Shannon Appelcline

Shannon Appelcline is a historian of tabletop role-playing games and a game designer. Two different editions of his book Designers & Dragons have won ENNIE Awards.

Game history

Appelcline wrote the book Designers & Dragons, published in 2011 by Mongoose Publishing.[1] He later wrote an expanded four-volume version, Designers & Dragons: A History of the Roleplaying Game Industry. It was published in 2014 by Evil Hat Productions, with one volume dedicated to each decade from the 1970s to the 2000s.[2]

Reception

René Reinhold Schallegger, author of The Postmodern Joy of Role-Playing Games: Agency, Ritual and Meaning in the Medium (2018), cited the original volume of Designers & Dragons as one of the central texts for the chapter "Generations: The Origins and Development of RPGs," calling it a:

comprehensive chronological collection of major RPG publishing houses and their games [...] Appelcline takes a production-oriented approach, chronicling the development of the people who make RPGs and their companies" and that his "detailed content should provide a satisfactory insight into the evolution of the medium in form and content beyond D&D.[1]

The 2018 book Role-Playing Game Studies: Transmedia Foundations posits that:

independent authors like Jon Peterson (2012) and Shannon Appelcline (2015) have produced substantial historiographies of the emergence and evolution of TRPGs and RPGs more generally [...] Appelcline details the fortunes of the myriad TRPG publishers that emerged, decade by decade, in the wake of D&D's publication.[2]

Curtis D. Carbonell in his 2019 book Dread Trident: Tabletop Role-Playing Games and the Modern Fantastic wrote that, "Jon Peterson's Playing at the World (2012) and Shannon Appelcline's Designers and Dragons (2015) both offer expansive histories of TRPGs."[3] Matthew B. Caffrey, Jr. wrote in his 2019 book On Wargaming: How Wargames Have Shaped History and how They May Shape the Future that, "For the most comprehensive history of not only the birth of Dungeons & Dragons but the role-playing industry itself see Shannon Appelcline's four-title Designers & Dragons series."[4] Matthew Ryan Williams for Wired wrote:

Shannon Appelcline's four-book series Designers and Dragons presents an incredibly detailed look at the history of tabletop roleplaying games, featuring profiles of more than a hundred companies [...] For each article, Appelcline gathered as much information as he could from magazines and websites, then ran his research past people who had actually worked at the companies in question. [...] Along the way he discovered that the history of tabletop gaming is full of confrontations, betrayals, and scandals, which makes Designers and Dragons a surprisingly lively read.[5]

Gerald Nachtwey wrote in his 2021 book Strictly Fantasy: The Cultural Roots of Tabletop Role-Playing Games that:

Appelcline's series relies on Peterson's book at many points [...] but expands on that prior work by focusing more intently on the business end of the early hobby [...] Both authors manage to present a mountain of information in a very accessible, engaging format, and anyone interested in particular stages of the development of the hobby [...] will find a rich trove of resources in either work.[6]

Ben Riggs, in his 2022 book Slaying the Dragon: A Secret History of Dungeons & Dragons, called the book "excellent" and wrote "Thanks to Shannon Appelcline, for his ambitious and clear-cutting work in RPG history."[7] Stu Horvath, in his 2023 book Monsters, Aliens, and Holes in the Ground, Deluxe Edition: A Guide to Tabletop Roleplaying Games from D&D to Mothership, wrote that Appelcline's four-volume Designers & Dragons books "were an invaluable resource for getting my facts straight and should be the first stop for anyone desiring to read about the history of the RPG hobby."[8] Benjamin Joseph Munise wrote in his 2023 PhD thesis "Roleplaying Games and Performance" that:

Shannon Appelcline's four-volume Designers & Dragons series, published by the TTRPG publisher Evil Hat Productions [...] combined archival documents and interviews to assemble portraits of significant game designers and the shape of the TTRPG industry over four decades, from the 1970s through the 2000s.[9]

Scott Michael Bruner in his 2023 PhD thesis "Agential Fantasy: A Copenhagen Approach to the Tabletop Role-Playing Game" wrote that compared to Jon Peterson's Playing at the World (2012), "Appelcline's Designers & Dragons series (2014- 2015) is an equally valuable record of the history of TRPG companies, creators, and philosophies of design.": 66 [10]

Awards

Designers & Dragons won a Judges' Spotlight award at the 2012 ENnie Awards,[11] and won the Gold Ennie for Best RPG Related Product in 2015.[12]

