekt Red](https://www.lanternhall.org/houses/cd-projekt-red/index.md): Two Warsaw friends who started out reselling imported games built the company that turned Andrzej Sapkowski's Witcher into one of the most acclaimed RPG series ever made.
- [Cephalofair Games](https://www.lanternhall.org/houses/cephalofair-games/index.md): Isaac Childres's Indiana publisher whose crowdfunded Gloomhaven, a colossal box of cooperative campaign dungeon crawling, spent more than five years as the top-rated game on BoardG
- [Chaosium](https://www.lanternhall.org/houses/chaosium/index.md): Greg Stafford's Bay Area 'house of chaos' that gave the hobby RuneQuest, the percentile Basic Role-Playing system, Call of Cthulhu and Pendragon, and survived half a century of nea
- [Del Rey Books](https://www.lanternhall.org/houses/del-rey-books/index.md): Judy-Lynn and Lester del Rey's Ballantine imprint, launched in 1977 with The Sword of Shannara, which proved that Tolkien's readers would buy long epic fantasy series by the millio
- [Electronic Arts](https://www.lanternhall.org/houses/electronic-arts/index.md): The publisher that sold games like rock albums, put The Bard's Tale in stores, then bought Origin, Westwood, Mythic and BioWare: EA owned a remarkable share of computer-RPG history
- [Enix](https://www.lanternhall.org/houses/enix/index.md): A real-estate advertising firm turned game publisher, Enix found its stars through a 1982 programming contest and used them to make Dragon Quest, the game that taught Japan to love
- [Fantasy Flight Games](https://www.lanternhall.org/houses/fantasy-flight-games/index.md): Christian Petersen's Minnesota publisher of lavish, component-heavy board games, from Twilight Imperium and Descent to licensed Star Wars and Lord of the Rings card games: a flagsh
- [FASA Corporation](https://www.lanternhall.org/houses/fasa/index.md): The Chicago company, named for a Marx Brothers joke, that built BattleTech's giant robots and Shadowrun's cyberpunk elves, then closed its doors in 2001 while still solvent.
- [Flying Buffalo](https://www.lanternhall.org/houses/flying-buffalo/index.md): Rick Loomis's Arizona company that turned play-by-mail wargaming into a business with a Raytheon minicomputer, then gave Tunnels & Trolls, the first rival to D&D, a home and invent
- [Free League Publishing (Fria Ligan)](https://www.lanternhall.org/houses/free-league/index.md): The Stockholm studio that grew from rescuing two Swedish RPGs in 2011 into a crowdfunding powerhouse behind Tales from the Loop, Forbidden Lands, Mörk Borg, Dragonbane and the seco
- [FromSoftware](https://www.lanternhall.org/houses/fromsoftware/index.md): A Tokyo business-software firm turned maker of cruel, beautiful dungeons: FromSoftware's Souls games made difficulty an art form and gave the RPG a new genre, the soulslike.
- [Game Freak](https://www.lanternhall.org/houses/game-freak/index.md): A hand-stapled gaming fanzine that became a studio, Game Freak turned Satoshi Tajiri's boyhood insect collecting into Pokémon, the monster-catching RPG that conquered the world.
- [Games Workshop](https://www.lanternhall.org/houses/games-workshop/index.md): Three friends' London mail-order business that imported D&D to Britain, launched White Dwarf and Fighting Fantasy, then built Warhammer into a miniatures empire now worth a place i
- [George Allen & Unwin](https://www.lanternhall.org/houses/george-allen-and-unwin/index.md): The London house that took The Hobbit on a ten-year-old's recommendation, gambled on The Lord of the Rings with a profit-sharing deal, and published Tolkien for more than half a ce
- [Interplay Productions](https://www.lanternhall.org/houses/interplay/index.md): The Irvine house that gave the world The Bard's Tale, Wasteland and Fallout, then published Baldur's Gate and Planescape: Torment before collapsing under debt in the early 2000s.
- [Iron Crown Enterprises](https://www.lanternhall.org/houses/iron-crown-enterprises/index.md): A Charlottesville company named after Morgoth's crown that built the crunchy Rolemaster system from college house rules and held the Middle-earth roleplaying license from 1982 unti
- [Jagex](https://www.lanternhall.org/houses/jagex/index.md): The Cambridge studio behind RuneScape, the browser-based world of Gielinor that gave a generation of children their first MMO and, reborn as Old School RuneScape, still thrives a q
- [Larian Studios](https://www.lanternhall.org/houses/larian-studios/index.md): A stubborn Belgian independent that spent two decades making Divinity games on a shoestring, crowdfunded its way to Original Sin, and then made Baldur's Gate 3, the RPG that conque
- [Milton Bradley Company](https://www.lanternhall.org/houses/milton-bradley/index.md): America's great family-game maker, from The Checkered Game of Life in 1860 to Twister and Simon, which in 1989 teamed with Games Workshop to put a plastic dungeon in toy stores wit
- [Mythic Entertainment](https://www.lanternhall.org/houses/mythic-entertainment/index.md): A small Virginia online-games shop that turned Arthur, Celtic myth and Norse saga into three warring realms: Mythic's Dark Age of Camelot made realm-versus-realm war the heart of a
- [NCSoft](https://www.lanternhall.org/houses/ncsoft/index.md): The Seoul-born publisher whose Lineage filled Korea's PC bangs with castle sieges, then went west to buy ArenaNet and Richard Garriott's team and become one of the world's great MM
- [New World Computing](https://www.lanternhall.org/houses/new-world-computing/index.md): Jon Van Caneghem's Southern California studio, which grew from a one-man Apple II epic into the Might and Magic role-playing saga and the turn-based strategy phenomenon Heroes of M
- [Nihon Falcom](https://www.lanternhall.org/houses/nihon-falcom/index.md): A small Tokyo-suburb studio that helped invent the action RPG with Dragon Slayer, then spent four decades making Ys and the Trails saga for a devoted audience.
