There are some stories of D&D campaigns which get passed around like folklore. Throughout the years they are told again and again, even by people who have no idea of the original context. Of these stories, the most famous is probably the "Head of Vecna" (the only one that might surpass it being the dread gazebo anecdote.) The story first showed up here. (Somehow that Steve Jackson games page is still up, and sitll with its glorious old web design!) You'll have to scroll down to get to the December 9, 1996 newspost. In case you don't want to, or if the site goes down, I will summarize things here:
The context for the "Head of Vecna" is that there are two powerful artifacts in D&D called the Eye of Vecna and the Hand of Vecna, each actual body parts from a powerful lich who later ascended to godhood. To use them, you would need to remove the corresopnding body part and replace it with the artifact. This comes up in one of Mark Steuer's campaigns. In that campaign he had two parties actively working against each other. Following the linked story, we'll call them "group one" and "group two." Group one gets the idea to trick group two with a fake artifact called the "Head of Vecna" (because hey, if the eye is already mega powerful, just think of using the whole head.) They get the head of some poor soul, magic it up a little, and create a trapped dungeon to make it look valuable. They then bribe local bards to spread tales of the legend of The Head of Vecna. The payoff of course being that the other party would cut off the heads of one of their own party members in order to use this great artifact.
The plan works. In fact, it works twice (the first time on accident). Group one had not told their druid player about their plan (Mark isn't sure why). The druid caught wind of the rumors and found the head, using summoned creaturtes to cut off his own head (at which point he of course died.) The rest of his group found his body and decided to reset the trap (and even improved it when they realized that they forgot to remove an eye from the supposed Head of Vecna; if one of his eyes is a separate artifact of course it shouldn't be included in the remainder of the head.) Group two later falls for the trick, and in fact falls so hard for it that they argue about who gets the honor of getting his head cut off. Even after they killed one party member they still argued about it, since they figured that the reason for why the first guy died was that they didn't put the head on his body fast enough. Only after the second guy from Group two dies do they realize that they've been had (and that's the third death from the Head of Vecna, since the druid was part of Group one.)
It's a funny story and it's easy to see why it's been repeated so many times. It's been referenced repeatedly by other works, such as Morte the floating skull from Planescape: Torment joking that he is the Head of Vecna, or an actual version of the artifact showing up in supplements.
But what interests me about it is this: the story makes no sense in the modern conception of D&D. If you ask most people about D&D how a campaign should be run, they will say this:
But in this story we have two openly antagonistic parties, splits going on within both parties, every action mentioned is directly instigated by the players (even things like what rumors bards are spreading), and there is no mention of a broader plotline. The two groups are trying to get rich and powerful while doing their best to kill the other group. This sort of situation is impossible on every level the way that D&D is now played.
I'm not saying that the story is made up. Rather, what I am saying is that it is firm evidence that D&D was played in a different way previously. We don't know excatly when this event went down, just that it was "many years" prior to the 1996 news update. So probably in the 80's, or maybe the very early 90's. The fact that Mark says "when we were all still playing D&D" makes me think that this may include Steve Jackson himself, and given that Jackson made GURPS Fantasy in 1985, that makes an early 80's time more likely. This means that there is a very high probability that the game was being played under the original D&D rules or the 1st edition AD&D rules. The 2nd edition didn't come out until 1989 and even if the story took place around 1989-1991 there is a good possibility that the group may simply have been veteran players using the old edition. Why is this relevant? Well, as I have went over in previous essays, the second edition of AD&D introduced a lot of bad advice which had not occurred in the previous edition. In particular, there are several places where agency is taken out of the player's hands and player actions are restricted to be non-antagonistic. For example, in 2nd edition assassinations should only work if the DM decides that they work well for his plot, with PC led assassinations discouraged as non-heroic. In 1st edition players could straight up be assassins and there were rules given to how to implement actual assassinations. A PC killing off a king and throwing the nation into chaos was an expected part of play in 1st edition, but impossible if you followed the advice of 2nd edition (unless the DM wanted the king to die, in which case the king could not fail to be assassinated.) Similarly 2nd edition discourages allowing random events to dominate play, since it would mean that the DM's adventure would not be remembered as fondly. If we follow the advice of 2nd edition, then the Head of Vecna story would be stamped out since the DM had no part in setting it up. (Though note that the actual DM of the story, Mark Steuer, didn't have any hard feelings about being "upstaged" but rather found the whole thing to be hilarious.)
Thus this story is evidence for an earlier play style which was suppressed around the time of 2nd edition.