Gamemasters: The Comic Book History of Roleplaying Games Celebrates a Beloved Pastime

2024 happens to be the 50th anniversary of Dungeons & Dragons, which makes this the perfect time to reflect on the history of roleplaying games. That's just what writer Fred Van Lente (The Incredible Hercules) and artist Tom Fowler (The Sandman Universe: The Books of Magic) are doing with their new graphic novel Gamemasters: The Comic Book History of Roleplaying Games.

With the crowdfunding campaign for Gamemasters now live, IGN can exclusively debut a new preview of this promising new book. Check it out in the slideshow gallery below:

Gamemasters will be published by Clover Press. Here's the official description for the book:

The story of the tabletop’s triumph even in our digital age begins in the day of actual sword-wielding warriors, leading right up to the fireball-casting avatars of today. Gamemasters: The Comic Book History of Roleplaying Games takes readers on an incredible journey from the mists of the past to the screen-lit present, showing not just how these games work and why we love them, but what they can tell us about ourselves.

“This project has been a labor of love for Tom and me since 2019, and it’s so exciting to bring it to fruition on the fiftieth anniversary of D&D,” said Van Lente in a statement. “It’s been so cool to follow the story of an idea, from the invention of chess and the earliest wargames, up through the birth of TSR in the 1970s, through all the innovations gamers and designers have added to the RPG genre since then, right up to Baldur's Gate 3, really.”

“The tabletop gaming industry is where I learnt to be a professional artist,” said Fowler. “After some years away, it’s been a privilege to reimmerse myself in the strange history of of that world!”

In other comic book news, Spider-Man is getting a new costume from Doctor Dom, and DC is finally bringing back the Justice League after Abslute Power.

Jesse is a mild-mannered staff writer for IGN. Allow him to lend a machete to your intellectual thicket by following @jschedeen on Twitter.