Of Dice and Men: The Story of Dungeons & Dragons and The People Who

by Ewalt, David M.

  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.

  The next day the play tests continued, and Ernie and Elise were joined by three players plucked from Gygax’s regular war-gaming group: his childhood friend Don Kaye (Murlynd) and local teenagers Rob Kuntz (Robilar) and his brother Terry (Terik). He also sent the manuscript to a few dozen war-gaming friends around the country, requesting feedback. “The reaction . . . was instant enthusiasm,” wrote Gygax. “They demanded publication of the rules as soon as possible.”

  The local gamers also clamored for more. As they got farther into the depths of Castle Greyhawk, they faced greater challenges and began to feel like they were a part of a legend: Thanks to Dave Arneson’s innovation of persistent characters, the dungeons had a living history. If Tenser killed a pack of kobolds on Tuesday, Robilar might find the corpses on Thursday. It was a brand-new way to create a story.

  Gygax began running regular sessions of the Fantasy Game for a growing group of players; simultaneously, David Arneson tried out the rules with his Blackmoor players in Saint Paul. Arneson and Gygax spent a year testing the Fantasy Game with their respective gaming clubs and then discussing what did and didn’t work.

  “I don’t know if any game ever has been play-tested as much as this game,” says Michael Mornard, the only person to play a regular character in both Gygax’s Greyhawk campaign and Arneson’s Blackmoor. Mornard grew up in Lake Geneva and was sixteen when he met Gygax, through his classmate and fellow war-gaming enthusiast Rob Kuntz. In late 1972, Mornard was playing a miniatures battle with Kuntz and Don Kaye at Kaye’s Lake Geneva home when he heard about the Fantasy Game.

  “Either after or between turns of the battle,” says Mornard, “Rob tells us, ‘Gary’s got this new game he’s working on. You’re a bunch of guys exploring an old abandoned castle full of monsters and treasure.’ And Don says, ‘That doesn’t sound very interesting.’ ” Mornard felt otherwise. “I was like, ‘What do I have to do to get in?’ ”

  A few days later, Mornard went over to Gygax’s house for his first foray into the depths of Castle Greyhawk. He rolled up a character with 15 strength and 15 intelligence, and decided to make him a fighter (or, as the class was known at the time, a “fighting-man”) named Gronan of Simmerya, an “obvious parody” of Robert E. Howard’s barbarian hero.4 Mornard’s memories of the game are a blur, but Gronan lived to fight another day. “At the end of it, I was like, ‘I don’t know what this game is, but that was really freakin’ great,’ ” he says. “It was kind of like a war game, only not . . . it was really different.”

  * * *

  Gary Gygax’s early Greyhawk sessions were understandably surprising to players like Mike Mornard, who’d never seen this brand-new thing called a fantasy role-playing game. But they’d also look different to today’s experienced D&D players.

  There was no common gaming table; the players sat together, and Gygax sat alone at his desk. “The way Gary’s study was arranged, he had a desk with a filing cabinet next to it, and he pulled out the drawers on the filing cabinet so we couldn’t see him,” says Mornard. “What you did was listen. You heard his voice. All the action took place entirely inside our heads . . . If you wanted a map, you drew one yourself.”

  There wasn’t much talking. Each party had a “caller” who spoke for the group. Players quietly discussed their actions and then told the caller, who told Gygax. If anyone talked too much, they risked missing an important announcement from behind the filing cabinet. “The tension in the room was palpable,” says Mornard.

  There were no set adventuring parties, nothing like Frodo’s Fellowship of the Ring. During early play-testing, Gygax ran the game for three to five players each time, drawn from a pool of about twenty people. “We were adventurers who occasionally banded together,” says Mornard. “He ran several games at several times during the week, and you got invites for certain times. I was usually on Thursday nights, but not invariably.”

