It also suggests a solution to a problem that’s plagued game makers for centuries: You can only sell a game once. I bought a Monopoly set fourteen years ago, and I’ll probably still be using it fourteen years from now—barring a house fire or theft, or, more likely, that I destroy the board in a bankruptcy-induced fit of bad sportsmanship. Parker Brothers got twenty bucks from me, and that’s it. But D&D is different. With the publication of Greyhawk, it became clear that if you kept adding on to the rules, you could keep selling stuff to players. The key to TSR’s success would be found not in a single set of rules but in a whole universe of stories, settings, and color.
* * *
By the summer of 1975, sales of Dungeons & Dragons were rapidly accelerating. It took eleven months to sell the first thousand D&D box sets, but the second thousand flew off the shelves in four, and the third thousand in less than two. In June TSR ordered a third printing of 3,300 sets; because the company was low on cash, the printer took payment in the form of the odd 300 copies and sold them directly to stores.
In its first year, D&D had sold mostly through mail order and direct sales to game shops. TSR did very little wholesale business and only had relationships with three ersatz distributors—small companies who made the lead miniature soldiers used in war games, so they had existing relationships with hobby stores. But now that D&D was really starting to move, Gygax and Blume were able to secure deals with several major distributors.
They also started thinking about selling products overseas. Historical war-gaming had deep roots in Europe, and there were lots of small hobby groups and newsletters. So Gygax sent copies of D&D to all the influential European gamers he could find.
One of those D&D box sets arrived at a small flat on Bolingbroke Road in West London, headquarters (and home to the founders) of a tiny company called Games Workshop. War-gaming buddies Ian Livingstone, Steve Jackson, and John Peake started the company in early 1975, selling handmade wooden games like Go and backgammon. They printed up a newsletter, Owl & Weasel, to promote the company and sent it to everyone they knew in the game business—including Gary Gygax, who sent back a copy of Dungeons & Dragons, hoping for a positive review.
“John thought it was horrendous,” says Livingstone. “It had quite unintelligible rules . . . you had to interpret them, and ad-lib a lot. But Steve and I were immediately hooked, from day one . . . it unlocked worlds of the imagination.”
Livingstone and Jackson loved the game so much, they decided to change the focus of Games Workshop away from handmade board games to concentrate on role-playing and war games. Peake left the company, and Livingstone called Gary Gygax. He ordered six copies of D&D and signed a three-year agreement to exclusively distribute the game in Europe.
“These milestones in games don’t come along very often,” says Livingstone. “There’s Monopoly, there’s Scrabble, then there’s a long gap, and there’s D&D. It was such an amazing fundamental shift in how you play games . . . making it more theater rather than just being fixed to a board. It was just fantastic.”
* * *
The more TSR grew, the more its founders worried about staying true to their gamer roots. The summer edition of The Strategic Review included an editorial explaining the company’s goals to customers, but that probably served more as reassurance for Gygax and Blume themselves: “Tactical Studies Rules is not a giant company; it is not even a large one. But we are growing now, and in the future we might attain substantial size. While we must make a profit in order to remain in business, TSR is not around solely to make money. The members of TSR are longtime gamers who have found that there is a great deal of satisfaction in creating and/or publishing a good set of game rules.”
Part of the tension over “keeping it real” was due to the continued involvement of Don Kaye’s widow, Donna. Don had grown up playing games with Gary and shared his passions, but Donna wasn’t part of the war-gaming crowd, and Gygax found her “impossible to work with.” So in July 1975, Gygax and Blume used what little cash they had to buy out Kaye’s interest, dissolve Tactical Studies Rules Inc., and reform the company without her as TSR Hobbies Inc.
The new company began life as Gary Gygax’s baby. Operations moved out of the Kayes’ house and into Gygax’s basement, and he took a controlling interest in the corporation, with 60 percent of the shares; assumed the title of president; and became the company’s only salaried employee, at a rate of $85 a week.
