Of Dice and Men: The Story of Dungeons & Dragons and The People Who (8 page)

In the fall, Wesely left the Twin Cities to attend graduate school in Kansas. Away from his gaming friends, he had months to plan something memorable for his return home over winter break. What he came up with was the first modern role-playing game.

The scenario was set during the Napoleonic Wars, in the fictional town of Braunstein, Germany, surrounded by opposing armies. But Wesely didn’t put the armies on the board. Instead, he assigned each player an individual character to control within the scenario. Some
players controlled military officers visiting town. Others took nonmilitary roles, like the town’s mayor, school chancellor, or banker. Wesely then gave each player their own unique objective, forcing them to consider motivations for their actions and to think beyond battlefield strategy.

The game quickly spun out of control. Players wanted to do things Wesely hadn’t planned for, like duel each other, so he had to make up rules on the spot. They also wandered away from the table in small groups to hold secret negotiations—a supposedly all-powerful referee’s nightmare. Wesely returned to school thinking the game had flopped.

But the players felt otherwise. Before long, they were begging Wesely for “another Braunstein.” He obliged by designing new scenarios, like one set in 1919 amid the Russian Civil War. Another explored a Latin American dictatorship through the eyes of student revolutionaries, secret policemen, and corrupt government functionaries.

Wesely’s friend David Megarry was one of the players in the second “Braunstein” game, set in the fictional country of Piedras Morenas. “It was sort of a banana republic,” Megarry says. “I was a revolutionary and trying to blow up something.” The players were intrigued by the freedom of the game and excited for the opportunity to play more. “It was a new dimension,” he says. “It was really quite electrifying.”

David Wesely’s innovations—using a referee, assigning players individual characters with unique objectives, and giving them the freedom to do whatever they want—lit a fire in the Twin Cities gaming community. His Braunstein role-playing adventures appealed to players who were tired of long, complicated war reenactments and got
them thinking about where the games could go next. It wasn’t long before others began to follow his example.

David Arneson
¹
was born in 1947 and grew up in Saint Paul, Minnesota. When he was a teenager, his parents bought him a copy of Avalon Hill’s Gettysburg, and he got hooked; later, he moved on to the hard-core stuff, including Civil War simulations and Napoleonic naval battles. Upon enrolling at the University of Minnesota to study history, he joined the Midwest Military Simulation Association to further indulge the habit, and his basement game room—a small space dominated by a big Ping-Pong table, with just a few feet of clearance on each side—became home base for the role-playing game crowd.

Seated on a cushy couch “throne” at the head of that Ping-Pong table, Arneson began making his own refinements to traditional war-game rules—mostly by breaking them. During one battle set amid the Roman conquest of Britain, he got bored and decided to spice things up.

“
I’d given the defending brigands a druid high priest,” Arneson explained in a 1983 interview. “In the middle of the battle, the
dull
battle, when the Roman war elephant charged the Britons and looked like he was going to trample half their army flat, the druidic high priest waved his hands and pointed this funny little box out of one hand and turned the elephant into so much barbecue meat.” Arneson removed the war elephant from the game, explaining that the druid had killed it with a
Star Trek
–style phaser gun. “That was absolutely the only thing in the game that was out of the ordinary, but they weren’t expecting it,” he said.

The players were nonplussed—save for the delighted commander of the British druid. But Arneson wasn’t put off from sneaking elements of fantasy into his war games. In December 1970, after a
two-day binge of watching monster movies and reading Robert E. Howard’s Conan the Barbarian books, Arneson invited his friends over under the pretense of playing a traditional Napoleonic war game. Instead, he introduced them to the city of Blackmoor.

“They came down to the basement and there was a medieval castle in the middle of the table,” says Megarry. “And then he says, ‘We’re going to do this instead.’ ” The players, Arneson explained, had been sent through time and space to a medieval city and had to control original heroic characters, each with their own attributes, powers, and goals.

“My very first character was a thief,” says Megarry, “and my nemesis was Dan Nicholson, the merchant. His role was to try to get stuff into town and then sell it. And my role was to try to steal his stuff and make my money that way. It gave us a framework of how to operate in this world.”

Characters in place, Arneson sent the players to explore the dungeons beneath the castle and town. Inside, he hit them with another twist: The subterranean passages weren’t defended by human soldiers but inhabited by fantastic monsters—like a dragon, which Arneson represented on the table using a plastic toy brontosaurus with a fanged clay head. The fantasy role-playing game was born.

