Shannon Appelcline

Shannon Appelcline is a game designer and game historian.

Career
Shannon Appelcline writes columns for Skotos Tech. Appelcline and Christopher Allen wrote articles on the subject of how game systems work at Christopher Allen's blog, Life with Alacrity. Appelcline is a writer and technologist, and with Christopher Allen he wrote iPhone in Action: Introduction to Web and SDK Development, an introductory tutorial which teaches the basics of both native (SDK) and web programming for the iPhone, and which also introduces Objective-C. Appelcline is the lead designer at Skotos, and he has written about emergent cultures within the games he designs (2000–2006).

Appelcline wrote the book Designers & Dragons, published in 2011 by Mongoose Publishing. 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."

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. The 2018 book Role-Playing Game Studies: Transmedia Foundations posits that "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 [...] Appelcline details the fortunes of the myriad TRPG publishers that emerged, decade by decade, in the wake of D&D's publication." Curtis D. Carbonell in his 2019 book Dread Trident: Tabletop Role-Playing Games and the Modern Fantastic wrote that "Jon Peterson's Playing at the World (2012) and Shannon Appelcline's Designers and Dragons (2015) both offer expansive histories of TRPGs." 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." 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 [...] 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." Gerald Nachtwey wrote in his 2021 book Strictly Fantasy: The Cultural Roots of Tabletop Role-Playing Games how "Appelcline's series relies on Peterson's book at many points [...] but expands on that prior work by focusing more intently on the business end of the early hobby [...] 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 [...] will find a rich trove of resources in either work." Ben Riggs in his 2022 book Slaying the Dragon: A Secret History of Dungeons & Dragons called the book "excellent" and wrote "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 Appelcline's four-volume Designers & Dragons 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 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."

Awards
Designers & Dragons won a Judges' Spotlight award at the 2012 ENnie Awards, and won the Gold Ennie for Best RPG Related Product in 2015.