Gygax and his TSR crew didn’t pen the entire magazine by themselves. Fantasy author Fritz Leiber contributed an article, and several D&D players contributed features inspired by their own campaigns. In his editor’s note, Tim Kask solicited more help from the community: “gaming, variants, discussion, fiction by authors both known and unknown, reviews of interest to our readers and anything else.” Through The Dragon, TSR hoped to rally its fans, cement their loyalty, and exploit their energy—lest they follow Gygax’s example and start making their own games. The threat was obvious: Dungeons & Dragons was conceived out of Guidon Games’s Chainmail rules and quickly eclipsed it in both popularity and sales. No one at TSR wanted to see the same thing happen to them.
A few companies had already launched competing products. In early 1975 Illinois-based Game Designers’ Workshop released Frank Chadwick’s En Garde!, a role-playing game set in seventeenth-century France that emphasized man-to-man sword fighting. Players responded to the Three Musketeers–style setting, but they didn’t care for the rules. War game publisher Fantasy Games Unlimited pushed setting even farther with 1976’s Bunnies & Burrows, a role-playing game inspired by Richard Adams’s 1972 novel Watership Down: The player characters were intelligent rabbits and had to compete for food, avoid predators, and deal with internal warren politics.
Other designers stuck closer to D&D’s swords-and-sorcery setting. Ken St. Andre, a public librarian in Phoenix, Arizona, fell in love with the idea of fantasy role-playing after reading a friend’s D&D rule books but found the actual rules confusing, so he wrote his own. Tunnels & Trolls, self-published in early 1975, simplified D&D in a way that emphasized entertainment over simulation: it dropped a lot of the war-game-derived rules for combat and movement; only required six-sided dice instead of hard-to-find polyhedrals; assigned wizards spell points, not spell books; and implemented dozens of other small changes that made the game looser. In June 1975, Illinois publisher Flying Buffalo Inc. released a second edition of the game, and Tunnels & Trolls quickly became one of D&D’s biggest competitors.
Gygax was not pleased. When ads and reviews of Tunnels & Trolls started showing up in game magazines, TSR had its lawyers send cease-and-desist letters to Flying Buffalo owner Rick Loomis and magazine publisher Metagaming Concepts. The lawyers claimed that even using the words “Dungeons & Dragons” to help describe Tunnels & Trolls infringed on TSR’s rights. Flying Buffalo deleted any such comparisons from future advertisements.
It wasn’t the first time TSR had made legal threats against a potential competitor. Earlier in the year, TSR had sent a cease-and-desist to one of its own fans, Boston gamer Robert Ruppert, who made the mistake of typing up a blank form with the header “Dungeons & Dragons Character Sheet” and selling it to fellow war gamers for two cents a copy. The crackdown was especially ironic considering TSR’s poor record in regards to other people’s copyrights; the company had already been spanked by the estate of Edgar Rice Burroughs for ripping off the John Carter novels in the game Warriors of Mars.
But TSR continued to pay close attention to the rights to its own works. That spring and summer, the company cut its first licensing deals with other companies, first with Miniature Figurines Ltd., a manufacturer of cast metal minis, to make models of D&D monsters, and then with publishing company Judges Guild, to print official D&D accessories like maps and supplements.
Judges Guild released their first licensed product, a game setting called City State of the Invincible Overlord, at Gen Con IX in August. During the three-day event, over 1,300 people from around the country visited three different venues in Lake Geneva (the Horticultural Hall, the Guild Hall, and the Legion Hall) to play, buy, and talk about games. TSR had a special interest in showing off new products at the convention, since they’d just taken control of the show from the moribund Lake Geneva Tactical Studies Association. So in a bid to dominate their attention, TSR showed off two new D&D rule books, supplements IV and V, and billed them as the final additions to Dungeons & Dragons.
Swords and Spells, written by Gygax, is the odd man out in the original D&D rule set. Rather than adding new details to the fantasy role-playing game, it takes a glance backward and provides rules for large-scale miniature war games that are merely based on Dungeons & Dragons. In his foreword, editor Tim Kask describes it as “the grandson of Chainmail.”
