After being made aware of the book by antoine, I requested a copy of Ben Riggs' Slaying the Dragon: The Secret History of Dungeons & Dragons via ILL and devoured it in three sittings.



First let me start by saying, I enjoyed the book. Riggs is a good writer and his prose flows and is eminently readable. I did learn a lot form the book. But, it is not, as the title purports, a secret history of Dungeons & Dragons, it is an anecdotal economic history of the rise and fall of TSR. It deals very little with the game itself except as a product that is produced and sold. It glosses over the origins and creation of the game briefly and shallowly, deals very little with the gameplay or mechanics of the game, but waxes long on the products, the production, the marketing, the market successes and market failures of the game, the management of the company, and other matters of that ilk that contributed to the meteoric rise and crashing fall of TSR leading to the sale of the company to Wizards of the Coast in 1997. It has a denouement chapter on the immediate aftermath of that sale, but other than that does not cover the last 25 years of the history of the game at all. It ends when TSR ends.

But I understand that putting D&D in the title rather than TSR is going to sell more books and secret history will garner more reader interest than economic overview of the rise and fall of a company. So in that Riggs and his publisher display more marketing savvy than TSR did through most of its history.

It's a good read, with lots of interesting info and some good research. Well worth checking out. But I do have some issues/questioning.

First is that while he is building his case for the causes of the fall of first the Blume/Gygax regime and later the Williams regime at TSR, he puts forward a lot of ideas and events and suggests causal relationships between them. He however, skips forward and backwards in time form chapter to chapter while building his case, making it seem like things have a causal relationship, but because he does not define the timeline of events, and presents those events out of chronological order, the causal relationship is dubious, especially when he hints that events that took place later in time influenced decisions about earlier events or that later events affected how earlier events were perceived prior to the later events happening. His timeline is cloudy, and that makes many of his causal hypothesis have questionable validity. He does have a lot of insightful observations, and there maybe be some fire to the smoke he is showing, but his methodology in presenting it undermines his credibility in a lot of it. He has a lot of anecdotal evidence, and some hard data to back up some of his suppositions and hypothesis, but his blurring of timelines in his methodology is problematic. And the bigger issue with that is that unless you are familiar with that timeline already, the presentation seems more convincing than it is, because the blurring of the timeline hides the flaws in his suppositions and analysis.

Second is an overreliance on some sources. Obviously in a work of this sort, you are at the mercy of who is willing to talk to you when you are doing the research. And those that are willing to talk more, provide more grist for the mill. In the story of the rise and fall of early TSR (i.e. the Blume/Gygax story) and the rise and fall of later TSR (i.e. the Williams era) there are a lot of conflicting stories of what happened, and not everyone involved is willing to talk about it, and not everyone who talks is entirely truthful or accurate in their recollections. There's a lot of he said/she said going on in a lot of it. And it's clear that Riggs either picked a side or only had access to people on one side in some of those instances, because he does little to represent counterclaims or other sides of the story from those of the sources he relied on for the bulk of his material. He makes a point of mentioning he could not get Lorraine Williams to speak with him on the record for this, and he mentions there is a difference of opinion about some of the issues, but he doesn't offer a balanced view of the two sides, and does little to verify the accounts of the sources he leans on for his material. He does mention those who corroborate it, but he either doesn't talk to or doesn't talk about those who dispute some of those accounts. And again someone who is not already are of those disputes and conflicting accounts might not think to question the versions that Riggs puts forward. I am not saying the side he chose is wrong or right, just that there is not an attempt to present both sides when giving his accounts of what he was told when digging in to the issues. He gives lip service to a few of the "hot button topics" such as does Gygax take too much credit or not get enough blame or is Lorraine Williams really the villain everyone thinks she is, but then neither of them were his sources, and he doesn't seem to question much about what the sources he leaned on claimed, and that again from a methodology standpoint raises questions about the validity of his analysis and hypothesis.

As a popular survey of the topic to produce a "journalistic feature" on the topic, it works. It's entertaining, offers some new data and insights and raises a few questions. As a scholarly investigation or deep five investigative journalistic piece, it falls down because of its slipshod methodology. And if you are looking for a history of Dungeons & Dragons as a game or a pop culture phenomenon, this ain't it. It's a look at the company, and some of the people at that company, who produced and sold the game. And that in and of itself is an interesting topic that needs more exploration. But it's not what the title purports to be. I'd still give it a 3.5/4 ish out of 5 stars for what it is, and most of my criticisms come from it not being what I hoped it would be (and with me being a harsh critic because my academic background was in economic history and historical methodology).

-M

You've heard of expansion.

Oops sorry, must have posted in wrong thread. Was gone all day yesterday and didn't see this until this morning. Will delete the post.

-M

Ill-Fated Frontier
Samuel Forman


This one jumped off the shelf at me in the library.. I've been thinking of re-reading Tales of Alvin Maker and I thought this might get me in the mood.

The author follows the Forman family (no relation) as they move a large household and several slave families from New Jersey to Spanish West Florida to attempt to secure some land grants. Along the way, the author discusses the Ohio river valley Native American tribes up through the Battle of Fallen Timbers.

Despite his statements of trying to tell a balanced stories.. the stories of the Northwest alliance were of of trickery and savagery, while the poor noble Americans suffered. The logistics of the trip were pretty interesting, but better the poor portrayal of the Native Americans and the extremely slanted depiction of slavery (almost as if it was a positive), I was shocked to see if was written in 2021.

It was also really surprised to see that mine was the first good reads review... the last time that happened was with an obscure 50s baseball book I found in a used book store.

Here's Fritz Leiber during his acting career in...

A Tale of Two Cities (1935) (That's Leiber on the right.)


He made quite a few movies, mostly in small parts, but he had a great face for character acting... 


and he pops up in a bunch of well known 30s and 40s classics, like "The Prince and the Pauper," "The Hunchback of Notre Dame," and "The Sea Hawk."

I will be on the lookout for it...