We have been quiet since our amazingly successful, annual Christmas Auction last December. Why? Because our fearless leader, Paul Stormberg, with his unmatched perspective on the history of Dungeons & Dragons, teamed up with screenwriter Adam Turner to produce, When We Were Wizards: An Oral History of Dungeons & Dragons, an unprecedented, 10 episode podcast, telling the riveting story of Gary Gygax, D&D, and TSR Hobbies, the company founded to publish the game.
We will resume our 2022 auction season, with a massive auction in August, over 500 items! Some of the rarest fanzines, games, and memorabilia you have come to expect from The Collector's Trove!
The podcast started three years ago when screenwriter, Adam Turner, and Dungeons & Dragons® historian, Paul Stormberg, embarked on a project about Gary Gygax, D&D®, and TSR Hobbies. During the course of this project they recorded their ongoing conversations, not only about the cultural impact of the game, but the profound personal impact it had on Gary, his family, friends, and colleagues. The result is an unprecedented 10-episode podcast that tells the story with the voices of the people who were there, through never before released interviews, personal letters, and internal company documents.
D&D® was the world's first published role-playing game and, as such, is one of the few types of table-top games ever created by humanity.
Can we say who created chess? Or dice? No, of course not. But we can name the people who created Dungeons & Dragons®, and we can tell their story. This is that story. One of dreamers and gamers who changed the world.
Dungeons & Dragons® is a truly global phenomenon. An estimated 50 million people have played the game since it was created and it has been translated into dozens of languages. Nearly 14 million people play it currently and 9 million people watch livestreams of other people playing it. The game pervades popular culture and has become part of the very fabric of our civilization.
Gary Gygax believed in the power of games to transcend age, gender, ethnicity, culture, language, religion, and class. Even as a child, that power drew him to games like chess, cribbage, mahjong, and others. But all those games were based on competition. In a millennia of game design, a thousand years of human history, no one had broken this paradigm of us vs. them, victory or defeat. The purpose of games were to win, and losing meant failure.
But for the first time in thousands of years, D&D® gives us something different. It’s a game whose only boundary is the imagination of everyone sitting around the table playing it. Where the shared experience is the reward.
Join Adam and Paul as they explore the origins of a cultural phenomena and how it changed the lives of those who created it and, ultimately, the whole world.
When We Were Wizards is currently available on these platforms:
SPOTIFY: https://open.spotify.com/show/7pcZ1tc0riPb1IarAXnIqS
ANCHOR: https://anchor.fm/traction-media
APPLE PODCAST: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/when-we-were-wizards/id1631699827
GOOGLE PODCAST: https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy8xMGRlYTVkNC9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw
AMAZON MUSIC: https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/5ef4cc84-8e34-4d24-8a8b-b136c77ca0c3/when-we-were-wizards