The Industrial Revolution made the area-of-effect spell possible in role-playing games. That is the argument PC Gamer is making in its latest entry in the Causality Chain series, and it traces a line from the steam engine through Tolkien’s Middle-earth to the fireball spell in Dungeons & Dragons. The paper’s honest reaction to this story is amusement: the piece draws a deliberate, winding line from the steam engine through Tolkien’s Middle-earth to the fireball spell in Dungeons & Dragons, with the author’s own jokes woven into the historical record.
The Death of the Agrarian Period
The Industrial Revolution started in the late 1760s and ran through the 1840s. A host of technological gains, such as upgrades to the steam engine and the practical use of larger blast furnaces made possible by switching coke for old-fashioned charcoal, joined with several social and economic forces, utterly transformed daily existence for many people. Machine tools took the place of skilled craftsmen, and factories spread across the land.
During this time, the social policy trees for Order and Autocracy became available, while the tech tree added Dynamite, Electricity, and Refrigeration. The paper treats these additions as a joke, a humorous reference to the oddity of linking a wargamer’s rules for Middle-earth with the mechanics of a computer game.
“Hmmm. Yes. This is good.”
The Black Country
In 1896, J. R. R. Tolkien’s family moved from Birmingham to rural Worcestershire. The four-year-old Tolkien discovered a love for the English countryside that would later inform his writing. His aunt’s farm, Bag End, gave its name to the Baggins’ home, and places like Moseley Bog in Shire Country Park inspired the Old Forest in the Shire.
Tolkien later described the area in his first newspaper interview: “It was a kind of lost paradise,” he said. “It was an area that had survived industrialization—though not for long.” In an introduction to the second edition of The Lord of the Rings, he wrote:
“The country in which I lived in childhood was being shabbily destroyed before I was ten, in days when motorcars were still rare objects (I had never seen one) and men were still building suburban railways. Recently I saw in a paper a picture of the last decrepitude of the once thriving corn-mill beside its pool that long ago seemed to me so important.”
To this day, the Midlands region remains known as the Black Country because its once-green countryside has turned black with soot. A working-class Midlands man explains the transformation to his literate daughter in Caitlin Moran’s novel How to Build a Girl.
“When I was a kid, you’d come up this hill, and all of that –” and he gestures to the valley in front of us “– was on fire. The foundries and the forges and the ironworks. The potteries. The whole place glowed – sheets of sparks, fifty foot high. The fires never went out. It looked like hell. Mordor. That’s what your Lord of the Rings is about. Tolkien was from round here. He was writing about how the Industrial Revolution turned the Midlands from Hobbiton into Mordor.”
Mordor, in Tolkien’s invented language Sindarin, means “the Black Land.”
Saruman’s Factories
Tolkien published The Lord of the Rings in 1954, and his wizards reflect his thoughts on industrialization. Saruman, who turns to evil, builds smoke-belching factories around the tower of Orthanc and later in Hobbiton itself, and he employs magical fire in the creation of an explosive substance capable of toppling walls (“they have lit the fire of Orthanc,” as Aragorn puts it during the Battle of the Hornburg).
Gandalf creates splendid fireworks through his magic. He could do much more, as he tells the Balrog, “I am a servant of the Secret Fire, wielder of the flame of Anor.” And yet again and again he chooses subtlety over explosions. Each time he employs magical flame, he later regrets it: his burning pine cones scare away wolves in The Hobbit, and in The Lord of the Rings he uses magical flame when the Fellowship is attacked while making camp on its way to Moria.
Patt’s Rules for Middle Earth
A set of rules for Middle-earth created by Leonard Patt was published in The Courier, the zine of the New England Wargamers Association, in 1970. Those rules went on to shape game designers for decades to come.
The fire that Patt gave to Gandalf was built as artillery. The passage describing the “fire ball” marks the first time a magical spell carries an area-of-effect rule, and it also brings about the first saving throw.
A marker like “Wizards in possession of magic powers can cast a fire ball once every other turn. The distance is 24″ describes how the hit is decided: a 6″ grid with a 2½” burst circle is used to determine it. Figures caught within that circle are destroyed, with the exception of HEROES and ANTI-HEROES, who instead survive if they pass a throw of a 5 or 6.
From Patt to Dungeons & Dragons
The fantasy supplement for the Chainmail wargame, created by Gary Gygax and Jeff Perren and building on Patt’s Rules for Middle Earth, formed the foundation for Dungeons & Dragons. That game, the work of Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson, was published by TSR in 1974.
The fireball spell has a burst radius of 2″ in original Dungeons & Dragons, which translates to 20 feet if you’re not playing with miniatures, and will “conform to the shape of the space,” meaning that it can blow back if cast into a small dungeon room—a rule that led to the death of many 5th-level magic users.
Screen Burn
Daniel Lawrence, a university student, brought D&D into digital form on a PDP in 1975. The article does not say which game or platform this conversion turned into, but it establishes the move from tabletop to screen.
The Line From Steam Engine to Fireball
The PC Gamer Causality Chain series follows history from the end of farming society through to the point where you burned down five goblins and found the act pleasing. It charts the strange shape of cause and effect, then rests its chin in its hand and remarks, “Hmmm. Yes. This is good.”
It ends with the dominoes being tipped, connecting the past to the present, before the enormous and complex Rube Goldberg machine known as “history” collapses into a pile of cast-off playing pieces.
The Paper’s Own Framing
PC Gamer admits the chain is a joke, and the line winds through history in an amusing fashion. It begins with the steam engine’s replacement of skilled craftsmen, through Tolkien’s disgust at industrialization, moves on to Patt’s artillery-style fireball, then follows the Chainmail supplement, before reaching the original Dungeons & Dragons rules, and finally the digital conversion that brought it all to screens.
The connection is presented as deliberate and playful. It shows how ideas travel across generations and mediums, from a novelist’s hatred of factories to a university student’s code running on a PDP.
This is an entertaining piece that repays careful reading. Its details are odd and particular, and its humor feels earned rather than forced. It is the sort of story that leaves you wanting to revisit the games you play with a new perspective.
Source material: “The Industrial Revolution is the reason RPGs have area-of-effect spells: A PC Gamer Causality Chain™,” PC Gamer.
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