Dungeons & Dragons Lore & Legends: A Visual Celebration of the Fifth Edition of the World's Greatest Roleplaying Game
416
Dungeons & Dragons Lore & Legends: A Visual Celebration of the Fifth Edition of the World's Greatest Roleplaying Game
416eBook
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Overview
Dungeons and Dragons 5th Edition is one of the most popular editions of the most popular roleplaying game. Now you can relive its brilliance with the people who made it happen in this behind-the-scenes look.
When the reimagined fifth edition of Dungeons & Dragons debuted in the summer of 2014, the game was on the brink of obsolescence. But within a few short years, D&D found greater success than it had ever enjoyed before, even surpassing its 1980s golden age. How did an analog game nearly a half century old become a star in a digital world? For the first time, Lore & Legends reveals the incredible ongoing story of Dungeons & Dragons fifth edition from the perspective of the designers, artists, and players who bring it to life. This comprehensive visual guide illuminates contemporary D&D—its development, evolution, cultural relevance, and popularity—through exclusive interviews and more than 900 pieces of artwork, photography, and advertising curated and analyzed by the authors of the bestselling and Hugo Award–nominated Dungeons & Dragons Art & Arcana.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781984859693 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Clarkson Potter/Ten Speed |
| Publication date: | 10/03/2023 |
| Series: | Dungeons & Dragons |
| Sold by: | Random House |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 416 |
| Sales rank: | 614,328 |
| File size: | 256 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
Kyle Newman is an author and award-winning filmmaker who has directed numerous feature films including the Star Wars-fueled comedy Fanboys, A24 Films’ Barely Lethal, the e-sports comedy 1UP, and the upcoming Dungeons & Dragons documentary for Hasbro, Inc. He has directed the music industry’s top artists, and produced films such as Raiders!: The Story of the Greatest Fan Film Ever Made. As an author, he is known for his work on Dungeons & Dragons: Art & Arcana, the New York Times bestselling cookbook Heroes’ Feast, and its follow-up, Heroes’ Feast Flavors of the Multiverse. An honors graduate of NYU’s Tisch School of Film/Television and a member of the Directors Guild of America, Newman resides in Los Angeles with his partner, Cynthia, and their three sons.
Jon Peterson is widely recognized as an authority on the history of games, best known as the author of Playing at the World, The Elusive Shift, and Game Wizards. He also co-authored Dungeons & Dragons: Art & Arcana, Heroes’ Feast: The Official Dungeons & Dragons Cookbook, and Heroes’ Feast Flavors of the Multiverse. He has contributed to academic anthologies on games, including MIT Press’s Zones of Control and Routledge’s Role-Playing Game Studies: Transmedia Foundations. Jon also has written for various geek culture websites, including Wired, Polygon, and BoingBoing, as well as maintaining his own blog.
Michael Witwer is a New York Times bestselling author known for his work on the Hugo-nominated Dungeons & Dragons: Art & Arcana, the critically acclaimed Empire of Imagination: Gary Gygax and the Birth of Dungeons & Dragons, and the bestselling Heroes’ Feast: The Official Dungeons & Dragons Cookbook. His most recent works include Dungeons & Dragons: The Legend of Drizzt Visual Dictionary, Heroes’ Feast Flavors of the Multiverse, and his debut novel, Vivian Van Tassel and the Secret of Midnight Lake. He holds degrees from Northwestern University and the University of Chicago and resides in Chicago, Illinois, with his wife, two daughters, and two sons.
Sam Witwer is an American actor and musician, best-known for a series of sci-fi genre roles spanning a twenty-year career. He led the SyFy drama series Being Human, playing down-and-out vampire-gone-straight Aidan Waite (8+3 Hit Dice), and played conflicted Raptor Pilot Crashdown in the Hugo Award-winning series Battlestar Galactica, Superman-killing Doomsday in CW’s Smallville, misunderstood Mr. Hyde in ABC’s Once Upon a Time, and antagonist Agent Liberty on WB’s Supergirl. Sam is also well-known for his continuing work for the Star Wars saga, bringing various characters to life in video games, film, and television, including Starkiller in Star Wars: The Force Unleashed, and a multi-year, Emmy-nominated run voicing the villainous ex-Sith lord Darth Maul. Recently, Sam served as the main character in Sony’s Days Gone videogame. He is a longtime fan of science fiction and fantasy, and an avid player of both electronic games and pen-and-paper role-playing games.
