I’ve got some paperbacks for you this week, starting with, What Is Dungeons & Dragons?, an ill-advised oddity of a book that seems to be a cousin of sorts to Fantasy Wargaming.

Written by three students at the posh English boarding school Eton (?), WID&D purports to be a guidebook to how to play Dungeons & Dragons, a claim that is kind of ridiculous considering the core D&D books are pretty decent guides to playing D&D. In practice, though, this is a deep dive into the Tom Moldvay Basic and Expert D&D rules, which came out in ’81. WID&D came out in ’82. By ’83, Frank Mentzer’s Basic Rules had come out, rendering WID&D utterly obsolete. The fact that this edition was published in ’84 boggles my mind.

After a rundown of the rules and a serviceable dungeon crawl, the writers ran out of steam on the Moldvay rules (amusingly, throughout the entire book, they abbreviate Dungeon Master as D.M., which looks so damn strange). The back half of the book is a gloss of other games and gaming products. It winds up being a curious little snapshot of a very specific period of time – the late 70s and early 80s British roleplaying scene.

The best bit is the chapter dedicated to computer games, which speculates that D&D should be possible to play on a computer with the CPU acting as DM. My beloved Temple of Apshai gets a shout out just before the authors mention that lots of people are looking forward to a time when D&D will be played in real time with 3D graphics. How quaint the past was!

[For the site, I’ve also included the Penguin edition I got later on, and used when I re-posted this on Instagram in 2020.]