Guided Tours
Curated walks through the collection. Each tour is a path of stops with a guide’s note at every one; once you begin, a bar at the bottom of each exhibit takes you to the next stop.
The Classic PathFrom a hobbit hole to the lawless streets of BritanniaThe 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 Ultima Online.
The Tolkien RoadFrom Beowulf's barrow to Baldur's GateFollow 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 that carried it to the Sword Coast.
The Birth of D&DUmpires, toy soldiers and a castle in a Twin Cities basementA 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 who made it.
Board Game, Wargame, or Roleplaying Game?A field guide to telling the fantasy game families apartThirteen 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 computer RPG's code and the MMO's crowd.
The Computer RPG LineageFrom PLATO terminals to Baldur's Gate 3Fourteen 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 LineHow Wizardry and Ultima became Dragon Quest, Final Fantasy and Elden RingFourteen 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.
Worlds OnlineFrom MUD1 to World of WarcraftFourteen 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 economies and epidemics they produced.
Sword & SorceryBlood, steel and paperback coversTwelve 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 the grim fantasy of today.
Monsters on the MoveHow creatures migrate from myth to gameThirteen 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-eaters, Dragon Quest's slime and the chocobo.
The Women Who Built Fantasy & RPGsWriters, designers, programmers and publishers the histories often skipFourteen 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 Kodama's Phantasy Star and the romantasy boom.