Saving Throes # 27 - Pages through the Ages: 50 years of Player's Handbook Races

Red Rooster's Gaming Coop

Welcome to the Saving Throes podcast! This is my Tabletop role-playing game podcast, part of the Red Rooster's Gaming Coop network where I talk gaming and gaming culture every week. Each episode will feature a topic or theme along with my take on current happenings in the world of tabletop role-playing games and semi regular updates on the games I am currently involved with, or new games or products I have come across.
The next instalment of Pages Through the Ages is here! With D&D's 50 year anniversary fast approaching, I wanted to start a look at the history of this landmark game that created the industry to examine how far it has come. What better way to start than to look at the book that most people will look at first when getting into D&D, and what element will likely be one of the first things these folks will look into when making a character. Race has always been a very important and flavourful choice important to D&D players - it defines that character concept living in your head and is half the baseline of the tools you will have to interact with the world, and in some cases can serve as a guideline to how to interact with others in that world (see the racial preference table in the AD&D 1e PHB to see what I mean!). It has been really interesting to look and compare how the race options have changed from 0e D&D all the way up to 5e, to see what has changed and what has stayed the same through the entire run. This is the first part of a long series of celebration episodes I plan to do for D&D's golden anniversary year. Tune in to hear my thoughts on the changes to the races of the PHB throughout the years.

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