- [Nintendo](https://www.lanternhall.org/houses/nintendo/index.md): A Kyoto playing-card maker turned console giant, Nintendo built the machines the Japanese RPG grew up on and published Zelda, Fire Emblem and Pokémon.
- [Obsidian Entertainment](https://www.lanternhall.org/houses/obsidian-entertainment/index.md): The Black Isle diaspora's second act: an Irvine studio that wrote sequels for other people's worlds, crowdfunded Pillars of Eternity, and became the conscience of the talky, reacti
- [Origin Systems](https://www.lanternhall.org/houses/origin-systems/index.md): The Garriott family's Texas studio, born in a Houston garage in 1983, that made the Ultima series and Wing Commander, gave the CRPG a conscience with the Avatar, and launched Ultim
- [Paizo](https://www.lanternhall.org/houses/paizo/index.md): The Seattle-area company that took over Dragon and Dungeon magazines in 2002, lost them in 2007, and answered by building Pathfinder, the game that kept D&D 3.5 alive and outsold D
- [Palladium Books](https://www.lanternhall.org/houses/palladium-books/index.md): Kevin Siembieda's Detroit-born publisher whose 'Megaversal' rules tie together fantasy, superheroes, mutant turtles and Rifts, a post-apocalyptic Earth where every genre pours thro
- [Puffin Books](https://www.lanternhall.org/houses/puffin-books/index.md): Penguin's children's imprint, born in 1940, which put Narnia and The Hobbit into British children's pockets and in 1982 published The Warlock of Firetop Mountain, launching Fightin
- [Sega](https://www.lanternhall.org/houses/sega/index.md): The arcade and console maker that answered Dragon Quest with Phantasy Star, put the first successful online RPG on a console, and now owns Atlus, home of Persona.
- [Sierra On-Line](https://www.lanternhall.org/houses/sierra-on-line/index.md): Ken and Roberta Williams's company in the California foothills that invented the graphical adventure, built the fairy-tale kingdom of Daventry in King's Quest and published Ultima 
- [Sir-Tech Software](https://www.lanternhall.org/houses/sir-tech/index.md): The small family publisher on the New York–Canada border that shipped Wizardry in 1981, set the template for the party-based dungeon crawl, and saw its creation become a legend in 
- [Sony Online Entertainment](https://www.lanternhall.org/houses/sony-online-entertainment/index.md): Verant Interactive built EverQuest, the dungeon-crawling online world players nicknamed EverCrack; as Sony Online Entertainment and then Daybreak, it has kept Norrath running for m
- [Square / Square Enix](https://www.lanternhall.org/houses/square/index.md): The Tokyo studio that bet its survival on a game called Final Fantasy, then spent two decades reinventing the Japanese RPG before merging with its great rival Enix in 2003.
- [Steve Jackson Games](https://www.lanternhall.org/houses/steve-jackson-games/index.md): The Austin company behind pocket-sized Ogre and Car Wars, the do-everything GURPS, the gamer parody Munchkin, and a 1990 Secret Service raid that helped create the Electronic Front
- [Strategic Simulations, Inc. (SSI)](https://www.lanternhall.org/houses/strategic-simulations-inc/index.md): A Silicon Valley wargame publisher that won TSR's Advanced Dungeons & Dragons license in 1987 and turned it into the Gold Box, the most faithful D&D computer games of their era.
- [Tor Books](https://www.lanternhall.org/houses/tor-books/index.md): Tom Doherty's New York house, founded in 1980, that bet on Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time and Brandon Sanderson's Cosmere and became America's largest science fiction and fantasy pu
- [TSR, Inc.](https://www.lanternhall.org/houses/tsr/index.md): The Lake Geneva basement partnership that printed 1,000 copies of Dungeons & Dragons in 1974, grew into a $40-million-a-year publisher, and collapsed under its own debts in 1997.
- [Turbine](https://www.lanternhall.org/houses/turbine/index.md): The Boston-area studio that built Asheron's Call, put Dungeons & Dragons and then Middle-earth itself online, and kept The Lord of the Rings Online alive long enough to outlast its
- [Westwood Studios](https://www.lanternhall.org/houses/westwood-studios/index.md): A Las Vegas studio that made SSI's real-time D&D dungeon crawler Eye of the Beholder and its own Lands of Lore before inventing the modern real-time strategy game with Dune II and 
- [White Wolf Publishing](https://www.lanternhall.org/houses/white-wolf/index.md): The 1991 merger of a magazine and a game studio that launched Vampire: The Masquerade and the World of Darkness, made gothic-punk horror the hottest thing in 1990s gaming, and pull
- [Wizards of the Coast](https://www.lanternhall.org/houses/wizards-of-the-coast/index.md): A basement start-up near Seattle that invented the collectible card game with Magic, bought the bankrupt-bound TSR in 1997, and has owned Dungeons & Dragons ever since.

## Culture and events

Conventions, magazines, controversies and online-world incidents.

- ["Frodo Lives!"](https://www.lanternhall.org/culture/frodo-lives/index.md): 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.