But instead of solidifying the company under Gygaxian rule and securing its future by gamers, for gamers, the shakeup did the opposite. Because he’d spent so much money buying Kaye out of the company, Gygax threw TSR off balance at a critical point in its growth. Within a few months, the company was out of cash. In order to raise the capital needed to print, ship, and develop new products, TSR issued more shares of stock. Brian Blume bought some, as did his father, Melvin (later, Melvin transferred his shares to his other son, Kevin). By the fall, the Blumes controlled the company, and Gygax owned just 35 percent of its stock.
Even decades later, Gygax clearly regretted losing control. In 2005, he told an interviewer that TSR’s ultimate fate may have been sealed in that very first year of operations: “There is no question in my mind that had Don Kaye lived, the whole course of later events at TSR would have been altered radically. Don was not only a very intelligent guy, a gamer, but he was also one who was not given to allowing the prospect of greater profits to cloud his judgment.”
* * *
Back in 1975, the future looked bright. TSR published several more war games, including Classic Warfare, a set of Gygax-authored rules for reenacting battles “from the Pharaohs to Charlemagne.” Gygax and Blume penned the company’s second role-playing game, Boot Hill; it was set in the Old West and focused mostly on gun-fighting. Dave Megarry contributed Dungeon!, a Blackmoor-inspired board game that represented TSR’s most ambitious production to date: a color game map, customized cards, tokens, dice, and a rules booklet all packaged in an attractive box.
University of Minnesota professor M. A. R. Barker also made his game-design debut at TSR. A scholar of ancient languages,1 Barker had spent decades crafting a fantasy world called Tékumel, writing thousands of pages of histories, describing its culture, and even constructing its languages.2 He served as adviser to the university’s war-gaming club, and after Michael Mornard showed him Dungeons & Dragons, Barker wrote two games based in Tékumel: a role-playing game, Empire of the Petal Throne; and a combat-oriented board game, War of Wizards. Barker died in March 2012, leaving behind an epic body of work describing Tékumel.3
Even with so many new products, Dungeons & Dragons continued to pay TSR’s bills. The third printing of D&D sold out by November; faced with surging demand, the company ordered a new printing of twenty-five thousand copies, over four times as many as the previous print runs combined. TSR also issued a second expansion to their less-than-two-year-old game: Blackmoor, written by Dave Arneson.
Like Greyhawk, the Blackmoor supplement added new rules to the game, including instructions for players wishing to move, fight, and cast spells underwater, and two new character classes, the monk and the assassin. But the sixty-page booklet said almost nothing about Arneson’s actual campaign—there were no descriptions of the inside of Blackmoor Castle or anecdotes about clever player-killing traps. Instead, more than half of the slim volume was dedicated to an equally important innovation: the first prewritten D&D scenario, a do-it-yourself adventure called Temple of the Frog.
D&D scenarios are the microwave dinners of the role-playing world.4 Every time players sit down at the game table, they consume an adventure that’s been prepared by their Dungeon Master. If they’re lucky, a talented storyteller like Morgan is doing the cooking, and he’s constructed a narrative from scratch—not just a “fight these monsters” conflict but also plot, character, setting, and theme. Less-experienced DMs are sometimes more comfortable heating up a story that’s been prepared and packaged by an outside expert. A scenario like Temple
of the Frog gives them everything they need to tell a story; all they have to do is follow directions.
Prewritten adventures read like a Lonely Planet guide compiled by a madman. Typically, they begin in the same manner as Temple of the Frog, providing background information about the region the players will visit and setting up the central conflict of the plot:
Deep in the primaeval [sic] swamps of Lake Gloomey, shrouded in perpetual mist, lies the city of The Brothers of the Swamp. For years past this “religious” order has delved into the forbidden areas of study and determined that animals have more potential to populate the world than man, who was, after all, a biological abomination which would ultimately threaten the existence of all life. Therefore the good Brothers began developing a strain of amphibian that would combine the worst ferocity and killer instincts of larger mammals with the ability to move through swamps with great swiftness to strike and avoid retaliation.
