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

by Ewalt, David M.

  Elsewhere in the magazine, Gygax shared in the celebration: “The course of TSR Hobbies’ development has been rather like a D&D campaign. When we finished our first fiscal year back in 1975, we were pretty much a low-level-character sort of company, with gross sales of only about $50,000. We had [an] excellent experience the next year, with a $300,000 figure, and in 1977 we doubled that to $600,000. TSR didn’t quite double again in fiscal 1978, ending the year at a gross of near $1,000,000, but in ’79 we did a bit better, finishing at a gross of well over $2,000,000. From the way 1980 is shaping up, there is no reason to doubt that we’ll at least double in size once again. It is possible that we’ll be the largest hobby game company—and ready to start toward the really high-level game producers such as Milton Bradley and Parker Brothers—by 1982.”

  In the four years after Tactical Studies Rules reformed into TSR Hobbies, the company’s revenues surged 4,000 percent. By Gygax’s reckoning, half a million people around the world were playing D&D, and bringing more of their friends and family into the hobby each day. D&D was competing with Monopoly and Scrabble, not Bunnies & Burrows. The game was practically a license to print money.

  None of this had slipped the attention of Dave Arneson.

  * * *

  In April 1975, when Tactical Studies Rules had sales of just $2,000 a month, Dave Arneson and Gary Gygax signed a contract giving the company the rights to Dungeons & Dragons. In return, TSR agreed to pay royalties for each and every copy sold—a total of 10 percent of the cover price, split equally between the two men.

  When you’re only selling two hundred copies each month, 5 percent of a ten-dollar game doesn’t add up to much money.11 But D&D grew so quickly that when Dave Arneson left TSR a year and a half later, his royalties were probably around a thousand dollars a month.

  Arneson kept collecting his 5 percent after he departed the company, and for years, the checks kept growing. But in the fall of 1977, he noticed his payment was smaller than expected. TSR had started selling the Basic Set, and it was a big hit, but the company wasn’t paying royalties on those sales. He protested, but the complaints went nowhere. Then TSR published the Monster Manual, and then the Players Handbook, and denied payment for those books too. Basic and Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, the company said, were new games and weren’t covered under the 1975 agreement, so TSR didn’t owe him more royalties.

  On February 22, 1979, Arneson filed a lawsuit against Gygax and TSR in Minneapolis’s U.S. district court, accusing them of violating his royalty agreement. TSR, it alleged, had published games that were copied and derived from D&D, so Arneson deserved to be credited and paid as their author. The suit also claimed that TSR falsely represented the Monster Manual and Players Handbook as the sole work of Gygax because it wanted to stop paying Arneson royalties—and that because he had been denied the “commercially and artistically valuable right” to be identified as the author of Dungeons & Dragons, Arneson’s reputation had been irrevocably damaged. He requested $100,000 in damages and asked the court to order TSR not to publish any D&D rule books unless they listed him as coauthor.

  In mounting their defense, Gygax and TSR claimed the books had nothing to do with Dave Arneson. “Advanced Dungeons & Dragons is a different game,” Gygax wrote in his column in the June 1979 issue of The Dragon. “It is neither an expansion nor a revision of the old game, it is a new game . . . it is necessary that all adventure gaming fans be absolutely aware that there is no similarity (perhaps even less) between D&D and AD&D than there is between D&D and its various imitators produced by competing publishers.”

  In addition to arguing independent creation, the defendants also tried to get the case dismissed on a technicality: Arneson had filed the suit in Minnesota, so Wisconsin-based TSR said the court didn’t have jurisdiction. But a judge denied the motion, pointing out that TSR had sold almost $12,000 worth of product to Minnesota customers. The case was set to go to trial.

  But before that could happen, Arneson, Gygax, and TSR reached a settlement. On March 6, 1981, they agreed that Arneson would receive a 2.5 percent royalty on sales of all three AD&D rule books, up to a maximum payment of $1.2 million, and on “any revised edition or foreign language translation thereof.” Arneson wouldn’t get an authorship credit in any of the rule books, but it was still a pretty good deal: In the third quarter of 1982, he received $60,236.68 in royalties.

