Tag Archives: Dave Arneson

D&D’s Biggest Controversies Ranked—1. D&D Becomes a Target of the Satanic Panic

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Content warning for discussion of murder, suicide, and mentions of child abuse.

Through the 1980s, Satan made regular headlines. Folks kept blaming the devil for luring kids to murder, suicide, and ritual sacrifice. Police dutifully investigated. The falsely accused sometimes went to prison only to be cleared years later. And the media trumpeted every lurid moment. Concerned parents found the devil’s work in heavy metal music, Dungeons & Dragons, and especially day care centers. The fervor became known as the Satanic Panic.

The panic started in 1980, but its power came from the culture of the seventies.

Throughout the seventies, the counterculture of the sixties lingered as a new age passion for astrology, crystals, and such. To some, things like tarot cards and witchcraft just seemed like a way to explore their spirituality in daring ways, but Christian fundamentalists saw the fad as an invitation to the devil.

In 1969, Charles Manson led his followers to perform a series of murders. The group staged the killings to appear ritualistic, leading the public to search for other murderous cults potentially inspired by the devil. The seventies had no more serial killers than other eras, but serial killers now got nationwide attention. The public learned how killers could seem like friends and neighbors, and how their bloody crimes might follow a ritual pattern. The Zodiac Killer even coined his nickname from astrology.

In the media, The Satanic Bible by Anton LaVey reached bookstores in 1969 and went to sell over a million copies. In 1973 the The Exorcist set box office records. The movie claimed to be based on a true story.

Meanwhile, the number of women working outside the home surged. They put their children in day care, but they felt guilty about it and feared time outside the home might somehow damage their children.

To battle what seemed like a rise of a depraved and godless culture, conservative Christians like Jerry Falwell organized the religious right into a voting block and helped elect Ronald Reagan as president.

Together, these trends created the right culture for a panic. The furor started when a 1980 book titled Michelle Remembers became a bestseller. The book tells how its author, psychiatrist Dr. Larry Pazder, treated a housewife named Michelle Smith using a technique called “recovered-memory therapy.” Prazder claimed to have uncovered Smith’s repressed memories from when she was five years old. She claimed to remember being given to a satanic cult and enduring 14 months of captivity and torture, while seeing ritual murders and mutilations, often involving babies. Today, recovered memory therapy is discredited as pseudoscience, but then many accepted Smith’s stories as fact. Pazder and Smith established themselves as authorities in “Satanic Ritual Abuse,” and they became resources for psychologists and law enforcement authorities. They made television appearances on shows like Oprah.

An anxious public came alert to the threat of satanic cults hiding next door, and they started seeing the devil’s influence everywhere.

In 1983, a California mother named Judy Johnson accused staff at her son’s preschool of abusing him. Questioned by investigators, her accusations grew to include sexual encounters with animals and a story of one teacher flying through the air. Prosecutors found no evidence, but the investigation expanded to interviewing several hundred children who had attended to school. Interviewers used suggestive techniques that invited children to pretend or speculate on supposed events. Children told of sexual abuse, and also of flying witches, hot air balloon trips, animal sacrifices, and a goat man. During the interviews, one child identified Chuck Norris from a photo as one of the abusers. Based on media reports, the day care seemed like a front for a satanic cult. The investigation lasted until 1987, and trials until 1990, when all charges were dropped without convictions. After a 12-day psychiatric examination during the affair, Judy Johnson was diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic.

Original Proctor & Gamble logo

Original Proctor & Gamble logo

News media and talk shows made the scandal into a national spectacle. Across the country, people found clues that seemed to reveal satanic cults hiding everywhere. Rumors spread that the consumer goods corporation Proctor & Gamble supported Satan. The evidence came from the company’s man-in-the moon logo from 1882. Part of the man’s beard resembled a reversed number 666 and the image included thirteen stars, a reference to the thirteen original U.S. colonies. Law enforcement officers trained to spot cult activities and traded information about satanic calendars, symbols, and supposed organizations. Authorities spent millions investigating hundreds of accusations of satanic abuse, especially in day care centers. They put suspects in jail and ruined lives and families. Eventually though, the cases proved baseless.

While this panic raged, D&D featured devilish-looking creatures and idols on the covers of its rule books. Inside, concerned parents found descriptions of demons, devils, and spells that could summon them. In 1979, the public learned about the game from reports that painted the game as “bizarre” and its players as “cultish.” During the Satanic Panic, D&D became a lightning rod.

