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

by Ewalt, David M.

  Tavis and I had both signed up to play a game of Dungeon!, the 1975 TSR board game. Its creator, David Megarry, had driven from Minneapolis to teach the game to curious fans. As Tavis and I talked, we watched him set up four different editions of the game on top of a beat-up old Ping-Pong table; the original 1975 version, with its floppy vinyl board and generic Parcheesi-style tokens, looked comparatively ancient next to 1992’s Classic Dungeon, which had a hard-backed board and molded plastic pieces shaped like wizards and warriors.

  Megarry looked a bit out of his era as well. His chestnut-colored hair and ubiquitous grognard beard were well on their way to white, and he wore simple wire-frame glasses and a straw boater hat with a black ribbon band. A member of La Compagnie des Hivernants la Rivière Saint Pierre, a nonprofit organization that creates historical reenactments from the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Midwest, Megarry looked like he could have come directly from a fur trading post.

  I get a weird sense of cognitive dissonance when I think about David Megarry reenacting eighteenth-century history, because he was a first-person witness to events that have their own historic importance. Megarry grew up in the Twin Cities and got involved in the war-gaming community when he was still a teenager. He played in some of Dave Wesely’s earliest Braunstein games and delved into the depths of Dave Arneson’s pioneering dungeon crawls.

  “In fact,” Megarry told the dozen or so players who had gathered around the table to play his board game, “this was the original table that was in David Arneson’s basement. We played Napoleonic miniatures on it, and we came down one Saturday morning, and there was this medieval castle on it.”

  Suddenly, the beat-up Ping-Pong table seemed to grow in my vision. I felt my heart pound and the hair on my arms stand up, a physical reaction to a sudden realization: This is where Dave Arneson ran Castle Blackmoor. In a very real way, this was the birthplace of fantasy role-playing.

  The thought made my head swim—to play a game on Arneson’s table is to literally touch the history of D&D, to share a physical and psychological connection with its creators. I experienced something like what devout Christians must feel upon entering the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, or, less sacrilegiously, what a baseball fanatic would experience if he got the chance to hit a few balls in Yankee Stadium using Babe Ruth’s bat. I thought I’d purchased tickets to play an out-of-print board game, a fun diversion; instead, I was performing an act of devotion.

  I took out my camera and started taking pictures of the table: a close-up of the wood grain, visible through fading green paint; a piece of yellowed masking tape, peeling off on a corner; little nicks and scratches; even a tiny pencil mark, potentially dating back to Blackmoor itself. After a minute I looked over at Tavis. “It’s amazing,” he agreed. “My son, of course, is totally uninterested and went off to play video games.”

  Had he stayed, Javi probably would have enjoyed himself. Dungeon! is still a lot of fun. The game simulates exploration of a series of rooms filled with monsters and treasure. Each player takes a premade character, heads out into the dungeon, kills the creatures, grabs their loot, and repeats. Since the monsters and treasures are printed on small cards and placed facedown on the board, players don’t know what sort of peril is in a room until they enter it—or how big the reward. Color-coded numbers on each monster identify what you must roll on a 2d6 to kill them: My character, Flennetar the Paladin, attacked using the red numbers, so I needed only a 2 to kill a goblin, whereas Longbranch the Elf attacked on white and would need a 3. Miss your target number by a point or two, and you could lose one of your 2 hit points. Miss by a bigger margin, and you’re dead. In addition to providing my combat details, Flennetar’s matchbook-sized character card explained I could move five spaces per turn and needed thirty thousand gold to win. It also detailed a paladin’s unique power—that I could take a turn to heal myself or another player.

  If this all sounds familiar, it’s not a coincidence. Dungeon! is a direct relative of D&D, born out of the same gaming sessions that inspired Arneson and Gygax. After a few months of playing Arneson’s Blackmoor games, Megarry began to notice the toll it took on his friend. “I was watching Arneson just be completely drained by the whole process,” he said. “It was an incredible amount of work. He couldn’t play his own game. It seemed unfair.” Megarry began to wonder: Could he make a dungeon crawl that didn’t require a referee, so everyone at the table could have fun?

