Adventures in Fantasy
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 1979 Excalibre edition | |
| Designers | Dave Arneson and Richard Snider |
|---|---|
| Publishers | Excalibre, Adventure Games |
| Publication | 1979, 1981 |
| Genres | Tabletop role-playing game |
Adventures in Fantasy is a role-playing game published by Excalibre Games in 1979, designed by Dave Arneson and Richard Snider. The game is a fantasy system, similar to early Dungeons & Dragons (D&D), which Arneson co-created. It received mixed to negative reviews in game periodicals, including The Space Gamer, Ares, and Pegasus, and ultimately flopped. Arneson later bought the rights to Adventures in Fantasy and published a new edition in 1981 through his own company Adventure Games.
Dave Arneson has been working on Adventures in Fantasy as early as 1976. It was co-designed by Richard Snider.[1][2]: 177 A playtest edition was published by Excalibre Games in 1978 as a limited edition of 164 photocopied pages; each page contains two pages of manuscript printed side by side.[1]
Adventures in Fantasy was then published in 1979 as a boxed set containing a 64-page book, two 56-page books, three cardstock sheets, and a die.[1] Since Arneson departed from TSR in 1976, lost involvement in D&D and developed rivalry with Gary Gygax, he hoped to clear up some confusions and incompleteness early D&D had, and to gain market share and recognition with this game. However, Advanced Dungeons & Dragons beat it in doing so. To accommodate a higher price tag than its competitors, many copies of the game were signed by Arneson and Snider.[3] Today, it is actually rarer to find unsigned copies of the game.
Arneson later bought back the rights to Adventures in Fantasy using money he acquired from a settlement with TSR, and his company Adventure Games released a new edition of the game in 1981.[2]: 39 Adventures in Fantasy was one of several games that the Thieves' World RPG (1981) included rules for.[2]: 85