  The detente didn’t last long. In 1983, TSR published Monster Manual II, a follow-up to the contested bestiary. In apparent deference to the “any revised edition” language in the settlement, the company granted Arneson a 2.5 percent cut of all sales—and paid out royalties totaling $108,703.50 in the first year of its publication.

  Then the checks stopped. On November 2, 1984, TSR sent a letter to Arneson saying that the payments had been a mistake because the Monster Manual II was not a “revised edition,” and that since he’d been overpaid, the company would take the difference out of his future royalties for the other books.

  Arneson sued again, alleging breach of both the settlement and his royalty agreement. The new lawsuit argued that Monster Manual II was substantially the same as its predecessor, so it was covered by the agreement—and that even if it wasn’t, and TSR paid him the royalties by mistake, they didn’t have the legal right to withhold his future earnings and had to eat the mistake. In 1985, the court ruled in his favor, and Arneson got to keep the cash.

  Arneson filed five different lawsuits against TSR in the three decades after his departure, and while most of the details and settlements were kept confidential, it’s clear he made a lot of money from Dungeons & Dragons. He funded his own game-publishing company, Adventure Games, and a computer-game company, 4D Interactive Systems; he also invested a lot of money in other people’s game companies, never getting much in return except for the satisfaction of making good games.

  Still, the relationship between Gygax & Arneson would never be repaired. “We don’t hate each other,” Arneson said in 2004. “We don’t hang out with each other that often, though. We just kept going our own two separate ways.”

  * * *

  1. TSR quickly overwhelmed its supplier of the cheap polyhedral dice included in each box and had to procure more directly from the Chinese manufacturer. As a result, the fifth and sixth editions of the Basic Set, both printed in 1979, came with two sheets of numbered chits printed on perforated card stock instead of dice.

  2. Gygax’s argument that the Blue Box might lead new players into Original D&D made about as much sense as Microsoft saying that fans of the 2012 video game Halo 4 should buy Pong while they wait for the next installment. While TSR did keep selling the original set—in a white box marked “Original Collector’s Edition”—through the end of the decade, it’s likely that few players moved from Blue Box to White.

  3. “The various eyes of a beholder each have a different function . . . 1 Charm person spell, 2 Charm monster spell, 3 Sleep spell, 4 Telekinese [sic], 5 Flesh-stone ray, 6 Disintegrate ray, 7 Fear, 8 Slow spell, 9 Cause serious wound, 10 Death ray, 11 Anti-magic ray.” Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Monster Manual, page 10.

  4. Gygax admitted that he “thoroughly enjoyed” The Hobbit but maintained that he disliked the Lord of the Rings trilogy: “Gandalf is quite ineffectual, plying a sword at times and casting spells which are quite low powered . . . [Tolkien] drops Tom Bombadil, my personal favorite, like the proverbial hot potato . . . The wicked Sauron is poorly developed, virtually depersonalized, and at the end blows away in a cloud of evil smoke . . . poof!”

  5. Saul Zaentz owns the rights to a lot of creative works he didn’t create, and frequently litigates to protect them: In 2011, his company sued a small pub in Southampton, England, that had operated for more than two decades as the Hobbit. Creedence Clearwater Revival front man John Fogerty wrote the song “Zanz Kant Danz” allegedly about Zaentz after they battled over the rights to CCR’s music; the chorus of the song is “Zanz can’t dance but he’ll steal your money / Watch him or he�
�ll rob you blind.” After Zaentz sued, Fogarty changed the name of the character in the lyrics and the title to “Vanz.”

  6. “[Elementals] are strong but relatively stupid beings conjured magically from their normal habitat—the elemental planes of air, earth, etc. . . . Upon command an air elemental can form a whirlwind [that] sweeps away and kills all creatures under three hit dice, and causes 2–16 hit points of damage on all non-aerial creatures which it fails to kill outright.” Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Monster Manual, page 10.

  7. “Topped by a huge mass of yellow orange hair which looks light a fright wig, Queen Frupy’s face is a mass of jowls and wrinkles, set in the middle of a very large head which sits squarely upon her shoulders. Her body is lumpy and gross, and her skin is covered with bristles the color of her hair.” Hall of the Fire Giant King, page 4.

