Was D&D responsible for the explosion in popularity of RPGs in the 1970s?

When I was researching the scenarios timeline I soon noticed that the number of scenarios was growing rapidly year on year. Because I found out the publication month for almost all the scenarios, we can clearly see this by plotting a cumulative graph of scenarios by date:

Because of this raw data we can dig into some fundamental questions about D&D without relying upon perceived wisdom or looking through the distorted lens of expectations. Looking closer at the data I realised that the near universal perception that RPGS are popular because of D&D is infact the wrong way round - RPGs would have become popular without the publication of D&D - instead the place of D&D would have been taken by something else which had been seeded from Blackmoor.

Final Timeline of Early D&D Scenarios X: 1979 November-December

These last two dozen scenarios take us through to the end of '79 and the end of the run. So that's every scenario published in the 1970s - all two hundred of them (or rather, those that I've been able to uncover). The aim was to have a comprehensive reference list in chronological order so that I could investigate how they influenced each other, and to see how they developed - which is what this blog's going to focus on next.

The list is perhaps more defined by what it doesn't contain - anything that is clearly not D&D (such as Runequest), anything that is just a description of a setting (i.e. without actual gameable content). Other than that, the rule has been - if in doubt, include it. This has meant I've uncovered lots of items of interest and connections between them that I'd never have discovered with a narrower focus.

The published clause has been extended to include anything that was shared sufficiently that it became potentially influential. Thus I included the very first personal dungeons, and some unpublished tournament adventures which have survived - as both of these illustrate the history and development of scenarios very well.

It includes sample adventures, dungeon crawl boardgames, solitaire adventures, map-only products, key-only products, random dungeon creation tools. It contains adverts, cartoons, and colouring books. It includes famous modules published by major name publishers that have been revised and republished many times in many editions over the years, all the way down to school fanzines with a tiny circulation. It includes obscure scenarios that are unsung greats, and others that are best forgotten. I'm fairly confident when I proclaim that No-one owns an original copy of every published scenario in the list - though I'm pretty sure a couple of people come extremely close.

By Erol Otus, my favourite RPG artist, from The Howling Tower