Even though Swords and Spells is numbered “Supplement V” on its cover, it’s really supplement IV that puts the final touches on Dungeons & Dragons. Gods, Demi-Gods & Heroes (coauthored by TSR’s Rob Kuntz and James M. Ward, a gamer and junior high teacher from Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin3) introduces mythology to the game and describes deities in the same manner earlier supplements described men and monsters.
Thor, the Norse thunder god, has 275 hit points, an armor class of 2, and the abilities of a twentieth-level fighter. Hades, Greek god of the underworld and death, is described as “a heavily muscled dark skinned man” who can “shapechange, fight invisibly, has the divine awe power, and his touch or stare acts as a death spell.” The holy figures of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam don’t make the cut, although the “Gods of India” incongruously do: The Hindu deity Vishnu is equipped with “a lotus flower capable of restoring all lost hit points at a touch,” as well as “a bow of curses called Sarnge, and a plus 3 sword of demon slaying called Mandaka.”
At its heart, Gods, Demi-Gods & Heroes represents another attempt to exert control over D&D players. Kask’s foreword drips with disdain for Dungeon Masters who allow their players to advance to high levels and explains that the supplement aims to correct their misguided actions: “Perhaps now some of the ‘giveaway’ campaigns will look as foolish as they truly are,” he writes. “When Odin, the All-Father has only . . . 300 hit points, who can take a 44th level Lord seriously?”
With that settled, TSR considered the Dungeons & Dragons rules to be complete. “We’ve told you just about everything,” Kask writes. “From now on, when the circumstances aren’t covered somewhere in the books, wing it as best you can.”
Of course, the company had no plans to stop making money off the game. Kask advises players to buy TSR’s periodicals for new rules and content. “Just don’t wait with baited [sic] breath for another supplement after this one.”
* * *
It’s possible that some of the resistance against publishing future D&D supplements was caused by Dave Arneson, who, for all his creative genius, was neither a strong nor a disciplined writer. He was slow to produce material, and when he did finish a draft, it required lots of work to get it ready for publication.
This was an issue beginning in the earliest days of Gygax and Arneson’s partnership, when Gygax had to work for months to turn Arneson’s twenty-page description of the Blackmoor campaign into a fifty-page draft of the Fantasy Game. “Dearly as I love Dave . . . he was not a very good writer,” says friend and player Mike Mornard. “What he gave Gary was his handwritten notes for an expanded version of Chainmail, and it looked like shit.”
But the problem came to a head when TSR decided that Arneson should pen the second supplement to Dungeons & Dragons. The Blackmoor supplement was likely conceived of and added to TSR’s publication plan sometime in 1974; in March 1975, Gygax told a war-gaming newsletter that Arneson was working on a final draft. TSR began accepting preorders for the product and advertised it in the pages of The Strategic Review . . . and then nothing. Months passed and Blackmoor wasn’t published. The winter 1975 issue of The Strategic Review stated the obvious: the supplement was running late. Then the following issue offered an outright apology from editor Tim Kask: “Blackmoor is finally done and in the hands of the printers,” he wrote. “We know that it’s late, but you wouldn’t believe me if I listed all the problems we had with it. Suffice it to say that I have been blooded, as an editor, by Blackmoor.”4 Arneson’s draft, Kask later explained, was “contradictory, confusing, incomplete, partially incomprehensible, lacking huge bits and pieces and mostly gibberish.” The six
ty-page booklet took weeks to edit and had to be mostly rewritten before it was completed.
Dave Arneson joined the staff of TSR and moved to Lake Geneva in January 1976, just weeks after Blackmoor was finally published. In a Strategic Review editorial announcing the hire, Gygax seemed both hopeful and anxious that the move might increase Arneson’s productivity: “His function will be to help us co-ordinate our efforts with free-lance designers, handle various research projects, and produce material like a grist mill,” Gygax wrote. “Crack! Snap! Work faster there, Dave!”