  8. “A sphere of annihilation is a globe of absolute blackness, a ball of nothingness 2' in diameter. A sphere is actually a hole in the continuity of the multiverse, a void. Any matter which comes in contact with a sphere is instantly sucked into the void, gone, utterly destroyed, wishes and similar magicks notwithstanding.” Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Dungeon Masters Guide, page 154.

  9. Only 2.3 percent of respondents to the survey were female. While the hobby is still very male dominated, it’s changing fast—as we’ll see later.

  10. Broadly speaking, lawful characters respect some kind of authority, chaotic characters follow their conscience, and neutral characters avoid rigid extremes. You could argue that in the original Star Wars movies, Darth Vader is lawful evil, Luke Skywalker is lawful good, and Emperor Palpatine is chaotic evil; Han Solo starts out as chaotic neutral but ends the trilogy as neutral good. Debating the alignment of characters in different TV shows, books, and movies is a popular geek pastime and Internet meme; I’ve seen people deconstruct the casts of everything from Game of Thrones to Downton Abbey. Violet, the Dowager Countess of Grantham, is apparently true neutral.

  11. That’s $100 in royalties, but some of you already knew that, because you stopped to do the math before you reached this footnote. A true nerd finds unsolved equations irresistible—they’re like unopened birthday presents.

  10

  THE SATANIC PANIC

  Substance-abuse counselors sometimes describe addiction in terms of four stages. My D&D habit progressed much the same way. When I first joined Morgan’s Vampire World campaign, I was only in Experimentation (“experimenting may occur once or several times as a way to ‘have fun’ or even to help the individual cope with a problem”), but the stuff was so good, I quickly advanced to Regular Use. By the time our characters began our journey to Las Vegas, I had moved on to Risky Use (“craving and preoccupation”); after we met the illithids and found the pyramid’s treasure I was deep in Dependence (“compulsive use . . . despite severe negative consequences to his or her relationships, physical and mental health, personal finances, job security”).

  I could go down the list: Negative consequences to relationships? I saw my D&D buddies every week but neglected all my other friends. Physical and mental health? Forget about the freshman fifteen; I put on the D&D thirty. Personal finances? I spent a small fortune buying out-of-print rule books on eBay. Job security? Instead of completing stories for the magazine, I spent entire days browsing online role-playing game forums for interesting discussions (“If you could only take three sourcebooks to a desert island, what would they be?”).

  One of my favorite forums was a small section on the social news site Reddit. In April 2011, some of Reddit’s users organized a Secret Santa–style gift exchange, one of those affairs where you’re randomly assigned another participant and have to send them an anonymous gift. Since this swap was held online, participants were assigned a stranger—someone chosen from the entire site’s user base, not just the RPG forum—and had to figure out what to get them based on what they’d written on the site. It sounded like a nice diversion from D&D, so I signed up.

  I was assigned a twentysomething college student from upstate New York. I learned right away that she liked to read and was studying to be an archaeologist—more than enough information to pick out a gift. But I dug deeper into her comment history, looking for something else . . . and found it. A single post, over a year old, where she mentioned she’d played a role-playing game with some friends.

  That was all I needed to hear. I ordered a few supplies, and when they arrived, I broke out my power tools and my gaming gear. A few precision-drilled holes later, I strung a purple twenty-sided die on a silver chain and attached jewelry closures to each end. It wasn’t the ugliest necklace I’ve ever seen, but it was definitely the nerdiest. With a satisfied grin, I showed it to my wife.

  Kara gave me a look that fell somewhere between amused and pitying. When I said I was going to make her a necklace, too, she seemed less than thrilled.

  * * *

  My sad attempt at jewelry design wasn’t the first time someone tried to channel enthusiasm for role-playing into novelty products. A small TSR licensee called Troubador Press crossed that line in 1979, when it published the Official Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Coloring Album; in the years that followed, other companies released a torrent of D&D-branded merchandise, including lunch boxes, beach towels, and action figures.

