8 /10 1 Votes8
Publication date 1976 Originally published 1976 Page count 45 Publisher TSR | 4/5 Goodreads Pages 45 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Similar Works by Gary Gygax, Role-playing game books | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Swords & Spells is a supplementary rulebook by Gary Gygax for the original edition of the Dungeons & Dragons fantasy role-playing game. Its product designation is TSR 2007.
Contents
Contents
Swords & Spells was a supplement of miniature rules, for use with the original D&D set. It provided miniature-scale battle rules more compatible with D&D than those of Chainmail.
Publication history
Swords & Spells was written by Gary Gygax, with art by David C. Sutherland III, and was published by TSR in 1976 as a 48-page digest-sized book.
Swords & Spells was published by TSR, Inc. in 1976, the fifth and final supplement to the original Dungeons & Dragons boxed set, and can be referred to as "Supplement V", with supplements Greyhawk and Blackmoor having been released in the previous year, and Eldritch Wizardry and Gods, Demi-gods & Heroes released previously in the same year. It does not, however, bear the official "Supplement V" designation on the cover, as "Gods, Demi-gods & Heroes" is stated in its introduction to be "the last D&D supplement." Swords & Spells' product designation was TSR 2007.
The 45-page Swords & Spells has been billed as "The fantasy-based successor to Chainmail," and indeed is stated within the introductory text to be "the grandson of Chainmail." The Chainmail rules originally formed the measurement and combat systems for the Dungeons & Dragons game, as the D&D rules could be cumbersome when conducting battles between armies. Improvisation was required, since D&D contained monsters and spells not covered in Chainmail. In Swords & Spells Gygax tried to fix this problem by introducing a diceless approach for large battles which averaged each monster's D&D statistics.
Swords & Spells proved unpopular, and its rules were discarded in later editions of D&D.
Reception
Lawrence Schick, in his 1991 book Heroic Worlds, felt that this book was "Sloppily produced, with some howling blunders in the rules."
David M. Ewalt, in his book Of Dice and Men, commented that Swords and Spells "is the odd man out in the original D&D rule set. Rather than adding new details to the fantasy role-playing game, it takes a glance backward and provides rules for large-scale miniature war games that are merely based on Dungeons & Dragons. In his foreword, editor Tim Kask describes it as 'the grandson of Chainmail.'"
Additional reading
Review: The Space Gamer #11 (1977)