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

by Ewalt, David M.

  The Monster Manual succeeded not just as a game supplement but by elevating the D&D rule book to fetish object. The solid construction made the book durable and portable, the kind of thing a kid could throw around and take wherever they went; Gygax’s short write-ups, paired with hundreds of illustrations by David Sutherland, David Trampier, and Tom Wham, made it perfect for browsing anytime, anywhere. The book became a beloved companion to a generation of gamers, something they came back to again and again. TSR initially printed fifty thousand copies of the Monster Manual, selling each for $9.95; over the next twelve years the company reprinted the book fifteen times. The Monster Manual buried All the Worlds’ Monsters and reminded everyone in the role-playing game business that Gary Gygax was boss.

  One fan-made game product had been dealt with, but Gygax was ready for war against the hordes. In a Dragon column published in December 1977, he unloaded on what he must have seen as a sea of enemies beating on the gates:

  Imitation is claimed to be the sincerest form of flattery, and D&D has ample reason to be flattered . . . Quite a few individuals and firms have sought to cash in on a good thing by producing material from, or for, D&D. Others have parodied the game. For most of these efforts TSR has only contempt . . .

  TSR is quite willing to face competition. We founded our company with a bit of money, a lot of ideas, and no outside help. Our growth has been because we furnished products which gamers found desirable, not because we got any help from anyone else, and possibly in spite of suppression of what we were doing by actively ignoring all we did. These days TSR is too big to be ignored, D&D is too popular to pass by. We feel that competition will only sharpen our collective face, and because of it we will furnish better products which will be more popular still. By no means do we desire suppression of fair and genuine competition! . . .

  I cannot resist the analogy of a lion standing over its kill. The vultures scream, and the jackals yap, when the lion drives them off without allowing them to steal bits of the meat. Perhaps a hyena will manage to successfully grab off a mouthful, but that is all. Other lions may also prey upon the same herd and make even bigger kills, but that is the law of the land. Pardon me, please, if you find the picture not to your liking. From my end it seems most apropos, for I hear a good deal of screaming and yapping. TSR was the lion which brought down the prey, and we intend to have the benefits derived therefrom. If we share with anyone, it will be on our terms. The hunter which fails to bring down its kill dies itself.

  It’s a powerful assertion of rights—and powerfully ironic, considering that at around the same time Gygax composed the essay, TSR was once again in hot water for violating someone else’s trademarks.

  Despite the similarities between the Middle-earth of The Lord of the Rings and the fantasy worlds of Dungeons & Dragons, Gygax had always maintained that J. R. R. Tolkien’s influence on the game was minimal, and he’d been more directly inspired by Robert E. Howard’s Conan stories, Fritz Leiber’s tales of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, and other authors including Poul Anderson, L. Sprague de Camp, and Michael Moorcock.4 “The seeming parallels and inspirations are actually the results of a studied effort to capitalize on the then-current ‘craze’ for Tolkien’s literature,” Gygax said. “To attract those readers . . . I used certain names and attributes in a superficial manner, merely to get their attention.”

  Superficial or not, they did attract attention. Saul Zaentz, an old-school Hollywood mogul who owned some of the rights to Tolkien’s works, filed a lawsuit against TSR alleging that D&D improperly used several protected terms, including “dragon,” “elf,” and “orc.” He also took exception to a new TSR product, a war game called Battle of the Five Armies, which simulated an epic clash of goblins, humans, elves, wargs, and dwarves from The Hobbit. Zaentz alleged nearly half a million dollars in damages;5 though Gygax was usually happy to debate Tolkien’s influence, this time he didn’t argue. The suit was settled out of court, TSR stopped selling Battle of the Five Armies, and future editions of D&D dropped some of the offending words. Thus the “hobbit” became “halfling,” “ent” became “treant,” and “balrog” became “balor demon.”

  * * *

  With competitors threatened, lawsuits settled, and the Monster Manual moving out the door faster than an air elemental6 on amphetamines, TSR was growing fast and needed more space. So in the spring of 1978, the editors of The Dragon took over the house on Williams Street, and the rest of the staff moved downtown into a former hotel on the corner of Main Street and Broad.

  The Hotel Clair was once a landmark. Back in the 1920s, when Lake Geneva was a summer retreat for Chicago’s rich and famous, it was the kind of place where Al Capone and William Wrigley Jr. might have shared a cocktail. In 1978, the building was a wreck. “It probably should have been condemned,” says Skip Williams, who helped move the Dungeon Hobby Shop into a former bar area on the first floor. “The floors were sagging, and in some places . . . had broken away, so they were just sort of hanging there. It had these marvelous tin ceilings, which somebody who didn’t appreciate had painted over with four or five layers of paint. It would peel, and you could sit there and shoot rubber bands at it and knock it loose.”

  On the second and third floors, employees were crammed into small offices, sometimes several people deep. When author and game designer Tracy Hickman started work at TSR in the spring of 1981, he was given desk space in the northwest corner of the building and discovered that the aging building presented some unique challenges to productivity.