  And there were no piles of rule books—and not just because they hadn’t been written. Gygax wanted his players to learn the game through experience. “For about the first year we played we didn’t see the rules at all,” says Mornard. “That’s an interesting way to play. It requires a certain amount of common sense.” Some players didn’t have it. Mornard recalls one adventure where a younger player opened a door in the depths of a dungeon to find a room where the floor was covered with piles of jewels:

  “He says to Gary, ‘I’m going to run in the room and start scooping them up.’ Gary says, ‘Okay, you’re standing in gems and jewelry up to your ankles.’ And the kid says, ‘I’m going to throw them up in the air and dance around.’ ‘Okay, now you’re standing in jewels halfway up your calves.’ And the kid keeps going on about how he’s dancing and throwing money around, while Gary says, ‘You’re standing in jewels up to your knees,’ and then ‘You’re standing in jewels up to your armpits.’ There was three inches of jewelry on top of quicksand. And the kid just didn’t get it. It wasn’t a trap where you take one step in and you’re gone. About the time you’re in to your knees, you’re supposed to start noticing something is going on. You’ve got to pay attention.”

  Because the game was so new, players never knew what to expect from their Dungeon Master, or from their cohorts. Gygax was learning the game alongside his players and changing the rules based on their actions. Night after night, small groups of players pushed the boundaries of what was possible. Their actions shaped Gygax and Arneson’s work, and decades of games that followed.

  Mornard remembers a small action that had a very big effect: When one of Arneson’s players decided he wanted his character to be a vampire, another said he would like to play a vampire hunter. “They had to figure out what a vampire hunter would be like in the game,” says Mornard. “So, to counter the vampire, they gave him healing powers. That sort of became the template for the cleric. It was a counterpoint to the vampire.” Today, clerics aren’t just one of the core D&D character classes—they’re a full-blown fantasy archetype, appearing in countless novels, films, and video games. Some random guy in small-town Wisconsin decided to screw with his buddy, and forty years later two hundred million gamers are playing with the result.5

  After the better part of a year spent playing in Gary Gygax’s Fantasy Game play tests, Mornard moved to Minneapolis to start college at the University of Minnesota. Naturally, he made friends with the local gamers—and soon found himself in Dave Arneson’s basement.

  Perhaps because the Blackmoor players were more often college-aged, and less often neighborhood children, Arneson’s games were less playful than Gygax’s. “Blackmoor was a much grimmer, grittier place than Greyhawk,” says Mornard. “In Greyhawk, if you were killed, the other players would drag your body home. But in Blackmoor there was no honor amongst thieves. You’d be looted before your body hit the ground.”

  The game
played a little differently too. “It was a different way of interacting,” says Mornard. Arneson liked to use miniatures, while Gygax rarely did so. Arneson used to draw maps for his players instead of insisting they do so themselves. And he made people write up their moves instead of shouting them out and talking over each other.

  Based on feedback from play tests in Blackmoor and Greyhawk and from war-gamer friends across the country, Gygax completed a 150-page revision of the Fantasy Game in the spring of 1973 and sent it out to more friends for testing. “The reaction was so intense that I was sure we had a winning game,” he wrote. “I thought we would sell at least 50,000 copies to wargamers and fantasy fans. I underestimated the audience a little.”

  The demand was there, the game worked . . . the only thing missing was a name. “Fantasy Game” was a fine working title but too bland for the final product. So Gygax created a list of words that related to the game and wrote them in two columns on a sheet of paper—words like “castles,” “magic,” “monsters,” “treasure,” “trolls,” “mazes,” “sorcery,” “spells,” and “swords.”

  He read them aloud to his players, including Ernie and Elise, to gauge their reactions. The young girl’s delight at two of the words, an alliterative pair, confirmed the choice: the game would be called Dungeons & Dragons.

  Now they only had to print it. In the summer of 1973, Gygax called Avalon Hill and asked if they were interested in publishing his game. “They laughed at the idea, turned it down,” Gygax wrote.6 Most of the gaming establishment wanted nothing to do with Arneson and Gygax’s weird little idea. “One fellow had gone so far as to say that not only was fantasy gaming ‘up a creek,’ ” wrote Gygax, “but if I had any intelligence whatsoever, I would direct my interest to something fascinating and unique; the Balkan Wars, for example.”