  The game came together in October of 1972, after Megarry broke up with a girlfriend. “After an argument with her, I just went home and sort of sulked,” he said. “But as part of that, I said, ‘Well, I’ll work on this game idea.’ And the minute I started working on it, I couldn’t stop.” He drew the dungeon outline on nine 10" by 13" pieces of poster board taped together at the edges, and glued on squares of colored paper to represent individual rooms. Monsters and treasures were described on tiny chits half the size of a business card. When laid out, the completed prototype—a white background covered with yellow and orange shapes—looks like a Mondrian painting.

  His friends loved it, and mixed in a few sessions of Dungeon! between their Blackmoor adventures. Megarry decided to try to get the game published: “I sent a letter to Parker Brothers asking if they would like to look at it, then I got my first rejection letter,” he said. “So Arneson and I went down to see Gary Gygax to show off our stuff.”

  Today, we remember Arneson and Megarry’s 1972 trip to Lake Geneva as the occasion when Gygax first saw Blackmoor, the “you got your peanut butter in my chocolate” moment when D&D was born. But Megarry was there too—and his board game must have helped inspire Gygax’s work. David Megarry’s contribution to the origin of role-playing games may not be as fundamental as that of Arneson and Gygax, but it’s still significant. He might not be one of the fathers of Dungeons & Dragons, but he’s at least a favorite uncle.

  In 1975—when TSR was flush with cash from the newly released Dungeons & Dragons—Megarry’s board game was finally published. But even though Dungeon! eventually sold half a million copies, Megarry never got rich or famous from the game, or for his part in the history of D&D. His relationship with TSR ended in a series of disappointments.3 But Megarry isn’t bitter—he made the game to entertain people, and he’s happy knowing he did.

  “You can second-guess all you want. But I can come away knowing that I made a fun game that people like, to this day,” said Megarry. “I’m satisfied with that.”

  This was the wisdom I’d been searching for. I had spent so much time learning about where D&D came from, about the controversies, the management errors, the lawsuits, and the edition wars, that I nearly forgot the most important thing about the game: It’s supposed to be fun.

  I won’t master the game by memorizing obscure historical arcana. I won’t find the key to a successful campaign in rule books or in obsessively detailed homemade maps. I just have to think about my friends and make sure they’re having fun.

  As he departed the temple of the creator, David thought back on what he’d left at home—family and friends, people he cared about but left behind.

  With a grimace, he realized his error. He wouldn’t find happiness choosing his own adventure; he’d find it sharing adventures with friends.

  He needed to think, to figure out where to go next. He wandered the city aimlessly, unsure where his feet were taking him.

  After the game, I got in my rental car and drove a few miles east into downtown Lake Geneva. During the summer, the resort town is flooded with tourists. But in the third week of March it was half-empty, with only a handful of locals on the sidewalks, quietly strolling and enjoying unusually warm weather.

  I parked on the street next to the public library, a one-story brick building on the north shore of Lake Geneva. The back side of the library faces the lake, and floor-to-ceiling windows look out onto a small park. I followed a neat walkway past the building and down the shoreline for about a half mile. It’s a nice walk—the thick grass
of the park slopes up on one side of the path, and the placid lake sits just a few feet away on the other.

  Halfway down the path, I sat on a park bench and looked out on the water. There were two men fishing on a rowboat a few hundred feet from shore, but I could see them only in silhouette against the rippling water. Birds chirped and sang in the trees. An older couple walked past, hand in hand, quietly talking.

  Someday soon, Library Park might be home to the Gary Gygax Memorial. Gary’s widow, Gail, has been working on the project for several years. Eventually, she hopes there will be a small statue here, perhaps a bust of Gary surrounded by the tools of his trade: a fantasy castle, a coiled dragon, some polyhedral dice.

  The city government has tentatively approved the location, but there are years of planning and permits and approvals before the memorial becomes reality. Fund-raising, too—although with Gary’s rabid fan base, coming up with the cash shouldn’t be a problem. Wizards of the Coast has already promised to donate the proceeds from a special-edition reprint of the original AD&D core rule books.