  “At one point one of the main support beams in the north side of the building had rusted through. They replaced that beam, but by the time they had it in place, the building sagged toward the north, which meant that all of the upper floors slanted northward, just slightly,” says Hickman. “I had your typical wheeled office chair, and because of the slant of the building, if I just sat in the chair, it would roll away from the desk toward the windows. So I got in the habit of hooking my foot around the leg of the chair and planting the toe of my right foot against the floorboard, to stop my chair from rolling away from the desk toward the windows. To this day I will occasionally find myself with my toe stuck behind the leg of my chair just to keep me in place, even though I don’t have a slanting floor anymore.”

  Despite its decrepitude, the Hotel Clair buzzed with exuberance. “You had a lot of young people doing creative work, and a lot of them were on their first jobs out of college,” says Skip Williams. Employees shot each other with squirt guns, goofed around with toys, and even climbed out the windows onto the fire escape and up to the building’s rotting roof. “Somebody fell through a ceiling at one point because they were screwing around in an unused attic space,” he says.

  While they were having fun, TSR’s employees also managed to publish a lot of new games. In early 1978, the company released its first stand-alone adventure module, Steading of the Hill Giant Chief, and two sequels, Glacial Rift of the Frost Giant Jarl and Hall of the Fire Giant King. Unlike Temple of the Frog, the loose scenario that appeared in the back of the Blackmoor supplement, these three modules provided Dungeon Masters with a tightly written story, setting, and motivation for the players:

  Giants have been raiding the lands of men in large bands, with giants of different sorts in these marauding groups. Death and destruction have been laid heavily upon every place these monsters have visited. This has caused great anger in high places . . . Therefore, a party of the bravest and most powerful adventurers has been assembled and given the charge to punish the miscreant giants. These adventurers must deliver a sharp check, deal a lesson to the clan of hill giants nearby, or else return and put their heads upon the block for the headsman’s axe!

  Gygax wrote the trilogy after he finished the Monster Manual and wanted to take a break from rule books; they’re full of vivid detail and descriptions that made the adventures come alive for players.7 Later in the year, he took another break from AD&D to write a sequel trilogy, Descent into the Depths of the
Earth, Shrine of the Kuo-Toa, and Vault of the Drow, which take the players onward to confront the force behind the rampaging giants—evil subterranean elves called the Drow. These modules are looser, more about exploration, but equally compelling. In 1986, TSR republished all six adventures along with their 1980 finale, Queen of the Demonweb Pits, as a single “supermodule” called Queen of the Spiders; many gamers consider it the greatest D&D adventure of all time.

  Another module published in 1978, Tomb of Horrors, has a darker reputation: the deadliest game ever written. Originally created by Gygax for the first Origins Game Fair, a war-gaming convention held in July 1975 in Baltimore, Maryland, the adventure was meant to challenge out-of-control players, putting their outrageously powerful D&D characters to the test—and, hopefully, killing them. Gygax lures the unwitting PCs into the tomb of the evil wizard Acererak with promises of “rich treasures both precious and magical,” but then unloads a series of complicated puzzles and nightmarish traps on them, like a hallway where the entire floor is balanced on a fulcrum, so that when players proceed past a certain point it tips and dumps them into a pit of molten lava. Few survive long enough to collect any treasure, and even fewer manage to find their way back through the deadly maze and escape with their spoils. Once the guys in my D&D group decided to take a short break from Vampire World and spend a few sessions testing our mettle against the tomb; not a single player made it out alive. R. C. died in the tomb’s very first hallway when he jumped into a hole he thought led deeper into the complex but turned out to be a sphere of annihilation.8

  * * *

  By the summer of 1978, TSR had eighteen full-time employees, several dozen successful products, and at least a hundred thousand devoted fans of its games around the world. A survey published in the June issue of the Judges Guild Journal indicated that the average role-playing game fan was a twenty-one-year-old male9 college student, with all the free time for games and disposable income that demographic implies.

  Finally, just in time for Gen Con XI in August, TSR delivered a new edition of Dungeons & Dragons. While the Monster Manual may have been the first book to bear the AD&D moniker, it collected only descriptions of creatures and didn’t actually contain much in the way of new and revised rules; in contrast, the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Players Handbook offered 128 pages of detailed instructions. Gygax hadn’t just revised D&D—he’d rewritten and expanded it into a whole new game.

  Sure, the core was familiar. AD&D preserved all the good stuff from the original D&D rules and supplements: characters had the same ability categories (strength, intelligence, wisdom, constitution, dexterity, and charisma) and were still sorted into a few basic professions. But while the original Men & Magic booklet spent less than a thousand words describing the game’s main classes (fighting man, magic-user, and cleric), the Players Handbook dedicated more than fifteen thousand words to five core classes (cleric, fighter, magic-user, thief, and monk) and five subclasses (druid, paladin, ranger, illusionist, and assassin). Each was fleshed out and detailed: Clerics, for instance, were now required to maintain a relationship with a specific deity, carrying its holy symbol, showing devotion through daily prayers, and behaving in a manner pleasing to that god. Failure to comply could result in the revocation of magical ability, since a cleric’s powers were bestowed in return for “diligent prayers and deeds.”

