Of Dice and Men: The Story of Dungeons & Dragons and The People Who (14 page)

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.

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. Tun
nels & 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, Wisconsin
³
) 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 s
upplement 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
.”
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Arneson’s draft, Kask later explained, was “
contradictory, confusing, incomplete, partially incomprehensible, lacking huge bits and pieces and mostly gibberish.” The sixty-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.