Part Forty-Nine: 2004-2013, Summarizing the Fourth Decade of Modern RPGs. A Historical Overview of Role-playing from the Trenches

Four decades of role-playing games. Forty years, that’s huge. That’s not an unusual adult lifetime (IE, twenty years growing up, then forty as an adult). Forty years certainly covers multiple generations, and that includes not only players but writers. Many folks working on games at this point may not have even been born back in …

Part Thirty-Eight: 1994-2003, Looking Back at the Third Decade of Modern RPGs. A Historical Overview of Role-playing from the Trenches

Unbelievable, right? D&D was released in 1974, sparking a new hobby that had become quite corporate by the year 2003. Let’s review what things were like for role-players in that third decade. For a brief refresher, here’s a link to the summary of the first decade, and here’s a link to the second. It sure …

Part Twenty-Seven: 1984-1993, A Look Back at The Second Decade of Gaming – A Historical Overview of Role-playing from the Trenches

We’ve arrived at the overview of gaming’s second decade. But before we go on, here's a direct link to the overview of gaming's first decade: https://themichlinguide.wordpress.com/2021/05/14/part-sixteen-the-first-ten-years-a-historical-overview-of-role-playing-from-the-trenches/ (I confess that I added a few new entries to the first decade's timeline, if you'd like to go back and re-visit it.) Pop Culture is Embarrassing Anyway, back …

Part Sixteen: 1974-1983, The First Ten Years – A Historical Overview of Role-playing from the Trenches

Let’s stop at 1983 for a look back, and pause to sum up that decade. Shall we? It was the best of times... and you missed it. All you get is this dumb t-shirt. Seriously. In that period the RPG hobby had sprouted and then bloomed, over the course of ten years. There was creativity, …