BETRAYAL AT KRONDOR INVENTORY SYSTEM SERIES

In time, said novels would become as big a part of their business as the games on which they were based.ДЄ third, only slightly less heralded example of the games-into-books trend actually predates the two IвЂ™ve just mentioned by a couple of years. It promptly became a nerdy sensation, the biggest fantasy novel of the year, spawning a whole new business for TSR as a publisher of paperback novels. Thus Dragons of Autumn Twilight, the first volume of The Dragonlance Chronicles, was published in the same year as The Hunt for Red October. TSR asked employees Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman to write a trilogy of novels based on the fourteen Dragonlance adventure modules and source books they planned to publish.

BETRAYAL AT KRONDOR INVENTORY SYSTEM SERIES

In 1983, TSR, the publisher of Dungeons & Dragons, decided to make a new series of adventure modules for the game, each of which would feature a different kind of dragon - because, as some of their customers were writing in their letters, the existing Dungeons & Dragons modules вЂњhad plenty of dungeons, but not many dragons.вЂќ The marketing exercise soon grew into Dragonlance, an elaborately plotted Tolkienesque epic set in a brand new fantasy world - one which, yes, featured plenty of dragons. To the literary establishment, it all seemed extremely strange and vaguely unsettling to many a wargamer, it seemed perfectly natural.ДЄnother line of ludic adaptations from the same period didnвЂ™t attract as much attention from the New York Times Book Review, much less the president, but nevertheless became almost as successful on its own terms. ClancyвЂ™s follow-up novel, a story of open warfare between East and West called Red Storm Rising, was a product of the same gestation process. The perfect book for a time of resurgent patriotism and military pride in the United States, it found a fan in no less elevated a personage than President Ronald Reagan, who declared it вЂњmy kind of yarn.вЂќ As the book topped the bestseller charts and the press rushed to draft their human-interest stories on the man who had written it, they learned that Clancy had gamed out its entire scenario, involving a rogue Soviet submarine captain who wishes to defect along with his vessel to the United States, with a friend of his named Larry Bond, using Harpoon, a tabletop wargame of modern naval combat designed by the latter. The most widely publicized early example of the phenomenon was undoubtedly the one which involved a humble insurance salesman named Tom Clancy, who came out of nowhere with a techno-thriller novel called The Hunt for Red October in 1984. By pushing against authorial fiat and the deus ex machina, it can give the whole work an internal coherency - an honesty, one might even say - thatвЂ™s too often missing from novels of this stripe. It can keep you honest by forcing your story to conform to a simulated reality that transcends the mere expediency of what might be cool and exciting to write into the next scene. But for a certain kind of plot-focused genre novel - the kind focusing strictly on what people do rather than why they do it - prototyping the whole thing as a game makes a degree of sense. Needless to say, basing your book on a game youвЂ™ve played isnвЂ™t much of a path to literary respectability. And, indeed, just such things were happening by the 1980s, as the first novels born from games arrived. In retrospect, it was perhaps inevitable that some of the stories generated in this way would make their way out of the gaming sessions which had spawned them and find a home in more traditional, linear forms of media.

The games became vehicles for exploring the vagaries of history or the limits of the imagination - vehicles, in other words, for living out shared stories. When a group came together to play Squad Leader or Dungeons & Dragons, there hung over the plebeian kitchen or basement in which they played a shared vision of the beaches of Normandy or the dungeons of Greyhawk. The paradigm shift this entailed was such that for many players these games ceased to be games at all in the zero-sum sense. These differed from the purely abstract board and card games of yore in that they purported to simulate a virtual world of sorts which lived behind their surface systems. During the 1960s and 1970s, a new type of game began to appear in increasing numbers on American tabletops: the experiential game.

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