Agent Cooper wrote:I'm admittedly a rank amateur compared with all of you scholars of the game.  Having admitted that, I agree with the assessment that the fact that there is artwork at all makes the play test or rough draft version theory suspect.  Why bother with art for a proto-type version?

Also, Gary Gygax's word on the matter, along with Dave Arneson's demurral, are both pretty convincing.  Yes, it was a long time ago.  But if this alleged play test version was done by either one of them, or by anyone associated with them, before OD&D was released I have to believe that Mr. Gygax or Mr. Arneson, THE original creators of the game, would surely have remembered that very clearly.  

With what evidence there is right now I would go along with the theory that a very dedicated fan created this.

I gather that the artwork and production quality remains the largest stumbling block, the concern here that is just not passing the sniff test for many people. Let me speak to it in a bit more detail, then. Bear with me.

First, let's get on the same page about the production quality that a fanzine of the era possessed:



(forgive me, I don't know how to thumbnail these inline on the forum here)

This is from mid-1972, the International Wargamer. Both Gygax and Arneson published in this fanzine. As you can see, it uses print-shop fonts (Old English, here, the same typeface as the section divider pages of the Dalluhn Manuscript), it has a decently-drawn cartoon, and it has text that is both right and left justified. Generating pages with this level of production quality was absolutely routine to the community of the era, done across many fanzines on a monthly basis. This issue was printed at a place called Modern Impressions in Chicago. Gary surely knew where it was.

If you were going to print up a version of your rules that was going to be distributed outside your immediate circle, outside of the Twin Cities and Lake Geneva, it does not at all seem unreasonable that you'd try to get the rules into a somewhat pretty package. Again, I think the production quality of this fanzine page is well beyond the level of the Dalluhn Manuscript, so while the Dalluhn Manuscript is not a trivial undertaking, it is a reasonable thing to expect someone might do if they wanted a manuscript to look passable, by the standards of the day. Everything had artwork - it might be terrible, but there was artwork.

When we ask ourselves what we would expect a playtesting copy might look like, we also need to consider what future Gygax and Arneson saw for the game at the time. If this was, as I suspect, an artifact from around the midpoint of their collaboration, say late in the spring of 1973, Gygax would by then know that Guidon Games would not be publishing the game, and TSR was not yet an option either. It could be that they were at the time considering releasing the game as an "amateur" publication, and for that purpose they were gathering art which they included in the Dalluhn Manuscript. It certainly doesn't contain all the art they would need to produce a finished product. There are only four labeled monster illustrations; they surely needed more. More interestingly, of the section divider pages (those with the Old English font, like "The Underworld" as shown in my first blog post), there are only four in the document, but it seems that there should be at least three more. There are in fact two gaps in the pagination of the second booklet that coincide with section breaks, where you would think you would find two more full-page section dividers. So perhaps they had started working on them, but they weren't done yet. (Though admittedly, they could just be missing from this copy, too. But that doesn't explain the monster shortage.) In this theory, the "playtesting" edition would be fairly close to what they envisioned they would publish, at that time - sort of a development snapshot.

Why didn't these pieces of artwork end up in D&D, then? Tough to say. One possibility is that the final printing process required that they use artwork of a different nature. The art in OD&D is all stark and simple line-art (you won't find much in the way of grays or shading techniques, just simple black and white), and it lends the artwork a peculiar character, especially with its heavy black fields where we would usually expect shading. I doubt this was entirely a matter of choice; it almost certainly reflects the limitations of their printing method. It may be that they needed to do the artwork on special paper, or through some special process, in order to get it into the booklets at the Graphic Printing company, and thus they couldn't transfer the existing art, everything had to be redone. Maybe it was impossible to translate the cartoon styles of the Dalluhn Manuscript into the necessary format; perhaps, because it is more detailed and complicated, it would have required a more expensive method of reproduction than the very simple line art we see in OD&D - maybe they tried it and it came out blotched and blurry. Note as well that OD&D doesn't have any section title pages at all; an editorial decision could have been made that they were superfluous, due to cost or space constraints. In this line of reasoning, once the plan became publishing this via Graphic Printing, no longer just photocopies but instead really printing at a press, the old artwork just wasn't usable or useful. These are just conjectures - but there could be any number of reasons why they didn't end up using the art we see in Dalluhn.

