Here is a mostly-finalized version of the Judges Guild history. I am completing my work on the larger portion of this product over this weekend. Some changes suggested by Bill Owen, and others, have been incorporated. Your comments are still welcome:
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Judges Guild began in 1976 as the idea of gamers Bob Bledsaw and Bill Owen of Decatur, Illinois. Both of them were wargamers who enjoyed writing variants of published board game. They even briefly considered publishing their own game, Martian America. They discovered Dungeons and Dragons together at GenCon in 1974. Another friend, Marc Summerlot, was involved in the early discussions about forming a company but he chose not to participate. Bledsaw and Owen combined their funds to open the company. (Later, Summerlot was to appear as a writer for two classic Judges Guild publications, Citadel of Fire and Thieves Fortress of Badabaskor.).
The key to Judges Guild's early success was a license from TSR to publish game materials bearing the Dungeons and Dragons name. The license was in place by August of 1976, when the partners brought their first product to GenCon in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. In its earliest form, the license was a verbal agreement with TSR allowing Judges Guild to rework charts and use terminology and statistics from the Dungeons and Dragons system. The first Judges Guild products did not bear the Dungeons and Dragons logo. According to Owen, it was TSR's own idea to add the logo. This occurred sometime in late 1976 or early 1977. Judges Guild printed red labels with the logo and attached them to items already in print. Products with the red labels are now specially prized collector's items.
Accounts about the provisions the license between TSR and Judges Guild vary. All products had to be approved by TSR before they could be published. This was the basis of the standard language on Judges Guild products of "APPROVED FOR USE WITH DUNGEONS AND DRAGONS." Concerns by TSR over royalties for the Dungeons and Dragons name was the cause for continued negotiations between the two companies. According to Owen, the two companies eventually settled upon TSR receiving 5-10% of Judges Guild's profits on all Dungeons and Dragons products. The exact percentage is unknown.
Gary Gygax, the founder of TSR, later said that he was against granting the license because, "there was no quality control. Gygax, who was recollecting events 30 years in the past and he was not directly involved in working with the Judges Guild license. Owen does not recall any direct conversations with Gygax about the license. According to Owen, TSR seldom required changes and often returned products for publication without comment. Delays in getting TSR approval for some products later caused problems for Judges Guild.
The informal nature of Judges Guild's license with TSR was typical of the early years of the role-playing hobby. At the time, the Dungeons and Dragons game was quickly growing in popularity but there were very few published modules. The game rules were also very rough and gamers were interested in expansions and playing aids that would show them how to play the game. A number of companies published for game systems, or used intellectual properties owned by other companies based on verbal agreements. Judges Guild was no real threat to TSR and their products filled a useful market niche. "Judges Guild was the underdog to TSR," wrote Owen, looking back four decades later, "with the attitude of a bad-tempered hobby ogre."
Judges Guild debuted at GenCon IX, August 20-22. 1976. The first official Judges Guild product was a large map of the City State of the Invincible Overlord, which became the center of one of the most detailed game worlds ever published. The city map was printed on heavy vellum paper and cost $5. The map was sold as a first installment in an annual subscription service. The first maps were sold out of the trunk of Bill Owen's car because Judges Guild did not rent a space in the convention's vendor area. On the second day, Owen and Bledsaw set up a card table and posted the giant City State map behind them on the wall in the vendor's area. ("The convention staff never asked for anything," said Owen.) The two entrepreneurs sold out most of their inventory, breaking even in one afternoon of sales. Judges Guild was launched.
Judges Guild's approach to
RPG publications varied strongly from that of TSR and other companies. The most significant variation was the idea of a gaming subscription service. Bledsaw and Owen decided to build their company around the City State of the Invincible Overlord and the Wilderlands of High Adventure campaign setting. Their idea was to build up details about the setting, and bring in new customers who would be attracted to the campaign. Subscribers would receive regular installments, including game aids, modules and maps that would gradually expand into a fully-realized game world. In effect, subscribers would become guild members and share in the growth of both the company and the Wilderlands setting. Subscribers would also have the opportunity to send in game settings and rule ideas and see them published.