From there, scenarios resemble more typical travel guides, providing maps of the area and describing points of interest:
Pool of the Frog: A downward sloping area, very slippery, leading to the next level down. Entrance into the area marked DOWN will cause the party to slide down the ramp to the next level, only persons of an 18 dexterity having a 50% chance of not falling, being able to slow his descent.
Some scenarios, like Temple of the Frog, simply describe an area and its residents and leave it to the DM and players to decide what to do—rob the temple, join it, or burn it to the ground. Others are tightly written stories that push the players down a specific narrative path. Sometimes they even come with prerolled characters, so all you have to do is sit down and play; I took the name Weslocke from an elven fighter/magic-user in Gygax’s 1982 D&D module The Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth.5 All this serves to make it easier for a DM to do their job and provide an easy point of entry into the world of fantasy role-playing. Without Blackmoor and Temple of the Frog, Dungeons & Dragons would probably have remained a wonky hobby just for war gamers and not a worldwide phenomenon.
Blackmoor also marked the debut of Tim Kask, an Illinois war gamer and friend of Gygax who became TSR’s first full-time hire. Kask’s first assignment at the company was to edit the Blackmoor supplement; afterward, he took over as editor of The Strategic Review. Gygax’s co-DM Rob Kuntz and his older brother Terry also joined the staff in 1975, to help write and edit game materials. And as winter rolled into Lake Geneva, Dungeons & Dragons coauthor Dave Arneson made the move from Saint Paul to start work as TSR’s full-time research director, responsible for coordinating with freelance designers and producing material “like a grist mill.”
For the first time, Dungeons & Dragons’s two creators were in the same place, working on games full-time. But the true promise of their longtime partnership would never be realized. “It started out being fun,” Arneson said later. “But as the money increased, the fun decreased.”
* * *
1. Like Tolkien.
2. Like Tolkien.
3. His admirers sometimes call him “the forgotten Tolkien.”
4. This is not to say they are all of low quality. They’re often quite good—but while I can appreciate good frozen pizza, I know it’s not the same as the brick-oven pie at Grimaldi’s in Brooklyn Heights.
5. Gygax had a true gift for inventing character names. In 1981’s Against the Giants, you could play as Gleep Wurp the Eyebiter, Beek Gwenders, Redmod Dumple, or Faffle Dwe’o-mercraeft. Descent into the Depths of the Earth featured Fnast Dringle, Fage the Kexy, Keak Breedbate, and Philotomy Jurament.
7
THE BREAKING OF THE FELLOWSHIP
An elf wizard, a dwarf fighter, and a human thief walk into a bar. The bartender looks up and asks, “What is this, a joke?”
It’s a corny gag, but it illustrates a truth about most D&D campaigns: Successful parties tend to exhibit a range of character classes, races, and backgrounds that borders on the absurd. Diversity may be admirable, but it doesn’t make much sense that a book-smart wizard (in our world, the equivalent might be a computer programmer) would team up with a battle-hardened warrior (army drill sergeant) and a self-interested rogue (cat burglar).1
Like so many things in modern geekdom, the origins of this convention trace back to a crusty English philologist. When J. R. R. Tolkien published The Lord of the Rings back in 1954, he didn’t build his fellowship from equals, like the Knights of the Round Table; he constructed a diverse group with individual strengths and weaknesses. There’s nothing in the D&D rules that says adventuring parties have to strike the same balance, but players tend to hew close to the archetype. You won’t often find a party consisting entirely of bards, and not just because it would be the most annoying group ever.
There are tactical reasons to mix things up, too. In combat, it’s advantageous to have a diverse set of skills in your group: a fighter who attacks hand-to-hand and soaks up damage, a thief who hides behind a tree and fires off arrows, a cleric who casts spells to aid his companions. Constructing a successful adventuring party requires good human-resources management, just like hiring for a successful business. Paladins might make great CEOs, but you’re better off with a wizard in accounting, a couple of rogues on the sales team, and a bard handling marketing.
This truth may help explain one of the biggest mysteries in the history of Dungeons & Dragons: Why did Dave Arneson leave TSR after just ten months at the company?