Incidentally, if we want to try to find a closer analogy to the production of the Dalluhn Manuscript in fanzines of the era, something that shows similar production value, look at this full page of the Dalluhn Manuscript up against a page from something I'll call the Mystery Fanzine:



We see the same left justification, but a ragged right. We see occasional hyphenation in the Mystery Fanzine. Overall the use of underlining and the typing style is very similar. In fact, if you look closely, you'll see that these two pages were typed with the same model typewriter even. So, I wouldn't say that the Dalluhn Manuscript is an outlier in its production values. I'd say it was certainly within the capability of the maker of the Mystery Fanzine to have created the body text of the Dalluhn Manuscript.

An insanely attentive reader might have noticed, though, that there are actually two different typewriters in use in the Dalluhn Manuscript - one for the main body text and one for the page numbers (you can find a 3 to compare in the middle of the second paragraph). Just as we see at least two hands in the illustrations - actually, I believe there are three (the jousting rules illustration from the reproduced Chainmail section shows another). This suggests that there was something of an assembly process here. Someone typed the main text of these pages and didn't number them. The person who did the numbering gathered artwork from multiple sources and left gaps for the section divider pages, but the person producing those didn't have them all done yet. If your theory is that this was produced by a lone fanatic, I think the evidence suggests otherwise - it took a village (or perhaps a "villege") to produce the Dalluhn Manuscript.

Oh, and by the by, the Mystery Fanzine is Domesday Book #7.

Pipswich wrote:Now that was worth reading.  And, some notable sleuthing to catch the typeface variance for the pagination.  I can't wait to see more!  Although, I think the artwork issue is a red herring, as I noted in my previous post.  The issue remains, who, when and how to prove, if indeed Gygax and Arneson both disowned the manuscript.

When we start relying upon might, future, may, possibly...     we can start substituting before, during, after, parallel and create our own fiction.  I think my issue is with the extensive use of might, maybe, possibly, etc.  

Textual evidence is unreliable at best.  Even if the typeface is from the same exact typewriter.. AND. then the physical evidence suggests it is from the same typewritter.... the physical evidence may not yield a before, during or after conclusion.

I can't wait to see more of the evidence though.  This is great!

Pipswich

Arneson did not disown it. Again, he believed it to be a pre-D&D manuscript, but didn't remember who had produced it. That's a very different reaction. But, from my perspective, these reactions aren't conclusive either way.

Sometimes you get to go to court with a signed confession, and sometimes you go with a lot of circumstantial evidence. With enough circumstantial evidence, you can get beyond a reasonable doubt. I am only scratching the surface with the stuff I've brought to bear to date. Let's take it one step at a time.

Also, finally, I'm not suggesting that I have forensic evidence that it was literally the same typewriter that generated the Dalluhn Manuscript and DB #7. What I was trying to put to rest was the idea that the production quality was too high, that the textual justifications or hyphenations or whatever indicated that the Dalluhn Manuscript was too professional. All I was trying to show here was that in the era, illustration and typesetting were pretty common. I don't think it being the same typewriter would alone tell us anything about befores and afters.  Like I said, you gotta take these points one at a time. Of course I did sneak in as well that this seems to be a team effort, not the work of a single person, but that is true of fanzines as well.

Jon, the characters section on Elves and Dwarves in the Dallhun Manuscript you posted above has more detail (commentary) than the respective sections in Men & Magic in OD&D. Isn't this the opposite of your argument with regard to the Sample Dungeon, where you argued the additional lines in OD&D pointed to a later date?

Zenopus wrote:Jon, the characters section on Elves and Dwarves in the Dallhun Manuscript you posted above has more detail (commentary) than the respective sections in Men & Magic in OD&D. Isn't this the opposite of your argument with regard to the Sample Dungeon, where you argued the additional lines in OD&D pointed to a later date?

Forgive me for saying first that I should have expected, when I put up a big post about the typefaces and so on, and use a page from Dalluhn to illustrate it, that responses won't actually be about whether or not the production values are compatible, but rather about the contents of the page...

But anyway, you're totally right that in some places the changes to the text are not decisive in establishing precedent. Crucially, unlike the dungeon maps I posted, comparing the Elf and Dwarf descriptions here between Dalluhn and OD&D, you'll see they don't share a single sentence in common. If one is based on the other, it was a complete re-write from the ground up. There are of course some reasons I could present to explain why that might be case if Dalluhn came first - for example, in Dalluhn, there are no NPC elves or dwarves in the monster sections, and thus there is kind of NPC-focused text here (e.g., about what kinds of weapons dwarves prefer). That alone would necessitate some major surgery on the text here. But I wouldn't be swayed by that argument myself, even.