The subscription service was a success. It lasted for 26 installments, confusingly labeled I (for "initial") through W and then numbered 15 through 25. The first installment in the Judges Guild subscription service was the map to the City State of the Invincible Overlord, sold at GenCon IX in 1976. The last installment was Castle Book II, published in 1980. These installments included the first appearance of several modules that were to become both classics and collector's items. The early installments came with booklets that included rules variations and play aids. They remain highly popular among collectors.
Another large difference between Judges Guild and TSR was in the subject matter of their modules. The first published module was Dave Arneson's Temple of the Frog, which appeared as part of TSR's Blackmoor supplement. Like other early modules, Temple of the Frog focused on an indoor "dungeon" setting where fantasy archetype characters essentially explored caves. Judges Guild would take a more ambitious route.
Although TSR had published booklets named for the Greyhawk and Blackmoor settings, large-scale campaign settings were still years in the future. Gygax's city of Greyhawk existed mostly in theory, with his campaign growing up around the dungeons of Castle Greyhawk. While much of the Greyhawk setting has since seen publication, in 1976 it was still invisible to gamers. The classic TSR module, Tomb of Horrors, for instance, was located somewhere in the midst of the Great Swamp. Gamers outside of Gary Gygax's personal campaign could only guess where and what the Great Swamp might be. It didn't really matter, since the focus of the adventure was on crawling through the tomb complex. Blackmoor itself would not really reach the hands of gamers until it was published by Judges Guild as The First Fantasy Campaign. When it finally appeared in print, Blackmoor would have a map connecting it to the larger Wilderlands of High Adventure campaign world.
Built around a city map, the Wilderlands of High Adventure setting grew organically in a different direction. Judges Guild adventures certainly included dungeons, but the early modules explored new themes such as fantasy cities, a haunted house, inside of a cloud, a wizard's tower and deep mines. Because these early modules were placed in the Wilderlands campaign world, the dangerous lands around them were also detailed. An extensive set of large-scale hex maps to depict the Wilderlands was supported by a series of publications detailing what adventurers would find in each hex. Various regions of the game world became the focus of modules, rather than a single dungeon within those regions.
The logic of the Wilderlands setting also demanded new types of publications. Judges Guild printed books of smaller-scale maps so judges (the word Judges Guild used to describe what TSR called a dungeon master) could fill in details in their own games. These books were not "adventure modules" so much as the first real "game aids." Castle Book 1, with maps of castles drawn on hex paper, was followed by books depicting more castles, villages, temples, ruins, caverns and islands. The existence of islands and oceans demanded details about ships and sea travel. The names of towns and regions demanded details about who lived there and why they needed killing. Judges Guild also published collections of shorter adventures based on treasure maps, one of which includes arguably their best visualized Dungeons and Dragons scenario, The Lone Tower.
The originality of the Judges Guild approach can also be seen in its central character, the City State of the Invincible Overlord. This city began as a map envisioned by Bledsaw for his home-brew Dungeons and Dragons campaign, set in Tolkien's Middle Earth. (The first known copy of the map even has notes in the margin describing it as an unidentified city in Middle Earth. The Middle Earth description was dropped when Bledsaw and Owen realized that the chance of getting approval from the Tolkien estate was slim.) The map required a description, which became a booklet, written by Bledsaw in August and September of 1976. The overlord had to have domains to rule and money to spend. The unfortunately named Glory Hole Dwarven Mine was located just outside the city. The tunnels and sewers beneath the city were described in Wraith Overlord. Modron, a town at the mouth of the Roglaroon Estuary, was the overlord's main port. A sea monster, under the overlord's control, guarded the entrance to the estuary, which was detailed in an underwater adventure as part of the Modron publication. The overlord also had to have enemies to fight, which spawned further publications detailing rival city states, pirates, amazons and other cultures.
