D&D’s Also-Rans – The Other Fantasy Games At The Dawn Of RPGs
Dungeons & Dragons may have been the first roleplaying game, but it inspired a whole industry full of Things & Other Things, as you’ll see.
Dungeons & Dragons is the most popular roleplaying game in the world. And it has a lot going for it–for one, it got there first and it struck a chord that was waiting to resound into the world. Getting there first meant a lot of things, it had the time to reach an audience, it had the time to set some ground rules. It was the proof in the pudding as well as the pudding itself. In the early years of RPGs, everything was a reaction to D&D, whether as a D&D-alike (which was definitely a genre at the time), or cast as D&D but with/without X, the world of Fantasy Roleplaying for the first few years was dominated by games that were Thing & Other Thing, thanks to D&D’s influence.
We’re going to take a look at the games that grew up in the shadow of D&D. From the earliest days, they tried to emulate or iterate on the genre-defining game that brought its blend of character and wargaming to the tables of people around the world. It all started back in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. Back in those early days, D&D was the standard that everyone was playing. For the first full year, players would move characters from campaign to campaign wherever they played. It wasn’t uncommon to hear about different campaign worlds clashing with each other. Onto this scene comes the first of our competitors/clones.
Tunnels & Trolls (1975)
Tunnels & Trolls, developed in 1975 by Flying Buffalo–a company that originally got its start making Play By Mail games, like Nuclear Destruction, and quickly became a game publishing company all their own. But while it had enjoyed success as a wargame-by-mail company, Roleplaying Games were poised to blow the doors open for them. But even then it took a while for word to spread all the way to Scottsdale, Arizona.
In 1974, after D&D made its initial wave, word began to spread through the gaming zines and mail-in communities that were the order of the day. And one gamer had been fruitlessly searching through local stores, Ken St. Andre, a self-described sword & sorcery fan, former wargamer, and occasional game designer, who was the first of the local gaming group to sit down and read the rules in Arizona. As he describes it:
Someone brought a copy of the original boxed set of Dungeons & Dragons to a gaming get-together in Scottsdale. No one knew how to play it. The owner was off playing some Avalon Hill wargame, so I sat down with his rules and began reading. I read for about an hour and a half, alternating between feelings of “this is nutty” and “this is great.” There was much I did not understand. For example, why have both intelligence and wisdom? Weren’t they pretty much the same thing? Why bother with all these many-sided dice? How was I, or any other normal human being, going to acquire four-, eight- and twenty-sided dice? They didn’t exist!
St. Andre’s reaction is a familiar one. And for context, a dice shortage hit the US in the early days of D&D. The manufacturers for the specialty dice hadn’t anticipated the demand, which meant that some OD&D boxed sets shipped with dice chits, because most folks didn’t have a gaming store to head down to with a massive vat of dice that look so shiny and shimmering you just want to plunge your hand into the dice bucket, even though you know it’s one of the least healthiest things you can possibly do.
At any rate, St. Andre was determined to read through the rules, and it changed him.
I was pretty confused that April evening, but there were a few things that had gotten through. You described your player characters by rolling three dice, you could arm them with weapons that also rolled dice, and you took them into a hole in the ground to fight monsters and collect treasure. I couldn’t play Gygax’s game, but I could write one of my own that would make more sense.
Since I was both out of school and out of work, I had time to do it. For the next three days I worked feverishly to put together a rough draft of my version of Dungeons & Dragons. It was written largely as a revolt against Gygax’s game. First to go were the funny-sided dice–my game would use all six-sided, which can be obtained from any old Monoploy or Yahtzee game. Next, let’s get rid of clerics. Religion was not very important in my life, so why should it clutter up my game? Next, I changed Wisdom to Luck. I didn’t understand the function of Wisdom, but Luck was something that everyone needed. Next to go was alignment. Why should characters be Good, Evil, Lawful, Chaotic, or Neutral? In the real world people made their own choices and characters. Hit points? Why bother? Characters already had an attribute called Constitution that would do just as well. Armor class making things more difficult to hit? I didn’t understand that at all. Armor obviously would take a fixed amount of damage depending on how good the armor was. Magic? Yes, there must be magic, but I really didn’t get into Gygax’s magic system.
