The Lantern Hall
Painting: a vast subterranean museum hall carved into a mountain, lit by hanging braziers and moonlight.

The Lantern
Hall

A living museum of fantasy and roleplaying games. Four thousand years of heroes, dragons and dungeons, from Beowulf to The Hobbit, Dungeons & Dragons, The Bard’s Tale and Ultima Online.

Read the ChronicleWalk the Classic PathNew here? Start with the primer

The Chronicle

The whole history in fourteen chapters, told as one story: myth and epic, the Victorian inventors, the pulps, Tolkien, the wargamers who became dungeon masters, the programmers who put dungeons on mainframes, and the worlds that went online.

All chapters
Painting: an Anglo-Saxon timber mead-hall at night on a misty fen, firelight and music spilling from its carved doors.I

Myth, Epic & Saga

c. 2100 BCE – 1500 CE
Painting: an armored knight on a white horse entering an enchanted forest of silver birches where a slender castle floats in morning mist.II

Romance, Fairy Tale & the Gothic

1500 – 1850
Painting: a Victorian writer's study lit by gaslamp, a mahogany desk strewn with manuscripts.III

The Invention of Modern Fantasy

1850 – 1920
Painting: a muscular barbarian swordsman and a cloaked thief on the steps of a sinister jungle temple under a huge sickly green moon.IV

Pulps, Weird Tales & Sword-and-Sorcery

1920 – 1960
Painting: a cozy 1940s Oxford pub back room with firelight, pipe smoke, pints and scattered handwritten manuscripts on a worn oak table with empty chairs.V

Tolkien, Lewis & the Inklings

1930 – 1960
Painting: a robed wizard on a sea cliff above a vast island archipelago under swirling psychedelic aurora skies, a dragon silhouetted far away.VI

The Paperback Boom & the Counterculture

1965 – 1980
Painting: a 1970s basement table seen from above at an angle: a sand-table battlefield of hand-painted lead miniature knights, graph-paper dungeon maps.VII

From Kriegsspiel to Dungeons & Dragons

1812 – 1977
Painting: a 1980s kitchen table at night: teenagers' hands, polyhedral dice mid-roll, pencil character sheets, a folding cardboard screen, soda cans.VIII

The Tabletop Golden Age & the Satanic Panic

1977 – 1990
Painting: a glowing CRT monitor in a dark 1980s bedroom showing a green wireframe dungeon corridor; stacks of floppy disks.IX

Mainframes to Microcomputers: the First Computer RPGs

1975 – 1992
Painting: a young hero with a sword on a grassy hill overlooking a sweeping overworld of castles, a wooden airship, crystal towers and a distant dragon.X

The Japanese Line: Console RPGs

1983 – 2000
Painting: a gothic city of spires under a blood moon, a caped vampire on a rooftop.XI

Collapse & Renaissance: Cards, Vampires & Baldur's Gate

1990 – 2000
Painting: thousands of tiny glowing adventurers gathered in the plaza of a vast fantasy capital city at dusk, threads of light connecting them like a network.XII

Online Worlds: From MUD1 to World of Warcraft

1978 – 2010
Painting: a lone armored traveler on a snowy mountain ridge overlooking an immense open world of forests, lakes.XIII

Screens, Sandboxes & the Open Game

2000 – 2014
Painting: friends around a glowing game table with microphones and dice, their hand-drawn map rising up into a full fantasy landscape of a tavern.XIV

The New Golden Age

2014 – present

One thread, pulled through time

Follow a single line of influence from an Anglo-Saxon poem to a 2023 game of the year. Every knot is an exhibit.