Although these subjects became common fodder for most game companies of the next four decades, they were incredibly innovative in 1976. The scale and quality of the City State of the Invincible Overlord map, which gamers now expect in all city products, was unprecedented at the time. All of this creative burst grew from the basic idea of a city map as the starting point for a game world. The result was a series of gaming publications that continue to see re-prints and new editions into the current decade, crossing all of the editions and incarnations of Dungeons and Dragons.
Judges Guild also differed from other companies in their view of how a game publication should be utilized. From the start, the central concept was that modules, maps and other materials were meant to be used up and worn out by gamers. Map sets for the Wilderlands setting came in two versions. There was a judge's map which showed all the landscape of a region or buildings of a city. With this came a players' map which was largely blank, with only coastlines or other known landmarks detailed. The assumption was that players would finish these maps for themselves by drawing in the landscape or noting city sites as they discovered them. This reflected the most popular activity in Bledsaw's home campaign, which was overland exploration.
This concept was carried over into modules, where space was provided for judges to write in their own ideas below the printed text. Players who bought their own copies of Judges Guild publications could never be 100% sure what they would encounter in a setting customized by their game master. While descriptive text could be colorful and interesting, it was often kept to a minimum. So, a shop in the city of Verbosh is described as a bakery run by a hobbit with flaming red hair. The hobbit is so bad at baking that his cookies can be used as +1 sling stones. But he's not actually a hobbit. He's a red dragon who is pursuing his passionate baking hobby with little success. The game master is not told what the dragon will do next, or what will happen if his identity is discovered. These details are left to the judge to decide.
This approach has caused many to criticize Judges Guild for lack of quality. In many cases this is true. There is a fine line between leaving room for creativity and hurrying a product into print without real effort and solid writing. For instance, one infamous Judges Guild publication notes that a secret door leads to a dungeon dominated by a lich. The author writes that he has not included the dungeon in the module because he has not had time to play-test it! This gradual reduction in quality, including recycled art or even public domain clip art, became a larger problem as time passed.
Some production quality issues crept into Judges Guild products as time passed. Some of these were sins of omission, such as missing text and poor quality art. Some were production gaffes, including a run of Book of Treasure Maps which had its front cover sliced off at the top at a crazy angle…but was shipped to distributors anyway. Some of these problems were the result of a loss of printing expertise when Owen sold his half of the company to Bledsaw in March 1978 and was no longer involved in production. Others were cost-saving measures that seem less forgivable to gamers from later eras.
Critics of Judges Guild quality should keep in mind the game industry standards of the 1970's. Spare descriptions were the norm for many classic publications. Fans produced game supplements of widely varying quality, most of it incredibly bad by later standards. Some of those "monster hotels" are highly valued by collectors but were almost useless as game products. Only TSR really kept and grew a professional publishing ethic that came to be the industry norm. Some of the later TSR modules even included text meant to be read aloud by dungeon masters. Whether you consider this text a great innovation or tedious and moronic has more to say about the era of gaming when you first entered the hobby than it does about the products themselves.
Finally, Judges Guild products stand out from other game companies in their overall feel. They are light-hearted and often overtly humorous. Two entrepreneurs run a store selling buckets of "greater demon destroying dirt." They are actually thieves digging into a nearby bank vault from their basement. A weekly percentage chance roll determines whether the thieves hit the bank vault or the town moat. Hulking amazons can't resist posing in partially unbuttoned fur bikinis. A beautiful elven florist is the secret girlfriend of the highly jealous town wizard. Visitors to the City State of the Invincible Overlord can pay to take a boat ride through the Park of Obscene Statues. Player characters might meet NPC's like the dwarf, Gutboy Barrelhouse, the merchant Talc Umpowder, or the "Halfling heroes" Rudi and Bosco. Saintly ghosts manifest to give the players advice or help them with artifacts. An ancient elven kingdom hides its treasure in a secret and highly guarded vault, and then leaves clues to help adventurers find it. Even the most evil bad guys are slightly funny or off-kilter in ways that make them worth killing.