Other writing

Appelcline is a writer and technologist, and with Christopher Allen he wrote iPhone in Action: Introduction to Web and SDK Development, an introductory tutorial which teaches the basics of both native (SDK) and web programming for the iPhone, and which also introduces Objective-C.[13]

Appelcline is the vice president of Skotos Tech,[14] and he has written about emergent cultures within the games he designs.[15][16] Appelcline and Christopher Allen wrote articles on the subject of how game systems work at Christopher Allen's blog, Life with Alacrity.[17]

References

  1. ^ a b Schallegger, René Reinhold (2018). The Postmodern Joy of Role-Playing Games: Agency, Ritual and Meaning in the Medium. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company. ISBN 978-1-4766-3146-2. Retrieved 2024-03-24 – via Google Books.
  2. ^ a b Zagal, José P.; Deterding, Sebastian, eds. (2018). Role-Playing Game Studies: Transmedia Foundations. New York: Routledge. ISBN 978-1-138-63890-7. Retrieved 2024-03-24 – via Google Books.
  3. ^ Carbonell, Curtis D. (2019). Dread Trident: Tabletop Role-Playing Games and the Modern Fantastic. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. p. 2. ISBN 978-1-78962-057-3. Retrieved 2024-03-24.
  4. ^ Caffrey, Jr., Matthew B. (2019). On Wargaming: How Wargames Have Shaped History and how They May Shape the Future. Newport, Rhode Island: Naval War College Press. p. 126. ISBN 978-1-935352-65-5. Retrieved 2024-03-24.
  5. ^ Williams, Matthew Ryan (2019-07-13). "Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Tabletop RPGs". Wired. Archived from the original on 2024-03-24. Retrieved 2024-03-24.
  6. ^ Nachtwey, Gerald (2021). Strictly Fantasy: The Cultural Roots of Tabletop Role-Playing Games. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company. pp. 12–13. ISBN 978-1-4766-7571-8. Retrieved 2024-03-24 – via Google Books.
  7. ^ Riggs, Ben (2022). Slaying the Dragon: A Secret History of Dungeons & Dragons. New York: St. Martin's Press. ISBN 978-1-250-27804-3. Retrieved 2024-03-24 – via Google Books.
  8. ^ Horvath, Stu (2023). Monsters, Aliens, and Holes in the Ground, Deluxe Edition: A Guide to Tabletop Roleplaying Games from D&D to Mothership. Cambridge: MIT Press. ISBN 978-0-262-04822-4. Retrieved 2024-03-24 – via Google Books.
  9. ^ Munise, Benjamin Joseph (2023-05-24). Roleplaying Games and Performance (PhD thesis). Louisiana State University. p. 16. Archived from the original on 2024-03-24. Retrieved 2024-03-24.
  10. ^ Bruner, Scott Michael (May 2023). Agential Fantasy: A Copenhagen Approach to the Tabletop Role-Playing Game (PhD thesis). University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. pp. 66, 88, 99, 164–166. Archived from the original on 2023-10-23. Retrieved 2024-03-24.
  11. ^ "2012 Noms and Winners | ENnie Awards". www.ennie-awards.com. Archived from the original on 29 August 2019. Retrieved 15 May 2022.
  12. ^ "2015 ENnie Award Winners | ENnie Awards". www.ennie-awards.com. Archived from the original on 31 August 2019. Retrieved 15 May 2022.
  13. ^ "iPhone in action; introduction to Web and SDK development". Scitech Book News. Vol. 33, no. 4. Copyright Clearance Center. December 2009. ProQuest 200187115.
  14. ^ "About Shannon Appelcline".
  15. ^ Pearce, Celia (2009). Communities of Play: Emergent Cultures in Multiplayer Games and Virtual Worlds. Cambridge: MIT Press]. p. 156. ISBN 978-0-262-16257-9. Retrieved 2024-03-24 – via Google Books.
  16. ^ Bartle, Richard (2004). Designing Virtual Worlds. Berkeley, California: New Riders Press. p. 607. ISBN 0-131-01816-7. Retrieved 2024-03-24 – via Internet Archive.
  17. ^ Davis, Steven B. (2008). Protecting Games: A Security Handbook for Game Developers and Publishers. Boston: Charles River Media. Cengage Learning. p. 192. ISBN 978-1-58450-670-6. Retrieved 2024-03-24 – via Internet Archive.