Dragon Fantasy

Lore & Background

Dragon Fantasy Book I contains three canonical chapters and one intermission chapter based on Minecraft. Chapter One, 'Dragon Fantasy,' centers on Ogden, a diminished former hero based on series creator Adam Rippon's father Thomas Rippon, getting back into saving the world. Chapter Two, 'The Heir Unapparent,' follows Prince Anders, brother of the kidnapped Prince Marlon, who discovers an important artifact central to the sequel. Chapter Three, 'Operation Desert Plunder,' introduces thief Jerald and his niece Ramona, who rob a ship carrying Anders and Ogden and find the artifact to their peril. Intermission M is a non-canon side-story where the heroes travel to a Minecraft server and retrieve Notch's magic Swedish hat from an Ender Dragon, created in honor of the game's first convention appearance at Minecon in 2011.

Reader's Guide

Dragon Fantasy is notable for its flexible visual and audio presentation. With the release of Dragon Fantasy Book I and Dragon Fantasy Book II on PlayStation Network, an enhanced mode with updated 16-bit styled graphics and orchestrated audio was added. This mode can be turned on or off at any time, allowing the player to experience the game as either an NES-style or SNES-style game. The compiled Volumes of Westeria for Nintendo 3DS, available via digital download since mid-2015, includes this feature as well. The game's significance lies in its deliberate homage to classic JRPGs, both in gameplay and in its narrative structure, which includes a personal tribute to the designer's father. The inclusion of a Minecraft-themed intermission chapter reflects the game's early presence at Minecon in 2011. The enhanced mode's toggleable nature preserves the original aesthetic while offering a modernized option, a design choice that acknowledges the player's preference for retro or updated presentation.

Did You Know?

• Dragon Fantasy was originally created as a homage to series designer Adam Rippon's late father, sculptor and professor Thomas Rippon.
• The game features an enhanced mode with 16-bit styled graphics and orchestrated audio that can be toggled on or off at any time.
• Intermission M is a non-canon side-story based on Minecraft, created for the game's first convention appearance at Minecon in 2011.
• Dragon Fantasy: The Black Tome of Ice (Book II) was released for PlayStation Vita, PlayStation 3, and PlayStation 4 on March 22, 2016, and for Wii U on May 26, 2016.

Ancient Impulses: Role-Play Before the Rulebook

Long before any rulebook carried the words 'role-playing game,' the impulse to inhabit another perspective was woven into human culture. In ancient China, the Han dynasty court staged gatherings where adults dressed and behaved as if living in a prior era, treating the exercise primarily as amusement. Sixteenth-century European troupes perfected Commedia dell'arte, street theatre built on stock characters and improvised dialogue. By the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, parlour games like Jury Box folded character assumption into their mechanics, while in Shanghai, courtesans routinely performed literary figures as part of their social repertoire. Viola Spolin's Theatre Games asked participants to step into roles and improvise freely, and mock trials or model legislatures gave players structured yet unscripted scenarios. Even the crude 'You're dead' assassin game, referenced in Harpo Marx's memoir as a 1920s New York pastime, hints at how far back the desire to narrate another's fate reaches. In the mid-1960s, the Society for Creative Anachronism—founded in Berkeley on May 1, 1966—and the Markland Medieval Mercenary Militia at the University of Maryland in 1969 began staging elaborate medieval recreations, seeding the 'creative history' tradition that would soon bleed into fantasy.

Wargames: The Mechanical Ancestor

The structural skeleton of every modern tabletop role-playing game can be traced to strategy games that predate recorded history. Chaturanga, born in the sixth-century Indian subcontinent, simulated the Kurukshetra War from the Mahabharata, with pieces standing for rajas, counselors, infantry, cavalry, chariots, and war elephants. Designer John Wick has argued that simply giving a chess piece a name and a motive effectively turns the board into a role-playing exercise, and he described Dungeons & Dragons as a combat simulation that players were already 'turning into a roleplaying game' in the same spirit. In Europe, Helwig's 1780 battle-emulation game for the Duke of Brunswick and the Prussian General Staff's metal-piece tabletop exercises between 1803 and 1809—complete with dice for randomness and a referee scoring outcomes—established the wargame as a serious analytical tool. H.G. Wells's 1913 Little Wars brought toy-soldier combat into the hobby market, and by the mid-twentieth century, Allan B. Calhamer's Diplomacy (invented 1954, released 1959) wove negotiation and interpersonal dynamics directly into the ruleset, while its live-action spin-off Slobbovia prioritized character development over conflict.

The Convergence: Fantasy Meets the Wargame Table

The decisive creative leap happened when fantasy writers and wargamers started sharing the same tables. Linguist M. A. R. Barker ran wargame-style sessions to flesh out his Tékumel setting, while Greg Stafford designed White Bear and Red Moon to dramatize conflicts in his Glorantha world, though it would not be published until 1974. At a 1970 Military Figure Collectors Association convention, the New England Wargamers Association demoed a fantasy wargame called Middle Earth, signaling the genre was no longer purely historical. Perhaps most influential was a 1969 session at the University of Minnesota, moderated by Dave Wesely, in which players each represented a single character in a Napoleonic-era small town called Braunstein; Wesely followed it with a second scenario set in a fictional banana republic where players played government officials and revolutionaries. Meanwhile, Gary Gygax and Jeff Perren, members of Lake Geneva's wargaming society, crafted rules for a late-medieval setting inspired by Siege of Bodenburg, published as Chainmail in 1971. Though originally a historical game, later editions appended sections for wizards and dragons, and the two designers were already pushing toward something that would become the archetype of the entire hobby.

The Long Arc: Boom, Bust, and Renaissance

The commercial and cultural trajectory of tabletop role-playing games has followed a pattern of explosive growth, quiet contraction, and slow reinvention. After the wave of new titles that flooded the market from the 1970s through the early 1990s, the hobby entered a pronounced downturn in popularity during the 1990s, as mainstream attention shifted elsewhere. The turning point came with the rise of the internet: in the early 2000s, independent design communities formed online, sharing experimental mechanics and narrative approaches that the traditional publishing pipeline had largely ignored. Then, in the late 2010s and into the early 2020s, a confluence of forces reignited mass interest. Videoconferencing tools made it possible to run sessions across continents without a shared physical table, the 'actual play' phenomenon—where recorded or livestreamed games reached audiences far beyond the gaming community—turned TTRPGs into a form of entertainment, and online marketplaces lowered the barrier for both purchasing and selling homebrew content. Together, these shifts ensured that the tradition stretching back to Han-dynasty role-play and Prussian war tables found a new, globally connected audience.

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