30 Years of Adventure

I was recently happy to find this book at the Lake Villa District Library. Now 14 years old, this oral history* of the game of D&D is a little dated now. But that's fine, you're not going to scoop up this book because you want the nuances of developing the game's "third edition" in the late '90s, you're going to want this book because a) you want to read the 1-2 page write-ups by celebrity gamers like Van Disel, Stephen Colbert, and Wil Wheaton about how they got into D&D, or b) you want the old history (the "deep magic," as they would say in Narnia) about what it was like in the early days in the 1970s, from primary sources like the game's creator, Gary Gygax.

For a much more thorough understanding of the birth of roleplaying games, though, you need Shannon Appelcline's Designers & Dragons series of books.

Anyway, I'm having fun with it. Thinking about rolling up a new character now!

(*Oral history, apparently, means you can publish whatever anyone says without having to fact check them. There are quite a few mistakes about the history of TSR here, some of them quite glaring.)