The history of actual play as entertainment.

[Jahydin]

@PoC2
That's really cool, never heard of it.

 

[PoC2]

Dungeon Majesty was quite the thing back in 2004/2005. There are a couple of contemporary threads here on ENWorld about it.

Many derided the production values (but it was zero-budget Public Access Television). Some thought that watching people play RPGs would never catch on, and some loved it for its fantastically gonzo nature.

I particularly liked it because they were (are!) really nice, enthusiastic people doing something creative and novel on the RPG field. I wished they’d done more - imagine 20 years on…

 

[Iosue]

Record of Lodoss War started as a series of "replay" serialized novels. Basically, a novelization of a B/X campaign in Japan. It was first serialized in the Japanese Comptiq magazine beginning in 1986. It is basically where all of the Japanese fantasy tropes in gaming and media originated. If TSR had actually translated D&D into Japanese, then D&D would be as dominant as widespread there as it is here. Alas, TSR's infamously poor foresight led them astray once again.

D&D was translated, that's how the members of Group SNE were able to play for the replay.

The problem came when Group SNE and Comptiq publisher Kadokawa wanted to release the serialized articles in book form. TSR and Shinwa (the Japanese publisher of D&D) came to negotiations in an overbearing, even insulting, manner that alienated Group SNE and pissed off Kadokawa, which was a major publisher.

Kadokawa told Group SNE to just replay the campaign with non-TSR rules, and it was these replays that were published in book form, along with a hugely popular original novel (the progenitor of today's "light novel" genre) and a direct-to-video anime series. The non-TSR rules were then revised and replaced with the Sword World rules, which rode the popularity of Lodoss to become the dominant TRPG in Japan.

 

[GMMichael]

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Was... Adam Duritz in Dungeon Majesty? That might explain what happened to his albums after This Desert Life...

Anyway, "entertainment" might need some defining in addition to "actual." Harmon Quest was entertaining. D&Diesel, not so much. (Sorry, Vin. Don't bend me into a pretzel!)