  After a while, I walked out of the park and past the library to the Riviera, a banquet hall built back in 1932, when Lake Geneva was a swinging summer party destination for Chicago’s rich and famous. In front of the old building, there’s a fountain surrounded by a memorial walkway—one of those things where local businesses and families make donations to get their names or a short message carved on bricks in a path. There’s one inscribed “to the world’s best husband,” one for “The Birkenheier Family,” another with the logo of a local bank. Then, near the base of the fountain, directly in front of the doors of the Riviera, there’s a large square brick depicting a dragon sleeping on top of a twenty-sided die. “In loving memory of E. Gary Gygax,” it reads. “Creator of Dungeons & Dragons. Donated by his family, friends, and fans.”

  I stood there for a while, thinking. Then I walked a little farther along the shoreline and turned left on Center Street, heading away from the lake and uphill into town. Four blocks in, on the corner of Wisconsin Street, is the house Gary lived in when he created Dungeons & Dragons. It’s a little white house with a gray roof, set back from the road behind a small garden. Since it was March, nothing was growing. But there was a small plaque in the dirt, resting against a wall of rocks: “If tears could build a stairway and memories a lane, I’d walk right up to heaven and bring you home again.”

  I lingered on the corner and imagined Gary sitting on the porch, smoking a cigar and thinking about wizards. Then I crossed the street and walked a few blocks to Sage Street.

  Don Kaye’s house on Sage Street is where TSR got its start. It’s gone now, bulldozed to make room for an elementary school. As I walked past, I saw a mom and dad leading their kids into the school for some after-hours event. The dad was wearing a tuxedo T-shirt, and I laughed at his silliness, but then remembered I was wearing a shirt with a picture of the Ghostbusters chasing the Pac-Man ghosts, Inky, Blinky, Pinky, and Clyde.

  I kept walking. A lady gave me a wave and a smile as I walked past her house on Marshall Street. A little farther on, I stopped to consider a house on the corner of Williams Street—the original home of the Dungeon game shop. Now it’s someone’s home, just slightly gray and faded. It’s next door to a Laundromat, and on the opposite corners there’s a Pizza Hut and a gas station.

  I turned on Williams Street and headed back downtown, toward the final destination of my pilgrimage. As I got closer to the lake, there were fewer houses and more storefronts, and then, in the last few blocks before Main Street, nothing but commercial space—a crepe restaurant, an antiques store, and lots of stores with beach towels and sunblock in the windows, waiting for summer and crowds of strangers.

  My final stop was the corner of Main Street and Broad. The building is currently called the Landmark Center, but back in 1873, it was the Hotel Clair. A hundred years later, it became the headquarters of TSR—the rickety old building where AD&D and the Red Box were born.

  Today, the residents of the Landmark Center include a jeweler, a bank, and an architecture firm. The main storefront—once the second home of the Dungeon—is a candy store called Kilwin’s Chocolates. A sign outside promises “Mackinac Island Fudge & Homemade Ice Cream.”

  I went inside. It smelled like caramel, a sweet, burnt aroma. Rows of glass-fronted bakery counters showed fresh-made fudge and candies. A few display tables had gift boxes of treats. I picked out a box of dark-chocolate cherry cordials—my favorite—and an assortment of truffles to bring home to Kara.

  There were two teenage girls behind the counter, neither older than sixteen. As one of them rang up my purchase, I casually asked a question.

  “Do you guys know the history of this building?”

  She looked at me, a little startled, but friendly. “No, I don’t think so.”

  “There used to be a game store here.”

  In the corner of the room, an older woman had been cleaning the marble table used for cooling fudge. She stopped what she was doing and walked toward the register.

  “Oh yeah, I know that,” she said. She pointed a finger at the ceiling. “Up there. Dungeons and Dragons.”

  “Yeah. Their offices were up there, back in the 1980s.”

  “I know that was there. I don’t know anything else, though.”

  “How long has the candy store been here?”

  “Oh, she’s been here sixteen years. I just work here, I don’t know much.”

  The young girl fished my change out of a drawer. I took it and turned back to the woman. “Thanks,” I said. “I was just curious.”