The dungeon map descriptions I present in my blog post, on the other hand, share about half of their text in common. The first room text is completely identical except that a verb ending error has been corrected in OD&D. Here we're not looking at a re-write from the ground up. We're looking at a question of whether one embellishes the other, or one strips text from the other. I would not hold up the Elf and Dwarf text as clear examples to show why either came first. There are many passages in Dalluhn that are just different from OD&D in ways that don't give us any clear hint as to which might have been based on which. But then there are other passages that I think do give us insights about that question.

Pipswich wrote:I reread you response to FF.

What you report is not exactly a credible assertion.  It's an either/or assertion of the form.  

Either A or B, when A = maybe and B = False (refuted by Gygax)  
We are left with A = Maybe Or B = True (Gygax misremembered or lied).  
Further, I agree with FF's suggestion that had Arneson gone to all the trouble to produce that as "my draft", he would dern well remember and argued his case while alive.

That suggests B = False from both primary authors.  
I am left with Either A or B  = A  (weak maybe) or B (strong False) as an invalid assertion from Arneson.  

And, no matter how much any of us may like any particular "improvement" that you note in that section...  there is no reason to presume someone didn't revise the system and reintegrate what they had encountered previously.  Granted that probably narrows the list of prospective authors down to the early group of gamers who knew Gygax and Arneson... but it does not drop it down to just the two of them, nor does it justify a pre-publication assertion.  

Granted I don't have the manuscript to examine, but this argument looks like it may be confusing "terminus a quo" with "teminus ante quem".

Pipswich

I didn't say what I reported was a credible assertion. In fact I said I didn't credit either Gygax or Arneson's assertions. And while your command of predicate logic is impressive, clearly what Dave meant was that he believed this was an pre-OD&D manuscript. From my own interactions with Dave, I did not find him so assertive as others seem to recall. But I think we're arguing about points that neither of us are eager to support, here.

Foul has raised already the conjecture that a third party might re-integrate pre-D&D material into a document like Dalluhn Manuscript after the publication of OD&D, perhaps cribbing from a hypothetical earlier draft (which would indeed limit the circle of people who could perpetrate this). In the interests of keeping the ball moving, I have a new post up about the differences in the spell list between Dalluhn and OD&D. Hopefully the argument in this one is more direct than in some of my previous posts. It speaks directly to the conjecture of re-integration by arguing that we see evidence of incomplete evolution towards OD&D in Dalluhn, something that I think is incompatible with the re-integration hypothesis.

I've raised some other concerns with the re-integration hypothesis above (like the apparent participation of multiple parties in this endeavor), but if those points don't concern you, I certainly agree that this is a difficult hypothesis to refute, precisely because a hypothetical earlier draft could contain anything. It might be 99% identical to Dalluhn, or only 20% identical to it. We don't know, because it's hypothetical. What we actually have today are a small set of documents that have a relationship to one another. I'm interested in discussing that relationship. If, at the end of the day, we think the relationships hold up, it may be we'll conclude that Dalluhn must be "close enough" to that hypothetical draft to deem the two identical. Over a few weeks of study, that is more or less the process by which I myself became convinced here. Even if I thought that the Dalluhn Manuscript preserved just 20% of the original rules, I'd still be falling all over myself to analyze it and figure out what it can teach us about OD&D and its origins. Unless you're suggesting that Dalluhn preserves 0% of that hypothetical source, I'd be surprised if you didn't feel the same way.

Anyway, see if my thoughts on the magic system help. Good discussion.

sauromatian wrote:What about all those bootlegs floating around in 1974-75? I seem to recall the claim that none have surfaced, but have any? Seems like they would be prime comparison material.

The scribble-shading resembles that of Ken Simpson, whose illustrations were added to the 1980 edition of First Fantasy Campaign. What was he doing in the early days?

AFAIK, 1974 bootleg editions were just photocopies. People had easy access to photocopiers at the time, and indeed a lot of early commentators pointedly noted the difference between the price of the OD&D boxed set and the expense of just photocopying it - as if to suggest that if TSR made the books cheaper, people wouldn't pirate them. I'm sure there were lessons here for the early mp3 market. But if you were going to do a bootleg, you ordinarily would not just retype it. Some people created "playing aids" (sometimes for profit) that reorganized tables, but they too typically worked from the photocopier.