“
Frankly, the boys in my club were bored,” Arneson said. “They wanted to try something new. To me, it was a logical extension to go into fantasy. It was less restrictive than history.”

Much of the appeal of the game came from the excitement of exploring the winding corridors underneath Blackmoor. “There was that thrill of discovery,” says Megarry. “You have to make a decision . . . left or right, or staircase in front of you going down?” The game was so popular, people wanted to play even when they couldn’t make it to Arneson’s house and would call him on the phone to lead them on solo adventures through the dungeons.

Over the course of several weeks, Arneson and his players obsessed over the new game—although it did have its critics. One local Napoleonic-miniatures fan campaigned loudly against Blackmoor after watching his gaming buddies abandon traditional war games in favor of newfangled dungeon crawls; he insulted the game and its players, and even played a nasty practical joke on Arneson. But the Dungeon Master had his revenge. Not long after, Arneson introduced a new villain in the game: the “Egg of Coot,” a riff on the disgruntled player’s name and temperament, described as an “all consuming personality [that] lives off the egos of others to support his own . . . a huge mass of jointly operating cells, a huge mass of jelly . . . the physique of this creature is too horrible for any mortal to behold.”

At first, combat in the world of Blackmoor was resolved using a clunky system of rock-paper-scissors showdowns. But Arneson quickly turned to the rules of a medieval-miniatures war game called Chainmail, paying particular interest to two sections of its sixty-two-page booklet: “Man-to-Man,” which explained how to manage individual heroes amongst your army, and “Fantasy Supplement,” which included rules for casting magical spells and fighting hideous monsters.

Chainmail provided a framework that helped Blackmoor develop from a novelty into a consistent, ongoing game. But ultimately the system proved too limited for Arneson’s growing fantasy world. He began adding his own innovations—rules for fighting in different types of armor, lists of magical artifacts, and provisions for improving a character over time.

Like any passionate hobbyist, Arneson was excited to share his work with others. So he decided to show off Blackmoor to Chainmail’s author.

Ernest Gary Gygax grew up playing games. Born in Chicago in 1938, he knew pinochle by age five and chess by six. His grandfather would challenge him to matches, checkmate him, start the game over at the point where “Gary” had made his biggest mistake, and then repeat the process until the boy’s play was perfect. When he was eight, the family moved out of the city—in part because mischievous Gary had been involved in a forty-kid rumble—to the quiet resort town of Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. Gary passed his time there playing board games and cards. At ten, he discovered Avalon Hill’s Gettysburg. “
That sealed my fate,” he’d later write, “for thereafter I was a wargamer.” As an adolescent, he got hooked on military miniatures battles and built his own sand table.

He also loved fantasy. When Gygax was a boy, his father, a Swiss immigrant, put him to bed every night with tales of wizards and warriors. He picked up the Brothers Grimm as soon as he could read, mastered Poe before he was ten, and devoured the amazing stories in pulp magazines like
Weird Tales, Argosy,
and
Blue Book.
Gygax found a favorite in the works of Robert E. Howard: “
Even now I vividly recall my first perusal of
Conan the Conqueror,
” he wrote in 1985. “After I finished reading that piece of sword and sorcery literature for the first time, my concepts of adventure were never quite the same again.” Maybe the thirst for adventure was in his blood: Gygax family tradition holds that they are descendants of the giant Goliath, whose progeny fled the Holy Land after the future king of Israel played a trick with his sling.
²

Bright and highly literate, Gygax had little interest in formal education and dropped out of high school in his junior year. Later, he attended junior college classes and toyed with the idea of becoming
an anthropologist. But his childhood interests had instilled an undeniable ambition to write and design games. He took a job as an insurance
underwriter to support his gaming habit, and then a growing family: In 1958, he married an attractive redhead, Mary Jo Powell, and they eventually had five kids.

In 1966, Gygax became a founding member of the United States Continental Army Command, a club whose impressive name belied the fact that its members were engaged in a play-by-mail campaign of the strategic war game Diplomacy. A year later, the group changed its name to the International Federation of Wargaming and its focus to promoting the hobby.

