AN ASTOUNDING DISCOVERY BY DANIEL BOGGS: THE SNIDER VARIATION

Dan Boggs has finally revealed one of the the most astounding discoveries in RPG research.

Here is the link:
http://boggswood.blogspot.com/2018/09/almost-forgotten-published-rpg-ruleset.htm

Few photos of Richard exist: Richard  is in profile with his brother John
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Now for a bit of background and some thoughts on this discovery.

A while back Dan Boggs decided to dig deeper into the mystery of the Dalluhn Manuscript a.k.a. Beyond This Point Be Dragons.

BTPBD is an old D&D manuscript.  No one really knew its provenance for many years.  We felt it was likely more closely related to Arneson than anyone else, as did Dan.  This led us to contact Dan since he was one of the few who was saying: It was found in M.AR. Barker's garage, thus the most logical avenue of investigation is a connection to the Twin Cities gamers.

This has led to a very fruitful relationship with Dan, and others on our team, regarding the many documents we've found.  We passed a lot of things onto Dan in order to get an outsider evaluation, a good example is the Spanish Royals Character Matrix.

Yet Dan does his own digging as well; and when Dan goes digging, he usually finds gold.

The continuing debate on the origins of BTPBD led Dan to finally trace it to a MMSA gamer,  Mark Bufkin, who would commute from northern Minnesota in order to play with his friends in the Twin Cities.

Oops, a correction via Dan Boggs: 

"Mark Bufkin - as far as anyone knows, Mark didn't ever commute to play in the TC and I don't think he was in the MMSA.  He was a gamer at Chuck Monson's table in Duluth where in 1973 Monson ran Duero's Tower, his Blackmoor spin-off campaign. Monson gave Bufkin access to whatever papers he brought back from TC.  It was Monson who did the commuting and was in the MMSA."

As with many of these searches, this led even farther into D&D history, because amongst his papers was yet another even more compelling document made up of 6 pages. 

Dan calls it The Richard Snider Variant. We tend to call it the Snider Variation. (It's quicker to say that. ;)) It is likely the oldest actual rules set from an RPG.

Since Dan found it, we've pestered him to reveal more of its content, as it is his find and we felt we couldn't publish anything about it ahead of Dan -- because it is Dan's find.

We did put an excerpt from it into our latest video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gM8GHeFVHyA&feature=youtu.be

Surprisingly, no one seemed to notice, or comment, on this undiscovered manuscript within the video. It just slipped by everyone.

We have some thoughts about these rules ourselves and our interest lies in the innocuous.  While others may want to look at combat systems and character attributes, our greatest fascination lies in how these rules deal with Secret Doors.

Yep, within the Snider Variation is a short sentence that deals with Secret Doors. 

Anyway, this is a very exciting day for us.  Dan's discovery of the Snider Variation is actually yet another goldmine of evidence that points to what our research group has been saying all along: If you want to find the origin of RPG's, you have to go to Minnesota!

Enough about what we have to say, go look at what Dan's post IS saying, because it is a bombshell.


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