But even when he was in the TSR office, where Gygax could crack that whip, Arneson published very little. During all of 1976, his name appeared in only three TSR products: He wrote an article for the July issue of Little Wars about World War II naval combat; penned the introduction to Valley Forge, a war game written by his friend Dave Wesely; and received a credit for “special effort” in Lankhmar, a board game based on Fritz Leiber’s novels. Arneson didn’t have a single byline related to Dungeons & Dragons, the game he helped invent and was presumably hired to help develop.
In contrast, Gygax published enough material in 1976 to account for both men. He was credited as the designer of Little Big Horn, a war game simulating the “last stand” of George Armstrong Custer; the author of Swords and Spells; and the coauthor of Eldritch Wizardry. He wrote dozens of articles in The Strategic Review and The Dragon, including editorials, discussions of war games, new rules for D&D, and his serialized novel. Gygax had six bylines in the February Strategic Review alone, filling seven of the newsletter’s sixteen pages. He even wrote for a handful of non-TSR newsletters, in order to promote the company’s products.
Three decades later, it’s unclear why Arneson produced so little during his time at TSR. Perhaps he created lots of material, but it required so much editing, it never got published. Maybe Gygax—anticipating a day when gamers would wonder who truly invented Dungeons & Dragons—killed his projects out of some sense of fratricidal competition.
Or maybe Dave Arneson just wasn’t interested. In his history of war games, Playing at the World, author Jon Peterson points out that Arneson’s limited experience as a writer and editor didn’t keep him from finishing non-TSR products: During his time at the company, Arneson published several issues of a newsletter for his Napoleonic miniatures games, and even printed the March 1976 edition on TSR’s mimeograph. But he exhibited little interest in Dungeons & Dragons, and “even less in promoting the game,” Peterson writes. “Perhaps Arneson simply preferred his nineteenth-century campaigns to fantasy.”
In November 1976, after just ten months on staff, Dave Arneson left TSR. The circumstances are again unclear, or vary depending on who’s recounting them: Gygax fired him because of low productivity; Gygax demoted him, so he quit; he quit because he thought his manuscripts didn’t need to be edited; he quit because he didn’t like making games for profit instead of making them for fun.
Whatever the reason, Arneson’s departure was likely, at a fundamental level, related to the issue of party composition. In 1976, TSR was just setting out on a great adventure; its staff was like a new team of heroes gathered in a tavern, brought together largely by convenience and circumstance. But there was a problem with the group’s dynamics: Gygax the Barbarian, a competitive brawler, bent on victory and motivated by treasure, was never going to work well with the wizard Arneson, a playful thinker, more interested in theory than practicalities, and motivated by fun. Their differences would always be greater than their similarities.
So as the year drew to a close, Dave Arneson left the party to seek out his own adventure. But he’d be back for his share of the treasure.
* * *
1. I’m imagining Michael Cera, Channing Tatum, and Kristen Stewart as the respective leads in the buddy flick based on this paragraph, working title Cognitive Dissonance. Hollywood, you’re welcome.
2. Game systems where players memorize a fixed list of spells are described as using “Vancian” magic, because that’s the way magic works in a series of books by author Jack Vance. Eldritch Wizardry’s psionics (and countless modern video games) use a point-based system, where players have a flat amount of magic available, and each spell has its own cost. The debate over Vancian vs. points is one of the most enduring and annoying arguments in modern geek culture, right up there with Kirk vs. Picard and Marvel vs. DC Comics.
3. In November 1976, TSR released an original game by James Ward called Metamorphosis Alpha, notable as the first role-playing game with a science-fiction setting. The game takes place on the starship Warden, a vast spaceship built by the player characters’ ancestors; in the aftermath of some unknown disaster, their progeny survive on the ship but don’t understand its technology and must fight mutated creatures to ensure their survival.
