Welcome to RPG Archaeology. I’m Eric, and I’m a long-time gamer and a bit of a game designer. I have a longstanding passion for tabletop and video/computer role-playing games, and this blog is a place where I will be sharing my more-or-less random, non-sequential thoughts and reflections on various well-known and forgotten RPG games, their history, how they worked (or didn’t work), their creators, the companies they formed, and much more.

I will also get into adjacent game types that either provided the conceptual building blocks for the development of RPGs or that spun off in interesting ways from the genre. I expect to do more on tabletop games at first, because they’re foundational. Along the way, I may reference contemporary RPGs, but we’re doing archaeology here, so to speak, and I won’t get too much into the rather vibrant current state of the genre.

As a bit of a personal introduction, I was first exposed to role-playing games in 1979 or so by my older high-school cousin, who let 10-year-old me sit in on one the Dungeons and Dragons sessions he ran in a converted shed out back of his parents’ house. There was a big table covered in maps, figures, books and dice. The walls were covered with fantasy and sci-fi posters. For a nerdy 10-year-old, that place, those witty high-schoolers, the wild story that unfolded — it was just the epitome of cool.

So, of course, I did what many kids did in the early 80s. I got copies of D&D, rounded up some friends, and in the basement of my parents’ house, we had our own epic adventures. But we didn’t just play D&D, we played Traveller, Champions, Villains and Vigilantes, Star Frontiers, Gamma World, The Mechanoid Invasion, Melee and more.

Since that time, I went to college a few times, got married, worked for over 30 years, raised kids, all that good life stuff. I played games as much as I could, and taught my kids to play RPGs, and I still play with old friends and new, mostly online. I also collect old RPGs as I can, for the love of the art, the worlds, the systems, and the fun of it all. So there’s some nostalgia behind this blog, I won’t deny it.

But this blog won’t be focused on longing for the old days. Rather, I plan to look at these artifacts in their gaming contexts — cultural, historical, as well as evolutionary. For over 50 years, people have been creating and playing these games, and not just D&D. And a lot of it was pretty cool. My abiding hope is that old-school players, retro gaming fans, and game designers of all stripes will find some insights, ideas and fun here.

Thanks in advance for reading! And feel free to comment.

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Eric Kingsbury is a writer, designer and futurist. After 35 years in Corporate America, he started Stratelex Game Design Studio to design and publish games. You can contact Eric here.