# TSR, WotC, & Paizo: A Comparative History



## Lord Rasputin

Other events: 

1968?: David Weseley's first Braunstein
1996: 2.5e Players Options books (not that anyone ever played them)
Sometime in the 200s: merger of RPGNow and DriveThruRPG

The individual AD&D books were so monumental that they might each warrant a mention, until 2e. Unearthed Arcana especially. The whole bit with TSR UK, White Dwarf, and the Fiend Folio. End of non-GW content in White Dwarf in the Eighhties, as well as the run of Space Gamer.


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## Lanefan

Seconded regarding Braunstein's significance to the early development of all this.


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## megamania

Lotta history to DnD


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## DMZ2112

Two "general" or possibly "TSR" items that may be worth including are the founding of the International Wargaming Foundation by Bill Speer, Gary Gygax, and Scott Duncan in 1966, and that organization's first convention in Malvern, Pennsylvania, in July 1967.  

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Federation_of_Wargaming

http://www.genconhistory.com/images/40YearsPREVIEW.pdf

Note that the Gen Con archivists got the date for the Malvern IFW convention wrong -- it apparently did inspire Gary's August 1967 Gen Con 0, but it happened a month earlier, in July 1967; not a year earlier.  There's a scanned image of the program in this Gygax memorial article at Wired.com, courtesy of Gail Gygax:

http://archive.wired.com/gaming/virtualworlds/news/2008/03/ff_gygax?currentPage=all

Here's a cool (if highly opinionated) secondary source, published by the original Avalon Hill Company as the cover story of Volume 4, Issue 3 of their "The General" magazine:

http://archive.org/stream/GeneralMagazineVol4i3/Vol4i3_djvu.txt


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## DMZ2112

Also, just because there's so much misinformation about this event out there already: James Dallas Egbert III did not commit suicide in the steam tunnels under MSU.  His /disappearance/ was blamed on the suspicion that he had died in the steam tunnels while playing live action D&D, but the private detective hired to find him eventually found him alive and well at the nearby house of a friend.

Egbert did eventually commit suicide, but that didn't make the news.  Neither did his discovery, although the private investigator wrote a book about the case, _The Dungeon Master: The Disappearance of James Dallas Egbert III_, that exonerates D&D completely (in his professional opinion, of course).  It might not be a bad source to cite just for an alternate perspective.


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## skotothalamos

awesome list!

I might include the 1979 Avalon Hill release of Magic Realm on the list. While not really and RPG, it is interesting that 5 years after turning down Gygax, they advertised that the game was "an effort to out-D&D D&D" and "If you are a D&D enthusiast who thrives on endless game systems, you'll love MAGIC REALM."


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## Achan hiArusa

No mention of M.A.R. Barker or Empire of the Petal Throne.


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## Tyler Do'Urden

Lord Rasputin said:


> 1996: 2.5e Players Options books (not that anyone ever played them)




Huh. My high school 2e group must have been atypical, because we used these hardcore.


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