Grimoire Games

• Designer — David A. Hargrave • Publisher — * David A. Hargrave (1977–1978) • Grimoire Games (1978–1983, 1990s) • Dragon Tree Press (1984–1988) • Emperors Choice Games and Miniatures (2002–) • Date — 1977–present • Genre — Fantasy, Science fiction, Horror • System — Custom

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. The setting of Arduin was heavily house-ruled and included hundreds of players and was situated in a neutral ground between nations that were once at war with each other. Greg Stafford of Chaosium played in the Arduin game run by Hargrave for a while around 1976, and he approached Hargrave to get the game system published as "The Arduin Grimoire". Chaosium listed the resulting book on its publication schedule for February 1977 to be its first role-playing game product, but the company instead rejected the incomplete manuscript that Hargrave submitted. Hargrave self-published The Arduin Grimoire in 1977 and two follow-up Grimoire books in 1978, and the three books became what was 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. Dave Hargrave appreciated the "brilliant idea" behind the original "Dungeons & Dragons", but was dissatisfied with the rules and playability of the game and decided to come up with his own design for fantasy role playing rules. 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.

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 David Bukata and George De Rosa of Emperors Choice Games and Miniatures in 1998.

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. Hargrave sold Arduin in 1978 to one of his players, Jim Mathis, who started Grimoire Games out of a UC campus apartment in Berkely to publish Arduin material by Hargrave 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 experiencing increasing financial challenges, and in 1984 its last publication for many years was 100 copies of the Arduin: A Primer booklet of revised rules; Mathis moved to San Diego and continued to sell products from the company for a few years. Hargrave continued to publish Arduin material through Dragon Tree Press until he died in 1988, at which point the rights to Arduin returned to Mathis and Grimoire Games. Mathis worked with Mark Schynert to complete the last unfinished Arduin manuscript by Hargrave, and 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 its print run, and the distributor took a loss, and it became the last publication by Grimoire Games.

• Monsters from Arduin (24 monster cards) (First and second printings with different images exist.) • Magic Weapons from Arduin (24 weapon cards) (First and second printings with different images exist.) • Magic Artifacts from Arduin (24 Artifact cards) (First and second printings with different images exist.) • Arduin Treasure Pak (a combination of the three items above). • Arduin Character Pack (illustrated character sheets; listed elsewhere as Arduin Character Sheets Combined Pack) This is a set of 24 character sheets for different Arduin races/character classes. Each sheet has a unique illustration. • Arduin Artifacts & Monster card set (64 Artifact cards) (As specifically found in the first four Arduin dungeons: (Caliban, The Howling Tower, The Citadel of Thunder and Death Heart))

• Arduin Dungeon No. 1: Caliban (1979, high level adventure) • Arduin Dungeon No. 2: The Howling Tower (1979, low-level adventure) • Arduin Dungeon No. 3: The Citadel of Thunder (1979, mid-level adventure) • Arduin Dungeon No. 4: Death Heart (1980, high-level wilderness and dungeon adventures)

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: • The Book of the Shining Land • Created December/January, 1980-81. Dedication and signature inside front cover. This is a complete campaign area, designed as a generic adventure campaign suitable for insertion into any RPG, written by David for his longtime friend, writer Paul Mosher. The Book of the Shining Land comprises 118 handwritten pages of 10 × 7 quad ruled paper in a composition style notebook. It includes a Master Map of the area (approximately 100 miles square) and 59 "keyed" adventure area maps all cross-referenced off of the Master Map. • The Book of Dreams of Lost Sardath • Created October 1981. Similar in size and concept to The Book of the Shining Land, this work comprises 158 handwritten pages of 10 × 7 quad ruled paper in a composition style notebook. Includes a Master Map of an area approximately 100 miles square. This work was written by David for his longtime friend, writer Paul Mosher. It comprises a "lost" island kingdom containing 136 villages/towns/cities cross referenced on the Master Map as well as 79 adventure area maps, of which 31 are "keyed". • Lancer's Rest • Created October 1987. One of the last game-related items created by David A. Hargrave before his death in August 1988, Lancer's Rest was Lance Mazmanian's personal burial chamber, a very large single-level dungeon adventure which included an Arduin "Hell Spiral" and a 3000 ft pool where Mazmanian's corpse was entombed. Created by Hargrave as a tongue-in-cheek tribute, the adventure itself was essentially a quest to gain life-prolonging treasure while avoiding Mazmanian's wandering Avatar, an extremely powerful Lich-like entity who would either attack or help a party on random percentage roll. Per Emperors Choice Games & Miniatures Corp.: Lancers Rest has been fully developed and written and art completed in 2023 and is to be released with the new Arduin Bloody Arduin rules system in 2025.

• The Playboy Winner's Guide to Board Games

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.

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.

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.