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.

Shannon Appelcline
Occupation(s)	computer scientist, game designer, game historian
Known for	Designers and Dragons
Awards	Origins Award, ENNIE Award, Special Award - UK Games Expo,
Website	www.designers-and-dragons.com www.erzo.org

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] He also wrote a history of the Traveller roleplaying game entitled This is Free Trader Beowulf: A System History of Traveller published in 2024.

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

Designers & Dragons won a Judges' Spotlight award at the 2012 ENnie Awards,^[11] The first edition also won Special Award at UK Games Expo, also in 2012.^[12]

The second edition of Designers & Dragons won the Gold Ennie for Best RPG Related Product in 2015.^[13] Also in 2015, Designers and Dragons was a finalist for the Diana Jones Award, but lost to Guide to Glorantha by Chaosium.^[14]

Game design

In the 1990s, Shannon Appelcline worked on two Call of Cthulhu RPG publications which won Origins Awards: Origins Award for Best Game Accessory of 1996 to Cthulhu for President,^[15] and Origins Award for Best Amateur Game Magazine of 1997 to Starry Wisdom.^[16]

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.^[17]

Appelcline is the vice president of Skotos Tech,^[18] and he has written about emergent cultures within the games he designs.^[19][20] Appelcline and Christopher Allen wrote articles on the subject of how game systems work at Christopher Allen's blog, Life with Alacrity.^[21]