So to reiterate, we have:
- A partial understanding of D&D
- The general concept of ‘dungeon crawling’
- And plenty of free time
Now of course, he did spend an evening reading the rules and turn around to develop his own version of D&D, which was popular enough to grow Flying Buffalo into a full-fledged publishing company. So, you know, it never hurts to pursue your dreams. From a “three day intense work-a-thon” Ken St. Andre put together the framework for what would become Tunnels & Trolls. This game had a number of differences as he outlined in the paragraph above. It used d6s, had no clerics, hit points, and magic spells that were full of spells like “Take That You Fiend!”
The result was a 20 page document that quickly made its way through the the Arizona gaming scene, and to a corner of a table at Flying Buffalo’s table at Origins in 1975, where every last copy was sold. And when Flying Buffalo’s founder, Rick Loomis noticed that it went like hotcakes, he decided to license the right to the game, churning out a 2nd Edition of the game later that year in December. Thus, the 3rd RPG of all time (right after Boot Hill), came to be the first with a 2nd Edition. From there, Flying Buffalo entered into the RPG publishing industry and carved out a niche writing adventures for use with Tunnels and Trolls as well as more of their own original games, and were the first to debut “Solo Adventures.”
Tunnels & Trolls is currently still in print with a Deluxe Edition and has an active community as of today.
Chivalry & Sorcery
Chivalry & Sorcery is another game that sprung up as a reaction to the supposed shortcomings of Dungeons & Dragons. But where Tunnels & Trolls designer Ken St. Andre thought that D&D was ‘silly’ or ‘a bit nutty’ but also ‘a ton of fun’; Scott Bizar, designer of our next game, thought that D&D had messed it up so spectacularly that he started his own company to prove it. As he puts it in an interview in Different Worlds:
My first exposure to role play, as with most others, was when I bought D&D. I immediately ran home and attempted to play. […] At first we could not make any headway with those rules as they never explained how to play. When we did figure it all out, we found that it was not worth the effort. With Wizards not carrying swords (where did that misconception come from?) and buying spells with gold (gold=experience points) in some kind of supermarket of magic, and the simplistic combat system, we could not balance the game with our own knowledge of fantasy and the fantasy tradition.
It’s at this point that we should mention that Bizar was described in the very same interview as “one of the more controversial personages in our hobby.” He continues though, describing his dissatisfaction with D&D.
I still think that the biggest factor against the game was that it missed the entire point of most fantasy, that the wizard does not go off adventuring exccept in the case of world shattering events, as in the case of Gandalf. The entire tradition of heroic fantasy has the wizard hiring Conan of Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser to do the adventuring for them.
On that level, and on that level only, I guess it can be said that we owe our start to TSR.
Here, Bizar is talking about the company Fantasy Games Unlimited, which was founded to develop something that would hew more to the “tradition of fantasy” though, again, this is referring only to a very specific set of the fantasy genre. Our next game began life as a D&D-derived game, designed by Wilf Backhaus and Ed Simbalist, who met with FGU at Gen Con in 1976.
Although, their game Chevalier, which was an alternate D&D with a strong setting, developed in response to TSR’s Empire of the Petal Throne was originally meant to be sold to TSR, the designers balked after watching Gary Gygax chew out a staff member. They ran into Bizar and the rest is history.
Well, actually it’s Chivalry and Sorcery. This game was notable in its own right–it was incredibly complex. Where Tunnels & Trolls was a streamlined D&D game, this was D&D with all the bells and whistles jammed in. It was an era of games that strived for “realism” which was to be accomplished with heaps of tables and charts that included scenarios for injuries, moving on horseback, different weapon locations, and the list goes on. But Chivalry & Sorcery was built to provide support for a setting.
The world of C&S is a world of medieval feudalism and the economics that prop it up. Which is exactly what most people looking for an RPG want to see. Economic simulations aside, C&S took a few big steps, taking RPGs “out of the dungeon” which meant that the designers writing adventures had to develop plots for their adventure, and that GMs had to run stories instead of just “glorified miniatures games.”
C&S hit at a time when campaign worlds were still becoming a thing, which meant that it had some broad appeal that helped support it at launch–though the initial interest waned, leaving C&S supported only be extremely hardcore/serious RPGers. But the FGU pendulum swung the other way as well.
Bunnies & Burrows
Bunnies & Burrows was another RPG published by FGU. And again, it came out of a response to D&D–though here it was an attempt to create something other than just dungeon crawl after dungeon crawl. B&B, designed by Dennis Sustare and Scott Robinson takes its inspiration as much from the 1972 novel Watership Down as it does D&D. This game, as you might guess from the title, casts its players as Bunnies–making this the first RPG that allowed players to take on the role of Bunnies dealing with the predators, hazards and monster (humans) of their world.
