History of Dominion Rules

Dominion Rules has been on the internet in a variety of forms since 1999. Thanks to the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, you can explore DR’s history and even download previous versions of the game. 

The current version of Dominion Rules, DR 3.1, is free to download from this web site. Just click here.

DR Beta Release (late 1999)

We can't quite recall when DR first hit the web, but the earliest pages in the Internet Archive are from late 1999 (click here to view them). They show DR’s beta release on the old Dominion Games web site. Dominion Games called its concept “Open Source Roleplaying” and even “The Future of Roleplaying”. 

That was a bit of an exaggeration. However, open gaming did later take off in a big way through Wizards’ d20 licensing scheme.

DR 1.0 and IDR 1.0 (2000)

Dominion Rules 1.0 came out in April 2000 (here’s the announcement). An illustrated version, IDR 1.0, followed in October (announcement) thanks to the terrific contributions of the Illuminators Guild (now seemingly defunct). 

The first draft of the Dominion Rules Licence appeared online in July 2000 (here). Version 1.0 of the DRL was published online by September 2000 (here). The current version appeared with DR 3.0 in 2008 and is available here.

DR 2.0 (July 2001)

Dominion Rules 2.0 hit the web in July 2001, together with a redesigned Dominion Games web site (here).

This version improved and expanded the game’s rules in several respects. It was also Dominion Games’ attempt to make some money off the game by offering the central components for free and other components for sale over the internet. Only very few sales were ever made, however, and the collaborative, “open source gaming” aspects of the game may have been undermined somewhat by this move.

DR 3.0 (April 2008)

Dominion Rules disappeared briefly from the internet around 2006 when a web squatter got hold of dominiongames.com. DR then relaunched in 2008 on dominionrules.org as an entirely free system.