  The Players Handbook focused heavily on character creation, offering lots of rich detail and opportunities for personalization. In addition to the ten core classes, players chose between seven playable “races”—dwarf, elf, gnome, halfling, human, half-elf, and half-orc. They picked one of nine “alignments” (chaotic evil, chaotic good, chaotic neutral, lawful evil, lawful good, lawful neutral, neutral evil, neutral good, and true neutral) that provided a loose description of their character’s moral code.10 They determined what languages the character could speak (from a pool including Lizardman, Hobgoblin, Kobold, and Orcish) and what equipment they carried; the handbook describes a monetary system (1,000 copper pieces = 100 silver pieces = 10 electrum pieces = 5 gold pieces = 1 platinum piece) and provides long lists of gear to make each hero unique (low, soft boots cost 8 silver pieces, and a ten-foot pole costs 3 coppers).

  For all its detail, the Players Handbook doesn’t spend much time actually describing how the game is played; the book only covers what a player needs to know to get started, like how to move and fight. Gygax hid much of the game’s inner workings behind a curtain, promising those rules in the upcoming Dungeon Masters Guide. Until that book was published, DMs would have to wing it based on what they could glean from the Handbook or default back to the original or Basic D&D set.

  One thing was clear about the new rules: The Basic Set didn’t really feed into Advanced D&D. Rather, they were two different experiences, parallel universes; AD&D was its own game from level one upward. Before long, most experienced players would come to look down their noses at the Blue Box set: Basic was for kids, AD&D was for men.

  AD&D was also Gary Gygax’s game, from start to finish. He’s listed as the sole author on the cover and on the title page; Dave Arneson only receives a thank-you in the preface, along with twenty other friends, family members, and TSR employees. Gygax even appears on the book itself. The wraparound cover illustration, by David Trampier, shows a group of adventurers looting a temple dominated by a huge statue of a horned devil: “There is one dweeb-like chap on the back cover,” Gygax would later admit, “that has a certain resemblance to yours truly.”

  The Players Handbook was another big hit—TSR sold ten thousand copies in the first three months after publication. That kind of success began to attract attention from outside the game world. On November 29, 1978, the Canadian national newspaper The Globe and Mail published one of the first long features about D&D to appear in a major media outlet: “Dungeons and Dragons: An Underground Game Is Ready to Surface” features interviews with D&D players at a Toronto hobby shop called Mr. Gameway’s Ark and notes that the game “inspires the sort of fanatic devotion usually associated with mind-bending religious cults.” Shelley Swallow, a Mr. Gameway’s buyer, is quoted describing the game’s growth rate as “astonishing” and saying the store sells twenty-five sets a week—twice as many as Scrabble.

  Gygax, never shy when it came to publicity, was also interviewed for the article, which describes him as “the J. R. R. Tolkien of the games world” and “the inventor of Dungeons and Dragons.” Cocreator Dave Arneson only warrants a misspelled parenthetical: “(The magic ingredient, the labyrinth, was borrowed from another designer, Dave Arnuson.)”

  At least he got a mention. Arneson’s name didn’t appear at all in the Dungeon Masters Guide when it finally arrived in the summer of 1979. In his preface to the book, Gygax offers “an alphabetical list of all those persons who in some way contributed to the formation of this work”; the twenty-nine names that follow include his players, his coworkers, and even the novelist Jack Vance, whose fantasy stories helped inspire AD&D’s spell-casting rules. Somehow, D&D’s cocreator didn’t make the cut.

  Still, there’s no denying Gygax’s singular achievement. The Dungeon Masters Guide is a mammoth piece of work, written entirely by the man himself—240 pages of rules and tables advising the DM on nearly every matter imaginable. There’s a section discussing how to deal with character aging and death, instructions for when your players want to develop new magical spells, even a table specifying the amount of time it takes to mine tunnels through different types of rock. If your players might conceive of doing it, Gygax labors to provide rules for it. The Dungeon Masters Guide is comprehensive to a degree that no game before it approached and few that came after attempted.

  “Only the most severe critic could point at a minor omission, let alone a serious one,” game journalist Don Turnbull wrote in a review of the Guide published in the UK magazine White Dwarf. “In the end, set to the task of reviewing something to which I know I cannot do justice, all I can say is—can you afford to be without it?”


  The initial publication of the Dungeon Masters Guide was plagued with technical problems: All forty thousand books in the first printing had to be recalled because they had sixteen pages from the Monster Manual mistakenly bound into them; twenty thousand books in the second print run were gouged by a loose wire on a boxing machine, and their covers had to be replaced. But the book was still a critical and commercial success. “Our once lonely pastime has arrived with a vengeance,” Tim Kask crowed in the March 1980 issue of The Dragon. “Sales of Advanced D&D DMG bear this out; it is the best-selling game/gamebook of all time.”