  No matter; the Dungeon Master wanted to choose his own adventure. Gygax had aspirations to run his own company—he just didn’t have the money to start one. At the time he was ready to start printing game books, Gygax’s income came from repairing shoes in his basement, and Arneson was “a security guard who couldn’t afford shoes.”

  The solution was found in the place where the whole project started. In August, the annual Gen Con convention—now in its fifth year, and bigger than ever—was held in several buildings on the campus of George Williams College, up the road from Lake Geneva in a town called Williams Bay. Members of Gygax’s ever-growing D&D play test flocked to the con and caught the eye of one of Gygax’s old friends. “Don Kaye saw the turnout, noted the interest in the fans,” wrote Gygax, “and after the event was over, asked, ‘Do you really think you can make a success of a game publishing company?’ ”

  Kaye didn’t have cash to invest, either. But after seeing the crowds at Gen Con, he was convinced D&D was a salable product. So he borrowed $1,000 against his life insurance, and that October he and Gygax became equal partners in a new company called Tactical Studies Rules. It was based out of Kaye’s dining room.

  There were still problems. A thousand dollars wouldn’t print enough copies of D&D to meet anticipated demand. So Kaye and Gygax decided to publish a different game first: Cavaliers and Roundheads, a set of rules for English Civil War–miniatures battles cowritten by Gygax and his Chainmail partner, Jeff Perren.

  “We published Cavaliers and Roundheads . . . hoping the sales of the booklet would generate sufficient income to afford to publish the D&D game soon thereafter,” wrote Gygax. “We both knew [D&D] would be the horse to pull the company.” The game raised only $700 in sales.

  Then the last piece fell into place. Another local gamer, Brian Blume, had also been to Gen Con, seen the crowds of people, and “badgered Gary into letting [him] in at the ground-floor.” Blume was twenty-three, divorced, and worked as a tool-and-die maker’s apprentice at a company owned by his dad, Melvin Blume. In December, he borrowed $2,000 from his father and became a full partner in Gygax and Kaye’s company.

  A few weeks later, Gygax sent his manuscript—now broken into three small booklets called Men & Magic, Monsters & Treasure, and Underworld & Wilderness Adventures—to Graphic Printing in Lake Geneva. He paid $2,300 to print a thousand sets.

  In January 1974, Tactical Studies Rules made its creation public. It cost $10 and came in a hand-assembled cardboard box covered in wood-grain paper. A flyer pasted to the top lid featured a drawing of a Viking warrior on a rearing horse—art copied from a Doc Strange comic book. Gygax and Arneson’s names were also on the cover, and above that was the title:

  DUNGEONS & DRAGONS

  Rules for Fantastic Medieval Wargames Campaigns Playable with Paper and Pencil and Miniature Figures

  * * *

  1. There are a lot of people named David involved in this game, aren’t there?

  2. Eventually, they made their way north; Gygax is a Swiss name, properly pronounced “GEE-gox.” After Gary’s father immigrated to the United States, the family Americanized the name to “GUY-gacks.”

  3. Like several other characters from the original Greyhawk campaign, Tenser ended up becoming something of a D&D celebrity. Gygax borrowed his name for several spells that appeared in the game, including “Tenser’s Floating Disc,” an evocation that creates “a slightly concave, circular plane of force that follows you about and carries loads.” The character also appeared in a number of Greyhawk campaign sourcebooks.

  4. Many character names of this era were puns or corny jokes; later, when Mornard rolled up a magic-user, Gygax named it “Lessnard.”

  5. Other character classes had odder origins: Mornard says the martial artist class of monk was created “because Jim Ward liked the song ‘Kung Fu Fighting.’ ”

  6. Avalon Hill would come to regret that decision. In 1975, noting D&D’s success, the company tried to buy the game after all; “It was my turn to laugh,” Gygax wrote.