  It seems silly, but at the time, the words “Dungeons & Dragons” could make any product a top seller. Even TSR’s bigger competitors knew they had value: In 1980, TSR partnered with Mattel to release the Dungeons & Dragons Computer Labyrinth Game, which required players to move a die-cast metal hero through a molded plastic maze. An electronic sensor (the “computer”) beeped and chirped every time a player moved their piece.1 A September 1980 Forbes article described D&D as “the hottest game in the nation” and predicted explosive growth. TSR went on to post sales of $8.5 million for the year, an increase of 400 percent year over year.

  In its early years, Dungeons & Dragons had been a pastime for grizzled veterans and nerdy college students. But after the success of AD&D and the Basic Set, the game went mainstream. D&D rule books and a whole universe of licensed products made it into the hands of children all across America—and it wasn’t long before confused adults started freaking out.

  * * *

  James Dallas Egbert III was a gifted child. He graduated from high school at age fourteen, beloved by teachers—and resented by peers. Alienated and friendless, when he started college at Michigan State University he was moody and depressed, even for a teenager.

  For a while, it seemed like college would provide the friends he’d been missing. He joined a club called the Tolkien Society, where students spent time discussing The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, and sometimes played Dungeons & Dragons. But then on August 15, 1979, sixteen-year-old Egbert disappeared.

  A few weeks passed before William Dear, a private investigator hired by Egbert’s parents, developed a theory: Egbert had been playing a live-action version of Dungeons & Dragons and got lost in a labyrinth of steam tunnels located below the campus. Maybe he was still down there, wandering alone and confused—or maybe he’d been killed by a competing player.

  Dear had obviously never played D&D, nor had any of the Michigan state police. But the investigators were all convinced the game was at fault, even though they didn’t have any proof. Desperate for clues, officers collected several empty bulletin boards they found in Egbert’s bedroom and drove them three hundred miles to TSR’s headquarters. Upon their arrival, the cops asked TSR staff to analyze the placement of unused thumbtacks on each board, in case they represented some sort of secret pattern or map. Gary Gygax and Tim Kask spent three days staring at the boards before concluding—rightly—that they signified nothing.

  But Dear didn’t give up. The press-happy dick2 gladly shared it with reporters, and the disappearance of Egbert became national news. Breathless newspaper stories pulled heartstrings with descriptions of an innocent genius led astray, a young boy tempted into a deviant world. Surely this game, they sugge
sted, full of magic and demons, had led to his downfall.

  The truth was simpler. Egbert, in a fit of depression, had run away. Eventually he bought a bus ticket to New Orleans, checked into a cheap motel, and attempted to poison himself. When that didn’t work, he hid out in Louisiana for a few more days before deciding to go home.3

  The staff of TSR was worried about receiving so much negative attention, but only until they saw the results. “The continual press coverage of [D&D] and its ‘dangers’ caused sales to skyrocket,” Gygax said in a 2002 interview. “We couldn’t print fast enough to fill orders.” Just one year after the Egbert affair, TSR posted annual revenues of $8.5 million; two years later, in fiscal 1981, revenues exceeded $12.9 million.

  D&D was famous. On November 8, 1979, just six weeks after Egbert returned to his family, Gygax appeared on the late-night television show Tomorrow with Tom Snyder to talk about the phenomenon; to his credit, Snyder seemed to embrace D&D in the spirit in which it was intended, and even needled an unprepared Gygax to run him through an impromptu dungeon on camera. But outside of late-night, the game was treated differently. The Egbert incident had marked Dungeons & Dragons in the public eye as something dangerous. And as the 1980s began, the game became a cultural bugaboo—seen, along with satanism and heavy metal music, as a corrupter of youth.

  In May of 1980, parents in the “solidly Mormon” farming town of Heber City, Utah, convinced their local school board to shut down an after-school D&D club and accused its organizers “of working with the Antichrist and of fomenting Communist subversion.” Local Christian minister Norman Springer told The New York Times that the game was “very definitely” antireligious: “These books are filled with things that are not fantasy, but are actual in the real demon world and can be very dangerous for anyone involved in the game because it leaves them so open to Satanic spirits.”