* * *
In January 1976, D&D was at a tipping point. TSR had sold ten thousand copies of the basic rules, but the game had easily ten times that many players, thanks to sharing and unauthorized photocopying. D&D had two supplements, distributors across the U.S. and on three continents, and a growing company behind it that finally included both of its cocreators. As Arneson settled down to work on new material, the company was blooming.
Several buds appeared in April’s Strategic Review. “This is the last issue,” Tim Kask warned in his editor’s note, “but harken well, better things are in the offing!” A new periodicals division of TSR Hobbies was set to launch two different magazines: The Dragon, devoted to “fantasy . . . sci-fi and roleplaying games,” and Little Wars, “to deal with the established types and periods of wargaming.” The hobby business was growing too: Game designer Mike Carr joined the staff as an editor, and Dave Megarry took over as the company’s treasurer.
To house its new employees (and increasingly large amounts of inventory), TSR moved out of Gygax’s basement and into its own space about half a mile away in Lake Geneva. The gray house at 723 Williams Street had once been a family residence; now rezoned for business, its second-floor bedrooms were converted into offices, and the ground-floor parlor rooms were turned into TSR’s first retail outlet—a hobby shop called the Dungeon.
Skip Williams, a local high school kid who played in Gygax’s D&D campaign, landed a part-time job working as a clerk at the store. “The Dungeon had everything that TSR published, which was D&D and all of the miniatures rules, and a couple of board games,” he says. “It also sold miniatures, scale tanks, scale ships . . . all the things that Gary liked to play with.” A few tables were set up for miniatures battles, and players could rent the space for a few hours if they paid a small fee. Before long, the store became a destination for gamers. “There were people coming literally from all over the country,” says Williams. “It was pretty cool.”
While TSR was certainly happy to sell more product, the proliferation of D&D rule books did have its drawbacks. Tim Kask described the problem in the foreword of Eldritch Wizardry, a new rule supplement published that May: “Somewhere along the line, D&D lost some of its flavor, and began to become predictable . . . When all the players had all of the rules in front of them, it became next to impossible to beguile them into danger or mischief.” Eldritch Wizardry tried to fix things by adding even more rules to the game—new powers, new monsters, new magic, and treasure—in the hope that players couldn’t possibly keep track. “These pages should go a long way towar
d putting back in some of the mystery, uncertainty and danger that make D&D the unparalleled challenge it was meant to be,” Kask wrote. “No more will some foolhardy adventurer run down into a dungeon, find something and immediately know how it works, or even what it does.”
It didn’t work, of course, as generations of players with encyclopedic knowledge of D&D’s rules can attest. But the supplement did introduce a number of important concepts to the game, including the druid character class, a kind of cleric who worships nature rather than a deity. New monsters included denizens of the underworld like succubi and the demon princes Orcus and Demogorgon—an editorial decision that would lead to quite a bit of trouble a few years later. And a set of rules governing psychic powers (known therein as “psionics”) attempted to address a frequent criticism of D&D’s system of magic—that wizards and clerics must memorize a fixed list of spells from a book instead of possessing the innate ability to cast whatever they want.2
In June, even more new rules arrived inside the first issue of The Dragon. “The Magazine of Fantasy, Swords & Sorcery and Science Fiction Gaming” was thirty-two pages long and cost $1.50, or $9 for a six-issue, one-year subscription. The cover art was a trippy illustration of an emerald-skinned dragon sitting on a pile of rocks in front of a riotously airbrushed background of hot pink, crimson, and yellow—and the contents of the magazine were no less chaotic. There were stats for new D&D monsters, descriptions of new spells, advice for Dungeon Masters, supplemental rules for several war games, and press releases for upcoming TSR products. The features ranged from the nerdy (“Magic and Science: Are They Compatible in D&D?”) to the extremely nerdy (“How to Use Non-Prime-Requisite Character Attributes”). There was even some fiction, the first installment of a fantasy novel called The Gnome Cache, which was serialized over the next few issues. It was written by Garrison Ernst—a pseudonym for Gary Gygax.
Of Dice and Men: The Story of Dungeons & Dragons and The People Who Page 10