The Highest Level of All: The Story of Fantasy Wargaming

https://gmkeros.wordpress.com/2024/05/17/the-highest-level-of-all-the-story-of-fantasy-wargaming/
The Highest Level of All: The Story of Fantasy Wargaming by Mike Monaco, is a free pdf download published at CMU Press under a CC BY-NC-ND license, and dealing with the history of the eponymous (if a bit incongruously titled) Fantasy Wargaming roleplaying game system. Yes, it turns out you can write whole books not only about DnD. At least if it’s something as weird as that game at least.
The original game Fantasy Wargaming: The Highest Level of All (or just Fantasy Wargaming in some editions) was a 1981 book by Bruce Galloway, a clear variation on Dungeons and Dragons, based on Galloway’s home rules. Unlike it’s competition it was not afraid of using actual historical concepts like astrology and occultism in it’s descriptions, although it also was written so densely it was hard to make sense of it in any shape or form by someone not already familiar with roleplaying games. And, well, it was called Fantasy Wargaming.
Which made this a problem, as the game was published both in the UK and the US by mainstream publishers obviously trying to break into the nascent TTRPG market. The most available version was most likely the one published by the Doubleday Science Fiction Book Club, which made the game available to many people who did not have any experience with roleplaying games before.
Unfortunately one has to say, as the game’s size (300pgs) and conceptual denseness made parsing the book quite a feat, meaning if people used this as an introduction to roleplaying, it might not have been very successful.
The Story of Fantasy Wargaming goes into this, and into the development of the game. It could have been a bit more thorough and a bit more critical, but for what it is it’s a nice look into the environment that created it. And well, it’s free.
(I learned about this book from an episode of the Vintage RPG Podcast which had the author on and talked about this project. Well worth a listen)
https://press.etc.cmu.edu/books/highest-level-all
The Highest Level of All
The Story of Fantasy Wargaming
By: Mike Monaco , & Heather Ford (Illustrator)
The Highest Level of All unearths the full story of FW and explores the intriguing personalities behind the game, as well as examining the game to demonstrate the books’ significance and influence in the RPG world.
Wargaming cover
Imprint
ETC Press
Copyright
Creative Commons NonCommercial, NoDerivatives (CC BY-NC-ND)
Release Date
December 14, 2022
Pages
222
ISBN
9781387411009
Language
English
Product Dimensions
6 x 9
Cover Design
Heather Ford
Total Downloads: 1787
Fantasy Wargaming (FW) was published in the early days of fantasy role-playing games as an alternative to the dominant game, Dungeons & Dragons. Because the book was published by a mainstream publishing house (Patrick Stephens Ltd in the UK; Stein & Day in the USA), it had distribution through channels unavailable to any other FRPG—being sold in mainstream book stores rather than just in specialist hobby shops and it even appeared as a selection in the Science Fiction Book Club. For this reason the book had a larger audience than almost any other FRP game of the time.
However it never gained much of a player base and became a bit notorious as a game that was overly complicated and poorly organized. The authors of the book were mostly unknown in gaming circles, and the book seemed destined to be little more than a curiosity of gaming history. That the lead author died in an accident before a planned sequel to FW could be completed seemed to doom FW to obscurity.
The Highest Level of All unearths the full story of FW and explores the intriguing personalities behind the game, as well as examining the game to demonstrate the books’ significance and influence in the RPG world. By interviewing the people involved in the creation of the book and compiling the first ever bibliography of reviews and mentions of FW, the author puts together a more complete picture of the book, the authors, and the game itself.