I did show the illustrations from the Dalluhn Manuscript to a professor of art history that I know, and she remarked on the use of shading techniques like cross-hatching and stippling in the illustrations. I did for comparison show her those those against the 1977 FFC illustrations. I don't think I've actually seen the additional illustrations in the 1980 version, though.

sauromatian wrote:

increment wrote: I don't think I've actually seen the additional illustrations in the 1980 version, though.

And I haven't seen the early edition. Anyone out there have both the 96- & 64-page versions of Arneson's JG First Fantasy Campaign?

Not I:  I only have the 64 page version, and didn't know there was a different printing

Jon:  I do have some vintage photocopies of Chainmail and OD&D; if they would be of any use, please let me know.

What a fascinating discussion!

I have been trying to follow this here, as well as on your blog and the OD&D discussion board. I know you are not done sharing all of your analysis yet (indeed we get a new nugget almost daily on the blog!), but am I mistaken that the evidence you've explicitly presented so far seems to be tilting (at least to my reading) more towards a prepublication working (collaborative) manuscript than towards a playtest document?

Though I don't know if there would necessarily be much distinguishing between two such hypothetical documents, I think the definition of playtest necessitates that this document was actually used to play the game and evaluate the state of the rules. This is something for which presented evidence is (so far) pretty lacking?

If on the other hand, we imagine this is a transitional step to rules publication, where notes and practices from various sources are in the process of development towards a more formal structure, the lack of evidence that sessions were ever actually played from this rule draft is much more explainable, and indeed is the expected outcome for a system that is still being negotiated?

My view on this is likely colored by how I personally work when collaborating. Take everyone's notes, compile them, add structure and formatting, send out a draft to get feedback on what needs more elaboration, what is over-specified etc, incorporate the feedback into the next draft, update the format and structure and so on until either we have a consensus or run out of time and we have to live with what we have. Again -- this is maybe a bit easier today with email, MS word, scanners, digital cut and paste etc, than with the tools of the time, so maybe again my perception is colored a bit.

Of course, barring finding a smoking gun somewhere, making a definitive assessment of this document is somewhat problematic isn't it?. This of course doesn't mean there are less likely and more likely possibilities given the existing evidence. What we may end up with is a set of probabilities for several competing theories which are each more or less supported by the evidence in some proportion. It doesn't necessarily mean any of them is right (or wrong), just which ones are most likely.

Btw -- really enjoying your book Jon. It's not admittedly a quick read, but has gems liberally dispersed throughout. "Beardgamers" and your attached footnote caught me in just the right mood and I couldn't stop smiling for a good fifteen minutes.

Thanks for your work on this and the sharing of your observations!

Hey guys. I'm late to the party as usual, and I didn't even exist in 1973. But I see this as the elaborate plot to pull me back onto the site on a regular basis that it is.  Because y'all know I love a mystery.

Here are a few points based on my limited observations of the data made available thus far.  I will do little to explain those observations/assertions; consider the notes the uninformed substance-free pedantic opinion that they are.  Maybe it'll help someone else pull it together though.  Is there a way to get ahold of the whole Dalluhn thing? I'm working from bits and pieces, which is obviously prone to error.

Treasure tables (pg. 15 of D&Dfirst.pdf; vs. pg. 25-26 of OD&D 1st, Vol II)

1.  The Dalluhn manuscript apparently uses "divisions" of law and chaos; but so does OD&D at least in describing languages.  However, on pg. 15 of the pdf, there is a Helm of Evil (Good).  In OD&D Vol. 2, page 26, this is a Helm of Chaos (Law). Looks like Dalluhn had not been corrected.
2.  Numerous other differences in the equipment naming, use of single-quote for feet vs. double-quote for tens of feet, etc. suggest an un-Gygaxian hand editing/simplifying his material in a less convoluted way.
3.  Dalluhn has a wand of "Polymorph Others"; OD&D has it listed as merely "Polymorph".  Whether this is an embellishment or simplification is unclear; OD&D notes either type of wand may be found but I don't have the Dalluhn explanation, just the table.
4.  Missing items. I find it hard to believe the author of Dalluhn would remove the Bag of Holding or the Mirror of Life Trapping.  The Bag of Holding in particular would seem to be a very early and obvious invention...but it's only in OD&D.  It is strong evidence that Dalluhn is based on something predating OD&D.
5.  In the treasure tables the ranges for Silver/Gold/Gems is simplified to a number of dice.  That doesn't strike me as particularly Gygaxian; he's all about the complicated.