  1. c. 700BeowulfEpic poem
  2. 1220The EddasMyth cycle
  3. 1896The Well at the World's EndNovel
  4. 1937The HobbitNovel
  5. 1932–1936Conan the CimmerianBook series
  6. 1954–1955The Lord of the RingsNovel
  7. 1971ChainmailWargame
  8. 1974Dungeons & DragonsTabletop RPG
  9. 1975pedit5Dungeon crawler
  10. 1979Akalabeth: World of DoomComputer RPG
  11. 1981Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad OverlordDungeon crawler
  12. 1985Ultima IV: Quest of the AvatarComputer RPG
  13. 1985–2019The Bard's TaleComputer RPG
  14. 1986Dragon QuestJapanese RPG
  15. 1987Final FantasyJapanese RPG
  16. 1978–1999MUD1MUD
  17. 1997Ultima OnlineMMORPG
  18. 1999EverQuestMMORPG
  19. 2004World of WarcraftMMORPG
  20. 2011Dark SoulsAction RPG
  21. 2014Dungeons & Dragons 5th EditionTabletop RPG
  22. 2015Critical RolePhenomenon
  23. 2023Baldur's Gate 3Computer RPG

The wings of the museum

Nine ways in. Every exhibit links to the works that shaped it and the ones it inspired, so you can wander from any door.

Painting: an infinite library whose shelves are carved from living trees, glowing books hanging like lanterns, a spiral staircase rising into a starry sky.The CollectionBooks, tabletop games, computer and console RPGs, MMOs, films and shows.204 worksPainting: a long hall of weathered marble statues of anonymous robed makers, writers with quills, designers with dice, artists with brushes.Hall of MakersThe authors, designers, programmers and artists who built the genre.144 makersPainting: a cartographer's atlas table with a vast hand-drawn fantasy map of many different kingdoms, inkpots, compass, brass dividers and candles.Atlas of GenresSword & sorcery to soulslikes: what each genre is and how to tell them apart.49 genresPainting: a naturalist's cabinet of curiosities of fantasy creatures: a dragon skull, griffin feathers, jars of glowing slime, sketches pinned to the wall.The BestiaryHow dragons, orcs and owlbears migrated from myth to the dungeon.30 creaturesPainting: a great river of time seen from high above, flowing through a landscape that changes from standing stones to castles to glowing modern cities.The TimelineEvery exhibit and milestone on one river of years.583 momentsPainting: a deep night sky over a lone observatory tower, where the stars form a vast web of constellations shaped like a sword, an open book.ConstellationThe web of influence, drawn as a star map you can explore.638 starsPainting: a medieval guild street at night with blank hanging guild signs, a glowing printing-press workshop.Guild HousesThe publishers and studios, from Allen & Unwin to Larian.51 housesPainting: a 1980s kitchen table at night: teenagers' hands, polyhedral dice mid-roll, pencil character sheets, a folding cardboard screen, soda cans.Culture & EventsConventions, magazines, moral panics and the memes of online worlds.35 eventsPainting: an ancient lexicon open on a carved lectern in a dark chapel of books, glowing runes and symbols lifting off its pages like fireflies.The LexiconHit points, THAC0, aggro, eucatastrophe: the language of play, defined.101 terms

Guided tours

Curated paths through the collection, with a guide’s note at every stop.

All tours
Painting: a lantern-lit path leading from a round green door in a hillside, past a bard playing a lute at a tavern.

The Classic Path

From a hobbit hole to the lawless streets of Britannia

Painting: a long road winding from a Viking burial mound past a ruined tower to distant snowy mountains under a golden sunset.

The Tolkien Road

From Beowulf's barrow to Baldur's Gate

Painting: lead miniature soldiers and a hand-drawn dungeon map in a 1970s Wisconsin basement, a dragon's shadow rising from the map.

The Birth of D&D

Umpires, toy soldiers and a castle in a Twin Cities basement

Painting: a split tabletop: on one side a colorful fantasy board game with cards and a spinner-free board.

Board Game, Wargame, or Roleplaying Game?

A field guide to telling the fantasy game families apart

From the vaults

A few of the exhibits visitors start with. Or roll the die for a random one.

Painting: a round green door set into a grassy hillside burrow at golden hour, a brass knob in the center, flowers and a winding lane.