D&D co-creators Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson both identified as Christians. Gary’s devotion even led him to refuse to celebrate Christmas, in part because of the holiday’s pagan roots. But Gygax recognized D&D as make believe and happily added elements from real Christian religion to the game. That included holy men who could walk on water and turn sticks into snakes. He added demons named in Christian sources. If demons and devils served as foes to kill, Gygax saw them as fair game for pretending.

However, fundamentalists saw the game differently. In 1980, Utah parents demanded that Wasatch High School ban its D&D club because the game’s lack of holy reverence for biblical miracles like water walking and resurrection. Christian Life Ministries examined D&D and reported on the dangers they perceived. “If it’s only a game, why do they use hundreds of traditional Christian terms? And why do they use them in such blatantly blasphemous ways?? Why??” Across the country, parents fought to rid D&D from their schools.

In 1982, teenager Irving “Bink” Pulling II committed suicide. The Washington Post reported that the boy had trouble fitting in. A classmate said, “He had a lot of problems anyway that weren’t associated with the game.” On his death, his mother Patricia Pulling learned for the first time that Irving had been playing D&D for the last two years. She blamed the strange game for her son’s death and started a crusade against D&D. She founded the group BADD, short for Bothered About Dungeons & Dragons. She sued her son’s high school principal for negligently allowing D&D play at the school. She sued D&D publisher TSR and accused the company of brainwashing kids and leading them to the occult. “If kids can believe in a god they can’t see then it’s very easy for them to believe in occult deities they can’t see.”

Televangelists like Pat Robertson, whose Christian Broadcasting Network reached millions, connected the game to “news reports of murders, suicides, fantasy mental changes. Young people are going totally crazy as a result of this game.” Evangelist Jack Chick published Dark Dungeons (1984), a comic that aimed to show readers how D&D led to Satan.

Many parents saw the alarm about devil worship as silly, but they still worried that the game blurred reality and fantasy in unhealthy ways, potentially causing psychological damage. The news offered plenty of stories to support that fear. For a while in the eighties, anytime a young victim of suicide happened to play D&D, the media reported on the D&D angle. A youth convicted in a murder case even tried to use D&D as part of his defense, claiming the game accustomed him to violence and led him away from God. Whenever tragedy struck the lives of young people who happened to play D&D, parents looked for something to blame, and the strange new game they didn’t understand seemed like an obvious culprit.

In 1985 more than 22 million people watched a segment linking Dungeons & Dragons to suicide and murder on the prime-time news show 60 Minutes. The report interviewed Pat Pulling and her tearful daughter. Gygax defended his game, but he stood little chance against the emotional appeal. On 60 Minutes, part of the entertainment comes from showing apparently guilty culprits squirm under the camera. Gygax tried to explain that D&D’s surging popularity meant that millions of kids played the game and, separately, some of those kids happened to be involved in tragedy. He aptly called criticism of D&D a witch hunt. The segment steered away from the devil-worship angle and toward the notion that the game damaged young minds. Still, psychiatrist Thomas Radecki talked about parents who saw their son “summon a Dungeons & Dragons demon into his room before he killed himself.”

To defend D&D from claims that the game threatened emotional harm, TSR hired psychologist and TV personality Dr. Joyce Brothers. TSR avoided ever showing gameplay that blurred reality with fantasy, so Gen Con banned any “live action events.”

To defend D&D from claims that the game lured kids to the occult, TSR removed the devilish idols and efreet from the covers of the Player’s Handbook and Dungeon Master’s Guide in favor of more wholesome pictures in 1983. Then they renamed Deities & Demigods to Legends & Lore. The game’s second edition removed the words “devil” and “demon” and replaced them with the purely make-believe terms “tanar’ri” and “baatezu.”

Today, most parents’ opinion of D&D completely reverses the fears of the eighties. Parents see the game as a creative activity that teaches teamwork, encourages reading, practices arithmetic, fosters social skills, and creates real-world friendships. Today’s parents fear that children spend too much time glued to screens, so best of all, D&D games encourage kids to spend time with friends together at the kitchen table.

Go back to number 10.

