(7/41: 1981) BRUCE GALLOWAY
The Historian Who Brought Medieval Heaven to the Table and Lost
Bruce Galloway tried to make Dungeons & Dragons answer to God. Not a god — a player-created deity with stats and a portfolio. The God. The medieval Christian God of Thomas Aquinas and the Inquisition, of zodiacal influence and divine intercession, of a cosmos where magic wasn’t a spell list but a theological negotiation between the caster and the heavens.
It didn’t work. Almost everyone who reviewed it said so. Rick Swan called it among the worst RPGs ever published. W.G. Armintrout in The Space Gamer said he’d never seen a worse game. Greg Stafford, reviewing for Different Worlds, wished someone had told the contributors no.
But the ambition deserves a moment of respect before the autopsy. Because what Galloway attempted in 1981 — grounding fantasy role-playing in rigorous historical scholarship — was ahead of its time conceptually, even if the execution was a disaster. He just didn’t live long enough to try again.
The Cambridge Experiment
Galloway was a history graduate student at Cambridge University in the mid-1970s when he started running games for a circle of fellow students. The group included Bruce Quarrie (a historian and wargaming writer), Nick Lowe, Mike Hodson-Smith, and Paul Sturman. They played in the post-D&D ferment of British university gaming culture — a world where Tolkien was the text and Gary Gygax was the mechanic, and Galloway decided both were insufficiently serious about the Middle Ages.
The result, developed between 1979 and 1980 and published in October 1981 by Patrick Stephens Limited, was Fantasy Wargaming: The Highest Level of All — a 222-page hardcover that devoted its first half to a detailed historical survey of medieval Europe (economy, religion, culture, warfare) and its second half to a role-playing system built on that foundation.
The US edition followed in 1982 through Stein & Day. The Science Fiction Book Club distributed copies. It reached mall bookstores. For a moment, it had a real audience.
The System That God Built
The ideas inside Fantasy Wargaming are more interesting than the game that contains them. Character generation is astrological — your birth zodiac sign directly shapes your physical, mental, and spiritual attributes. Social class and birth order determine your starting position in a stratified medieval world. Magic isn’t a spell list; it’s a faith-based system grounded in medieval theological concepts, where divine intercession is a game mechanic and the caster’s relationship with God (or the Devil) determines outcomes.
Combat includes morale and behavior systems that override player choice — your character might break and run regardless of what you want, because medieval soldiers broke and ran. Large-scale battle rules sit alongside individual skirmish mechanics. The whole thing attempts to simulate not just what medieval people did but what they believed — a cosmos where the stars matter, where sanctity is measurable, where Hell is a real place with real consequences for your character sheet.
In 1981, nobody else was doing this. D&D treated medieval Europe as a costume rack. Galloway treated it as operating system. The problem was that the operating system crashed on boot.
The rules are disorganized, contradictory, and incomplete. Multiple contributors wrote different sections without sufficient editorial coordination. Key mechanics are buried in prose paragraphs rather than presented as usable tables. The game requires substantial reconstruction to play as written. The ambition outran the craft by a mile.
The Road Not Taken
Galloway stepped away from gaming almost immediately after publication. He returned to academic history — publishing A History of Cambridgeshire and The Union of England and Scotland, 1603–1608. He pursued political campaigning, hiking in East Anglia, the quieter work of a young historian building a career.
In 1984, Bruce Galloway died in an automobile accident. He was thirty-two years old.
There is no second game. No revised edition. No chance to learn from the reviews, reorganize the rules, bring the same historical intelligence to a system that actually functioned at the table. Fantasy Wargaming is a first draft that never got a second — not because the designer abandoned it, but because the designer ran out of time.
The Scoring Case
Invention (3): “Competent variation”
Astrological character generation, faith-based magic grounded in medieval theology, social stratification as mechanical infrastructure — genuinely ambitious ideas for 1981, when most fantasy RPGs were pure Tolkien pastiche. Nobody else was trying to make fantasy role-playing answer to historical-religious realism at this scale. But the ideas didn’t travel. Zero adoption by other designers. The execution was too poor for anyone to extract the innovations from the wreckage. Not 4 because the execution so thoroughly obscured the innovation that it had no practical impact. Not 2 because the conceptual ambition was real and ahead of its time — the astrological system and theological magic represent genuine design thinking, not genre exercise.
Architecture (2): “Barely holds together”
Critics consistently identified the same problems: disorganized rules, contradictory mechanics, poor editorial coordination among multiple contributors, key systems buried in prose rather than presented as usable tables. The game requires substantial reconstruction to play as written. The scope was enormous (222 pages, comprehensive medieval simulation) but the structure couldn’t support the weight. Not 3 because the problems go beyond needing patience — the game requires active repair to function. Not 1 because the book does contain identifiable, playable subsystems beneath the organizational chaos.
Mastery (2): “One shot”
Single published work, collaboratively produced with four other contributors. Galloway served as compiler and editor as much as designer. Critically panned across multiple review outlets. No opportunity for refinement — Galloway died at thirty-two, three years after publication. Cannot evaluate mastery from one poorly-received collaborative game. Not 3 because there is no second design to demonstrate growth or range. Not 1 because the book exists as a substantial 222-page work with real intellectual ambition, and Galloway’s editorial hand shaped the whole.
Adjustments — +0
- ■ Longevity (+0): Active design career approximately 1979–1981. Three years.
- ■ Full-time career (+0): Galloway was a history graduate student and later academic historian. Game design was a side project during university years.
- ■ Awards (+0): No awards or nominations. Predominantly negative critical reception.
- ■ Branded name (+0): Not recognized outside gaming circles.
- ■ Cross-genre (+0): Single RPG publication.
- ■ Commercial success (+0): Multiple printings but modest sales. No evidence of significant commercial performance.
- ■ Design propagation (+0): No mechanics adopted by other designers. The system’s poor organization prevented anyone from extracting the ideas.
- ■ Field stewardship (+0): No mentorship, institutional, or community contributions beyond the immediate Cambridge gaming group.
The Hidden Pattern
Fantasy Wargaming is a dissertation that wanted to be a game.
Galloway was a historian first. The book’s structure reveals this — half historical survey, half game system, as if the research needed to justify the play. The astrological mechanics, the theological magic, the social stratification — these aren’t designer innovations. They’re historian’s observations translated into dice rolls. Galloway didn’t invent a magic system; he described how medieval people believed magic worked and then tried to make that playable.
The tragedy isn’t that the game failed. It’s that the failure was fixable. A stronger editor, a clearer layout, a second edition with the organizational problems solved — the ideas underneath the chaos were worth developing. Games like Ars Magica (1987) and Pendragon (1985) would later prove that historically grounded fantasy RPGs could work brilliantly. Galloway was trying to build the same house. He just couldn’t get the walls to stand.
He died before anyone could help him try again. The book became a collector’s curiosity — a rare hardcover that people buy because it’s strange, not because it’s good. But somewhere inside those 222 disorganized pages is a designer who understood something important: that the Middle Ages were weirder, more magical, and more systematically structured than any fantasy RPG had yet acknowledged. He was right. He just couldn’t prove it at the table.
What Remains
Fantasy Wargaming: The Highest Level of All (1981) — a Cambridge historian’s attempt to ground fantasy role-playing in medieval reality. Astrological character generation. Theological magic. Social stratification as game engine. Critically panned, structurally broken, conceptually ahead of its time.
One book. No second chance. A collector’s curiosity with a real idea buried inside.
Total: 7 points. Year: 1981.
7 points. 1981. The historian who brought medieval heaven to the table and lost.
One book. No second chance. A collector’s curiosity with a real idea buried inside.