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Introduction
Dungeons & Dragons was released in 1974 and would go on to change the world in ways both big and small. It single-handedly launched the tabletop roleplaying game industry and pioneered gaming mechanics and setting concepts that would be counted among the most influential and foundational of the Information Age. But forty years after its release, it seemed like the world might have passed D&D by. The game had enjoyed a good run, but following its faddish popularity in the 1980s, Dungeons & Dragons had difficulty connecting to a gaming culture that increasingly revolved around consoles, computers, and mobile devices. Ironically, these digital games depended heavily on the very same ideas that the quirky tabletop game had originated, which were now delivered to a tech-savvy audience that was far more interested in pixels than dice. Video games based on D&D’s concepts, such as World of Warcraft, Dragon Age, and The Elder Scrolls, had overshadowed and replaced tabletop roleplaying games almost to the point of obsolescence. When D&D was invoked by popular culture, it was done so as a nostalgic relic of a bygone era.
But not everything was as it seemed. Initiatives were already in motion that would elevate the game to greater heights than anyone could have imagined. In May of 2012, D&D publisher Wizards of the Coast launched the largest and most ambitious tabletop RPG playtest in history, totaling more than 175,000 playtesters by its conclusion. Their due diligence paid off: when the D&D fifth edition Player’s Handbook was released just over two years later, it topped Amazon’s sales charts—not just among game books, but all books. What had seemed like the end for D&D was actually the beginning of an incredible resurgence that has grown by leaps and bounds every year.
Today, fifty million people play the game worldwide; a major feature film and a bevy of TV shows are ample evidence of its popularity. D&D rulebooks, novels, and lifestyle products consistently top the bestseller charts; blockbuster shows, from Stranger Things and The Big Bang Theory to Rick and Morty, can’t seem to reference the game enough. Droves of new fans are tuning in every week to watch the game played by livestreamers. In short, D&D is everywhere. The astonishing revival of the game demands an explanation: How did an analog game nearly a half-century old became a star in a digital world? Why did it suddenly connect with our cultural moment?
Answering those questions is the quest that inspired this book. Some of the contributing factors are more obvious than others. Striving to satisfy the true appetites of their customers, Wizards of the Coast assembled an expert team to design and produce the new edition of the game. The result was an elegant ruleset that appealed equally to beginners and old-schoolers, featuring a bold new visual aesthetic that matched the game’s fresh dynamism. Thanks to the rise of social media, countless celebrities in entertainment and technology could proudly credit D&D for awakening them to creative possibilities, helping to convert their fans into D&D fans. Then, a surprising wave of interest in streaming-game spectatorship introduced a new generation to the delights of tabletop gaming, as did a burgeoning convention culture that has nurtured all aspects of geekdom, propelling these events from the fringes to the mainstream. There’s a bit of nostalgia to it as well. Interest in 1980s pop culture has never been greater, and to many, few things define that era better than D&D. But to get to the heart of the matter, we need to delve a bit deeper. That’s what you’ll discover in the pages that follow.
The book you are holding is the incredible story of D&D’s astonishing comeback—both an exploration and a celebration of how it all happened. It is a carefully curated selection of interviews, art, analysis, photography, advertising, making-of war stories, and ephemera that we feel best represents D&D’s fifth edition and the brand’s triumphant renaissance. While we can’t possibly hope to capture every product, moment, or feature of what is now a true phenomenon, our goal as authors was similar to that of the game itself: if everyone has a good time, we all win! So, in the immortal words of the original Player’s Handbook, “Enjoy, and may the dice be good to you!”