- [Appendix N](https://www.lanternhall.org/culture/appendix-n/index.md): 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 syllab
- [BBS Door Games](https://www.lanternhall.org/culture/bbs-door-games/index.md): 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 
- [BlizzCon](https://www.lanternhall.org/culture/blizzcon/index.md): 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 final
- [Challenge Runs, Speedruns & the Souls Community](https://www.lanternhall.org/culture/speedrunning-and-challenge-runs/index.md): 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 permadeat
- [Critical Role](https://www.lanternhall.org/culture/critical-role/index.md): 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 Kickstar
- [Crowdfunding & the Kickstarter Era](https://www.lanternhall.org/culture/crowdfunding-tabletop/index.md): 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 
- [Dagorhir](https://www.lanternhall.org/culture/dagorhir/index.md): 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 record
- [Dragon Con](https://www.lanternhall.org/culture/dragon-con/index.md): 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 i
- [Gen Con](https://www.lanternhall.org/culture/gen-con/index.md): 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: T
- [Leeroy Jenkins](https://www.lanternhall.org/culture/leeroy-jenkins/index.md): 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 b
- [Mazes and Monsters](https://www.lanternhall.org/culture/mazes-and-monsters/index.md): 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 rolepl
- [Origins Game Fair](https://www.lanternhall.org/culture/origins-game-fair/index.md): 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, s
- [PLATO](https://www.lanternhall.org/culture/plato-system/index.md): 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-pla
- [Renaissance Faires](https://www.lanternhall.org/culture/renaissance-faires/index.md): 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 cos
- [Society for Creative Anachronism](https://www.lanternhall.org/culture/society-for-creative-anachronism/index.md): 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 the
- [The Ace Paperback Affair](https://www.lanternhall.org/culture/the-ace-paperback-affair/index.md): 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.
- [The Actual-Play Boom](https://www.lanternhall.org/culture/actual-play-boom/index.md): 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 Assassination of Lord British](https://www.lanternhall.org/culture/lord-british-assassination/index.md): 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 le
- [The Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series](https://www.lanternhall.org/culture/ballantine-adult-fantasy/index.md): 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 ancest
- [The Corrupted Blood Incident](https://www.lanternhall.org/culture/corrupted-blood-incident/index.md): 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 accide
- [The Gygax–Arneson Disputes](https://www.lanternhall.org/culture/the-gygax-arneson-dispute/index.md): 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
- [The Inklings](https://www.lanternhall.org/culture/the-inklings/index.md): 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.
- [The Mythopoeic Society](https://www.lanternhall.org/culture/mythopoeic-society/index.md): 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 seate
- [The Oblivion ESRB Re-rating](https://www.lanternhall.org/culture/oblivion-rerating/index.md): 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 nerv
- [The Open Game License](https://www.lanternhall.org/culture/open-game-license/index.md): 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 large
- [The Satanic Panic & D&D](https://www.lanternhall.org/culture/satanic-panic/index.md): 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 ser
- [The Strategic Review & Dragon](https://www.lanternhall.org/culture/dragon-magazine/index.md): 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 fir
- [The Tolkien Rights Saga](https://www.lanternhall.org/culture/tolkien-rights-saga/index.md): 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 fol
- [The Tolkien Society](https://www.lanternhall.org/culture/the-tolkien-society/index.md): 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 t
- [Virtual Economies, Gold Farming & the GDP of Norrath](https://www.lanternhall.org/culture/virtual-economies/index.md): 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 l
- [Virtual Tabletops](https://www.lanternhall.org/culture/virtual-tabletops/index.md): 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 ta
- [Weird Tales](https://www.lanternhall.org/culture/weird-tales/index.md): "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.
- [White Dwarf](https://www.lanternhall.org/culture/white-dwarf/index.md): 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 Fo
- [World Fantasy Convention & Award](https://www.lanternhall.org/culture/world-fantasy-convention/index.md): 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 g

## Bestiary

Creatures traced from myth into fiction and games.

- [Balrog / Balor](https://www.lanternhall.org/bestiary/balrog/index.md): Tolkien's fire-demon of shadow and flame stopped Gandalf on the Bridge of Khazad-dûm, fought Blackmoor's first heroes, and survived a copyright retreat to become D&D's balor, lord 
- [Basilisk](https://www.lanternhall.org/bestiary/basilisk/index.md): The 'little king' of serpents whose glance kills: Pliny's venomous snake from Cyrene, hatched by medieval cockerels, turned into D&D's petrifying lizard and Harry Potter's monster 
- [Beholder](https://www.lanternhall.org/bestiary/beholder/index.md): A floating orb of flesh with one great central eye, a fanged maw and a crown of spell-casting eyestalks: D&D's most recognizable original monster, dreamed up by a player at Gygax's
- [Chocobo](https://www.lanternhall.org/bestiary/chocobo/index.md): A big, flightless yellow bird that goes 'kweh': Koichi Ishii's lunch-break sketch for Final Fantasy II became the series' steed, racer, summon, roguelike hero and best-loved mascot
- [Dragon](https://www.lanternhall.org/bestiary/dragon/index.md): From a Mesopotamian 'furious serpent' to Smaug on his gold and the chromatic wyrms of D&D, the dragon is the oldest and greatest monster in the archive — and the second half of the
- [Dwarf](https://www.lanternhall.org/bestiary/dwarf/index.md): Norse smiths who forged Thor's hammer, Grimm's seven miners, Tolkien's thirteen gold-hungry exiles: the bearded, ale-loving, axe-wielding dwarf of every game descends from one list
- [Elf](https://www.lanternhall.org/bestiary/elf/index.md): Germanic spirits of disease and beauty, shrunk into flower-fairies by Shakespeare, restored to terrible grandeur by Dunsany, Anderson and Tolkien — and then handed a bow and a char
- [Gelatinous Cube](https://www.lanternhall.org/bestiary/gelatinous-cube/index.md): A perfectly transparent ten-foot block of acidic jelly that slides down dungeon corridors digesting everything organic: the monster that only makes sense in a D&D dungeon.
