The Lantern Hall
Painting: a lantern-lit winding path through a vast underground museum of fantasy dioramas, a hooded guide with a lantern leading visitors.

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Fantasy and roleplaying games in ten minutes: what they are, how the forms differ, and where to go next in the museum.

What we mean by fantasy

Fantasy is fiction built on the impossible: magic that works, monsters that exist, worlds that never were. Its roots are the oldest stories we have — the Epic of Gilgamesh, Homer’s The Odyssey, Beowulf and the Norse The Eddas. Modern fantasy as a genre of its own took shape in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries with writers such as George MacDonald, William Morris and Lord Dunsany, and then with J. R. R. Tolkien, whose invented history of Middle-earth set the pattern of the secondary world: a complete, consistent other place with its own maps, languages and past.

Alongside that high tradition ran a faster, darker one: the pulp magazines, where Robert E. Howard created Conan and Fritz Leiber created Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser. Sword & Sorcery and epic fantasy are the two poles most later fantasy moves between. The Atlas of Genres maps the rest.

What a roleplaying game is

In a roleplaying game you play a single character rather than an army or a token, and you decide what that character does. The rules decide whether it works. Your character grows over time, and the story continues from one session to the next.

The form was invented in the Upper Midwest around 1970–1974, when wargamers such as David Wesely, Dave Arneson and Gary Gygax began giving each player one figure to play. The result, published in 1974, was Dungeons & Dragons. Within about a year, students on the PLATO network were turning it into computer games, and it has kept splitting into new forms ever since.

A field guide to the forms

These forms are easiest to tell apart by two questions: who runs the world, and does the game end?

FormWho playsWho runs the worldHow outcomes are decidedWhen it endsExamples in the archive
Miniatures wargameTwo or more players, each commanding an armyNobody — the battlefield is the whole worldWritten rules, measuring tapes and diceWhen the battle is wonKriegsspiel (1824), Little Wars (1913), Chainmail (1971), Warhammer Fantasy Battle
Board game2–6 players, usually competingThe board and cards; the rules are completeRules, dice and cards — no referee neededWhen someone wins, in an eveningTalisman, HeroQuest, Gloomhaven
GamebookOne readerThe author, in advanceYour choice of numbered section, sometimes diceAt one of the book’s endingsChoose Your Own Adventure, Fighting Fantasy, Lone Wolf
Tabletop roleplaying gamePlayers each voicing one character, plus a game masterA human game master, improvisingRules and dice, interpreted by the game masterNever, necessarily — campaigns run for yearsDungeons & Dragons, RuneQuest, The Atlantean Trilogy, Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition
Live-action roleplayPlayers in costume, physically actingOrganizers and the players themselvesRules, sometimes padded weaponsAt the end of the event — or it continues next seasonDagorhir (1977)
Single-player computer RPGOne player guiding a character or a partyThe programCode: hidden dice and formulasWhen the story is finishedWizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord, Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar, The Bard's Tale, Baldur's Gate 3
MUDDozens of players at once, over a networkA server, in text; often wizards who run itCodeNever — the world persistsMUD1 (1978)
MMORPGThousands of players at onceA company’s servers, run as a live serviceCodeOnly when the servers shut downUltima Online, EverQuest, World of Warcraft

Board game or Dungeons & Dragons?

A fantasy board game like Talisman or HeroQuest can look almost identical to a game of D&D: heroes, monsters, dice, a dungeon. The difference is in what you are allowed to do. In a board game, every legal move is written in the rules, and the game is over when someone wins. In a tabletop RPG you can attempt anything you can describe — talk to the goblin, climb the wall, burn the map — and a human game master decides what happens. Nobody wins. The story simply continues.

HeroQuest sits deliberately on the border: it has a game master player called Morcar, but the rooms, monsters and moves are fixed. The Board Game, Wargame or Roleplaying Game? tour walks through the whole family with examples.

Single-player or massively multiplayer?

Computer RPGs replaced the game master with a program. That made them solitary: in Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord, Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar or The Bard's Tale, the world waits for you and ends when you finish. Meanwhile MUD1 (1978) put many players in one shared text world at the same time. Its graphical descendants — Meridian 59, Ultima Online, EverQuest and World of Warcraft — became massively multiplayer online RPGs. Those worlds persist whether or not you log in, and the other players are as much the content as the monsters are.

Japanese designers took the same Western roots in another direction. Dragon Quest (1986) and Final Fantasy (1987) adapted the menus and random battles of Wizardry and Ultima for home consoles, with authored stories and characters: the Japanese RPGs (JRPG).

Where to go next