Designers & Dragons

Designers & Dragons is a book by Shannon Appelcline about the history of the tabletop role-playing game industry.

Publication history
Shannon Appelcline wrote the book Designers & Dragons, published in 2011 by Mongoose Publishing.

Appelcline wrote an expanded four-volume version of Designers & Dragons: A History of the Roleplaying Game Industry, published in 2014 by Evil Hat Productions, with one volume dedicated to each decade from the 1970s to the 2000s.

Reception
René Reinhold Schallegger wrote that for his 2018 book The Postmodern Joy of Role-Playing Games: Agency, Ritual and Meaning in the Medium, one of the central texts for the chapter "Generations: The Origins and Development of RPGs" was the original volume of Designers & Dragons, a "comprehensive chronological collection of major RPG publishing houses and their games [...] Appelcline takes a production-oriented approach, chronicling the development of the people who make RPGs and their companies" and that his "detailed content should provide a satisfactory insight into the evolution of the medium in form and content beyond D&D."

Troy Leaman in his 2016 book Playing for Change: FreeMarket and the Rise of Serious Tabletop Role-Playing Games noted how the two volumes on the 1990s and the 2000s "discuss the legal battles and rulings that determined that system mechanics could not be copyrighted."

The 2018 book Role-Playing Game Studies: Transmedia Foundations  posits that "true to the intertwining of RPG fandom and scholarship, independent authors like Jon Peterson (2012) and Shannon Appelcline (2015) have produced substantial historiographies of the emergence and evolution of TRPGs and RPGs more generally [...] The historical arc traced here draws in large measure upon two recent histories of the origins of TRPGS: Jon Peterson's Playing at the World (Peterson, 2012) and Shannon Appelcline's multi-volume Designers and Dragons (Appelcline, 2013). Peterson describes the precursors to and influences upon the development of D&D as well as the early history of the game itself (Chapter 3), while Appelcline details the fortunes of the myriad TRPG publishers that emerged, decade by decade, in the wake of D&D's publication. These works provide detailed overviews of the history of RPG publishing, extending earlier, briefer accounts but, in large measure, confirming their outlines."

Patrick Holleman in his 2019 book Reverse Design: Diablo II praised the work of Appelcline, noting of his own previous work Reverse Design: Final Fantasy VII, "If you're looking for a longer explanation of RPG design history, I recommend that book and the many great books it cites, especially the work of Jon Peterson and Shannon Appelcline."

Curtis D. Carbonell in his 2019 book Dread Trident: Tabletop Role-Playing Games and the Modern Fantastic wrote that "the broad category of RPGs has been subjected to a considerable amount of critical commentary. ... Jon Peterson's Playing at the World (2012) and Shannon Appelcline's Designers and Dragons (2015) both offer expansive histories of TRPGs. What ties these works together is fantasy's seminal role in opening horizons of possibility for new technological-driven world creation and subject formation."

Matthew B. Caffrey Jr. wrote in his 2019 book On Wargaming: How Wargames Have Shaped History and how They May Shape the Future that "For the most comprehensive history of not only the birth of Dungeons & Dragons but the role-playing industry itself see Shannon Appelcline's four-title Designers & Dragons series on Kindle from Evil Hat Productions (expanding and updating a single-volume issuance from Mongoose Publishing). It is also a good history of print and miniatures wargame publishers."

Matthew Ryan Williams for Wired wrote that "Shannon Appelcline's four-book series Designers and Dragons presents an incredibly detailed look at the history of tabletop roleplaying games, featuring profiles of more than a hundred companies, including TSR, Wizards of the Coast, and White Wolf. ... For each article, Appelcline gathered as much information as he could from magazines and websites, then ran his research past people who had actually worked at the companies in question. ... Along the way he discovered that the history of tabletop gaming is full of confrontations, betrayals, and scandals, which makes Designers and Dragons a surprisingly lively read."

Dimitra Nikolaidou wrote in the 2020 book War Games: Memory, Militarism and the Subject of Play how "According to Shannon Appelcline's (2013) exhaustive historical treatise Designers and Dragons, the story of roleplaying games is the story of two different trends coming together: one concerning wargames, the other reflecting the new-found love for fantasy that flourished with the sudden US success of Lord of the Rings in the 1960s."

