We've previously discussed how the seeds of a failed Dungeons & Dragons campaign was the inspiration for several video game franchises like Doom and Quake, but there's another D&D campaign that is more popular than both of them combined.
[h=3]Setting the Record Straight[/h]Documenting a campaign to an audience is now commonplace thanks the abundance of diverse media available to enterprising game masters. But that hasn't always been the case, and for an example of how things can get muddled one needs to look no further than the Dragonlance franchise. James Maliszewski explains how Dragonlance changed the industry :
It's true that Dragonlance helped launch the transmedia strategy of expressing Dungeons & Dragons in other channels like books and later animation, it wasn't the first and it wasn't actually based on a campaign. Co-creator of Dragonlance Tracy Hickman explains :
For one of the most successful transmedia franchises based on a campaign, we need to move out of U.S. territory to Japan, where The Record of Lodoss War reigned over fantasy for decades before the arrival of the Lord of the Rings movies.
[h=3]A New War[/h]The D&D craze didn't reach Japan right away, in part because of poor translations of the core rules. When the game was finally translated in the 80s it took off, but there was no easy means of serializing the campaign like there is today. Lewis Packwood explains on Kotaku:
Podcasts, video recordings, text summaries, and even comics are now part of tabletop gaming culture, but in the 80s when Lodoss War was just coming into its own, this was something new. Instead, their adventures were serialized in a print magazine known as Comptiq.
The "replays" (now sometimes termed "actual plays" or "story hour" on ENWorld), would launch a transmedia franchise that is still popular today. Lodoss War launched its own ruleset, Sword World RPG, and the wide ranging novels and spin-offs have sold over 10 million copies. It launched nine video games and even a Massive Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game (MMORPG). That's not all:
And that brings us to my own campaign.
[h=3]Launching Your Own Franchise[/h]The sister of one of the players in my original Advanced Dungeons & Dragons campaign is the English voice actress for Deedlit in The Record of Lodoss War. That connection proved prescient -- at the time, we didn't know Lodoss War based off of D&D -- and Welstar has followed its own path since then, including two novels and a Multi-User Dungeon, RetroMUD .
I've recently launched the Welstar Grand Unification Project (WGUP) in which all the games I play online or in-person, all the fiction I write, and all the maps and media I create will be set in my own campaign that's over three decades old. The line between fiction and storytelling, role-playing and retelling, have become so blurred that it's much easier to combine the two than ever before.
The truth is that this is nothing special. Thanks to podcasts and Twitch channels, and the most recent incarnation of the Open Game License, any enterprising game master can introduce players to her own campaign without launching a multimedia franchise. It just takes a lot of time, effort, and enthusiasm -- which the role-playing industry has in spades.
... it was such a brilliant idea and succeeded so well at its intended goals as an early foray into the creation of a "multimedia" campaign for an RPG. They didn't call it such back in the day, as the term hadn't been invented so far as I know, but that's what it was. Dragonlance wasn't just a collection of adventure modules; it was also a series of fantasy novels -- phenomenally successful ones at that.
It's true that Dragonlance helped launch the transmedia strategy of expressing Dungeons & Dragons in other channels like books and later animation, it wasn't the first and it wasn't actually based on a campaign. Co-creator of Dragonlance Tracy Hickman explains :
While many have assumed that Margaret simply 'wrote down' what happened during our games and that when we had written down enough game sessions had clued it together into a book is far from the truth. Game sessions do not make good stories; their structure is different and a discussion of that will be left for another time. What is true, however, is that the portrayal of these two characters in the game surprised Margaret and I by inspiring us about who those characters really were or needed to be in the books, and therefore shaped the story that followed in fundamental and important ways.
For one of the most successful transmedia franchises based on a campaign, we need to move out of U.S. territory to Japan, where The Record of Lodoss War reigned over fantasy for decades before the arrival of the Lord of the Rings movies.
[h=3]A New War[/h]The D&D craze didn't reach Japan right away, in part because of poor translations of the core rules. When the game was finally translated in the 80s it took off, but there was no easy means of serializing the campaign like there is today. Lewis Packwood explains on Kotaku:
Among the early adopters were a small cadre of friends who would later be known collectively as Group SNE (which stands for ‘Syntax Error’). Under the leadership of Dungeon Master Ryo Mizuno, they created a compelling world of high fantasy populated by elves and magic. The characters were all based on classes from basic DnD: Parn was a fighter, Deedlit was a female elf (who was actually played by a man, Hiroshi Yamamoto), Ghim was a dwarf, Woodchuck was a thief, Etoh was a cleric and Slayn was a magic-user. All of them headed off to fight evil emperors and necromancers, just like in any basic DnD session. The difference was that thousands of people were following their every move.
Podcasts, video recordings, text summaries, and even comics are now part of tabletop gaming culture, but in the 80s when Lodoss War was just coming into its own, this was something new. Instead, their adventures were serialized in a print magazine known as Comptiq.
The "replays" (now sometimes termed "actual plays" or "story hour" on ENWorld), would launch a transmedia franchise that is still popular today. Lodoss War launched its own ruleset, Sword World RPG, and the wide ranging novels and spin-offs have sold over 10 million copies. It launched nine video games and even a Massive Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game (MMORPG). That's not all:
The novels were turned into a seminal 13-episode anime that stood as the benchmark for screen depictions of high fantasy. As Mike Crandol writes at the Anime News Network: “it was not until Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings adaptation that Lodoss War was dethroned as the king of cinematic fantasy, live-action or otherwise. In the animated realm, however, it still holds absolute sway.”
And that brings us to my own campaign.
[h=3]Launching Your Own Franchise[/h]The sister of one of the players in my original Advanced Dungeons & Dragons campaign is the English voice actress for Deedlit in The Record of Lodoss War. That connection proved prescient -- at the time, we didn't know Lodoss War based off of D&D -- and Welstar has followed its own path since then, including two novels and a Multi-User Dungeon, RetroMUD .
I've recently launched the Welstar Grand Unification Project (WGUP) in which all the games I play online or in-person, all the fiction I write, and all the maps and media I create will be set in my own campaign that's over three decades old. The line between fiction and storytelling, role-playing and retelling, have become so blurred that it's much easier to combine the two than ever before.
The truth is that this is nothing special. Thanks to podcasts and Twitch channels, and the most recent incarnation of the Open Game License, any enterprising game master can introduce players to her own campaign without launching a multimedia franchise. It just takes a lot of time, effort, and enthusiasm -- which the role-playing industry has in spades.