Judges Guild had a way of dealing with grim subjects in an inoffensive manner. Demons and devils appeared as flawed character actors. Gods like Dorak, God of Peace allied themselves with gods like Dacron, God of Craftsmen against Mungo, God of Nightmares and Phread the Sightless, God of Unseeing. For sure, Judges Guild products also dealt with topics like human sacrifice, torture and rape, but the villains were the ones perpetrating these crimes, depicted in simple, cartoon-like illustrations that tended to defuse the subjects. There were really no great moral questions that could not be solved with fireball spells.
This sort of humor would go out of style in Dungeons and Dragons, but it catches the feeling of the early game as it was first played. The soap opera romance and grim dread of the Dragonlance modules was unknown in the 1970's. Puns and literary jokes would have been lost on later gamers, who tended to be younger and younger as the golden era progressed. (Those were probably the gamers who tended to like blocks of text to read aloud.) There are fashions in gaming just like any other activity. After a decade or three, Judges Guild came back into style just like any other consumer product.
The first incarnation of Judges Guild came to a slow, painful end in 1982, when the
RPG market hit an economic wall. The first generation of gamers went off to college and stopped buying books. Judges Guild no longer enjoyed a license from TSR to use the Dungeons and Dragons name and had to resort to the fiction of a "universal" game system. (There were plans to expand this system into a full role-playing game, but the project was never fully developed. The system appeared in later Judges Guild publications as a collection of statistics and terms in which standard Dungeons and Dragons terminology was hidden. "A Judges Guild UNIVERSAL Fantasy Supplement" logo appeared on later products. These were essentially Advanced Dungeons and Dragons supplements without the name.)
When distributors and game stores went out of business still owing money to Judges Guild, the company was forced to move out of its offices and stop publishing. Literally tons of Judges Guild products were stranded in boxes stored in warehouses, container cars and garages. Judges Guild was not alone. It was a decade that would see many game companies go under. Even Gary Gygax was forced out of TSR. The golden era was over.
Many of the names associated with Judges Guild went on working in the gaming industry. Judges Guild's best writer, Paul Jaquays, continued to work in the print and electronic game fields as an artist and designer, including a stint on staff at TSR. Artist Kevin Siembieda, whose early style became the distinctive look of Judges Guild products, founded Palladium Games, which was active in the industry for another two decades. Writers like Rudy Kraft, Dave Arneson and Dave Petrowsky went on to work with other companies and projects. Other writers, such as Marc Summerlot, Scott Fulton and Geoff O. Dale were active in recreating the Judges Guild magic with new editions of Judges Guild products in the
D20 Open Gaming License boom of 2001 to 2008.
Judges Guild has reappeared in various forms since 1982. In 1999 the company surfaced online with Bob Bledsaw announcing the rebirth of the company through the internet. Very little actually got done, but classic Judges Guild products have appeared for new iterations of Dungeons and Dragons. These publications have been popular with gamers who remember the golden age. Some of them, including Necromancer Games versions of City State of the Invincible Overlord and Wilderlands of High Adventure, have become new classics. Companies that have produced or re-produced materials based on Judges Guild products include Necromancer Games, Eostros Games, Goodman Games, Gamescience,
RPG Realms and Adventure Games Publishing.
Bob Bledsaw died in 2008 during a short span of time that also saw the passing of fellow game legends Gary Gygax, Dave Arneson and J. Eric Holmes. Bledsaw was mourned by the entire
RPG community and eulogized by Bill Owen in a published history of Judges Guild which includes many personal recollections and anecdotes about his friend. As of this writing, Judges Guild remains active under the direction of Bledsaw's son, Bob Jr. The publication of Dungeons and Dragons 4th Edition in 2008 put several proposed Judges Guild revival projects on hold. Judges Guild products remain available through the electronic gaming books industry and as sought-after collector's items. As long as there are
RPG gamers and publishers, it seems likely that Judges Guild products will continue to appear.