The game was all about giving players every opportunity to take on the role of rabbits, imagining what sort of adventures bunnies might go on. As such, the game emphasized role-playing over combat for, according to Steffan O’Sullivan, “You’re playing a rabbit, after all – how much combat do you want to do?”
Players new to role playing games, and experienced hands accustomed to outfitting dwarven warriors, elven rangers, or human wizards, might be puzzled by a game about rabbits. What, after all, can a rabbit do, except eat, sleep, groom itself, run away from danger, and possibly end its life in the jaws of a fox? Rabbits have been depicted in myths and stories as tricksters and merrymakers, magicians and warriors, with abilities ranging from almost-real-world rabbits (as in the novel Watership Down, by Richard Adams) to the anxious, waistcoated White Rabbit (of Alice in Wonderland) to swashbuckling heroes (as in the Redwall novels of Brian Jacques).
Well, the bunnies of B&B are closer to natural rabbits than to Wind in the Willows. They may not wield a sword or drive motor cars, but they can fight (much better than you might expect), spring traps without getting caught, use their wits to outfox a fox or trick a coyote trickster, bargain and persuade other rabbits and even other animals (if they know the language), carry things (tucked in their fur, or in a woven bird nest used as a bag), count (but only up to four), disguise themselves, and tell fabulous stories. Some rabbits may possess more fantastic abilities: they might glimpse events in the future, master the lore of herbalism (the closest thing rabbits have to magic), heal wounds by laying on of paws, and use certain other mental powers. Our own experience has found that the game has a tendency to evolve during play, with rabbits devising new ways to do more complicated things, and thereby becoming more versatile and powerful. Most of all, playing ostensibly small and weak characters such as rabbits, squirrels and opossums encourages players to use their imagination, instead of relying on brute force to solve every problem.
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And while Bunnies & Burrows was initially received rather coldly, with many wargamers looking down at the “cutesy” cover and deciding that the game was somehow lesser, this game was fairly innovative. It was one of the first to de-emphasize combat, which meant developing a unique skill system, as well as rules for detailed martial arts, known as bun-fu.
But Bunnies & Burrows knew exactly what it wanted to be, and it set out to do it. Pushing challenges on players like “competing for food” or “avoiding predators” while also developing systems for handling the political struggles within the players’ own warren, it set to deliver an experience like you might find in Watership Down. And like the novel that gave it its inspiration, Bunnies & Burrows might look cutesy from the cover, but it’s anything but. With its unique system and an appeal to both hardcore players as well as new ones, B&B left a lasting mark on those who did pick it up.
A few key innovations meant that it had rules for creating quick characters, adventure seeds and rules for dealing with humans. A psionics system. Because every game in the 70s had to have a psionics system. So why not play psionic bunnies–but this one looked wildly different from the psionics of TSR’s endeavours. It was a game known for its appeal to both men and women, capturing a much wider attention once you got past the cover of the book. Eventually Bunnies & Burrows was acquired by Steve Jackson Games and published under the GURPS umbrella, which would go on in the 80s to expand the world with more rules for Bun-Fu and Team Acrobatics as well as other add ons to bunny culture. If you’ve ever wanted to know what bunny drugs are all about, you should track down a GURPS book.
With its push towards roleplaying, it’s emphasis on character and skills and encouraging players to outwit obstacles instead of just having better damage numbers, the framework for many modern RPGs is outlined in the original Bunnies & Burrows. B&B is still around, with a recent Kickstarter delivering a 3rd Edition late last year.
As you can see, there are many games that rose up in the shadow of TSR. And though the companies that published them might have faded into the shadows of obscurity, TSR did as well. The games have endured, and though none have matched the popularity of Dungeons & Dragons, they still manage to carve out an enduring legacy to this day. Whether through wit or charm, through sheer complexity and “realism”, or just through encouraging players to think differently–as long as D&D has been around, people have been remixing it and adding to it, trying to make the game that they want.
It’s a trend that continues today. One only has to look around at Dungeon World, which is dungeon crawling for the PBTA set, or the explosion of interest around the older editions of D&D, like Mazes, Knaves, and the like to see that the idea of Fantasy Adventures is one that will endure.
Happy Adventuring!
