AiF Publication History

[Havard]

Adventures in Fantasy was first published in 1979 by Excalibur Games. The rights to the game were later transferred to Dave Arneson's company Adventure Games.

Back in 2010 Jeff Berry / Chirine wrote about some of his experiences working at Dave's company at the time and you can read about that here.

Jon Peterson dropped by yesterday to share some additional information about the publication history of Adventures in Fantasy in this thread.

1981(?)
Dave Arneson founds his own company, Adventure Games.
Adventures in Fantasy tranferred to Adventure Games.

This is complicated, and should probably be broken down into more stages. Bear in mind that this is outside the scope of PatW, so, I haven't really written this up before, but I think it will hold water.

First, there's Adventures Unlimited. I suspect Arneson was using this name as early as 1977, not long after he left TSR, though the first hard evidence I see is from 1978. He made the Dungeonmaster's Index available by mail from his current St. Paul residence under the name of Adventures Unlimited. Now, the DMI doesn't fess up to any publisher, except to say that it was printed at Heritage Models; surely Heritage feared legal action and kept the book at arm's length. Interestingly, I have two different versions of Arneson's business card for Adventures Unlimited: one with "Heritage Models" on the top, and one without. I think we should probably deem Adventures Unlimited the publisher of the DMI, and a concern connected to Heritage. It's unclear how much of a back end there was on Adventures Unlimited, in terms of corporate status or capitalization.

The 1979 "playtest" edition of Adventures in Fantasy is copyrighted by Adventures Unlimited, and if you open up those Excalibur boxes, the books inside say that on their covers as well. Arneson apparently tried to get Heritage to publish the AiF project first, but they declined: there are some reasons to think that Arneson's contract with Heritage, and its connection to AU, caused him to abandon AU as a brand around this time. Adventures Unlimited of course morphed into Adventure Games: when you look at an Adventures Unlimited business card, it has the motto "We're Fantastic!" on it - as does Arneson's Adventure Games business card. So the "transfer" of AiF to Adventure Games was really more a matter of Adventures Unlimited itself transforming into something new - though some money did change hands with Excalibur. The situation had also shifted at Excalibur, as Randy Hoffa (perhaps better known here as Ran of Ah Fooh) took over the project and created some onerous conditions.

Adventure Games begins to make a mark on the print record in 1980. Games like Richard Snider's Mutant, which Adventures Unlimited was supposed to print in 1980, ended up on the Adventure Games product map then (and from there, endlessly postponed). John Snider bought back Star Probe and Star Empires from TSR, and as of the end of 1980, those two games were also on AG's roadmap, and again, never quite materialized. AG didn't really blossom until after the resolution of Arneson's lawsuit with TSR early in March 1981; it obviously benefited from Arneson's sudden buying power. That included putting Harpoon to press as of April, so, things went pretty quick. Adventure Games restored a number of Tekumel items to print as well. Futhermore, Adventure Games reflects something that is not captured in the timeline here, which I hesitate to bring up, really - the Way International folks that Arneson hung around with in those days. But AG also immediately included a number of close associates from the earlier wargaming days, including John Grossman and Dave Megarry.

And yes, Arneson traded AG's remaining inventory for Flying Buffalo stock in 1985. This happened at the time that, well, the Way International sent him on a one-year mission to San Francisco (part of their WOW, or "Word Over the World" mission program). Arneson was not in a position to run a company during that time. Flying Buffalo gave away free copies of Megarry's Pentantastar to subscribers of their discontinued house magazine Sorcerer's Apprentice in lieu of future issues.

There were also plans for a 2nd edition of Adventures in Fantasy, as mentioned in Different Worlds (Issue 14 - Sep 1981), but this edition was never published.

-Havard