Arduin

Arduin is a fictional universe and fantasy role-playing system created in the mid-1970s by David A. Hargrave. It was the first published "cross-genre" fantasy RPG, with everything from interstellar wars to horror and historical drama, although it was based primarily in the medieval fantasy genre.
Development history.
"Arduin" was one of the earliest challengers to TSR's "Dungeons & Dragons". It began in the mid-1970s as a personal project Hargrave created to share with friends, but became so popular that he was inspired to publish the material.
Hargrave was one of several early RPG players from the San Francisco Bay area to also become a game designer, having started by creating variant rules for his weekly "Dungeons & Dragons" campaign which was heavily house-ruled and included hundreds of players, and was focused on Arduin, a neutral ground between formerly warring nations. Around 1976 Greg Stafford of Chaosium played in Hargrave's "Arduin" game for a while, and he asked Hargrave about publishing the game system as "The Arduin Grimoire"; the book was placed on Chaosium's publication schedule for February 1977 to be the company's first role-playing release, but the company instead rejected Hargrave's incomplete manuscript. Hargrave self-published "The Arduin Grimoire" in 1977 and two follow-up "Grimoire" books in 1978, and the three books became known as The Arduin Trilogy. They are, in order, "The Arduin Grimoire" (1977), "Welcome to Skull Tower" (1978), and "The Runes Of Doom" (1978).
The "Arduin" books attempted to add many interesting and notable features to the fantasy role playing milieu. In addition to new rules, "the Arduin Trilogy" contained unique new spells and character classes, new monsters, new treasures, maps, storylines, extensive demonography, and all sorts of charts and lists which detailed the "Arduin" "multiverse", many of which were new to role-playing gamers of the time.
While the original series of Grimoire supplements were intended as supplements for original "Dungeons & Dragons", mention of "D&D" was prohibited legally. Although the "Arduin" books did not explicitly claim to be a "Dungeons & Dragons" supplement, they were treated as such by most users. As follows, there was contention in the RPG world that the "Arduin" system lacked cohesion. It was only with the publication of the later book "The Arduin Adventure" (1981) that a true standalone system began to evolve, where other systems were not needed to adequately run a game. "The Arduin Adventure" was eventually written to replace use of the "D&D" core book. Material from all of these were subsequently used as the basis for "The Compleat Arduin" (1992), a standalone system.
Publication history.
The original "Arduin" suite of supplements, dungeon modules, and gaming aids were initially self-published (1977–78), but were then later produced by Grimoire Games. Dragon Tree Press produced four further "Arduin" supplements in the mid-1980s before the "Arduin" rights and properties were purchased by Emperors Choice Games and Miniatures in the early 2000s.
Grimoire Games.
Grimoire Games was a publishing company run by Jim Mathis. Active from 1978 to mid 1981, Grimoire Games's primary focus was the early Arduin series of RPG supplements, written by Hargrave. "The Arduin Trilogy" is the most famous of the Hargrave supplements.
In 1977 Hargrave sold "Arduin" to one of his players, Jim Mathis, and in 1978 Mathis started Grimoire Games out of an apartment building on the south side of the UC campus to publish Hargrave's "Arduin" material beginning with a series of four adventure modules and two boxed sets. By the time "The Arduin Adventure" was published in 1981, the company was having increasing financial problems, and in 1984 its last publication for many years was 100 copies of a booklet of revised rules for "Arduin"; Mathis moved to San Diego and kept selling products from the company for a few years. Hargrave continued to publish "Arduin" material through Dragon Tree Press until he died in 1988, which brought "Arduin" back to Mathis and Grimoire Games.
After finishing Hargrave's unfinished "Arduin" manuscript, Grimoire Games eventually published it as "The Compleat Arduin" in 1993 with financial assistance from a games distributor; however the large work was expensive and outdated and only sold less than half of the print run, and the distributor took a loss, and it became the last publication by Grimoire Games.
