Dungeons & Dragons is a fantasy tabletop role-playing game (RPG) originally created and designed by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson. The game was first published in 1974 by Tactical Studies Rules, Inc. (TSR). It has been published by Wizards of the Coast, later a subsidiary of Hasbro, since 1997. The game was derived from miniature wargames, with a variation of the 1971 game Chainmail serving as the initial rule system. D&D's publication is commonly recognized as the beginning of modern role-playing games and the role-playing game industry, and also deeply influenced video games, especially the role-playing video game genre.
Zork is a text adventure game first released in 1977 by developers Tim Anderson, Marc Blank, Bruce Daniels, and Dave Lebling for the PDP-10 mainframe computer. The original developers and others, as the company Infocom, expanded and split the game into three titles—Zork I: The Great Underground Empire, Zork II: The Wizard of Frobozz, and Zork III: The Dungeon Master—which were released commercially for a range of personal computers beginning in 1980. In Zork, the player explores the abandoned Great Underground Empire in search of treasure. The player moves between the game's hundreds of locations and interacts with objects by typing commands in natural language that the game interprets. The program acts as a narrator, describing the player's location and the results of the player's commands. It has been described as the most famous piece of interactive fiction.
Dragonlance is a shared universe created by Laura and Tracy Hickman, and expanded by Tracy Hickman and Margaret Weis under the direction of TSR, Inc. into a series of fantasy novels. The Hickmans conceived Dragonlance while driving in their car on the way to TSR for a job interview. Tracy Hickman met his future writing partner Margaret Weis at TSR, and they gathered a group of associates to play the Dungeons & Dragons role-playing game. The adventures during that game inspired a series of gaming modules, a series of novels, licensed products such as board games, and lead miniature figures.
Sourcery is a fantasy novel by British writer Terry Pratchett, the fifth book in his Discworld series, published in 1988.
Fiend Folio is the name of three separate products published for successive editions of the fantasy role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons (D&D). All three are collections of monsters.
Deities & Demigods, alternatively known as Legends & Lore, is a reference book for the Dungeons & Dragons fantasy role-playing game (D&D). The book provides descriptions and game statistics of gods and legendary creatures from various sources in mythology and fiction, and allows dungeon masters to incorporate aspects of religions and mythos into their D&D campaigns.
Expedition to the Barrier Peaks is a 1980 adventure module for the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons role-playing game written by Gary Gygax. While Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) is typically a fantasy game, the adventure includes elements of science fiction, and thus belongs to the science fantasy genre. It takes place on a downed spaceship; the ship's crew has died of an unspecified disease, but functioning robots and strange creatures still inhabit the ship. The player characters fight monsters and robots, and gather the futuristic weapons and colored access cards that are necessary for advancing the story.
Synergistic Software was a video game developer based in Seattle. Founded in 1978, the company published some of the earliest available games and applications for the Apple II family of computers. They continued developing games for various platforms into the late 1990s.
Wizard of Wor is an arcade video game released in 1981 by Midway. Up to two players fight together in a series of monster-infested mazes, clearing each maze by shooting the creatures. The game was ported to the Atari 8-bit computers, Commodore 64, Commodore Max, Atari 2600, and Atari 5200 and renamed to The Incredible Wizard for the Bally Astrocade. The original cartridge came with a cash prize offer to the first person to complete the game.
In the Dungeons & Dragons fantasy roleplaying game, Tharizdun is the god of Eternal Darkness, Decay, Entropy, Malign Knowledge, Insanity, and Cold. He originated in the World of Greyhawk campaign setting but has since also appeared in other settings.
In the Dungeons & Dragons fantasy role-playing game, goblins are a common and fairly weak race of evil humanoid monsters. Goblins are non-human monsters that low-level player characters often face in combat.
The legion of fictional deities in the World of Greyhawk campaign setting for the Dungeons & Dragons fantasy roleplaying game covers an extensive range of spheres of influence, allowing players to customize the spiritual beliefs and powers of their characters, and as well as giving Dungeon Masters a long list of gods from which to design evil temples and minions. Although the Greyhawk campaign world, when it was merely a home game, started with no specific gods, the value of having deities available for both players and game plot purposes was quickly realized. The number of deities has varied with each version of the campaign world that has been published, but for many years numbered a few dozen. It has only been since 1999 that the number of gods increased dramatically to almost 200, due to the volume of newly published material that was subsequently integrated into the campaign world.
Charles Ira Fox is an American composer for film and television. His compositions include the sunshine pop musical backgrounds which accompanied every episode of the 1970s ABC-TV show Love, American Style; the theme song for the late 1970s ABC series The Love Boat; and the dramatic theme music to ABC's Wide World of Sports and the original Monday Night Football; as well as the Grammy-winning hit song "Killing Me Softly with His Song", written in collaboration with Fox's longtime writing partner, Norman Gimbel.
SoftSide is a defunct computer magazine, begun in October 1978 by Roger Robitaille and published by SoftSide Publications of Milford, New Hampshire.
The World of Greyhawk Fantasy Game Setting and the World of Greyhawk Fantasy World Setting are two closely related publications from TSR, Inc. that detail the fictional World of Greyhawk campaign setting for the Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) fantasy roleplaying game. Both publications were authored by Gary Gygax, and they were the first stand-alone offerings to provide detailed, comprehensive information regarding a D&D campaign setting.
The Lost City (B4) is a Dungeons & Dragons adventure module by Tom Moldvay. It was first published by TSR in 1982 and was designed as a stand-alone adventure for use with the Dungeons & Dragons Basic Set. The working title for the module was "The Lost City of Cynidicea". Moldvay designed the module as a low-level scenario to give novice Dungeon Masters experience in fleshing out adventures such that it is only partially complete. The plot involves the player characters discovering a ruined subterranean city slowly rising out of the sands. The adventure is set inside a huge step pyramid, with the lower pyramid only sketched out and the city itself described with a list of the major areas and a map. The adventure's main villain is Zargon, a giant one-eyed monster and his minions. The entire double pyramid, not including the city, contains over 100 rooms.
Operation Sabotage is a text adventure game by Ray Sato for the TRS-80 and published by SoftSide Magazine in 1982. It was ported by Rich Bouchard to the Atari 8-bit computers and translated for Apple II by Ron Shaker and later the IBM Personal Computer by Fred Condo & Kerry Shetline. The game was republished in The Best of SoftSide (1983), which also included the program on an accompanying 5¼-inch floppy disk.
Shiren the Wanderer Gaiden: Asuka the Swordswoman is a roguelike role-playing video game developed by Neverland and Chunsoft. It is part of the Mystery Dungeon series, and is a side story based on the Shiren the Wanderer series. It was originally released for the Dreamcast by Sega on February 7, 2002. A Microsoft Windows port was later released on December 20, 2002 and re-released later with internet compatibility on February 27, 2004, both published by Chunsoft.
In the Dungeons & Dragons fantasy role-playing game, gnomes are one of the core races available for play as player characters. Some speculate that they are closely related to dwarves; however, gnomes are smaller and more tolerant of other races, nature, and magic. Depending on the setting and subrace, they are often skilled with illusion magic or engineering. Gnomes are small humanoids, standing 3–3.5 feet (91–107 cm) tall.