D&D’s Biggest Controversies Ranked—5. D&D Splits Into Two Games With “No Similarity,” Provoking Lawsuits

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D&D’s original Basic Set arrived in stores in the fall of 1977, but in only reached third level. For higher levels, the set directed players to Advanced Dungeons & Dragons—except the advanced game would take two more years to complete. The AD&D Dungeon Master’s Guide, which included the advanced combat tables, came in 1979. For 2 years, D&D players blended combat rules and magic items from the game’s original brown books with monsters from the AD&D Monster Manual, and later with the new races and classes from the AD&D Player’s Handbook (1978).

In the June 1979 issue of The Dragon, Gary Gygax made claims that baffled D&D fans used to playing with a mix of original, basic, and advanced D&D rules. “ADVANCED DUNGEONS & DRAGONS is a different game. Readers please take note! 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.”

Gary Gygax

AD&D never proved as different as Gygax claimed. His new version of D&D remained roughly compatible with the original. Supposedly, AD&D featured strict rules while original D&D featured room for customization, but everyone—even Gygax—changed and ignored AD&D rules to suit their tastes. Later, Gygax wrote, “I just DMed on the fly, so to speak, and didn’t use the rules books except for random encounters, monster stats, and treasure.”

Why did Gygax vehemently argue that AD&D held “no similarity” to D&D when the game’s fans found the claim laughable? Because D&D co-creator Dave Arneson felt that TSR owed him royalties for AD&D, while the company claimed Arneson only deserved royalties for the original game.

From Dave Arneson’s perspective, D&D came from his ideas. He had started with a sort of miniature game that had existed for generations and that appealed a tiny hobby, and then he had added the concepts that made a revolutionary game. Arneson invented a game where each player controlled a single character, and where a referee enabled players to attempt any action. He discovered the fun of looting dungeons. His fantasy game added characters defined by numeric attributes, and characters who could improve through experience.

From Gary Gygax’s perspective, he had labored for years on D&D. He had turned 20 pages of notes into the original rules. He had bet every cent he could scrape together on publishing an odd, risky game. In supplements and magazine articles, he enriched D&D. He defended it in letters and editorials. His friend Frank Mentzer wrote that for D&D, Gygax “paid the costs in stress on himself, his marriage, family, and friends.” Arneson had only planted an idea.

Dave Arneson (photo Kevin McColl)

Dave Arneson and Gary Gygax each argued that D&D’s success rested on his contribution. Both were correct, but that didn’t make sharing the wealth any easier. The court fight lasted until March 1981. The settlement granted Arneson a royalty of 2.5% of the cover price of core AD&D books. (In 1985, Arneson sued TSR again. His lawyers argued that the Monster Manual II—a collection of new monsters—qualified as a “revision” of the Monster Manual. Stop laughing. The court agreed.)

After Wizards of the Coast purchased TSR, they dropped the “Advanced” brand for the game’s third edition. In 30 Years of Adventure, Wizards CEO Peter Adkison wrote, Arneson “was supposed to get a royalty off of any product TSR published in the Dungeons & Dragons line. Previous owners ‘got around’ this royalty by publishing everything as Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. To me this seemed silly. I talked with Dave, and we agreed that he would release all claims to Dungeons & Dragons if I simply gave him a big check. I did.”

For the full story, see Basic and Advanced—The Time Dungeons & Dragons Split Into Two Games.

Next: Number 4.

D&D’s Biggest Controversies Ranked—7. D&D changes the game’s original handling of races and humanoids

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When D&D creators Dave Arneson and Gary Gygax adopted the word race for the playable species in D&D, they used the term in the same sense as the human race. More commonly, “race” refers to human groups who share superficial traits common to their ancestry, and that use recalls a long history of people using ancestry and appearance to justify mistreating and exploiting people. The choice of the word “race” weighed the game with problems that lasted until today. And D&D’s issues with race go beyond the baggage that weighs on the word.

“In the old days, elves and dwarves and some of the other playable options were very much the product of folklore, and in folklore, elves and dwarves were embodied metaphor,” said D&D’s lead rules designer Jeremy Crawford. “They were metaphors for different aspects of the human psyche. So elves were often associated with more elevated lofty aspects of the human psyche. Dwarves were often associated with the industriousness that some people manifest.” If fairy tales, these metaphors became talking creatures. “You can meet a demon that’s embodied evil. You can meet an angel that’s embodied good. You can meet a dwarf that’s the embodiment of industriousness and hardiness.”