- [Ghoul](https://www.lanternhall.org/bestiary/ghoul/index.md): A shape-shifting desert demon of Arabian lore that lured travelers to their deaths became, via the Arabian Nights, Lovecraft and D&D, the paralyzing corpse-eater lurking in every f
- [Giant](https://www.lanternhall.org/bestiary/giant/index.md): Gods' enemies in Greek and Norse myth, fairy-tale ogres who smell the blood of an Englishman, and D&D's ladder of hill, frost, fire, cloud and storm giants: the giant is the oldest
- [Goblin](https://www.lanternhall.org/bestiary/goblin/index.md): A Norman demon, a Victorian fruit-seller, George MacDonald's tunnelers and Tolkien's Misty Mountain raiders: the goblin is the small, sly monster every adventure meets first.
- [Griffin](https://www.lanternhall.org/bestiary/griffin/index.md): Lion's body, eagle's head and wings: the gold-guarding sentinel of Scythian steppes and Greek temples, heraldry's favorite beast, and the aerial taxi of World of Warcraft.
- [Halfling](https://www.lanternhall.org/bestiary/halfling/index.md): Tolkien's hobbit, filed off by lawyers into D&D's halfling: the small, lucky, homebody adventurer who has been the underestimated member of the party since 1974.
- [Kobold](https://www.lanternhall.org/bestiary/kobold/index.md): A German house spirit that swapped silver for worthless ore gave its name to cobalt, then became D&D's weakest foe — until trap-laying tribes and a dragon-worshipping makeover turn
- [Kraken](https://www.lanternhall.org/bestiary/kraken/index.md): The sea monster so vast that sailors mistook it for islands: a Norwegian fishermen's tale made famous in 1753, confirmed in part by the giant squid, and summoned ever since with 'R
- [Lich](https://www.lanternhall.org/bestiary/lich/index.md): An undead wizard who hid its soul in a box to cheat death: the lich is one of the few great fantasy monsters invented by Dungeons & Dragons itself, assembled from pulp sorcerers an
- [Mimic](https://www.lanternhall.org/bestiary/mimic/index.md): The treasure chest that bites back: a shapeshifting predator that disguises itself as a door, a column or a pile of loot, and taught generations of players never to trust a box.
- [Mind Flayer (Illithid)](https://www.lanternhall.org/bestiary/mind-flayer/index.md): A robed, purple-skinned humanoid with an octopus for a face, which eats brains and blasts minds: D&D's Lovecraftian horror, and the parasite at the heart of Baldur's Gate 3.
- [Minotaur](https://www.lanternhall.org/bestiary/minotaur/index.md): The bull-headed son of Pasiphaë, fed on Athenian youths in Daedalus's Labyrinth until Theseus came with Ariadne's thread — and the original monster at the heart of a maze.
- [Orc](https://www.lanternhall.org/bestiary/orc/index.md): An Old English word for a demon, turned by Tolkien into the Dark Lord's inexhaustible soldiery, then turned green, tusked and eventually heroic by D&D, Warhammer and Warcraft.
- [Owlbear](https://www.lanternhall.org/bestiary/owlbear/index.md): Half bear, half owl and entirely a product of the gaming table: a dime-store toy that Gary Gygax turned into one of D&D's most beloved monsters, present in every edition since 1975
- [Phoenix](https://www.lanternhall.org/bestiary/phoenix/index.md): The bird that dies and is born again: Herodotus's once-in-500-years visitor to Heliopolis, Christian symbol of resurrection, Dumbledore's Fawkes, and the feather that revives a fal
- [Rust Monster](https://www.lanternhall.org/bestiary/rust-monster/index.md): It barely fights and hardly hurts, and players fear it more than dragons: a propeller-tailed bug that turns a knight's magic sword and armor to rust with a touch of its antennae.
- [Slime](https://www.lanternhall.org/bestiary/slime/index.md): From Lovecraft's shoggoths and The Blob to D&D's acid-dripping oozes and Dragon Quest's grinning blue teardrop: the creature that went from dungeon horror to the most beloved weakl
- [Tarrasque](https://www.lanternhall.org/bestiary/tarrasque/index.md): Fifty feet tall, seventy long, and alive only to eat and destroy: D&D's apocalypse on legs, descended from a dragon that a saint once led on her girdle through a small town in Prov
- [Treant](https://www.lanternhall.org/bestiary/treant/index.md): Tolkien's slow, shepherding Ents walked out of Fangorn and into Chainmail and D&D, where a legal letter turned them into treants — the name every fantasy game has used for a walkin
- [Troll](https://www.lanternhall.org/bestiary/troll/index.md): A Norse word for almost anything uncanny, a Norwegian giant that bursts in sunlight, Tolkien's stone-trolls — and, thanks to Poul Anderson, the lanky green regenerator that taught 
- [Unicorn](https://www.lanternhall.org/bestiary/unicorn/index.md): A one-horned wild ass in a Greek traveler's report became Christ's own emblem, then a narwhal-tusk swindle, a Scottish royal supporter, a novel's heroine and a maiden-only mount in
- [Vampire](https://www.lanternhall.org/bestiary/vampire/index.md): A Serbian peasant's exhumed corpse, a Byronic lord and a Transylvanian count made the vampire; Dungeons & Dragons gave it level drain, Ravenloft gave it a tragic castle, and White 
- [Werewolf](https://www.lanternhall.org/bestiary/werewolf/index.md): From a shepherd cursed by Ishtar and a Greek king turned wolf at Zeus's table to Hollywood's silver bullet and D&D's contagious lycanthropy, the werewolf is humanity's oldest story

## Lexicon

Terms of play, defined with their origins.

