When Dungeons & Dragons was created in the mid 1970s, nobody thought it would become as popular as it did. And like so many other ventures, it started without a clear sense of who actually did what at the outset. In the case of D&D, Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson each had a claim to certain elements of the game system, and they had a rather public falling out, with Arneson leaving TSR (the company he and Gygax formed which owned D&D), and then suing it for not being paid what he saw as his ownership stake in the game's success.

Overall, this was an interesting read for the amount of detail it was able to provide about the early days about the development of D&D, but it also felt like the author was a little too proud of all the research he had done, since he included literal photocopies of contracts, balance sheets, etc. that he uncovered from TSR's early days. There's no question that Jon Peterson is an excellent researcher and a noted expert on the history of tabletop roleplaying games, but I really don't think readers needed him to "show his work" as often as he felt the need to include it.

I was also a little disappointed that the book just kind of left off after the lawsuit; there's so much to the history of D&D (TSR was eventually purchased by a company called Wizards of the Coast, which was in turn acquired by Hasbro and each has brought with it a unique set of challenges) that was left out. I suppose that's a misread of the subtitle on my part; I assumed "the epic battle for Dungeons & Dragons" was a reference to the entire history of D&D as people and companies have fought to control it, while Peterson clearly intended to only write about the legal battle between Gygax and Arneson. To me, that was a little less interesting (and definitely not worth spending 400 pages writing about), but to each their own I suppose.

I'd recommend this book for anyone who's nerdy enough to be interested in the legal history of a tabletop roleyplaying game.

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Created Jan 18, 2025 at 4:14pm • Submit your own review...