History, Medieval, Retrospective
Stuart Gorman
The Battle of Castillon – A Reflection

Today is the anniversary of the battle of Castillion. A year ago today I submitted the final draft of my manuscript for Castillon: The Final Battle of the Hundred Years War to my editor. Now, once again on the anniversary of the battle, my book is out and I thought it would be interesting to write something about the experience of writing it. 

If I’m honest, though, I feel kind of disconnected from the book now. I finished it over a year ago, and while I’ve re-read it in that time as part of proofreading and making the final tweaks to the text, as a project it has felt finished for a long time. In the intervening time I moved to South Korea and started a new job, and I haven’t had much time to think about what that day in 1453 might mean to me still. 

The Battle of Castillon – A Reflection

Jon Peterson

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Playing at the World, 2e Volume 2: Three Pillars of Role-Playing Games by Jon Peterson

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Playing at the World, 2e Volume 2: Three Pillars of Role-Playing Games by Jon Peterson

I have made no secret of my affection for Jon Peterson’s study of the origins of Dungeons and Dragons (D&D), both in its original single volume form and in the new two-volume second edition from MIT Press. I reviewed the revised first volume at the end of last year, and having now completed the second volume I have a greater appreciation of why it was split in two. I am one of the self-confessed sickos who really liked how in the original Playing at the World you were somewhat unceremoniously dumped into extended chapters on the history of fantasy and early wargaming after a brief introduction to D&D, before the story returned to the main arc of D&D’s creation. In the new second edition, all these chapters have been split away from the core narrative of the more personal story of Gygax and Arneson’s gaming histories and the collaboration that led to the creation of D&D. This creates a cleaner first volume, and that is probably the book that most people should read, while volume two is essentially three books (or Pillars, as Peterson calls them) stitched together. The first “Pillar” covers the development of fantasy literature, particularly those works that influenced D&D; the second examines the history of wargames from Chess variants through kriegsspiel and up to the state of the hobby in the early 1970s; and the final one studies how the idea of players role-playing a single character came to be, primarily through the Science Fiction and Fantasy fandoms of the mid-twentieth century but also through wargames campaigns and other interesting avenues. The final product is a massive tome that took me probably two months to read, and it’s not something that is for everyone, but for weirdos like me who are interested in this stuff I cannot recommend it highly enough.

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Playing at the World 2e, Volume 1: The Invention of Dungeons and Dragons by Jon Peterson

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Playing at the World 2e, Volume 1: The Invention of Dungeons and Dragons by Jon Peterson

Few books have impacted me quite as much as the first edition of Jon Peterson’s Playing at the World. A 700 page self-published brick of a history on the origins and influences of Dungeons and Dragons was exactly the kind of deep nerd lore that I craved. I devoured it while working on my PhD, and even snuck in a little reference to it on my footnotes. Now long out of print, it was a book I would recommend but with many caveats around people having to really be into this kind of thing specifically. Thankfully, Peterson has seen fit to put together a revised second edition, now available via MIT Press, and Playing at the World has never been so approachable. While a weirdo like me can’t help but miss some of the first edition’s idiosyncrasies, even I must admit that this is altogether a more polished history of the origins of D&D and roleplaying games in general.