D&D

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2024 in Review – Top 8 Books

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2024 in Review – Top 8 Books

I like to set myself a goal for the number of books I will read in a given year. In previous years this was fifty books, but I found that this constrained my choices as I often passed over big doorstopper volumes because they take too long to read which could imperil my chance of reaching my target. In 2023 I dropped my goal to forty books and barely hit that target, and 2024 proved to be an exact repeat – sliding in to the finish in the last weeks of December. For 2025 I may drop down to thirty-five to allow even more room for the kind of dense books I enjoy. However, I am also hoping to read more fiction, which generally goes much faster than the kinds of history I usually read. I’ve recently been getting more review copies of academic books which has been great (academic books are expensive!) but it also means I’m reading more dense history books and I need to put some more lighter fair in there as well.

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Playing at the World 2e, Volume 1: The Invention of Dungeons and Dragons by Jon Peterson

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Playing at the World 2e, Volume 1: The Invention of Dungeons and Dragons by Jon Peterson

Few books have impacted me quite as much as the first edition of Jon Peterson’s Playing at the World. A 700 page self-published brick of a history on the origins and influences of Dungeons and Dragons was exactly the kind of deep nerd lore that I craved. I devoured it while working on my PhD, and even snuck in a little reference to it on my footnotes. Now long out of print, it was a book I would recommend but with many caveats around people having to really be into this kind of thing specifically. Thankfully, Peterson has seen fit to put together a revised second edition, now available via MIT Press, and Playing at the World has never been so approachable. While a weirdo like me can’t help but miss some of the first edition’s idiosyncrasies, even I must admit that this is altogether a more polished history of the origins of D&D and roleplaying games in general.

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Fifty Years of Dungeons and Dragons ed. Premeet Sidhu, Marcus Carter, and José P. Zagal

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Fifty Years of Dungeons and Dragons ed. Premeet Sidhu, Marcus Carter, and José P. Zagal

We’re living through a particularly excellent time for scholarship on Dungeon’s and Dragons, and this latest edited volume from MIT Press is a real showcase for the vibrancy of that scholarship. I’ll confess that sometimes these edited volumes make me a little concerned – it’s a real challenge to keep a book like this on theme while simultaneously ensuring that each chapter (twenty in total in this case) is interesting to anyone who might pick it up. That’s not to say that other edited volumes I’ve read have been bad – but rather that I often find myself enjoying at most one-third of these kinds of books with many of the other articles just being okay or simply not relevant to my interests. Given the range of fields on display in Fifty Years of Dungeons and Dragons I expected to find parts of it to be a bit of a drag, and while I cannot claim that I loved them all equally I found myself enjoying every single one of the book’s chapters. This is an excellent edited volume with plenty to offer anyone interested in the history, study, and culture of Dungeons and Dragons.

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Monsters, Aliens, and Holes in the Ground by Stu Horvath

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Monsters, Aliens, and Holes in the Ground by Stu Horvath

I was slightly worried when I first opened Stu Horvath’s Monsters, Aliens, and Holes in the Ground (Monsters from here) that what I had gotten all excited for was essentially an encyclopedia. Not that the existence of an encyclopedia of tabletop RPGs would be a bad thing, but they tend to be incredibly dry reading and I wasn’t excited to tackle one from cover to cover. Thankfully, while the format resembles an encyclopedia the contents are distinctly their own thing. The feeling that Monsters most closely evokes is that of having been invited into the basement of a genial but intense RPG aficionado to be walked through his collection one item at a time. The book oozes a sense of familiarity and enthusiasm that make coverage of even the driest, or most bizarre, RPG supplements a fascinating trip down a branch of the hobby’s history.

Review: Game Wizards: The Epic Battle for Dungeons and Dragons by Jon Peterson (MIT Press, 2021)

Review: Game Wizards: The Epic Battle for Dungeons and Dragons by Jon Peterson (MIT Press, 2021)

I was a huge fan of Jon Peterson’s earlier book Playing at the World (Unreason Press, 2012) when I read it back in either 2014 or 2015 – I was finishing my PhD and records from that time are hazy at best. I managed to sneak it into my thesis, so I must have read it before August 2015. I also really enjoyed Dungeons and Dragons Art and Arcana (Ten Speed Press, 2018), which Peterson contributed to. Given this pedigree of past works, I was very excited when I discovered that he was revisiting the subject of the early history of Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) in his new book, and I’m happy to report that it did not disappoint.