Like any great campaign, the history of roleplaying games is a long, arduous, and adventure-filled tale.
With the resurgence of games like Dungeons & Dragons, many historians and pop culture critics have produced a number of oral histories and book detailing the meteoric rise of the RPG, the messy fall, and the unlikely resurrection.
Fred Van Lente and Tom Fowler have rolled a 20 with their new Gamemasters: The Comic Book History of Roleplaying Games (currently available to back on Kickstarter through Clover Press) which provides an extensive and entertaining history and story of gaming in a form that is perfectly suited to the art-heavy RPGs of yesterday and today.
We spoke to both creators about their personal interest in their subject and how they were able to cover the many aspects of the history of RPGs in their new graphic novel.
How were both of you first introduced to the world of RPGs?
Tom Fowler: For me it was through my older brother and his friends. My first experience actually playing was around the time my family moved to Ottawa just before my eleventh birthday. I think my character fell down a well, but I was hooked! After that my new friends and I played a lot of D&D and the spy games James Bond and Top Secret.
Fred Van Lente: I got into D&D at about the same age as Tom. As a lifelong obsessive I just got sucked into creating my own adventures and scrawling pages of pages of notes. I’d make up campaigns with the Monster Manual in my town’s rec center instead of going swimming. I sobbed big, uncomfortable tears when my PC died during AD&D Module U1: The Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh. I was an intense kid, and interactive fantasy inspired intense feelings.
I may have slightly mellowed since then. I hope. Kept the good part of the passion without the crying jags.
Was the information about the history of role playing games difficult to locate/substantiate? Conflicting accounts?
Van Lente: Dungeons & Dragons has two major creators, Dave Arneson and Gary Gygax, and they had a very messy falling-out, and as is often the case, factions form between their various supporters. It’s interesting how often this happens in pop culture history. When I did Comic Book History of Comics, it’s Jack Kirby vs Stan Lee over the creation of the Marvel Universe; in Comic Book History of Animation, it’s Walt Disney vs Ub Iwerks over the creation of Mickey Mouse.
In all three of those cases, it’s the hype-man, the public-facing guy, the man with the better instinct for business, who comes out on top, and overshadows the other, more creative, artistic half of the duo—Stan Lee, Walt Disney, and in D&D’s case, Gary Gygax. Which is not to say Gygax is Walt Disney, or, for that matter, Arneson is Jack Kirby. Those are unfair as one-to-one comparisons.
But the challenge when you have factionalism is to not show too much favoritism to one side or the other. The only way to do that, really, is to go full Joe Friday and just provide the facts, ma’am: “This is what happened, based on the evidence available.” Don’t take sides. For one thing, that tension makes for a better narrative, aesthetically. And it’s, you know, the truth.
Which era did you find the most intriguing in terms of the storytelling and artistic aspects that you display in Gamemasters?
Fowler:: As fascinating as some of the early history around Prussian war gaming and the Mechanical Turk were, for me the rollercoaster of TSR’s various rises and falls was a real eye-opener. It’s a part of history you rarely get to see or read about and it’s just wild.
Van Lente: Yeah, I’m with Tom, I like the early stuff, the origins of things, that’s what gets me excited. This book is basically the story of an idea. Its germ started in chess, which became the Prussian Kriegsspiel, which—in a roundabout way that we trace—became Avalon Hill’s Gettysburg, the game that got both of D&D’s co-creators, Arneson and Gygax, into gaming. It’s running down those threads like a bloodhound that’s the most fun doing these pop culture histories.
Next to Dungeons and Dragons, which game did you have the most interest in making sure to include in the graphic novel?
Fowler: Selfishly, I wanted to revisit some of the games I’d been a part of. We got some Shadowrun in there, but I had the most fun discovering and drawing bits from Paranoia and Traveller. Lots of good stuff with throbbing mutant heads and lion people.
Van Lente: I loved how Tom did the Top Secret section, that was always a favorite of mine as a kid. People forget that TSR’s second biggest game was Marvel Super Heroes, and Tom and I first worked together on Hulk at Marvel, so that was like coming home.
Why do you think there has been such a resurgence in people playing these games?
Fowler: I’ve been thinking about this a lot as we’ve come down to the end of working on Gamemasters. As I’ve spoken about in other places, a number of years ago I hit a creative brick wall and fell into a deep depression. Basically, I’d started to hate to draw. Drawing was always the thing I’d done to make myself feel safe and, now that it was the thing that I depended on to pay my mortgage, it felt anything but safe. My wife suggested that, since I’d expressed an interest in joining some friends’ D&D game, I should go and do that to try and shake off some of the stress.
What I discovered was a safe place where I found myself doodling in the margins of my character sheet. When those doodles jumped the margins and I’d started filling in the back pages of old sketchbooks with drawing after drawing (while keeping track of my hit points in those margins) I started to put together that what I’d actually needed was to carve out time to start drawing again like I did when I was a kid; for fun, for me.
Now, that was my solution. But I think as life gets more and more stressful it’s important for people to carve out that time for themselves to play like I did. As a parent, we get inundated with articles etc about the importance in childhood development of “creative play”. I’m beginning to wonder if the benefits of that play, whatever form it takes, may not go away with age. I think that RPGs scratch that itch for a lot of people, and I’m happy that there’s so much variety and such a welcoming community out there.
Van Lente: Building off what Tom is saying, I think that even over Zoom or Roll20 or some over some on-line service, roleplaying gives people an opportunity to interact with each other, a real interaction, not the illusion of social media, which is often just a one-way shouting into the void. And because it’s an imaginary space, it’s less anxiety-inducing than real-word encounters. We can get too cynical about other people sometimes. Adventuring together lets us surprise each other, in good ways.
RPGs, particularly D&D were swept up in the “Satanic Panic” of the 1980s. How did you approach this in Gamemasters?
Van Lente: We, in fact, have an entire chapter dedicated to it, shockingly called “Satanic Panic.” There’s a certain class of people throughout history who always have a tough time with anything new. They’re anti-future, which is kind of like being anti-oxygen, but it’s just a function of the human condition. The busybodies will always be with us.
I’ve done enough pop culture histories to know that whenever a new media comes along, some moral reformer shits their pants and tries to stop it. The Puritans tried to ban theater in England. Fredric Wertham and the US Senate tried to get rid of comic books last century. Video games, rap music—and Dungeons & Dragons, these were all targets in the 1980s.
Ironically, of course, the hubbub around the allegedly demonic nature of D&D did nothing but boost its popularity and give it its national profile.
It’s almost like being anti-future is self-defeating or something.
Upcoming projects?
Van Lente: I am very excited for my creator-owned horror series for Mad Cave with Chris Panda, Murder Kingdom—a serial killer stalks a Florida amusement park, killing people in the gruesome manner of old fairy tales. Gruesome, gory fun. The first issue hits in October, just in time for Halloween. Folks should also check out my return to Valiant during the “Resurgence” event this fall.
Fowler: I’ll be continuing to produce covers for EC comics (as well as many others) for the foreseeable future and may even be doing some more RPG illustration work for my friends at Hit Point Press. But my main job for the next couple of years will be a series of bandes déssinnées for a major publisher in France (unfortunately it’s too early to reveal any more details about that, but I’m very happy with the shape that that project is taking).
Gamemasters is currently available to back on Kickstarter until Friday, August 23.
