Thesis

I've had this idea for some time, and I've decided to finally put it into practice.  The mission: read every D&D product ever published in chronological order from the original Chainmail rules up through at least 2nd edition and blog about it (by "D&D" I'm referring to the entire historical Dungeons and Dragons game, encompassing all of its manifestations such as original D&D, basic D&D, and AD&D).  I'd love to keep going into 3rd edition and beyond as much as possible, but life is only so long, so we'll see if that happens if and when we get there.

For the past several years I've been working on a related project - collecting PDF scans of every D&D book through 2nd edition.  This has been no mean feat in and of itself, as to do that I first had to put together a collector's checklist.  There are some decent ones out there already, but I ended up creating my own because I couldn't find one that adequately captured the printing differences of early products (a headache any serious D&D collector can tell you about - in the early days when the game was new, products were published in multiple small printing batches and often errata and subtle changes were introduced between printings, to say nothing of TSR's penchant for publishing completely updated versions of existing products).  A lot of blood, sweat, and tears research has gone into my meticulously organized Google spreadsheet.  It's still not technically done, nor are my collection efforts, but I have the first few years of D&D's existence completed, so I want to go ahead and get the ball rolling on this project as well.

In addition to all the books, I also will be reading TSR's magazines - the original Strategic Review, followed by Dragon (originally "The Dragon") and eventually its counterpart Dungeon.  I'm fascinated by the history of D&D and of role-playing games in general, and these magazines provide an invaluable record of the game's development, both from the perspective of the creators and the players.

This is a huge and daunting undertaking, for sure (I don't even want to guess at how many millions of words it will involve reading), but an exciting one.  I'll hope you'll join me in the journey.