  “The building’s got a lot of history, I don’t know what. But if these walls could talk, you know . . .” She trailed off and smiled. I smiled back.

  There was a park bench on the sidewalk just outside the store. I sat down and watched the traffic. A couple walked by, perhaps on their way to dinner. An old lady shuffled past with a walker, followed by her tiny dog. A kid with Spider-Man sneakers rode his bike up the sidewalk. None of them even glanced at the old brick building, the place where countless adventures began.

  I opened up the bag from the candy store and ate a cherry cordial. It was fantastic.

  Fortified in mind and body, David strode from the city. It hadn’t been what he’d expected, but he did find wisdom there: Build something together. Know yourself. Have fun.

  With the sun at his back, he surveyed the road ahead. A few dozen yards away, the path split and continued in different directions. Farther in the distance, he could see each path split again, and again, dozens of roads, headed to all corners of the globe.

  He had no map and no idea which path to take. So he reached into his pocket and pulled out a lucky token, something he’d carried since childhood—a small geometric figure, almost a sphere, but flattened to show twenty identical faces, each one numbered sequentially.

  He threw it high in the air, caught it on the way down, and opened his hand so it rested flat on his palm. He read the number on top and then laughed to himself. He stuffed the die back in his pocket and walked on with purpose.

  He was ready for adventure.

  When I returned to Brooklyn and met with the guys for our next game session, I left Weslocke at home. I’d scored our group an invite to Wizards of the Coast’s private play test of the fifth edition of Dungeons & Dragons, so it was time to start a new campaign, with new characters, in a new world of adventure.

  Once everyone had arrived, I reached into my bag and produced a fat folder of paper: five copies of an in-progress Player’s Handbook, collated and bound, hot off the laser printer in my office. One for each of us.

  We sat at Alex’s dining room table and read through the packets. Every few minutes someone would tut-tut or chuckle and point out a particularly controversial or exciting change in the rules. After half an hour we told ourselves we knew enough to begin and started to roll up new player characters.

  Alex decided he’d play an elven rogue named Kilën, after a beloved
grandfather. The fifth-edition rules ask players to choose one of several themes that describe their character’s identity; Alex said Kilën would be an “adventurer.” Later, he told me he’d really chosen “spy” but decided to keep that a secret from the other players.

  Phil rolled up a wizard and named him Tealeaf. Because he’s Phil, he made him an acrobatic gnome. In my mind’s eye, I pictured Yoda doing backflips and shooting bolts of Force lightning from his fingers.

  R. C. made a dwarf fighter, a nobleman named Beauteponce. When he rolled his intelligence score, it came up seven, not much smarter than a troll. It would be fun to have him in the party. And aggravating.

  Morgan would play a human cleric. He chose the theme of “pub crawler,” which grants the character an advantage to find information, since everybody knows his name in all the local bars. He called the character Norm.

  When they were done, I glanced over each character sheet, then returned them to their owners. I had brought several of my own characters with me, along with a few maps—winding caves, an unexplored countryside, a strange wizard’s tower. I also brought a few pages of notes—nothing too detailed, just an outline. Set decoration for a simple story, a quest to find a box of lost books. There’d be plenty of room for the players to fill in the details.

  I took a breath and surveyed the table, looking each of my friends in the eyes. “You have all gathered at a tavern,” I said, “in search of adventure and glory.”

  * * *

  1. That’s what the dot in a lowercase letter is called. Stop snickering.

  2. “Secret or concealed doors are difficult to hide from elves. Merely passing within 10' of the latter makes an elven character 16 2/3% (1 in 6) likely to notice it. If actively searching for such doors, elven characters are 33 1/3% (2 in 6) likely to find a secret door.” Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Players Handbook, page 16.

  3. Including spelling his name incorrectly on the Dungeon! rule book. “They had a ‘Gary’ in the room all the time, so they dropped an r,” Megarry said. “I figured, ‘They’ll get it right on the next printing.’ ” But when the first three thousand games sold out, TSR—knowing they had dropped a letter in “Megarry”—corrected it by adding a second g. “David Meggary” had to tell his editors they’d gotten his name wrong again. “Tim Kask was crestfallen,” he said.