The Topless Ladies of '70s Role-Playing Games

This entry includes forty-year-old drawings of naked women that appeared in role-playing game books. My remarks here are intended neither as prudish nor as endorsement. I think nudity is fine, and sex in role-playing games is fine, if everybody involved is on board. People should enjoy their fantasies.

This is merely commentary on a conspicuous aspect the culture of role-playing games in the 1970s and very early 1980s. I think about why fantasies are the way they are.

At the same time, I really am glad my preteen daughter doesn’t have to deal with this shit when she looks up her abilities in the Fifth Edition. Not just my daughter, but also my son, my wife, and the kids that my kids play role-playing games with.

Gamers' imaginary breasts

The original D&D books featured a drawing of a bare-chested amazon beside a “beautiful witch” (shown immediately below). This set a standard and sent a message about the game’s possibilities.

 

OD&D: Men & Magic, 1974, p. 27.

When then-thirty-year-old game designer Ken St. Andre introduced himself in the first issue of Different Worlds magazine, in 1979, this is part of what he had to say. “Six feet tall, brown-haired (once thick but now thinning), near-sighted as a bat, 180lbs., I am an indifferent though not totally worthless swordsman, I like large-breasted women, and am married to one named Cathy.” When he gets to the story of how he designed Tunnels & Trolls, which appeared in 1976, he wrote, “It came out pretty well. The cover of the first edition shows a chunky unicorn watching over a large-breasted maiden who is bathing in a pool…”

I detect a theme.

Tunnels & Trolls, 1st ed., 1975, p. 19.

If you got Empire of the Petal Throne, which came out a few weeks after Tunnels & Trolls in 1975, you’d find the author’s own drawings of some topless ladies of the science-fantasy setting of Tékumel in positions of dominance and submission. M.A.R. Barker's drawings set a high standard for the time in that they were not mere doodles.

Empire of the Petal Throne, 1st, ed. 1975, p. 5

Empire of the Petal Throne, 1st, ed. 1975, p. 34

 

Those were the first three fantasy role-playing games to be published. In 1976, players of this new kind of game probably had come to expect amateur drawings of bare breasts in their games, because every game had them. As role-playing games boomed in popularity, and Reagan's 1980s rolled in, they naturally were pruned of such content to avoid the objections of a moral panic. But this was the original style of presentation.

Rolling for attributes

Dave Hargrave’s Arduin Trilogy comprised extensive D&D modular rules that came out originally in 1977 and 1978. When I bought them in a box in the mid-1980s, I immediately regretted the purchase after seeing nothing but a jumble of D&D house-rules inside. Boxed sets sometimes hide junk.

I was also surprised to find tables for randomly determining a character’s “female attributes.” You were to roll three times, for bust, waist, and hip measurements, in inches. There was no male version of these charts. The instructions say, “Remember that these rolls CAN have an effect on the lady in question. For instance, if the lady’s waist is 34 inches or so, and she only has a 36 bust, it’s obvious that she’s fat, thus reducing her looks.”

 

Here is the author of that chart, Dave Hargrave.

Immediately after his chart for female body measurements, we find an admonition to "read and heed" everything in the book, apparently because these factors may come up in combat. Hm!

Hargrave’s Charisma chart on the following page includes colorful commentary in the form of notes for each level of Charisma. Have a Charisma of 2? “Poop is prettier!” it says.

You can find a positive take on the impact of the Arduin books with DM David. As for me, these are some of the few game books I literally threw in to the recycle bin, years ago. 

Playboy Magazine and D&D

These are things I had forgotten for decades. Several months ago, though, as I was digging back into the early history of role-playing games for my enjoyment and reminiscing, I was struck by how frequently amateur drawings of topless women occur in the earliest gaming materials. It is noticeable because things have changed since then.

I am a little too young to know for sure, but I think, in the culture of the 1970s, in the midst of the “sexual revolution,” there was a period in which bare breasts were considered less remarkable than they are today.

I’m guessing that most of the game artists did not have real naked women as models but used Playboy images or imagination as their models. Playboy was a big deal in the 1970s.

I remember seeing a huge stack of Playboy magazine issues in my grandfather’s basement, where I played as a child with my sister in the 1970s. Of course, we looked in them and saw naked women. We knew it was grown-up stuff but we were naturally curious and they were sitting right there. My grandfather had no embarrassment about it, as far as I could see. My grandma did not hide them.

Rob Kuntz, the protégé of Gary Gygax and one of the first D&D players, reported that he first learned about gaming through Playboy magazine at thirteen (so, 1968 or 1969). Playboy indirectly led him to meet Gygax. The magazine peaked in the 1970s, having been the medium for fiction by some of the most serious writers of the time along with pictures of naked women.

