Designers and Dragons by Shannon Applecline

The seventies can rightly be called the golden age of role playing game design. The history of TSR and the creative duo of Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson is well known (and was also covered in depth in 'Of Dice and Men' by David Ewalt), but Shannon Applecline takes a slightly different approach by cataloguing the significant releases of role playing games and associated products by all of the companies founded in the seventies as well as the monolithic TSR. Thus we get histories of Flying Buffalo, Games Designers Workshop, Chaosium, Judges Guild, and the UK Games Workshop as well as a raft of smaller companies and personalities. There was an unsurprising amount of cross-fertilisation of ideas as designers moved from company to company or influenced each other in various ways (from friendly collaboration to personality clashes and feuds ending in lawsuits).

Although this book is the first of four in a series covering the 70s, 80s, 90s and 2000s respectively, each company started in the 70s gets their full history in this volume, so we see TSR's rise and fall, the dogged persistence of Flying Buffalo  and resurgence of Chaosium in recent years. It's more of a reference encyclopedia that is fun to dip into than something that you might read cover to cover in one go, but it's an entertaining piece of history, particularly for those of us who started in the hobby at the end of the 70s and heard second hand accounts of the mighty deeds of those legendary figures.