Partial bibliography.
One-of-a-kind "Arduin" items.
Hargrave's death in 1988 left many "Arduin" items press-ready but unpublished and/or incomplete. A few items he created on a whim for those he especially liked or was close to. Among these are the following:
Reception.
In 2019, Goodreads carried a cumulative rating of 4.21 out of 5 for the first of the Arduin Trilogy publications, "The Arduin Grimoire, Volume 1". The second Arduin volume, "Welcome to Skull Tower," carried a 2019 rating of 4.08 of 5, and the final volume of the original Arduin trilogy, "The Runes of Doom", a rating of 3.91.
In the April–May 1979 edition of "White Dwarf" magazine (Issue 12), Don Turnbull gave the just-published "Trilogy" a below average rating of only 4 out of 10, finding it disorganized, hard to read, and "a mass of information, no doubt useless to some and useful to others." Turnbull concluded "I could not advise anyone to buy "The Grimoire" from which to learn the fantasy game hobby from scratch, but if you want what is in effect a "D&D" supplement, don't mind the price and are prepared to be selective in what you extract from it, there will no doubt be useful snippets you could find."
In the Oct-Nov 1979 edition of Different Worlds (Issue 5), Mike Gunderloy admired the huge amount of supplementary information in the "Arduin Trilogy" that could be added to a "D&D" campaign. But he admitted the trilogy was not perfect, especially "the lack of organization. Rules relating to a single subject are often in different parts, even different volumes, of the trilogy. Worse, not only are there no cross-references to related sections, there is no index either." But Gunderloy concluded that any "D&D" gamemaster looking to improve their campaign world needed the trilogy: "No referee who has decided to expand his world should be without a copy of "The Arduin Trilogy". Buy it, you'll be amply rewarded in the form of ideas and enjoyment."
Lawrence Schick, in his 1991 book "Heroic Worlds", described "Arduin" as a "Fantasy system, derivative of "Original D&D". In fact, the first Arduin rulebooks were thinly-disguised supplement for "D&D" – only later did Arduin grow into a stand-alone system. Arduin rules and scenarios are frequently unencumbered by the restraints of conventional good taste."
RPG Geek gives the Arduin Trilogy a rating of 7.57 out of 10, with one review calling it, "A work of genius, a work of plagiarism; brilliant and ridiculous."
Controversy and criticism.
The TSR legal issue.
In 1977, TSR objected to certain contents of the first Arduin book. David Hargrave negotiated with TSR about two points. First, Hargrave's foreword made it appear as though he advocated people copying game books (such as D&D) without buying them. Hargrave removed that foreword from later editions. Second, a Prismatic Wall spell in Arduin appeared to be plagiarized directly from D&D; Hargrave changed some of the description, including some colors. Hargrave further distanced himself from controversy by using white-out and typing correction tape to mask all direct references to Dungeons and Dragons, and then the volumes were reprinted exactly that way. In some versions of the "Arduin" printings, these so-called "corrections" are clearly visible.
"Arduin" mechanics.
Much criticism was made of Hargrave's combat mechanics, to the point where many Game Masters simply used either their own versions, or those of TSR.
Greg Stafford and Chaosium.
While David Hargrave was considered one of the "best of the best" of game masters, he was also known for having a somewhat volatile personality. The original role-playing community at large was split between love and mere tolerance of Hargrave's passions, and his infamous falling-out with Greg Stafford, which resulted in Hargrave naming an "Arduin" spell after him as revenge, is one such example. The spell was called Stafford's Star Bridge ("The Arduin Grimoire", Volume 1, Page 41):
Hargrave felt that Stafford had betrayed him over a Chaosium publishing deal, thus "falling through selectively". According to Stafford, Hargrave was later very upset with himself for having created this spell and for his behavior in the situation.
Notable illustrators.
Several notable illustrators worked on "Arduin" materials at various times over the years, including the following: