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Subject: The Highest Level of All: The Story of Fantasy Wargaming
Date: Fri, 17 May 2024 15:28:26 +0200
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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.