To that end, Gygax decided to organize a war-gaming convention. He rented out the Lake Geneva Horticultural Hall for fifty dollars, and on August 24, 1968, he welcomed friends and IFW members to “Gen Con”—a double pun referring to both the rules of war and the event’s location. Admission cost a dollar, and the show made just enough money to cover the rental.

In August of 1969, Gygax held the event again. This time, IFW member Dave Arneson drove from Saint Paul to check out the action, and the two gamers spent a lot of time together. “
Since we’re only talking a couple hundred people at that point, we pretty much ran into each other all the time,” Arneson said. “We were both interested in sailing-ship games.” Arneson had developed new rules for naval warfare simulations and showed Gygax his system; after the convention was over, they stayed in touch via phone and letters, and shared ideas about how to make the game better.

In 1970, determined to make a career in gaming, Gygax quit his job as an insurance underwriter and took a part-time job writing and editing rule books for Guidon Games, a tiny publisher based in Evansville, Indiana. To supplement the meager income, he learned how to repair shoes and practiced cobblery out of his basement.

Guidon Games barely lasted as long as a new pair of leather soles. But before it went belly-up, it produced two games of particular importance: 1971’s Chainmail, written by Gygax and his friend Jeff Perren, which provided a starting rule set for Dave Arneson’s Blackmoor campaign; and 1972’s Don’t Give Up the Ship!, authored by Gygax, Arneson, and war-gaming friend Mike Carr, the result of their ongoing discussion about naval warfare.

Based on his use of Chainmail and the successful collaboration of Don’t Give Up the Ship!, Dave Arneson knew what to do after he created the fantasy role-playing game Blackmoor: He shared it with Gary Gygax.

In the four decades that have passed since Dave Arneson and Gary Gygax began their most important collaboration, various geek pundits have attempted to describe, by way of analogy, the nature of their momentous and fateful partnership. I’ve heard them described as Paul McCartney and John Lennon, James Watson and Francis Crick, even John the Baptist and Jesus. I enjoy a bit of careless sacrilege as much as the next guy, but these comparisons make me cross.

Here’s my attempt: Two young men meet in the late 1960s and bond over a shared love of a nerdy pastime. They both belong to the same hobbyist’s club and start making things to share with the other members. Before long, they’re working together on something new and exciting. One of them is the engineer; he invents new ways of doing things. The other is the visionary; he realizes the potential. The product they create could not have existed without both of them. When it’s released, it launches a brand-new industry and changes the world.

The story’s the same whether you base it in the International Federation of Wargaming or the Homebrew Computer Club, where
Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs jump-started the personal computer industry by founding Apple Computer. Wozniak, the engineer, designed the hardware and made the computer function; Jobs, the visionary, made it user-friendly and something people wanted.

Arneson visited Lake Geneva in the fall of 1972 to show off his Blackmoor game, but what he really delivered was innovations: Every player at the table controls just one character. Those characters seek adventure in a fantasy landscape. By doing so, they gain experience and become more powerful.

Gary Gygax took those ideas and turned them into a commodity. “
I asked Dave to please send me his rules additions, for I thought a whole new system should be developed,” he wrote. “A few weeks after his visit I received 18 or so handwritten pages of rules and notes pertaining to his campaign, and I immediately began work on a brand new manuscript.”

Over the next two months, Gygax labored at a portable Royal typewriter crafting the rules for a new kind of game, where players roll dice to create a hero, fight monsters, and find treasure. By the end of 1972, he’d finished a fifty-page first draft. He called it the Fantasy Game.

The first people to play it were Gygax’s eleven-year-old son, Ernie, and nine-year-old daughter, Elise. Gygax had created a counterpart to Arneson’s Blackmoor, which he called Castle Greyhawk, and designed a single level of its dungeons; one night after dinner, he invited the kids to roll up characters and start exploring. Ernie created a wizard and named him Tenser—an anagram for his full name, Ernest.
³
Elise
played a cleric called Ahlissa. They wrote down the details of their characters on index cards and entered the dungeon. In the very first room, they discovered and defeated a nest of scorpions; in the second, they fought a gang of kobolds—short subterranean lizard-men. They also found their first treasure, a chest full of copper coins, but it was too heavy to carry. The two adventurers pressed on until nine o’clock, when the Dungeon Master put them to bed. Fatherly duties completed, Gygax returned to his office and designed another level of the dungeons.