Often gamers enjoy playing metaphors and relish taking the role of an ale-loving, hammer-smacking dwarf who craves gold. Sometimes gamers like to play characters who stand out for their unique qualities, such as a dwarf wizard who happens to love tea and gardening. When the D&D team made faeries a playable race, tiny barbarians became widely popular. A chance to play a raging fairy that felt one of a kind delighted players.

Through most of D&D’s history, the rules penalized or blocked players who wanted a character who defied a race’s archetype. At first, rules blocked many combinations of race and class, so a dwarf simply couldn’t become a wizard. Later, the game added racial ability score modifiers that encouraged characters to fit the archetype of their chosen race, so half-orcs gained strength and constitution, but lacked charisma. Originally, half-orcs only excelled as assassins. The modifiers meant a player who wanted to play something like a dwarf wizard had to settle for a less efficient character. Most players disliked suffering a penalty just to play a certain combination of race and class.

Also, ability score modifiers raise troubling reminders of how real ethnic groups can suffer from racist stereotypes that paint people as lacking certain aptitudes. D&D’s unfortunate use of the word “race” makes those reminders far more powerful. D&D races can include robot-like warforged, tiny fairies with wings, and humanoid dragons that breathe fire and lay eggs, but they all represent sorts of people in the game world.

In 2020, the D&D team decided that some of the game’s rules and lore aimed at treating non-human game people as metaphors had to go. To “pave the way for truly unique characters,” Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything stopped linking ability modifiers to race. Now, players could create a dwarf wizard with a green thumb without settling for a less efficient build than a similar character who happened to be an elf.

Players also wanted game people to have just as much potential to be good and virtuous—or to be wicked—as real people.

Humans have a knack for imagining human-like qualities for animals, monsters, and even inanimate objects like desk lamps. When a human-like character also shares qualities associated with a human group, we tend to imagine that that character as part of the group, so a cartoon truck with eyelashes and a bow seems female. When imaginary creatures share qualities associated with real human groups, this tendency can create troubling associations. For example, Gary Gygax created drow to resemble the photo-negative of Tolkien’s elves. Instead of having dark hair and white skin, drow featured white hair and black skin. A dark-skinned race characterized as evil without exception creates a troubling association. Drow are imaginary, and Gygax never intended to link drow to real races, but the association remains. Suppose you read a children’s book featuring imaginary talking dogs. In the tale, all the golden dogs are good and pure, while all the brown dogs are wicked and savage. Instead of thinking, “Well, they’re just imaginary talking dogs,” you would say, “Oh, hell no,” before hurling the book across the room.

The D&D team wrote, “Throughout the 50-year history of D&D, some of the peoples in the game—orcs and drow being two of the prime examples—have been characterized as monstrous and evil, using descriptions that are painfully reminiscent of how real-world ethnic groups have been and continue to be denigrated. That’s just not right, and it’s not something we believe in.”

This belief shows in the alignments listed for creatures in the game. The 2014 Monster Manual listed drow and orcs as evil, but newer books characterize them as having “any alignment.” Even demons and angels now get “typical” alignments rather than unvarying ones. Some of this just reflects an extra emphasis. The 2014 Monster Manual already explained that “the alignment specified in a monster’s stat block is the default. Feel free to depart from it and change a monster’s alignment to suit the needs of your campaign.”

More recently, the D&D team announced that the 2024 update to the game would scrap the term race, likely in favor of the word species. Unlike races, the differences between character species go beyond superficial, so the term “species” fits better, even if its flavor seems a bit scientific for a fantasy game.

Some folks have pointed out that the word “species” brings as much historical baggage as “race,” because real world racists once pretended that people who looked different were different species, and then used that as a way to justify all sorts of injustices. Still, “species” likely rates as the best of all the imperfect options.

The controversy came from different perspectives. Some gamers favored characters that fit mythic archetypes—a valid preference. Some gamers loved the D&D they grew up with and felt angry about any changes that implied the old game included elements that felt racist. Some gamers wanted a game with unalterably evil humanoids, so young and old orcs could be killed without question. And many just followed an allegiance to their ideological team and raged at change.

Next: Number 6.

Related: How D&D’s Rules Changed To Encourage More Varied Groups of Heroes Than Those in the Pulp Fantasy That Inspired the Game

How D&D’s Rules Changed To Encourage More Varied Groups of Heroes Than Those in the Pulp Fantasy That Inspired the Game.

