Only if you want ‘The story’ to be about business and sales.
I don’t, so I don’t agree with your viewpoint.
Edit: I also rather feel like “The History of D&D and TSR” has been written. It’s there. The facts are pretty much down. Sure, people can argue about who ousted who, and why, but it’s pretty clear cut in terms of what happened. Design trends, on the other hand, are a bit more debatable, a bit more fluid, a bit harder to pin down, and make better history.
Tiny nitpick: It’s “Drakar och demoner”.
I think if you’re going to mention any older Swedish games in this type of quick overview it would be Mutant, as an example of a BRP spinoff and as a distant ancestor of Mutant: Year Zero (which in itself could be an interesting example of a post-PbtA/old school mashup), and Kult.
But even as a Swede who lived through most of the Swedish history of roleplaying games I don’t think it would be necessary to mention any of them.
I do think it would be meaningful to mention the 1980’s drive towards simulationism and point build systems, though. And if you’re doing this for history majors, you’ve got to mention GURPS and its historical supplements.
Wow, no, if I had ten minutes with a group of people who wondered what RPGs were, I’d play a ten minute RPG with them. If somebody says “So what’s bird watching all about?” you don’t regale them with the history of ornithology, you hand them some binoculars. I love the idea of an RPG history lightning talk but that’s for after they are totally hooked.
Even if all the people in the room are history majors? 
Thanks man 
I edited my post to “Drakar och demoner” (I am no swede 
)
I figured, and no worries. Like I said, it was a tiny nitpick.
When I first reached out to the game studies faculty at my university, I quickly realized that they had knew a good deal about board/card/video games but no one had much experience with RPGs and larp. So I put together a slide deck to, more or less, argue that RPGs and larp were something worth paying attention to and showing them a bunch of ways to tie RPGs/larp into their existing work and interests (e.g. language, culture, literature, education). I spent a slide each on defining RPGs, D&D, a mosaic of notable games from the 80’s/90’s, Designers & Dragons, impact of PDF/POD/croudfunding, and then switched to slides that presented clusters of RPGs around a common theme. I did something similar for larp. I also included slides on relevant texts, journals, conferences, classroom applications, safety, game jams, translation, streaming, etc. So yeah, rather than focusing on their field(s) of study, I focused on their common situation as academics. As far as I can tell, it went over well.
Yeah, I maybe wasn’t clear in my original post, sorry >.<
The idea was we’d get together to play whatever game and make a whole evening of it, and also, as the person bringing TTRPG’s to the group, I’d do a little history lecture. Partially out of genuine interest in the topic, but also as a bit of a tongue-in-cheek thing, because even when we all get together just to socialize, we can’t help but end up talking about our work and research and donning our historian hats.
The history talk wouldn’t be the thing hopefully making or breaking their interest in games, because I agree, that probably wouldn’t go over well =P
FWIW I was aware of these two (Kult had some following in Poland - no pun intended) but did not know anything about Dragons and Demons (?) before Trudvang on KS.
Yeah, Drakar och demoner translates as Dragons and Demons. The name was chosen because it looks similar to Dungeons & Dragons and because of the alliteration. (There’s no good Swedish translation for “dungeon” in the D&D sense; the closest is “fängelsehåla” which explicitly and obviously refers to a prison in a way that I don’t think dungeon quite does in English.)
The very first edition of Drakar och Demoner is a translation and development of the then not yet published Magic World expansion for Basic Roleplaying. Later editions moved away from those origins a bit (but not that much) but since it took a long time for it to become anything other than a fairly generic fantasy game the growth potential outside Sweden and the other Nordic countries was fairly small.
I’m not sure that’s what prevented it from catching up. Trudvang has fairly unique Swedish folk setting (unique from my POV at least) and I think there’s a kernel of interesting gameplay hidden somewhere in there. But mechanics as stated are a complete dog and translation is lacking. So, yeah, perhaps it was a fairly generic fantasy game but I don’t think it was a fairly generic fantasy.
That sounds silly and fun! I’d do the talk last, though…
Oh yeah, Trudvang is a different issue. I should have been clear that I meant the settings made for it before that. The first one, Ereb Altor, was set up as a very standard fantasy world (as far as I know; I never got into it that much since we tended to make up our own settings or play the early published adventures which I think were retrofitted into it later), and Chronopia which came in the early nineties was kind of steampunky IIRC but before steampunk was established in Sweden so it didn’t last very long. After that I lost track until Trudvang showed up, which I haven’t played in but it at least seems different.
I can’t speak to the rules of the later editions (meaning anything after Expert) in detail, but my impression is that they’ve been a bit of a mess. The first (and second, depending on how you count) versions were standard Basic Roleplaying. Expert changed the system to use a d20 instead of a d100 (though it was still roll-under and skill based) and made the skills based on build points rather than ability multipliers, and it vastly expanded the skill list. It also developed the magic system.
After that I mostly lost track but I think they started adding in advantages and other things, and my impression is that it’s been trying to become a different kind of system without being able to shed its BRP roots enough to get there. But that may be an unkind distortion based on the game moving away from what I played when I was young.
I remember Chronopia. Target Games was pretty prominent in Poland back then with Chronopia and (more importantly, I guess) Mutant Chronicles/Doomtrooper. To me Chronopia was just skirmish-level, edgier WH but I had no idea what steampunk was back then so my POV was probably completely bogus.
As for Trudvang - your description of Expert (I assume this indicates DoD Expert or something like that?) rings true to what Trudvang in English is. Again, in places translation makes it hard to grasp what authors mean so it may be better than or worse from what you describe, hard to tell, really. 
Yeah, Expert is Drakar och Demoner Expert, I should have made that clear.
I may have read in the steampunk thing in the illustrations I saw from Chronopia; I never played it or owned it so I’m guessing a bit.
It’s too bad the translation of Trudvang is that bad, though there’s a real chance the rules aren’t that much more clear in the original Swedish… I seem to remember some discussion about them being a bit of a mess.
Mutant Chronicles, yeah, that was a thing. I always dismissed it as a WH40K-meets-Kult cash grab though I played the miniatures game a couple of times and the Citadel game as well, which I think is considered pretty good even if I didn’t get that at the time. And hey, they made it into a bad movie with Ron Perlman so I guess that’s something. 