Wired.com presents the Geek's Guide to the Galaxy. And here is your host, David Barr-Kirtley.

Hello and welcome to episode 369 of Geek's Guide to the Galaxy.

Our guest today is Shannon Applecline.

He's written tabletop gaming material for Chaosium, White Wolf, and Wizards of the Coast.

And he's also written fiction for Green Night Publishing and comic books

for Skoto's tech and we'll be speaking with him today about his four book series

designers and dragons a history of the role-playing industry which features profiles

of over a hundred different tabletop gaming companies from the 70s to today.

And if you missed it, you should also check out our interview with Matt Barton back in episode 363,

in which we discussed his new book Dungeons and Destops, The History of Computer Roleplaying

games. And today's show is made possible thanks to support from listeners like you.

So if you enjoy the show and want it to continue, please sign up to give us a dollar or two per episode over at

Patreon.com slash geeks. And I want to give a special thank you to Anastasia Frilova and

Matt Ray, who both just signed up this week to support us on Patreon.

All right, so now let's get to our interview.

All right, so we're here with Shannon Applecline.

Welcome to the show.

Thank you very much.

Okay, so how did you first get interested in tabletop RPGss?

I first started playing tabletop RPGss when I was 10 or 11 back in the early 80s.

I don't know exactly where I saw the Dungeons and Dragons game, but I do know I asked my dad for a copy of it and he got for me for my birthday. It was the old red-covered book that was done by Tom Moldvey. It's called

the BX Edition now. And my problem after I got it was I didn't have anyone to play with it. So my dad

...