- [Ability scores](https://www.lanternhall.org/lexicon/ability-scores/index.md): Numbers rating a character's basic capacities. D&D's six (Strength, Intelligence, Wisdom, Dexterity, Constitution and Charisma), originally rolled on three six-sided dice each, bec
- [Active Time Battle](https://www.lanternhall.org/lexicon/active-time-battle/index.md): Square's hybrid combat system in which each character's gauge fills in real time, and the player must choose actions as turns come up while enemies keep acting. It added urgency to
- [Adventure module](https://www.lanternhall.org/lexicon/adventure-module/index.md): A prewritten adventure published for game masters to run: maps, room keys, monsters, treasure and a hook to get the party moving. Classic modules such as The Keep on the Borderland
- [Aggro](https://www.lanternhall.org/lexicon/aggro/index.md): Short for aggravation or aggression: an enemy's hostile attention. Online RPGs track which player each monster most wants to attack, and managing aggro, keeping it on the tank and 
- [Alignment](https://www.lanternhall.org/lexicon/alignment/index.md): A character's moral and ethical outlook, expressed on D&D's grid of Law versus Chaos and Good versus Evil, from Lawful Good to Chaotic Evil. Endlessly debated at the table, the nin
- [Armor Class](https://www.lanternhall.org/lexicon/armor-class/index.md): A rating of how hard a target is to hit, combining armor, shield and agility into one number. In early D&D lower was better (plate and shield was AC 2), which made attack math noto
- [Bleed](https://www.lanternhall.org/lexicon/bleed/index.md): Emotional spillover between player and character: feelings from the game carried into real life, or real feelings shaping play. Bleed can be powerful and deliberate, especially in 
- [Blobber](https://www.lanternhall.org/lexicon/blobber/index.md): A first-person dungeon crawler in which the whole party moves around the grid as a single unit, or blob. Wizardry, The Bard's Tale, Might and Magic and Dungeon Master are classic b
- [Boffer](https://www.lanternhall.org/lexicon/boffer/index.md): A padded foam weapon used for safe, full-contact combat in live-action games. American battle games such as Dagorhir and Amtgard built whole combat systems on boffers, with hits co
- [Boss](https://www.lanternhall.org/lexicon/boss/index.md): An especially powerful enemy that caps a level, dungeon or story arc. Boss fights test everything the player has learned and are often the most memorable moments in a game.
- [Buff & debuff](https://www.lanternhall.org/lexicon/buff-and-debuff/index.md): A buff is a temporary effect that strengthens a character; a debuff weakens one. As a verb, buff (and its opposite, Nerf) also describes developers strengthening or weakening somet
- [Campaign setting](https://www.lanternhall.org/lexicon/campaign-setting/index.md): A fictional world packaged for play, with maps, histories, gods and factions that a group can adventure in over many sessions. Published settings such as Greyhawk, the Forgotten Re
- [Character class](https://www.lanternhall.org/lexicon/character-class/index.md): A package of abilities that defines what a character does, such as fighter, wizard, cleric or thief. Classes make roles distinct and parties interdependent, and they became a backb
- [Conlang](https://www.lanternhall.org/lexicon/conlang/index.md): A language invented deliberately, with its own sounds, grammar and vocabulary, rather than evolved naturally. Tolkien built Middle-earth partly as a home for his Elvish languages; 
- [Cooldown](https://www.lanternhall.org/lexicon/cooldown/index.md): A waiting period after using an ability before it can be used again. Cooldowns replaced or supplemented Mana as the main limit on powers in MMORPGs and action games, turning combat
- [Cosplay](https://www.lanternhall.org/lexicon/cosplay/index.md): Dressing as a specific character from fiction, games, comics or anime, often with elaborate handmade costumes and performance. A fixture of Gen Con, Dragon Con and every major fan 
- [Critical hit](https://www.lanternhall.org/lexicon/critical-hit/index.md): An exceptional success, typically a natural 20 on the d20, that deals extra damage or produces a spectacular result; its opposite, the fumble or natural 1, is a comic disaster. Cri
- [Crunch and fluff](https://www.lanternhall.org/lexicon/crunch-and-fluff/index.md): Gamer shorthand for a book's two kinds of content: crunch is rules and statistics, fluff is setting, story and atmosphere. A crunchy game has heavy, detailed mechanics.
- [Dragon kill points](https://www.lanternhall.org/lexicon/dkp/index.md): A points system raiding guilds use to share scarce boss loot fairly: members earn points for attendance and spend them to bid on items. It turned guilds into small economies with t
- [Dungeon crawl](https://www.lanternhall.org/lexicon/dungeon-crawl/index.md): An adventure in which characters explore a confined labyrinth of rooms and corridors, fighting monsters, avoiding traps, solving puzzles and hauling out treasure. It is the oldest 
- [Eucatastrophe](https://www.lanternhall.org/lexicon/eucatastrophe/index.md): The sudden, joyous turn in a story when all seems lost, such as the eagles' arrival or the Ring's destruction. Tolkien considered it the highest function of fairy-story: a glimpse 
- [Experience points](https://www.lanternhall.org/lexicon/experience-points/index.md): Points awarded for defeating foes, finding treasure or achieving goals, which accumulate until a character gains a level and becomes more powerful. In original D&D much of a charac
- [Fantasy heartbreaker](https://www.lanternhall.org/lexicon/fantasy-heartbreaker/index.md): A lovingly made independent fantasy RPG that contains genuinely good ideas but is so close to D&D in its assumptions that it has little chance of finding an audience. The phrase is
- [Fix-up](https://www.lanternhall.org/lexicon/fix-up/index.md): A novel stitched together from previously published short stories, revised to connect them. Many fantasy and science-fiction books of the pulp and paperback eras began this way.
- [Fudging](https://www.lanternhall.org/lexicon/fudging/index.md): When a Game Master secretly alters a die roll or a monster's statistics, usually to spare the party or keep the story on course. Whether it is kindness or cheating is one of the ho
- [Gacha](https://www.lanternhall.org/lexicon/gacha/index.md): A monetization mechanic, named after Japanese capsule-toy vending machines, in which players spend currency on random draws for characters or items. It became central to Japanese m
- [Game Master](https://www.lanternhall.org/lexicon/game-master/index.md): The player who runs the game: describing the world, voicing every Non-player character, adjudicating rules and deciding what the dice mean. Different games give the role different 
- [GM screen](https://www.lanternhall.org/lexicon/gm-screen/index.md): A folding cardboard screen that hides the Game Master's maps and dice from the players while printing the most-used tables on the inside. It is both a practical tool and a symbol o
- [GNS theory](https://www.lanternhall.org/lexicon/gns-theory/index.md): Ron Edwards's model of roleplaying that sorts players' priorities into Gamism (overcoming challenges), Narrativism (creating meaningful story) and Simulationism (exploring a consis
- [Gold farming](https://www.lanternhall.org/lexicon/gold-farming/index.md): Playing an online game to collect in-game currency for sale to other players for real money. It became an industry in the 2000s, often in workshops employing low-paid players, and 
- [Griefing](https://www.lanternhall.org/lexicon/griefing/index.md): Deliberately harassing other players in ways the game does not intend, such as killing newcomers, stealing kills, blocking doorways or destroying player-built structures, for the p
- [Grinding](https://www.lanternhall.org/lexicon/grinding/index.md): Repeating the same fights or tasks to accumulate Experience points, gold or items. Sometimes a design choice and sometimes a flaw, grinding was notorious in early JRPGs and MMORPGs
- [Grognard](https://www.lanternhall.org/lexicon/grognard/index.md): A veteran gamer devoted to older games and styles, often wargames or early editions of D&D, and skeptical of newer ones. Used with both affection and exasperation.
- [Gygaxian naturalism](https://www.lanternhall.org/lexicon/gygaxian-naturalism/index.md): The habit, seen in Gary Gygax's early rulebooks, of treating monsters as parts of a functioning ecology, with lairs, young, diets and numbers appearing, rather than as isolated com
- [Hard & soft magic systems](https://www.lanternhall.org/lexicon/magic-system/index.md): A hard magic system follows explicit rules and costs that readers understand, so characters can solve problems with it; soft magic stays mysterious and wondrous, like Gandalf's. Ga
- [Hexcrawl](https://www.lanternhall.org/lexicon/hexcrawl/index.md): A wilderness adventure played on a map divided into hexagons, each holding terrain and perhaps a lair, ruin, village or dungeon. Players choose where to travel and the referee reve
- [Hit points](https://www.lanternhall.org/lexicon/hit-points/index.md): A number measuring how much damage a character or creature can take before it is defeated. Attacks subtract hit points and rest or healing restores them, turning the drama of a fig
- [Homebrew](https://www.lanternhall.org/lexicon/homebrew/index.md): Rules, monsters, classes, settings or adventures made by players themselves rather than bought from a publisher. Homebrew is as old as the hobby, since early D&D practically requir
- [Initiative](https://www.lanternhall.org/lexicon/initiative/index.md): The procedure that decides who acts first in combat and in what order, usually by rolling dice and adding a speed bonus. Rolling initiative is the signal that a scene has turned in
- [Instanced dungeon](https://www.lanternhall.org/lexicon/instance/index.md): A copy of a dungeon or zone created separately for one group, so parties do not compete for the same monsters in a shared world. Instancing solved the problem of thousands of heroe
- [Invincibility frames](https://www.lanternhall.org/lexicon/invincibility-frames/index.md): A brief window, measured in animation frames, during which a character cannot be hurt, typically while dodging or rolling. Mastering the dodge-roll's i-frames is central to Soulsli
- [Isekai](https://www.lanternhall.org/lexicon/isekai/index.md): Japanese for another world: stories in which someone from our world is transported, reincarnated or summoned into a fantasy realm, often gaining special powers. A close cousin of P
- [Kiting](https://www.lanternhall.org/lexicon/kiting/index.md): Leading an enemy around while attacking it from range, staying just out of its reach, like a kite on a string. A staple tactic of ranged characters in MMORPGs and action RPGs.
- [Legacy game](https://www.lanternhall.org/lexicon/legacy-game/index.md): A board game that changes permanently as it is played, as players tear up cards, place stickers on the board and open sealed boxes, so that each copy tells its own campaign story. 
- [Level up](https://www.lanternhall.org/lexicon/level-up/index.md): Gaining a level once enough Experience points accumulate, improving a character's abilities in a single jump. The satisfying moment of leveling up, inherited from D&D, is one of th
- [Living campaign](https://www.lanternhall.org/lexicon/living-campaign/index.md): An organized-play format in which thousands of players run characters through a shared, persistent setting at conventions and game stores, with results carried from table to table.
- [Loot & loot tables](https://www.lanternhall.org/lexicon/loot/index.md): The treasure taken from defeated foes and explored rooms. A loot table is the list of possible rewards and their odds, a mechanism born in the random treasure tables of early D&D a
- [Loot box](https://www.lanternhall.org/lexicon/loot-box/index.md): A purchasable virtual container that yields random items. Loot boxes drew regulators' attention in several countries because of their resemblance to gambling.
- [Ludonarrative dissonance](https://www.lanternhall.org/lexicon/ludonarrative-dissonance/index.md): A conflict between what a game's story says and what its gameplay makes the player do, such as a gentle hero who must kill hundreds of enemies. The term is a portmanteau of ludolog
- [Mana](https://www.lanternhall.org/lexicon/mana/index.md): A pool of magical energy spent to cast spells and replenished by rest or potions, usually shown as a blue bar. It is the chief alternative to Vancian magic and made famous in card 
- [Meeple](https://www.lanternhall.org/lexicon/meeple/index.md): A small, flat, human-shaped wooden playing piece, now the unofficial mascot of hobby board gaming. The word is a contraction of my people.
- [Metagaming](https://www.lanternhall.org/lexicon/metagaming/index.md): Using out-of-character knowledge, such as a monster's statistics from the rulebook or what another player overheard, to guide a character who could not know it. In competitive game
- [Min-maxing](https://www.lanternhall.org/lexicon/min-maxing/index.md): Building a character to maximize strengths and minimize whatever the rules let you neglect, sometimes to absurd effect. Admired as system mastery by some players and derided as mun
- [Mob](https://www.lanternhall.org/lexicon/mob/index.md): A computer-controlled creature in an online game, especially a hostile one to be fought. Players talk of pulling, killing and farming mobs.
- [Monomyth](https://www.lanternhall.org/lexicon/monomyth/index.md): Joseph Campbell's pattern of the hero who leaves home, passes trials, wins a decisive victory and returns transformed. Folklorists criticize it as oversimplified, but it deeply inf
- [Monty Haul](https://www.lanternhall.org/lexicon/monty-haul/index.md): A campaign in which the Game Master hands out treasure, magic items and experience far too generously, until the characters become absurdly powerful. The name puns on Monty Hall, h
- [Moral panic](https://www.lanternhall.org/lexicon/moral-panic/index.md): A wave of public fear in which a group or activity is cast as a threat to society, with the danger exaggerated by media and campaigners. Fantasy games have been targets repeatedly,
- [Multiclassing](https://www.lanternhall.org/lexicon/multiclassing/index.md): Combining the abilities of more than one Character class in a single character. Early D&D reserved true multiclassing for demihumans such as elves and dwarves and allowed humans on
- [Murderhobo](https://www.lanternhall.org/lexicon/murderhobo/index.md): Joking description of adventurers as rootless wanderers who kill everything they meet and loot the bodies. It captures, and mocks, the default morality of the classic Dungeon crawl
- [MUSH](https://www.lanternhall.org/lexicon/mush/index.md): A text-based online world, descended from MUDs, focused on social play, collaborative storytelling and user-built content rather than combat. MUSHes hosted long-running roleplaying
- [Mythopoeia](https://www.lanternhall.org/lexicon/mythopoeia/index.md): The deliberate creation of a mythology within fiction: invented gods, cosmologies and legends that feel ancient. Tolkien's legendarium is the defining example, and the Mythopoeic S
- [Nerf](https://www.lanternhall.org/lexicon/nerf/index.md): To weaken an item, ability or character in a game update, usually for balance; the opposite of a buff. Players protest nerfs to their favorite builds as loudly as any policy change
- [Non-player character](https://www.lanternhall.org/lexicon/non-player-character/index.md): Any character not controlled by a player: the innkeeper, the villain, the hireling and the king, all voiced by the Game Master. The term passed into video games for computer-contro
- [NPC (meme)](https://www.lanternhall.org/lexicon/npc-meme/index.md): Internet slang, drawn from the gaming term Non-player character, for people accused of not thinking for themselves and repeating stock phrases like a scripted game character. The g
- [One-shot](https://www.lanternhall.org/lexicon/one-shot/index.md): A self-contained adventure designed to be played in a single session, common at conventions, for trying new systems and in Actual Play specials. Critical Role itself began as a bir
- [Permadeath](https://www.lanternhall.org/lexicon/permadeath/index.md): A rule under which a dead character is gone for good, with no reloading from a save. It is a defining trait of the Roguelikes, a feature of hardcore modes in games such as Diablo I
- [Planetary romance](https://www.lanternhall.org/lexicon/planetary-romance/index.md): Adventure fiction set on an exotic alien world, where swords, beasts and princesses mingle with strange science. Edgar Rice Burroughs's Mars books defined it, and Appendix N's list
- [Player character](https://www.lanternhall.org/lexicon/player-character/index.md): A character controlled by one of the players rather than by the Game Master. The shift from commanding armies to embodying a single persistent hero, who remembers, grows and can di
- [Player killer (PK)](https://www.lanternhall.org/lexicon/player-killer/index.md): A player who attacks and kills other players' characters, especially where the game allows it but most people would rather not. Unrestricted player killing in Ultima Online (1997) 
- [Polyhedral dice](https://www.lanternhall.org/lexicon/polyhedral-dice/index.md): The set of four-, six-, eight-, ten-, twelve- and twenty-sided dice used by roleplaying games, written in shorthand such as 3d6 (three six-siders added together) or d20. The icosah
- [Powered by the Apocalypse](https://www.lanternhall.org/lexicon/pbta/index.md): A family of games built on the design of Apocalypse World, in which players trigger moves by describing fictional actions and roll 2d6, where 10+ is a success, 7–9 a success with a
- [Procedural generation](https://www.lanternhall.org/lexicon/procedural-generation/index.md): Creating game content such as dungeons, maps, loot or entire histories with algorithms rather than by hand, so each play-through differs. It descends from the random dungeon and tr
- [Raid](https://www.lanternhall.org/lexicon/raid/index.md): A large-group challenge in an online game, typically a series of powerful bosses that require many players, careful planning and repeated attempts. Raiding guilds built schedules, 
- [Railroading](https://www.lanternhall.org/lexicon/railroading/index.md): When a Game Master forces the story down a predetermined track regardless of players' choices, like a train that can only go one way. Usually a criticism, it describes blocked exit
- [Real-time with pause](https://www.lanternhall.org/lexicon/real-time-with-pause/index.md): A combat system in which action flows continuously but the player can pause at any moment to issue orders to each party member. It combined the tension of real-time play with the d
- [Respawn](https://www.lanternhall.org/lexicon/respawn/index.md): The return of a defeated player or monster to the game world after a delay, usually at a set point. Respawning monsters made endless hunting and Grinding possible, and camping resp
- [Retro-clone](https://www.lanternhall.org/lexicon/retro-clone/index.md): A game that uses open game content to restate the rules of an out-of-print edition, usually early D&D, so it can be legally published and played again. Retro-clones such as OSRIC, 
- [Roguelite](https://www.lanternhall.org/lexicon/roguelite/index.md): A game borrowing roguelike elements, such as procedurally generated runs and death that resets progress, while adding permanent upgrades or unlocks that carry between runs, and oft
- [Rule zero](https://www.lanternhall.org/lexicon/rule-zero/index.md): The unwritten first rule of many roleplaying games: the Game Master has final say and may change any rule for the good of the game. It underwrites Homebrew and ends many rules argu
- [Rules as written](https://www.lanternhall.org/lexicon/rules-as-written/index.md): Reading a rule strictly by its text (RAW), as opposed to what its designers meant (RAI, rules as intended). D&D designer Jeremy Crawford has written that ideally the two align, but
- [Rules lawyer](https://www.lanternhall.org/lexicon/rules-lawyer/index.md): A player who argues the letter of the rules, often to their own advantage, and treats the rulebook as a legal code. Every table has one; sometimes it is the Game Master.
