by Brant Guillory, 12 December 2024
Billed as “A History and Guide to Role-Playing Games” the RPG guide Heroic Worlds was catnip to college-aged me, trying to find any high-falutin’ faux-intellectual approaches to my favorite hobbies. Somewhere along the way, I’d lost it in one of my many moves around the country, and it was a priority for me to re-acquire on the recent Noble Knight road trip.
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Published in 1991, and never republished or updated, Heroic Worlds attempted to define & describe an RPG, as well as provide a brief history of RPGs up front. And at the time, the history was brief. RPGs weren’t even 20 years old yet. TSR hadn’t collapsed; Wizards of the Coast isn’t even included as a publisher. The World of Darkness wasn’t even a “world” yet with only one game released at the time of the book, and none of them published while author Lawrence Schick was writing it. Apocalypse World and the derivative PbtA games were further in the future than the publication of OD&D was in the past. Put another way, this book in 36 pages covers only two of the four-and-growing volumes of Applecline’s Designers & Dragons series of RPG histories.
That brief history, though, is what makes Heroic Worlds even possible, because the ‘meat’ of it can be found in another 340 pages, which comprise a product index of every known standalone RPG product from the major publishers of the time (and even some minor ones), organized into genres. If you thought the Mystara inventory was extensive, this one is downright nuts.
The genre chapters of Heroic Worlds are intentionally broad, and reflective of the dominant game genres of RPG’s first 20-odd years. While the “Fantasy” genre is subdivided into ancients, Arthurian, Oriental, Sword & Sorcery, and Other, the “Espionage” and “Military” ones are standalone categories. Sci-fi is also subdivided, but the other categories include (among others) “Mystery and Crime” and “Westerns” and “Horror” and there’s even a “Humor” category that collects the funnier versions of games that probably belong in all those other genres.
At the front of each genre heading, you get a top 5 or top 10 systems recommended by “Heroic Worlds” (really, just the author, but it sounds better if it seems as though a whole collection of people were involved). For many of them, you’ll also get recommended products. For the Fantasy RPG listings, you also get the top game worlds, top cities, top products to convert to AD&D, and more.
Once you launch into the product listings – hooboy there’s a lot here. You get the author, artists (including cover artists called out separately), a blurb about each, plus a page count, publisher, and year. You also get Heroic Worlds’ own unique product code — I’ve seen it described elsewhere as trying to become the “Dewey Decimal System for RPGs — that combines info on the publisher, product line, edition, and publication year into a non-barcode barcode that would probably work for a mass inventory tool, but it’s not hard to believe that in the 30+ years since the book was published that their inventory code “capacity” would’ve long ago been exceeded.
Celebrity guests appear to introduce different parts of Heroic Worlds, such as Ken St Andre talking about the origins of Tunnels & Trolls, and Jennell Jaquays (then still known as Paul) talking about how to design adventures. Arneson & Gygax both make appearances, as do Stafford, Crossby, Stackpole, Jackson, and Moldvay, among others. The directory at the end of the book ties the home-brewed product codes to specific publishers and there’s actually a useful index.
Why would you want your own copy of Heroic Worlds?
- If you want a true ‘snapshot’ of the state of the RPG industry in 1991, this book is invaluable.
- If you want an actual historical record of the companies themselves, this book is far less useful than the Designers & Dragons series.
- If you’re a nostalgist (hey look, you’re reading a “ThrowBack Thursday” column!) then flip through this book on archive.org and make a call; it’s a great opportunity to flip through the product blurbs and remember some great games, scenarios, and settings from the earliest years of role-playing.
What this book does miss, however, is the imminent early-90s explosion of role-playing that was narrative-heavy / combat-optional games, with White Wolf’s World of Darkness games as their exemplars. It’s not any sort of intentional omission, however – V:TES wasn’t released when Schick was writing the book! So what you have is an inventory of a hobby that doesn’t realize it’s at an inflection point.
This is an equivalent snapshot of role-playing to the Complete Book of Wargames from Consumer Reports in 1980 for wargaming. We’ve come a long way, certainly. But taking the time to appreciate where (and how) it all started is hardly a waste of time.
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