  5

  STRENGTH OF CHARACTER

  When I decided to end my decade-plus retreat from the world of Dungeons & Dragons, I did so with great trepidation. I wasn’t worried about getting obsessed with role-playing games like when I was in high school—I thought I was far too sophisticated to fall into that trap again. But I was embarrassed.

  Every Tuesday, I left my tiny studio apartment in Brooklyn and slinked to Brandon’s third-floor walk-up like I was doing something illicit. From the shame on my face, an observer might have guessed I was off to buy drugs or had developed an addiction to strip clubs. My fear was that they might prefer a junkie or lech to what I was really becoming: a grown man who liked rolling dice and talking about wizards.

  I didn’t tell any of my friends. I wasn’t eager to explain my motives or defend the pastime. Since I grew up playing D&D, I knew all too well that the game has a poor reputation. Like many nerdy pursuits, Dungeons & Dragons imparts a sense of undesirability. If you’re a kid who plays D&D, people assume you’re a nerd with no social skills. If you’re an adult who plays, the stereotype is worse: You’re a loser, you’re a freak, you live in your parents’ basement.

  It’s strange, because I am unquestionably a giant nerd, and it’s hardly a secret. My friends would have been no more shocked if I told them I played Dungeons & Dragons than if I said I had chicken for dinner. But the desire to keep the hobby secret was burned deep into my psyche—a self-defense mechanism that came from years of teasing, bullying, and living on the fringes of schoolyard society. Geeky kids learn to hide their passions and play their cards close to their chest, lest they surrender more fodder for mockery.

  The one person I did tell was my girlfriend Kara.1 She had never tried D&D and didn’t know anything about it; Kara played sports and went to parties in high school instead of fighting trolls and hiding from reality. She was supportive but a little confused. “Are you going to wear a costume?” she asked.

  I took care to explain the game in detail and reassure her I wouldn’t be dressing up like an elf or doing anything deviant—just sitting down at a table with a couple of normal guys. “It’s no
different than playing cards,” I told her. “Just think of it like I’m going to a weekly poker game.”

  That satisfied her, for a while. But as weeks passed and it became clear that I wasn’t on a temporary flight of fancy, she started to get more concerned. “Why are you still doing this?” she asked me one night. “Are you okay with me telling people you’re going out and playing Dungeons & Dragons?”

  I had no answer.

  My new D&D companions had their own problems. When we started playing, Alex Agius, who plays Jhaden, was living with a girl who had strong negative feelings toward the game, thanks to a D&D-playing brother. “He was a pothead, a dropout, kind of a fuckup,” Alex told me. “She had always associated D&D with that. When I started playing with you guys it really stuck in her craw. It was a sticking point between us until the day we broke up.”

  Later, when Alex met Jennifer, the girl who eventually became his wife, he hid his D&D habit until the relationship started getting serious. “I was very hesitant to tell her,” he said. “I don’t remember how it finally came up, but I told her that I was playing D&D, and she was just like, ‘That’s cool.’ ”

  * * *

  Despite any reservations held by certain players and girlfriends, our D&D group continued to meet, and our adventuring party prospered. After Weslocke, Jhaden, Babeal, and Ganubi fought off the fish-monster pirates, we managed to free our ship and sail to San Francisco, the only human city left on North America’s Pacific coast—Los Angeles, of course, is full of vampires. We spent a few sessions knocking around the Bay Area, killing random monsters, and eventually earned enough experience points for our characters to advance a level.

  Leveling up a Dungeons & Dragons character is serious business. Level isn’t just a badge of honor indicating how long a character’s gone without dying; it’s a way to quantify the heroic journey and allow characters to become more powerful over time. The process is detailed in the Player’s Handbook, with tables that cross-reference statistics like base attack bonus with level, and instructions that tell players when they can add a point to one of their ability scores or skills. This time, as Weslocke advanced from a level-twelve to a level-thirteen cleric, the transition was simple. But advancement can get really complicated if you want it to—particularly if you start pulling abilities, spells, and powers from one of the dozens of supplemental D&D rule books.