The History of Dungeons & Dragons Gets a Glossy Coffee Table Book Appreciation

Dungeons & Dragons Art & Arcana: A Visual History doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, but it isn’t necessarily supposed to. Presented as a summary of the history of the tabletop role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons, Visual History does all of the things that you might expect it to. It patiently walks readers through the creation, rise, fall, and warbling up-and-down that the game has experienced in the 40 plus years since it was originally released.

In being exactly what you might think, the book sits in a strange place. I’m a fairly knowledgeable person about the history of tabletop gaming. I have taught this topic at the college level, I do a long-running YouTube show on isometric D&D games, and I’ve been actually playing the games off-and-on for more than a decade. Because I care about these games, I want to know a little bit about them, and there was very little for me to learn in Art & Arcana. For obvious reasons, the four authors of the book are not breaking new ground in the historical summary for a wide audience, and so I patiently read my way through the book nodding my head and generally saying “yep.”

So for people like me, this book doesn’t have a whole lot to offer. For the most part it is going to be a retread of things you already know, and the information that you might learn from this book is mostly general knowledge about Dungeons & Dragons.

That said, the book relies pretty heavily on information from correspondence and interviews, so while you might know things like, say, the general narrative about the wide array of products that diluted the D&D brand during the 1990s, you probably have not seen the context that this book provides. From the angle of a kind of intellectual completionist, it’s pretty neat.

Beyond questions of information, the “visual history” part really does make this a great resource for the visual tone of D&D down through the years. Original ads, comparisons of early art in the game with the comics they were copied from, and the iterations of various iconic paintings litter the book. Alongside them, you get ads and general design changes, all of which speak to changing cultural standards around D&D and the various moves that the game made to respond to those standards.