4. A year and a half later, in the foreword to Gods, Demi-Gods & Heroes, dated July 4, 1976, Kask still sounds wounded: “My first assignment, fresh out of college, was Blackmoor. I came to regard it with a mixture of love and loathing, that has gradually seen the love win out. The loathing grew out of the educational trip that it was for me. They don’t teach you in college what to do when the press breaks down, or your manuscript gets mysteriously misplaced; you just have to wing it.”
8
WHY WE PLAY
At the peak of his fame, the artist Marcel Duchamp developed an obsession with chess, and it quickly took over his life. He played constantly, stopped producing art, and even spent his entire honeymoon studying chess strategies, instead of his wife. “Everything around me takes the shape of the Knight or the Queen,” he wrote, “and the exterior world has no other interest for me other than its transformation to winning or losing positions.”
I know the feeling. As I threw myself headlong into researching the origins of Dungeons & Dragons, I began to feel an obsession with the game reemerging from deep within my psyche. Every rule book and history I read drew it further out. At work, I read D&D Internet forums; at home, I rolled up sample characters; on the weekends I pored over a library search of every article ever published that included the words “Dungeons & Dragons.”
A few months into the project, my girlfriend Kara and I got married. I didn’t play D&D on our honeymoon in the Caribbean, but I did bring along a stack of books with names like The Creation of Narrative in Tabletop Role-Playing Games and The Fantasy Role-Playing Game: A New Performing Art. “Just beach reading material,” I told her.1 I told myself it was essential research, but this went far beyond due diligence. I was geeking out.
I needed to play D&D, too—I was dependent on it, like a junkie needs a fix. If my Tuesday-night game was canceled because someone had to work late or Morgan was out of town, I was agitated and restless for the rest of the week. When I was out of town and the game went on without me, that was even worse. Once I had to fly to San Francisco on a Tuesday morning to report a story for Forbes and knew I’d be missing a session, so I posted a message in an online “looking for game” forum: “Anyone running a D&D game (any edition) in the Bay Area, preferably within an hour drive of San Francisco International Airport?” It felt dirty, like I was an unfaithful husband trolling for casual sex on Craigslist. It felt worse when I couldn’t find any action.
So that Tuesday night, while Jhaden, Ganubi, and Graeme negotiated a job with a group of rich San Francisco merchants, Weslocke stayed home, and I sat in my room at the “real world” San Francisco airport Marriott, reread A Game of Thrones, and tried to ignore the irony. I wondered what they were up to and what I was missing—and how I’d gotten to this point again.
We traveled south out of San Francisco, along the edge of the bay, and then east across rolling grasslands and into a great valley. Before long we came across a highway and followed it into the mountains. All that remained of the road were chunks of asphalt, but they were enough to point the way.
The merchants had found the route while studying ancient documents printed in the twentieth century, before the vampires came out of hiding.
They also found a description of riches “beyond your wildest dreams”—a treasure, buried beneath a pyramid somewhere in the desert. They hired us to find it and protect them along the way.
It was no easy journey. On the eastern slope of the Sierra Nevada we were caught in a snowstorm and then attacked by walking corpses with icy skin. They fell upon us and tried to consume our flesh, but we fought them off with fire and spells that shattered their frozen bodies. Perhaps they were the remains of some dishonored party—travelers who got lost in the mountain pass and turned upon each other, committing evil deeds that doomed their spirits to an eternity of undeath.
In the desert below, we fought a massive sandworm with a mouth bigger than a man, full of hundreds of tiny teeth. Jhaden charged the beast, tried to jump on its back and ride it—but he missed his mark, and it swallowed him whole. Fortunately, he held on to his sword and managed to cut his way out of the great worm’s gullet, killing it in the process.
A few days later, we found the object of our quest: a city, built in an arid basin on the desert floor. At the heart of it stood a huge black pyramid, shining like glass in the midday sun.
In April of 1958, American anthropologists Clifford Geertz and his wife, Hildred, traveled to Bali, Indonesia, to perform an ethnographic study. They found a place to live in the small village of Tihingan, the local chief welcomed them, and the prospects for their research looked good.
Of Dice and Men: The Story of Dungeons & Dragons and The People Who Page 11