Standing On The Shoulders of Giants

How The Lost Dungeons of Tonisborg Preserves D&D's True History

Author’s Note: There are very few text links in this article. I do have links in this article though and nearly all of them, if clicked, will take you to the product in the photo in one form or another. The Lost Dungeons of Tonisborg and Secrets of Blackmoor as well as Ben Riggs’ book, Slaying The Dragon are works that I recommend and support. Please visit those links and consider joining me in supporting their work.

Awhile back, I wrote an article about The Lost Dungeons of Tonisborg. Okay, truth be told, it wasn’t the original focus and it should have been. Instead, I was comparing two histories and, more truth to the matter, there’s no comparison between Wizards of The Coast’s book full of self-flagellation The Making of Original Dungeons & Dragons and The Lost Dungeons of Tonisborg. These are two different things. One is history, complete with people who were and are still there. Some of them still play the game, embroiled in a campaign that carries on even to this day. Fifty years. That’s a long campaign. I’ve only ever met one other person face-to-face that told me that his group have been playing the same campaign for forty plus years. Needless to say, I was impressed. I could only hope to have a group that plays as long as that.

The other book, while it does contain the entirety of Original Dungeons & Dragons (OD&D), it will also contain many digs at both Gygax and Arneson. It will tell you how evil they are, even if they didn’t intend to be. It will virtue-signal and pander to a crowd that claims to love D&D but doesn’t know anything about it’s true history. That’s why I’m not going to spend more time on that book than this.

I will expand upon those Lost Dungeons. I’ll tell you about the DVD Secrets of Blackmoor which is worth it to own. I’ll tell you that if you want to know the true history of anything, you should talk to the people involved. Many of them are still alive today and they’re willing to tell you all the stories. They’re willing to tell you about the highs and the lows, the stories of triumph and agony, the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat. Ben Riggs talked to many of them, some of them before they passed away, like Jim Ward, a legend and pioneer who brought us Metamorphosis Alpha and Starship Warden.

They’re people like you and me. Some of them had characters, a multitude of them, that died in some of the first encounters they ever took part in and others went on to have characters that would become legendary at that table.

Some of them, even appeared in the very video I mentioned. Hear their stories directly from the sources who were on the scene at the time.

It’s an excellent documentary and one you won’t regret seeing. Forget renting it, get your copy right here. You’ll thank me later.

I was watching a video by Venger Satanis who reviewed the Lost Dungeons book.

You’ll see most of the content of the book in his video.

What Makes It “Lost?”:

For starters, Greg Svenson wrote it and mapped it out. It was somewhat of a work-in-progress when he loaned it to David Megarry. Megarry was loaned the original documents so that he could make copies of them for himself. Megarry put the original documents into a magazine and he worked a job where he was working third shift. He came home, went to bed and, while he slept, the cleaning lady had thrown out all of the magazines she found. It was garbage day. Tonisborg was gone and Megarry had to break the news to Svenson.

That’s a piece of real D&D history. Back then there wasn’t cloud storage or USB thumb drives or any means of saying “You know what? I have that backed up somewhere.” It was all pen, pencil, paper and the only means of backup was called Xerox. At the time, Tonisborg, The Megadungeon created for Blackmoor was gone. It was created in a time before D&D’s initial publication.

Another piece of D&D history you may not know, the trademarks to the name Dungeons & Dragons was owned by Dave Arneson. This happened because Advanced Dungeons & Dragons was being marketed and advertised as a completely different game, one that Gary Gygax would own and Arneson found himself cut out of the game he helped co-create. That’s also fact. Wizards of The Coast had to purchase the trademarks of Dungeons & Dragons from Arneson so, today, when you say you’re playing Dungeons & Dragons rather than Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, you should thank Dave Arneson for having that hand in it. Please, don’t turn this paragraph into a drinking game.

At that time in the early 1980s, David Megarry had the unenviable task of telling Greg Svenson that all of his work had vanished into a landfill because of a cleaning lady, but more importantly, he hadn’t properly safeguarded the documents loaned to him. I don’t know Megarry but I can say, all things being equal, I wouldn’t want to be in his shoes at that time. I also wouldn’t want to be Svenson. Someone blinking away my work because it was hastily tucked into a magazine would break my heart in many ways. Ever lost something you worked on, put your heart and soul into only to have it suddenly gone? If you ever felt like not wanting to even try to re-create that, that’s a feeling I know I understand.

So, If It Was Lost, How Is It Now A Book That’s Available?:

A great question. Something happened. Namely a documentary crew was making a little film detailing the true history of D&D. Might have heard of it in this article. It was called Secrets of Blackmoor. David Megarry is in the film and it was during the interviews that Megarry remembered a dungeon he had from that time period still safely tucked away in his parents’ basement. Everyone went down to check it out and, these old Xeroxed copies from 1974, they looked familiar. There were maps and notes and all manner of scribbles. Megarry knew something was extremely familiar about them and then he realized that earlier, Svenson had given him copies of the documents before handing over the originals and there they sat. They scanned the documents and emailed them to Svenson who confirmed the good news: Tonisborg had been found.

They put it together in a professionally-printed book and sold it. Depending on the cover you have, depending on the print run, the one you possess now may have experienced a significant rise in value. Personally, this is my copy and now, this is where the story gets good…

The D&D Book That Stands Alone:

That’s not an exaggeration. When I got my copy of this book and I unboxed it, I was running my hands all over the cover. Sure, the image of the dragon sleeping in a corridor with one eye open can come across as silly but remember that we’re talking about a game in the days where the artwork was not the stuff you see today. It wasn’t big, epic and flashy. It didn’t depict scenes of world-breaking, nay, world-ending threats. You were only promised adventure, exploration, hard-fought battles where victory was not promised to you by anyone and a moment of stupidity could get your character killed. The feel of that cover is still something that amazes me to this day. I opened it to find a letter from Chris & Griff. I kept it. It’s still in the book. Now, let’s really get past the covers and dive in

First thing’s first, they do cover boundaries with players in this book. I’ll be honest, in a game this deadly, if you’re sitting at my table, resign yourself to the fact that you are guaranteed nothing and that’s final. You either trust me as a Dungeon Master, you sit down and, in the words of Hunter S. Thompson, “buy the ticket, take the ride.”

Past that I noticed the font keeps with older D&D rule sets which was nice. It’s easy on the eyes and the next thing I noticed was that some of the artwork does evoke that old-school sensibility of dark caverns, caves and subterranean levels and all the emotions of fear and anticipation that come with it. And then there are other pieces of artwork that come off as comical, like what would happen if Mad Magazine had done a piece on D&D back in the 70s.

Fact is, we all have our favorites in our libraries. Though I only relegate Dungeons & Dragons to running for my innermost circle anymore, this is hands-down the one book I would grab if I had to leave in the middle of the night and never return and the reason why is because, when I opened this book, I was taken back in time to when D&D was Sword & Sorcery over High Fantasy. This wasn’t Marvel Medieval Superheroes. This was a time where you had to earn your place and carve out your own niche within the game itself. This was a mighty megadungeon that you wouldn’t finish in one session. For that matter, you weren’t going to finish it in the dreaded six sessions. This one book would provide you with one dungeon that went deeper and deeper and deeper. You’d need hirelings and carriages to haul away any loot you found. If you had the right tools, your character could take the doors, the iron that bound the heavy, thick wood together, the hinges, everything that wasn’t mortared into place, you could take with the right Dungeon Master and haul it back to sell as scrap to get a few more silver pieces. Nothing was “just infrastructure” and everything is there for the taking if you can. Was this everything I thought about when the name D&D was brought up to me when I first started playing? No but it was at least a part of it.

As I flipped through these pages, I realized that I was looking directly at a nice piece of D&D history, one that went untouched by Wizards of The Coast, one that they could never take away, retcon or “update for modern audiences.” There was a magic in these pages that still makes me love the medieval fantasy genre.

This was preserved, ultimately, by being lost for so long. It never became part of TSR’s lineup and, thus, never touched or seen by Wizards of The Coast. There’s also something else; The book is not intended for players, it’s the one book, next to the Dungeon Master’s Guide that is solely intended for The Dungeon Master. The only books that can possibly compare are the books that Goodman Games releases such as The Dark Tower by Jennell Jacquays or Temple of Elemental Evil, the old-school modules that they update to be played with D&D 5th Edition or as they originally were as both are included and commentary and essays are included. It’s D&D History that isn’t revised, it’s preserved in it’s original state so that you can see what the game was like before Hasbro’s attempt to turn it into a lifestyle brand.

On top of preserving D&D History, it’s also playable. Granted, if your table is accustomed to 5th Edition, this may be the time to start trying to convert your players to the OD&D rule set so that you can effectively run this game. If you want to do that without giving Wizards of The Coast any money (let’s face it, they don’t deserve it) then I recommend the following book to use as a core rule set…

Wight Box is a faithful adaptation of Chainmail and the Three Little Brown Books that came in the white box in the 1970s. Since the PDF is a Pay What You Want thing, it’s a good time to pick up the PDF, check it out and purchase a physical copy on Lulu Dot Com if you do like it. I think you will.

There are ten levels to this megadungeon. Ten. You’ll have to do what you can do to clear a part, get out with whatever loot you can carry, rest, heal, train, level up and then go back. You’ll do it over and over and over again and let me tell you, every level is going to take awhile.

Take heart, adventurers, in those pages, you’ll find many quotes by Dave Arneson being quoted from Pegasus articles he wrote concerning when to bend, stretch or even break rules and even quotes about how the rules don’t really plan for every contingency and nor should they. Arneson says that the rules don’t exist to be a rigid structure to be adhered to, they’re there to make the Referee’s life easier. That’s it.

To close out this article, the reason that I bring you my thoughts on The Lost Dungeons of Tonisborg is because, sure, you can read Slaying The Dragon by Ben Riggs. Certainly, you could also watch Secrets of Blackmoor and you would learn more about real, true history of The World’s Most Popular Role Playing Game but why not take a chance and immerse yourself in it? That’s what Lost Dungeons of Tonisborg does, it immerses you in it. It puts you right into the thick of things as the creators and play-testers intended. I still stand by my assertion that the best Dungeon Masters come from those who’ve played OD&D because improvisation is a big part of what being a Dungeon Master, Referee, Game Master or Judge is all about. Those that take the head of that table in that role have to use the utmost in creativity at times and The Lost Dungeons of Tonisborg will not only be a humbling experience but one that imparts great lessons and will improve your mastery at running these games.

If you can’t afford one of the hardcovers or they’re no longer available, grab one of the trade paperbacks and treat your table to an honest-to-goodness experience. You won’t have to wonder how it was played back in those days. You’ll get to do it yourself and you’ll gain a truly unique perspective on the game.

Final Cost Breakdown:

The History of Original D&D: $99.99 (One book, contains the information laid out in the three little brown books with color commentary)

The Lost Dungeons of Tonisborg: $30 (Softcover)

Slaying The Dragon by Ben Riggs: $19 (Hardcover)

The Secrets of Blackmoor: $15 (DVD)

Wight Box by The Basic Expert: $0.00 (PDF), $15 (Softcover)

Vote With Your Wallet, Peeps.