TSR’s First Five Games After D&D – PRIME
In addition to D&D, TSR is collectively responsible for 20 different Role-Playing Games. Have you played ’em all? Find out here.
The original TSR was founded in 1973 and shuttered in 1975, but a second TSR, TSR Hobbies, Inc. was born out of the remnants of the former company and was active until 1983. Then the company split into four companies, one of which, TSR, Inc. went on to last until Wizards bought them up in 1996. Now we can Ship of Theseus this all we like about which TSR is the real TSR–but through its various incarnations, TSR published many roleplaying games. Perhaps most well known is the legendary Dungeons & Dragons, but many of their other games won critical acclaim and prestigious gaming awards in their day.
Yet another became a prestigious award. The point is, even TSR’s also-rans often left a mark on gaming. Let’s take a look back through their catalog, starting off with the first five post-D&D games developed. How many of these have you played?
Empire of the Petal Throne (1975)
The 2nd RPG in existence, the Empire of the Petal Throne was also originally created in 1974. However, its creator M.A.R. Barker, a professor of Urdu and South Asian Studies only sold about 50 copies before bringing it to TSR. However, the game and its world of Tékume presented TSR with one of the most richly developed settings in RPG history. It was the first game to launch with a well-laid-out setting and allowed for TSR to experiment with the basic rules they were laying out with D&D. The game sold alright, but what it left us with is a world that many still remember:
Tékumel is a fictional planet that orbits the star Sinistra, which is a real star name, and it was first settled by humans who set out to explore the galaxy 60,000 years from the 1900s. They found this planet (among many others) and began terraforming an inhospitable world into something mostly Earth-like, banishing resident flora, fauna, and even intelligent species, to remote corners of the world.
Boot Hill (1975)
1975 was a banner year for TSR with the release of two new RPGs in addition to D&D. Boot Hill was one developed by TSR partners Gary Gygax and Brian Blume, and was a game of gunslinging in the old west. This game gets back to TSR’s roots as a miniatures wargaming company, and indeed, is more of a miniatures game than an RPG by today’s standards. But Boot Hill branched off massively from the D&D formula, proving that TSR had more than one trick up their sleeve.
With its focus on deadly gunplay and simulating real world environments on a tabletop surface, the game carved out a niche for itself among players in a time when no other Western games really existed, and the genre was going through its own metamorphosis.
Metamorphosis Alpha (1976)
Created by James M. Ward and produced by TSR, Metamorphosis Alpha is the first known sci-fi RPG, predating Traveller by a year. The original game takes place on a massive generational starship, the Warden, after a series of cataclysmic events have upended normalcy on the ship. With many colonists and crew dead, and more still turned into mutated creatures, the players are cast as crew of the ship, though they believe it to be the entire world.
This was the first game to live and breathe in its expansions, including several articles in Dragon that added in rules for clones, robots, cyborgs, and more.
Gamma World (1978)
Another Ward production, co-designed with Gary Jaquet, Gamma World is an evolution of Metamorphosis Alpha. It takes place in the mid-25th century on earth, more than 100 years after a nuclear war has destroyed human civilization and left behind only ruins. This is definitely the game that they put together after reading A Canticle for Leibowitz, and like that same series, the world was plunged into a Dark Age, and you play adventurers who live in the pseudo-medieval world.
Armed with Crossbows and exploring a world full of ancient, buried technologies, robots, artificial intelligence, and mutants, it was many people’s first gaming brush with post-apocalyptic fiction. Its influence can be seen in later TSR products like Dark Sun and the like.
Top Secret
We leave behind the 70s with the launch of Top Secret. This is a classic espionage-themed RPG written by Merle M. Rasmussen. It launched with the idea that players and GMs would collectively build their own espionage-filled settings. This was more James Bond than Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, but could allow for all sorts of styles of play. Players took on the role of espionage agents who focused on assassination, theft, or research. The game itself used a d10, percentile based system, which shares much with games that use similar engines, like Call of Cthulhu.
It was a flavor-filled game that really leaned hard on its tropes to offer players narrative control in the form of Fame and Fortune points that most other RPGs at the time didn’t. There’s a reason this game has been launched and relaunched even as recently as two years ago.
And that’s just the first five games beyond D&D in TSR’s catalog. There’s another 15, some memorable, others… less so. But all left their mark on gaming.
