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by TSR, Inc. in 1985, but it included Gygax’s earlier module The Village of Hommlet from 1979. As the rules for D&D went through further editions, the module was re-done, this time by Monte Cook in 2001. Cook’s Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil uses the same setting as the original story but is intended to be more of a sequel. In addition, the original Temple story was published as a novel by Thomas Reid in 2001 and became a computer game in 2003. In order to explore the relationship between genre and medium, I trace Temple as it has evolved and changed in its many iterations. I focus primarily on the printed texts of the original module, the computer game, and the novel, but also use comments from players on their experiences with Temple in its many different forms.

Genre and Medium

We have seen how the TRPG functions as a genre, but part of the reason that it differs from computer role-playing games (CRPGs) as well as novels is a difference in medium. The relationship between genre and medium is a problematic one. Ryan (2005a) notes that it is often difficult to classify texts as either a genre or a medium. She uses the example of hypertext, which she says “is a genre if we view it as a type of text, but it is a (sub)medium if we regard it as an electronic tool for the organization of text” (Ryan, 2005a, p. 290). Likewise, we could say that the TRPG is a medium in that it is a tool for creating and telling stories. To return to Mackay’s (2001) definition, though, we see that the TRPG is more than a tool, it is a system—“an episodic and participatory story-creation system” (p. 4). As a system, the TRPG draws on multiple texts from multiple media. The oral text of the gaming session is the core of the genre, but it is supported by written text of the rule books and modules. The TRPG can thus be seen as a multimedia text. These media combine to meet a particular rhetorical need—that of narrative agency.

Based on player experiences, we can say that CRPGs fit a different rhetorical purpose than TRPGs, but the question of how they do so is a question more related to medium. Both genres and media appear to exercise control over the shape and form of texts, yet Ryan (2005a) sees genres as more malleable than media. She writes that “genre is defined by more or less freely adopted conventions chosen for both personal and cultural reasons, medium imposes its possibilities and limitations on the user” (Ryan, 2005a, p. 290). Miller and Shepherd (2009) define the difference in rhetorical terms referring to the relationship between medium and genre as “the way that the suasory aspects of affordances ‘fit’ rhetorical form to recurrent exigence.” In other words, media offer affordances that allow for (or perhaps require) different forms in order to respond to exigencies or needs, which define different genres. It seems that for Miller and Shepherd (2009), as well as Ryan (2005a), media are less under our control than genres. The notion of affordance is key in both of these definitions.

Affordances are the physical aspects of a medium that allow for certain types of discourse to develop while constraining others. For example, if we look at the medium used for the TRPG, we could see the live Dungeon Master (DM) as an affordance of the face-to-face interaction that allows the TRPG more flexibility than the computer-mediated CRPG. However, visual design might be an affordance of the digital medium of the CRPG that is not found in the TRPG. While Aarseth (1997) argues that his notion of cybertext stretches across media, we can’t deny that the negotiation the user engages in to access the narrative is decidedly different in the face-to-face oral storytelling medium of the TRPG than it is in the computer-mediated text-adventure game. There are clearly affordances of these two media that affect the way that a text is both created by an author-like figure1 and navigated by an audience. When the concept of role-playing games emerged, they constituted a new genre of gaming. They were distinct from war games and board games in both their