Gerald Nachtwey wrote in his 2021 book Strictly Fantasy: The Cultural Roots of Tabletop Role-Playing Games how "Two recent histories of the hobby that have found their way into print are notable: Jon Peterson's Playing at the World (2012), and the series Designers & Dragons by Shannon Appelcline (2013), which devotes one volume each to the 1970s, eighties, nineties, and two-thousands [...] Appelcline's series relies on Peterson's book at many points—especially in the early volumes—but expands on that prior work by focusing more intently on the business end of the early hobby, with special attention paid to things like intellectual property rights, marketing, and distribution. Both authors manage to present a mountain of information in a very accessible, engaging format, and anyone interested in particular stages of the development of the hobby—from hit points and character classes to the first “indie” games and the rise of "story-based" role-playing—will find a rich trove of resources in either work [...] Shannon Appelcline has already written an extensive account of the economic history of the hobby in his Designers & Dragons series, in which he highlights an important fact: however much role-playing games might constitute a labor of love, from their earliest conception they were mined for their profit-making potential."

Ben Riggs in his 2022 book Slaying the Dragon: A Secret History of Dungeons & Dragons wrote that "when I was assigned to write an article titled “Did You Know that Wizards of the Coast DIDN'T Originally Make Dungeons & Dragons?" for Geek & Sundry, I felt like I knew the exact story I was going to tell about the company's fall. I'd lived through it and read Shannon Appelcline's excellent Designers & Dragons, which touched on the topic. [...] According to RGP historian Shannon Appelcline, "Back in 1978, Gygax had decided that it was best if the players did not know the rules." [...] Thanks to Shannon Appelcline, for his ambitious and clear-cutting work in RPG history."

Stu Horvath in his 2023 book Monsters, Aliens, and Holes in the Ground, Deluxe Edition: A Guide to Tabletop Roleplaying Games from D&D to Mothership wrote that "A number of references were critical in the writing of this book. First among them is Shannon Appelcline's four-volume history, Designers & Dragons (Evil Hat Production, 2014). Those books were an invaluable resource for getting my facts straight and should be the first stop for anyone desiring to read about the history of the RPG hobby."

Benjamin Joseph Munise in his 2023 PhD thesis "Roleplaying Games and Performance" that "Shannon Appelcline's four-volume Designers & Dragons series, published by the TTRPG publisher Evil Hat Productions [...] combined archival documents and interviews to assemble portraits of significant game designers and the shape of the TTRPG industry over four decades, from the 1970s through the 2000s."

Scott Michael Bruner in his 2023 PhD thesis "Agential Fantasy: A Copenhagen Approach to the Tabletop Role-Playing Game" wrote that "Jon Peterson and Shannon Appelcline's historical scholarship provides the record of the emergence of the TRPG." Bruner stated that compared to Jon Peterson's Playing at the World (2012), "Appelcline's Designers & Dragons series (2014- 2015) is an equally valuable record of the history of TRPG companies, creators, and philosophies of design." Bruner noted that Dave Arneson "has not received as much popular recognition – although his influence is being discovered and reevaluated (thanks in part to the rigorous scholarship of historians such as Peterson and Appelcline)." Bruner commented that "Appelcline notes that TRPG play in the 1970s was often “competitive” between players and the referee." Bruner noted how "In The Science Fiction in Traveller, Appelcline examines many of the most influential texts and genres which influenced the game’s design (2016). ... The literary inspirations that Appelcline and Driussi refer to are based in 20th Century pulp fiction. As with the lurid, fantastic action-oriented titles that inspired Gygax for Dungeons & Dragons, many of Traveller's literary antecedents are fairly obscure. Appelcline identifies Dickson’s “Childe Cycle” series, H. Beam Piper's space operas, Keith Laumer's comic science fictions, E.C. Tubb's “Dumarest” saga, and David Drake's military science fiction stories, as primary inspirations." Bruner wrote that "Although Miller has cited Asimov’s “Foundation” series as influential to Traveller, most of the works that Appelcline identifies belong to a more heroic, adventurous legacy of science fiction (which might also lend themselves more accessible to a game that requires players to role-play compelling action-oriented heroes) (Wolf). Appelcline posits that Traveller is a “child of the ‘50s and ‘60s,” because its inspirations belong to a mode of science fiction based on an interstellar manifest destiny. "