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This was created as a Kickstarter stretch goal, and while good, is smaller and much more limited than the main four books.

The first part is a collection of four essays done as a result of the Kickstarter that funded the publication of the main series. One is on women in the industry, and starts off reasonably interesting, but falls into a wall of names for the end, which is a common problem with things like that. The other three are about different fan groups that had an influence on the industry. The last of these is somewhat autobiographical, as its the group Appelcline was (and is) part of, while one is a group that had an impact on the tournament scene and helped the popularity of the Hero System, and the first one is about the group that generated the thief class in D&D.

And all of them do a lot to shore up weaknesses in coverage of main volumes. Fan communities have had some profound effects on the history of RPGs, but much of that gets lost in the focus on companies, so that fans that started companies become the only glimpse into that world we get. In addition, the look at women in the RPG industry is the only place where Appelcline tries to take a look at overall trends, instead of focusing on what was going on in a particular place. With a few more chapters like these (perhaps some that at least summarize what has happened in non-English speaking countries), the entire work will be much more complete.

The last part of the book is a reprint of a series of yearly ‘year in review’ essays that Appelcline has been writing since 2008. Since it’s the entire industry, a year at a time, it has a different perspective than the main text, and since this volume came slightly later, it includes the 2014 essay. There’s also some nice asides included where he comments on his own comments.

This is about a quarter of the size of the main volumes, and not as packed with info, due to the format, but still well worth a read.

The fourth (and kind-of final) volume of Shannon Appelcline’s massive history of the RPG industry finishes up the project well. However, I can’t help a feeling that this one is less important, and unpolished.

Some of this is my prejudices, but some is caused by the nature of how the books are put together. Since each chapter is a look at the full history of a company, instead of being confined to the decade under study, earlier volumes had histories that covered multiple decades in long histories with a lot of context. Here, all the histories are relatively short, since no company could have more than thirteen years of existence at the time of writing. This is shown by the coverage of 26 companies in this volume, plus thirteen company mini-histories, a quick look at OSR, a short look at Glorantha fanzines, and finally two asides talking about his conception of ‘story games’ (which have been brought up since the first volume).

The format also ill-serves overall industry trends, which was a minor problem before, but really damages coverage of the d20 years. I know it was a big thing, and it comes up a lot as a driving force in a lot of chapters, but I still don’t have a clear picture of how it operated because of the fragmentary coverage. Short of the creation of the RPG itself, it’s probably the biggest industry-wide force there’s been, and I have no idea just how many companies (large and small) published during it (and how that compares to, say, the ’80s boom), and so on.

There’s some good coverage of the indie movement, and trends in it (including a much better picture of how it got going than I’ve seen elsewhere), and some lesser coverage of OSR. Of course, the real problem with all of this, is that with it all being so recent (/ongoing), it’s harder to judge what’s going to be of lasting importance at this point. Moreover, the book was written as D&D 5E was preparing to come out, so current events are still playing havoc with important subjects here, notably Paizo.

The second volume of Shannon Appelcline’s history of the RPG industry is every bit as large as the first. It’s a much bigger subject though, since the 1980s saw a lot of activity up and down. But TSR and GDW were very prominent parts of this decade, and were already covered in the first volume. This is also the decade of most of my role-playing activity, so there’s a lot of familiar names here, and many more I remember from ads, but never knew someone who actually got the products.

There’s another 23 major histories here, plus six ‘mini-histories’, and two magazine histories (these really need to be in the table of contents). This is about twice as many entries as the previous volume, which shows that most of them aren’t as long, though there’s still some very substantial chapters.

The biggest omission I noted in this volume was Car Wars. Appelcline passes over it quickly as a board game that Steve Jackson Games did very well with. However, it really exists in that halfway realm of the ‘proto-RPG’ or ‘hybrid game’ that he explores a little in the first volume. While the people in Car Wars are largely not the focus, there is a skill system, and there is character advancement through those skills. Moreover, the expected mode of play was for characters to persist from session to session. Sunday Drivers (expanded and reprinted from The Space Gamer, and later retitled Crash City) was labeled as ‘a role-playing supplement for Car Wars‘ and Convoy (reprinted from the first issue of Autoduel Quarterly) is a solo adventure (though not for one character) not unlike the ones produced for Tunnels & Trolls. Perhaps a large history of the RPG industry isn’t the place to meditate on just what constitutes an RPG, but I think looking at the edge cases, especially where play styles and fan groups start bleeding over into each other, is instructive.

While there’s several companies I’m very familiar with in here, they’re concentrated in the early parts of the book. In the last two (of six) parts, the company I’m most familiar with (DGP) I only really knew of after the fact, and I never got anything by New Infinities and only one from R. Talsorian (Dream Park, though I certainly enjoyed playing Teenagers From Outer Space). Again, it’s an extremely informative book that covers a lot of ground well.