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Today’s Dungeons & Dragons focuses on letting players build custom characters to suit their taste, but for half of the game’s 50-year history, the rules emphasized rolling a character and playing the numbers the dice gave. Especially at first, gamers demonstrated their play skill by making the most of some random combination of scores. Original D&D paired non-humans with particular character classes, so dwarves could only become fighting men. Every elf, dwarf, and (until 1977) hobbit fit their race’s archetype. Mainly though, gamers loyal to the game rules played humans, because the rules limited the number of levels non-humans could gain. For example, a dwarf could only reach level 6. Largely human parties suited the taste of D&D co-creator Gary Gygax. Ability scores hardly mattered, and with limited character options, characters became distinctive as they adventured and won magical gear. Those magic trophies served as mementos and made one elf play differently from all the others.

Today’s game looks very different. If a party contains a single human, the group rates as unusual. Player’s typically want characters who feel extraordinary from level 1. Often, that means playing the best ale-loving, hammer-smacking, dwarf who ever craved gold. Sometimes that means playing a dwarf wizard who happens to love gardening. The countless tiny, fairy barbarians that have joined my tables show that players relish a chance to play a character who defies type and at least seems one of a kind. Non-human characters only match a racial archetype when a player chooses it. To most players, the old rules that made races fit a stereotype now feel confining. Sometimes, those old rules even feel like a troubling reminder of outdated attitudes.

This evolution took all of D&D’s 50 years. This post tells the story of the change.

“In the old days, elves and dwarves and some of the other playable options were very much the product of folklore, and in folklore, elves and dwarves were embodied metaphor,” says D&D’s lead rules designer Jeremy Crawford. “They were metaphors for different aspects of the human psyche. So, elves were often associated with more elevated lofty aspects of the human psyche. Dwarves were often associated with the industriousness that some people manifest.” In fairy tales, these metaphors became talking creatures. “You can meet a demon that’s embodied evil. You can meet an angel that’s embodied good. You can meet a dwarf that’s the embodiment of industriousness and hardiness.”

Early D&D included rules that made characters fit the archetype of their chosen race. The game restricted non-humans to particular classes and blocked their advancement to higher levels. Later, the game added racial ability score modifiers that encouraged characters to fit certain archetypes, so half-orcs gained strength and constitution, but lacked charisma. Originally, half-orcs only excelled as assassins.

Gary Gygax favored the sort of human-dominated fantasy that appeared in the fiction that inspired him. To Gary, non-human level limits explained why humans dominated D&D worlds despite the extraordinary talents and longevity of elves and dwarves. Gary wrote, “If demi-humans, already given some advantages, were as able as humans, the world would be dominated by them, and there goes the whole of having a relatively familiar world setting in regard to what cultures and societies one will find in control. So, a demi-human is unlimited in thief level only, as that this a class not destined to control the fate of major groups or states.

“Why are humans more able to rise to higher levels than demi-humans?“ Gygax wrote in a internet discussion. ”Because the gods say so, and don’t like pointy eared types with curly-toed shoes, squat miners with big beards, hairy-footed midgets, etc.” Gygax intended the comment as harmless fun at the expense of make-believe creatures, and in 2005 most readers read it that way. But now the comment reads in a way Gygax surely didn’t consider. In our history, people have justified inflicting countless horrors on other humans by claiming that God disapproved of some group. Talking about even fictional half-humans like this raises uncomfortable echoes.

Arduin adventure party

This adventuring party was pictured in Arduin Grimoire III

Even in D&D’s first years, not every player shared Gygax’s taste for games where most characters resembled the human heroes of Poul Anderson, Fritz Leiber, and Robert E. Howard. When J. Eric Holmes wrote the 1977 D&D Basic Set, his draft explained, “An expedition might include, in addition to the seven basic classes, an African witch doctor/magic-user, a centaur, an Amerindian medicine man/cleric, a lawful werebear, a Japanese samurai fighting man and a half-human, half-serpent naga”. The published book cut most of those options, leaving only “a centaur, a lawful werebear, and a Japanese samurai fighting man.” In Dragon 53, Holmes wrote about the set’s limited character options. “I am personally sorry to see the range of possibilities so restricted. The original rules (the three little brown books) specifically stated that a player could be a dragon if he wanted to be. I enjoyed having dragons, centaurs, samurai and witch doctors in the game. My own most successful player character was a Dreenoi, an insectoid creature borrowed from McEwan’s Starguard.” Meanwhile, Arduin Grimoire III (1978), an unofficial supplement to D&D, included pictures of an exotic adventuring parties that scarcely resembled a typical group. Author Dave Hargrave wrote, “The fact is that most players want individuality in their characters.”