The Hobbit

Novel1937

A comfortable, pipe-smoking hobbit is hired as a burglar by thirteen dwarves and walks out of his round green door into the adventure that invented modern fantasy's map.

Painting: a bard playing a lute leads a small party of adventurers through the snowy, frozen streets of a walled medieval town at night.

The Bard's Tale

Computer RPG1985–2019

Mangar the Dark has locked Skara Brae in eternal winter, and only a bard, a few rogues and some junior magic users stand in his way: the Commodore 64 dungeon crawl that out-sold every CRPG of the 1980s.

Painting: the drowned continent of Atlantis in its golden age: spired crystal cities on concentric islands, alchemists' towers.

The Atlantean Trilogy

Tabletop RPG1984–1986

Three books that rebuilt Dungeons & Dragons for the drowned world of Atlantis — a magic-and-alchemy grimoire, an atlas of lost continents, and a bestiary — from the tiny Bard Games.

Painting: a bustling medieval fantasy town square crowded with hundreds of adventurers of every kind, player-built houses on the hills, a blacksmith's forge.

Ultima Online

MMORPG1997

Richard Garriott's Britannia turned into a living, lawless shared world: thousands of players building houses, running shops, and killing one another. UO popularized the MMORPG and taught a generation of designers how hard virtual societies are.

Painting: three small plain tan rulebooks in a wood-grain cardboard box beside strange new polyhedral dice, pencils and a graph-paper dungeon map.

Dungeons & Dragons

Tabletop RPG1974

Three little booklets in a woodgrain box, hand-assembled in Lake Geneva in January 1974: the first published roleplaying game, and the template for every tabletop and computer RPG since.

Painting: a glowing golden ankh rising over a medieval land of eight shrines on hills, lakes and forests, a lone pilgrim on the road, dawn light.

Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar

Computer RPG1985

The RPG that asked players to become good rather than merely strong: no dark lord to slay, only eight virtues to live by, a cloth map, a metal ankh, and the Codex waiting at the bottom of the Abyss.

Painting: a young hero with a sword and shield on an overworld path, a small cute blue slime blocking the way, a castle and a dragon-shaped mountain far away.

Dragon Quest

Japanese RPG1986

A lone descendant of the hero Erdrick sets out from Tantegel Castle to face the Dragonlord: Yuji Horii's streamlined Famicom RPG, drawn by Akira Toriyama and scored by Koichi Sugiyama, that made the role-playing game a Japanese national pastime.

Painting: a colossal nautilus-shelled flying ship with tentacles looming over a burning coastal city at dusk, tiny adventurers fleeing across a rope bridge.

Baldur's Gate 3

Computer RPG2023

A mind flayer tadpole behind your eye, a camp full of beautiful liars, and a twenty-sided die deciding everything: Larian's Baldur's Gate 3 turned fifth-edition D&D into the most celebrated role-playing game of its age.

J. R. R. Tolkien

Author1892–1973

An Oxford philologist who invented languages, then a world for them to be spoken in — and, with The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, supplied the elves, dwarves, orcs and halflings of every roleplaying game since.

Richard Garriott

Game designerb. 1961

The astronaut's son who sold his first RPG in Ziploc bags, ruled Britannia as Lord British through the Ultima series, built a castle with secret passages outside Austin, and in 2008 paid his own way to the space station.

Gary Gygax

Game designer1938–2008

The Lake Geneva insurance underwriter and wargamer who co-created Dungeons & Dragons, co-founded TSR, and wrote the rulebooks that taught a generation how to be a Dungeon Master.

Sword & Sorcery

Literature genre1929

Blood, steel and bad magic: the pulp-born genre of Conan, Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, and Elric — personal adventures at the edge of civilization that gave D&D its rogues and its appetite for treasure.

The hall holds 638 exhibits — 204 works, 144 makers, 51 houses, 49 genres, 35 events, 30 creatures and 101 terms — in about 405,000 words, cross-linked and searchable by meaning.