Playboy magazine routinely detailed the measurements of women’s bodies in the manner of Hargrave’s charts for feminine attributes. It is obvious this medium is where Hargrave got the idea that female characters were fantasy centerfold girls. Why not? Nothing wrong with fantasies. But this is also the culture of the 1970s presciently satirized by Kurt Vonnegut in his cynical novel of 1973, Breakfast of Champions, in which the author's strong narrative voice coldly interjects statistics about the characters in the story. In his novel, out of the blue, men are assigned figures, in inches, for penis length and girth, and women are assigned figures, in inches, for breasts, waist, and hips. Our human virtues are reduced to physical measurements of bland, mechanical report. Hargrave’s prurient Charisma modifiers for women have about just as much life and meaning in them. It is not subversive or edgy, but rather just another reflection of popular culture, in which everything desirable is enumerated and commodified and sold back to you in exchange for your time at labor. Your dimensions have a value. Inches in the right places mean dollars. Your own imagination is turned into a product and and sold back to you. Entrepreneurs will even tell you what to imagine and then make you pay for it.

Elixir of testosterone (potion, common)

To understand it, we have to understand the context. Ultimately, it was about selling the fantasy to young men, who constituted 99% of the population of gamers at the time. They were the prime audience of Playboy and other similar publications. D&D joined in.

Tim Kask, Gygax’s much-needed editor, in an internet discussion forum in 2008, admitted that the cover of Eldritch Wizardry (1976), an original D&D Supplement that featured a naked girl on a sacrificial altar, was intended to raise sales through sex.

Hehehe... we sure pandered to a bunch of young male fantasies with that one. And, oh Lordy, did we get grief and catch a ton of flak for it, too. It made us out to be sexist devil-worshippers teaching witchcraft to the innocent youth (young boys) of America. What I want to know is this: If that were true, why didn't we all get rich? And, who let the cat out of the bag?

A female discussant responded in the forum as follows:

LOL! I remember seeing that cover for the first time at my gaming store when I was a kid. I was kinda shocked, I have to be honest. [...] I just remember seeing Eldritch Wizardry there and being like... "Whoah! What the heck are they thinking?!" lol Now I know it was all your fault, Tim. ;) I didn't get all mad or anything about it... I was just kinda shocked and amused, to be honest. I am sure a lot of girls back then didn't see it my way, though. Lol

Kask responded:

A lot of girls didn't see it all, bitd. It was sooo male, the odor of testosterone was overwhelming.

Shifting to a younger audience

When TSR made the smart strategic decision to market to younger players, the Holmes Basic Set (1977) lacked such images. (Holmes Basic had little art to begin with.) It was marketed to “Ages 12 and up.” When they sold the Moldvay Basic set in 1981—my first role-playing game set—they were selling to ages 10 and up. I squeaked in. The topless amazons and scary-faced monsters with bare breasts had disappeared, but images like Morgan Ironwolf, Tom Moldvay’s own character, took their place.

As far as I can tell, Morgan Ironwolf (drawn by Jeff Dee) is imagined as a very tough Morgan Fairchild, but I still don’t understand the nipples showing through chainmail (?). Ouch!

 

 

A sampling

 

There were lots of drawings of topless women in role-playing materials from the 1970s and early 1980s. No one game company monopolized this.

 

OD&D: Supplement 1: Greyhawk, 1975, p. 50.

OD&D Supplement 2: Blackmoor, 1975, p. 25.

Strategic Review 2.2, April 1976, p. 20.

All the Worlds' Monsters, vol. 1, 1977, p. 4

All the Worlds' Monsters, vol. 1, 1977, p. 26.

Dragon Magazine 2, p. 25

Dragon 10, 1977, p. 5 (accompanying an article called "Too Much Loot in Your Campaign? D&D Option: Orgies, Inc."

   

Different Worlds 1980 (April/May), p. 6 and p. 11

Different Worlds 1980 (June/July), p. 20.

The cover of this Dragon magazine from 1980 hides the bare breast behind the man's arm, but his loincloth barely conceals his penis.

 

This is what fantasy looked like then.

Realism versus reality

From the point of view of fatherhood in 2020, it’s startling to see just how prevalent amateur drawings of bare breasts were in early RPG materials four decades ago. Maybe if I was a father in the 1970s, I would not even shrug.

Depending on whom you ask, the more "realistic" early RPG amateur drawings may be preferable to the highly unrealistic female bodies portrayed in new comic book styles and anime/manga features in many games of more recent years. Today’s ideals of body shape are conditioned by cosmetic surgeries, drugs, and similar apparatus unknown in the 1970s.

My own view is that the doodles of topless women detract from the games in which they appear, whether or not they are realistic, by restricting the audience. I will not play a game with my daughter or my son which features completely unnecessary drawings of sexualized women. Anybody who fails to see how creepy that would be does not have kids. When I was in college, playing with male and female gamers alike, it was different. But we did not need doodles of breasts to authorize us to include sexuality in our games then.

 

From the beginning, role-playing games used sex in their marketing to appeal to an audience of young men used to seeing naked women in magazines. That was the world of the 1970s. It still goes on today, but in a different form, corresponding to today's world.

 

After forty-five years of role-playing games, the world has changed and the games have changed with it. Gamers who subscribe to the "Old-School" movement cannot recreate the context in which casual female toplessness will elicit no comment. Even fantasies are contained by specific social circumstances.

 

On a bigger, human scale, sex has always been a part of fantasy, just as fantasy has always been a part of sex. But as different sexual fantasies are particular to specific tastes, the more that marketing relies on sexual fantasies, the more limited its range of appeal becomes.