Conclusion: Further persual of these tables will undoubtedly help unravel the mystery and they should be closely scrutinized.  We don't have a lot of material to work with here.  If Dalluhn has anything to say about Purple Worms/Wyrms/Dragons, that would be an area of interest. IIRC, Chainmail's purple dragons (wyrms) became OD&D's Purple Worms.

Other pages/notes/thoughts:

1.  Some of the text accompanying the artwork, eg. "Ogre", "Ghoul" appear of the same style used within OD&D.  This suggests to me that the creator of the Dalluhn manuscript had either seen that artwork and copied the style, or perhaps was the same artist.  Who was this artist? I dunno.
2.  The writer (or editor) of Dalluhn knows how to spell "lightning"; OD&D frequently uses "lightening".  This suggests different parties are involved, at least in editing.
3.  "Gold pieces" in OD&D is abbreviated with "G.P.".  This is a very old-school style of abbreviation that we almost no longer use today, but it was only starting to disappear in the 70s.  Dalluhn uses the more modern "GP"; sans dots.  This again suggests different parties are involved; possibly somewhat younger.
4.  The "Lord Arn" bit to me suggests the author knew/liked/was Arneson.  These guys just loved putting their own names and others in the books.
5.  Page 3 of Dalluhn states Elves are "fine natural horsemen and sailors." Pg. 16, Vol 2 of OD&D states "they are not naturally adapted to horseback." I just find that funny.
6. Page 3 of Dalluhn uses the word "amoung".  This suggests Canadian or UK insertion of a "u" in some words.  Might help in pinning down the author, or it might just be an error.

Conclusion:
It is clear that the creator(s) of Dalluhn had seen either OD&D or a play-test copy thereof.  (And of course Chainmail.)  It is also clear that one or more different actor(s) are involved.  It is my personal feeling that the Dalluhn manuscript itself is *not* a playtest copy, but that it was based on a playtest copy + chainmail.  I also believe it predates production OD&D entirely.

However this does not suggest that Dalluhn is ancestral to OD&D, and it is imperative not to think linearly.  It seems that somebody took an earlier play-test copy and customized it (simplifying, correcting and embellishing in places) to their liking, thus diverging somewhat from what would eventually become OD&D.  OD&D would *likewise* simplify, correct, and embellish on that earlier form.  Thus we see odd Gygaxian terms like "hedge" being reused and reworded by Dalluhn's author, and Gygax himself quite probably rewriting/expanding the playtest copy's passage with his own flare for OD&D.  It's clear that the word "hedge", about as Gygaxian a usage as you'll find, was found within the playtest copy but the wording on that copy is unknown as we don't have that beast.  (Having worked on my own games/campaign settings for several years, I can attest that you go through many iterations of editing/scrapping/rewriting your own text!)

Dalluhn preserves some features of a common ancestor, and OD&D preserves some other features from that same ancestor.  What they share, it would be fairly reasonable to assume was within their common ancestor. (Though extremely rarely, even this is not the case.)  What they do not share, it is not reasonable to assume was present in the previous document without further information.  Either version may be the original, or perhaps neither one.  Consider the obvious case of 1E and Holmes Basic.  Neither is the ancestor or descendant of the other; both preserve some elements of OD&D and embellish others.

While Increment has stated that he does not believe it to be a fork, taxonomically that's exactly where I'd place it.  This placement best explains both additions *and* omissions between the documents, while eliminating the concept of OD&D "reverting" Dalluhn's additions/omissions.  Placing Dalluhn as transitionally before OD&D does not explain things quite so well; placing it after OD&D is somewhat absurd IMHO.  

Who created it? I have no idea, but it does not appear to be Gygax.  In my opinion, it was someone very close to Gygax/Arneson if not in direct collaboration, and not merely a "fan".  Perhaps even Arneson, but that would require more research.

As to the question of bootlegs, I for one have in my possession an early photocopy of the 1st printing OD&D.  I believe it cost me something in the order of $20 a few years back on eBay (I was hoping it was something it wasn't).  It has come in very handy for reference purposes, as I don't mind thumbing through it at length and frequently.

...And that was a lot longer than I'd expected, but I have the day off.