BEST. GIFTS. EVER. Advent Calendar Day 22: The Gift of Imagination…

Best Gifts Ever

The heavy hitters keep reappearing in our BEST. GIFTS. EVER. advent calendar!

TSR – Advanced Dungeons and Dragons (1989)

Advanced Dungeons and Dragons_2nd_Edition_Player's_Handbook

Ahh, D&D – the hobby that launched a thousand geekdoms. Dungeons & Dragons has helped forge what we now consider modern geek culture; imaginative settings, fantastic elements, serialized storytelling, elves, orcs, and nerds obsessing over a make-believe reality. The rise of D&D in pop-culture began in earnest during this period, as TSR started revising their popular game, releasing countless settings, licensed their product to Marvel for comics and cartoons, and basically took the stage as the premiere icon of what it meant to be a dork. This was also the dawn of the infamous D&D backlash, where misguided parenting groups starting singling out the hobby as a gateway to evil, but I’m not going to focus on that. Instead, I want to recall an all too brief period where hints of what the hobby could be began to emerge, and when kids like me, unfettered by a generation that had already grown up with D&D, set forth to create a whole new form of subculture all our own.

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