{"id":5039,"date":"2025-06-03T20:07:00","date_gmt":"2025-06-04T01:07:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/deathcookie.com\/home\/?p=5039"},"modified":"2025-06-03T20:15:16","modified_gmt":"2025-06-04T01:15:16","slug":"review-gamemasters-the-comic-book-history-of-roleplaying-games","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/deathcookie.com\/home\/review-gamemasters-the-comic-book-history-of-roleplaying-games\/","title":{"rendered":"Review: Gamemasters: The Comic Book History of Roleplaying Games"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"Jon Peterson\u2019s Playing to the World<\/a> was one of those rare books, like Guns, Germs, and Steel<\/a> or High and Mighty<\/a>, that\u2019s extremely engaging despite covering subject matter that seems like it should be boring as hell. While I\u2019m not bothering with the multi-book \u201clet\u2019s see if they\u2019ll buy it twice\u201d reboot of Playing to the World<\/em>, I have read Peterson\u2019s follow-up books. I\u2019ve also tried to read a few other RPG histories, but most of them were<\/em> boring as hell and a gave up after a few chapters. Yet I keep buying them, because I never learn.<\/p>\n

I actually finished a (sort of; more on that later) non-Peterson history of RPGs for a change, but it was only 100 pages long and had a lot of pictures. The book was <\/em>Gamemasters: The Comic Book History of Roleplaying Games<\/a>, by Fred Ven Lente, Tom Fowler, and Bill Crabtree. I backed the Kickstarter a while ago and the book arrived last week. When I took it out of the box, I knew I\u2019d read it soon. There was something about the book that really drew me to it, but I didn\u2019t realize what it was until I sat down to read it.<\/p>\n

It turns out, it was all about format. The book is constructed like a First Edition D&D book: The size, the texture, the sharp corners, and everything else makes the book feel like you\u2019re holding an old Player\u2019s Handbook<\/em>. And not one of the orange-spined reprints with Jeff Easley art. We\u2019re talking the Trampier cover here. There\u2019s something different about the material used to make the \u201cnew ones\u201d that\u2019s so slight it takes years of thumbing through them to notice the difference. So right off the bat, the design team gets credit for making me want to read the book by activating my sense of nostalgia.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s inside is less impressive, and not just because it\u2019s slick color paper rather than the world\u2019s thinnest and gentlest sandpaper that they used in the old books from my childhood. The first several chapters are just a stripped-down version of Peterson with pictures (which we\u2019ll talk about in a minute). I mean, it\u2019s history, so there\u2019s definitely going to be a lot of overlap, but since they mention several other sources at the end of the book, you\u2019d think there\u2019d be something<\/em> new. While I tried and gave up on some of the source material cited in the comic, the only one I\u2019m familiar with is the Secrets of Blackmooor<\/a> documentary, which came out before Peterson\u2019s Game Wizards<\/a> but covers a lot of the same material. So maybe Peterson was just so thorough that every other history basically follows his outline.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t really think that\u2019s the case though, in part because of what happens once they get past the material that Peterson has covered in depth. Everything after the (very abbreviated telling of) Gygax getting the boot is just a mess. It\u2019s out of order, disjointed, and the subject matter sometimes seems completely random. For example, there\u2019s nearly 3 pages about CD Projekt Red, a video game company. Even worse, that part comes before the discussion of White Wolf (which only gets 3 panels), Magic: The Gathering<\/em>, the WOTC and Hasbro takeovers, the OGL, Pathfinder<\/em>, and many other events that in some cases happened decades before Keanu played Johnny Silverhand. Since most of the material in this section is well-documented (the FBI raid on Steve Jackson Games) or recent (the OGL fiasco from a few years ago), you get the feeling that they wanted to go beyond what\u2019s already been written, but didn\u2019t have the time, ability, or motivation to actually do the research.<\/p>\n

\u201cMaybe it\u2019s not supposed to cover new ground,\u201d you may be saying, \u201cbut to retell the story in a new format. After all it\u2019s a comic book.\u201d There\u2019s just one problem with that theory: despite the subtitle, this is not a comic book. A comic book tells a story using words and pictures. This book tells a story with words and also has some pictures. I only noticed two (very minor) instances where the illustrations provided any information that wasn\u2019t in the text. In fact, half the images are only tangentially related to what\u2019s being discussed. You don\u2019t need the illustrations to tell what\u2019s going on, which makes this an illustrated story in my taxonomy. Just because the illustrations are frequently arranged in a 9-panel grid does not make it a comic book. The art is good, and often funny, but the book is not a comic.<\/p>\n

Overall, this book feels like something that was only produced because someone decided they could turn a profit on it. There\u2019s a \u201cwork for hire\u201d vibe to the whole thing that makes me wonder if anyone involved has ever even rolled a d20. It\u2019s not so much bad as just completely unnecessary.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jon Peterson\u2019s Playing to the World was one of those rare books, like Guns, Germs, and Steel or High and Mighty, that\u2019s extremely engaging despite covering subject matter that seems like it should be boring as hell. While I\u2019m not bothering with the multi-book \u201clet\u2019s see if they\u2019ll buy it twice\u201d reboot of Playing to…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":5038,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1991,2062,25],"tags":[3786,3798,3797,3796,3795,3794,3793,3792,3791,3790,3789,3788,3787,238,3785,3699,3591,2357,2267,2200,2157,2133,1475,1446,1118],"class_list":["post-5039","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-gaming","category-general-gaming-articles","category-reviews","tag-comic-book-history-of-roleplaying-games","tag-magic-the-gathering","tag-keanu-reeves","tag-cd-projekt-red","tag-david-trampier","tag-secrets-of-blackmoor","tag-game-wizards","tag-high-and-mighty","tag-guns-germs-steel","tag-jon-peterson","tag-bill-crabtree","tag-tom-fowler","tag-fred-ven-lente","tag-cyberpunk","tag-gamemasters","tag-johnny-silverhand","tag-pathfinder","tag-white-wolf","tag-gary-gygax","tag-ogl","tag-steve-jackson-games","tag-playing-to-the-world","tag-dungeons-dragons","tag-illuminati","tag-dd"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/deathcookie.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5039","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/deathcookie.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/deathcookie.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deathcookie.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deathcookie.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5039"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/deathcookie.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5039\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5043,"href":"https:\/\/deathcookie.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5039\/revisions\/5043"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deathcookie.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5038"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/deathcookie.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5039"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deathcookie.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5039"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deathcookie.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5039"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}