- [Safety tools](https://www.lanternhall.org/lexicon/safety-tools/index.md): Techniques that help a group agree on content and stop play when something is unwelcome. Lines rule topics out, veils keep them off-screen, and the X-card lets anyone tap a card to
- [Sandbox](https://www.lanternhall.org/lexicon/sandbox/index.md): A game world the player explores freely, choosing goals rather than following a set plot. In tabletop play it describes a campaign where the referee prepares places and factions ra
- [Save scumming](https://www.lanternhall.org/lexicon/save-scumming/index.md): Reloading a saved game repeatedly to undo bad luck or death, rerolling outcomes until they come up right. The term is especially associated with roguelike players, for whom it defe
- [Saving throw](https://www.lanternhall.org/lexicon/saving-throw/index.md): A roll made to avoid or reduce a sudden danger such as poison, a dragon's breath, a trap or a spell. The save represents a character's luck, reflexes or willpower rather than an at
- [Secondary world](https://www.lanternhall.org/lexicon/secondary-world/index.md): An invented world with its own consistent laws, which the reader enters imaginatively and believes in while inside. Tolkien contrasted it with the Primary World of real life and ar
- [Session zero](https://www.lanternhall.org/lexicon/session-zero/index.md): A meeting before a campaign begins in which the group agrees on tone, themes, rules, scheduling and Safety tools, and often creates characters together. It aims to prevent misunder
- [Subcreation](https://www.lanternhall.org/lexicon/subcreation/index.md): Tolkien's term for the human act of making a Secondary world: the author as a sub-creator, working in the image of a greater Creator. It is the theological heart of his defense of 
- [THAC0](https://www.lanternhall.org/lexicon/thac0/index.md): The number a character needed to roll on a d20 to hit a target of Armor Class 0; subtract the target's AC to find the roll needed against anything else. It compressed pages of atta
- [The Chosen One](https://www.lanternhall.org/lexicon/the-chosen-one/index.md): A protagonist marked by prophecy or bloodline as the only one who can save the world, typically an unassuming youth who discovers a hidden destiny. The trope runs from Arthurian le
- [The Dark Lord](https://www.lanternhall.org/lexicon/dark-lord/index.md): An evil overlord who embodies darkness and seeks domination of the world, usually from a distant fortress. Sauron and Morgoth made the figure a fantasy staple, repeated in countles
- [The holy trinity](https://www.lanternhall.org/lexicon/holy-trinity/index.md): The three-role party structure of group content: a tank to absorb enemy attention, a healer to keep everyone alive and damage dealers (DPS, damage per second) to kill things. It fo
- [The magic circle](https://www.lanternhall.org/lexicon/magic-circle/index.md): The boundary that separates a game from ordinary life, inside which special rules and meanings apply. Game scholars debate how porous it is, as when virtual gold sells for real mon
- [The party](https://www.lanternhall.org/lexicon/party/index.md): The group of player characters who adventure together, pooling complementary skills. Its fantasy prototype is the Fellowship of the Ring; its gaming form is the fighter, cleric, wi
- [Theater of the mind](https://www.lanternhall.org/lexicon/theater-of-the-mind/index.md): Running scenes, including combat, through description alone, without maps or miniatures, leaving positions and distances to shared imagination. The phrase comes from radio drama.
- [TPK](https://www.lanternhall.org/lexicon/tpk/index.md): The death of every player character in a single encounter, ending the adventure (and often the campaign). Feared, joked about and occasionally engineered by devious Game Masters, i
- [Turn-based combat](https://www.lanternhall.org/lexicon/turn-based-combat/index.md): Combat in which participants act one at a time in a set order, as around a tabletop with Initiative. Standard in early computer RPGs, JRPGs and tactical games, it has enjoyed a rev
- [Vancian magic](https://www.lanternhall.org/lexicon/vancian-magic/index.md): A magic system in which wizards memorize a limited number of spells each day and forget each one as it is cast. Named after the fantasist Jack Vance, whose Dying Earth magicians co
- [Wandering monster](https://www.lanternhall.org/lexicon/wandering-monster/index.md): A creature met by chance rather than placed in a room, determined by rolling on a table at intervals. Wandering monsters make lingering in the dungeon dangerous; their video-game h
- [West Marches](https://www.lanternhall.org/lexicon/west-marches/index.md): A campaign format with a large, rotating pool of players who schedule their own sessions and head out from a safe town into a dangerous, persistent wilderness. With no set plot, pl
- [Worldbuilding](https://www.lanternhall.org/lexicon/worldbuilding/index.md): The craft of inventing an imaginary world's geography, history, cultures, languages and ecology. Tolkien's languages and maps set the modern standard; roleplaying games made worldb