When Wizards of the Coast purchased TSR, new CEO Peter Adkison steered D&D to more flexible character options. “My biggest beef with the older rules were the consistent limitations on what characters could become,” Adkison wrote. “Why couldn’t dwarves be clerics. Why could wizards of some classes only advance to some pre-determined level limit? Why couldn’t intelligent monster races like orcs and ogres pick up character classes? In my mind these restrictions had no place in a rules set but should be restrictions established (if at all) at the campaign-setting level.” The 2000 edition scrapped non-human level limits and rules that limited each race to particular classes.

Still, ability score modifiers remained in the game, and they stayed in the 2014 Player’s Handbook. Lead rules designer Jeremy Crawford said the modifiers “are specifically there just to reinforce the traditional D&D archetypes for dwarf adventurers, elf adventurers, halfling adventurers, and so on.” The modifiers meant a player who wanted to play something like a dwarf wizard had to settle for a less efficient character.

Experienced players rarely settled, so the ability score modifiers felt like as much of a restriction as the old rule that limited dwarves to playing fighting men. As for new players, the ability score modifiers became a trap. A player who fancied playing a halfling barbarian would later learn their character suffered a permanent limitation. Restrictions that force players to make interesting choices can make better games. Much of the fun of character building comes from choosing among enticing options, but for players set on a class, the choice between one race and a plainly weaker option adds nothing. “All games are about making choices and making meaningful choices,” Crawford said. “But we want the choices to be between things that are all fun and interesting. Like a great example is making the choice between the classes where it’s an open-ended field and you get to just choose the one that sing to you. What we don’t want is choice where just hiding inside it is some kind of trap. And that’s what the traditional ability score bonuses often feel like to people.”

Aside from adding a trap—and not the fun kind—ability score modifiers raise troubling reminders of how real ethnic groups can suffer from racist stereotypes that paint people as lacking certain aptitudes. D&D’s unfortunate use of the word “race” makes those reminders far more powerful. When D&D creators Dave Arneson and Gary Gygax adopted the word race for the playable species in D&D, they used the term in the same sense as the human race. More commonly, “race” refers to human groups who share superficial traits common to their ancestry, and that use recalls a long history of people using ancestry and appearance to justify mistreating and exploiting people.

Our characters in roleplaying games represent us in the game’s imaginary world. They might be just-pretend types like dragons, vampires, and robots—sometimes pronounced warforged—but we identify with them because our game world stand-ins think and feel mostly like us as people. Our characters represent people, and if they’re people, we can imagine them enjoying the same versatility and potential as real-world people.

To “pave the way for truly unique characters,” Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything (2020) stopped linking ability modifiers to race. Now, players could create a dwarf wizard with a green thumb without settling for a less efficient build than a similar character who happened to be an elf. “It is not our assumption and never has been in fifth edition that those bonuses in the players racial traits are true of every member of the race,” said Crawford. “As the game continues to evolve, and also as the different types of character people make proliferates and becomes wonderfully diverse as people create types of characters that many of us would never imagine. It’s time for a bit more of those old assumption to, if not pass away, to be something that a person can set aside if it’s not of interest for them and their character. It’s with that in mind that we created this system to be true to our philosophy. We sometimes talk about when we give DMing advice to whenever possible say yes. This is a system about saying yes to players. That yes, you can play the dwarf you want to play. You can play the elf you want to play. You can play the halfling you want to play.” In D&D, player characters stopped serving as metaphors.

How Shadowdark Delivers Old-School D&D Intensity With Modern Game Mechanics

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The Shadowdark game by Kelsey Dionne of The Arcane Library bills itself as delivering old school gaming with modernized mechanics. Shadowdark hardly rates as the first game with this approach. Into the Unknown (2019) boasts 5E compatibility combined with old-school mechanisms such as “morale, reaction rolls, random encounters, gold for XP, and henchmen.” Still, with a Kickstarter closing in on a million dollars, Shadowdark stands as an unprecedented success.

I played Lost Citadel of the Scarlet Minotaur, an adventure from the Shadowdark free quickstart set, and marveled at how well the game duplicated so much of the charm of D&D in 1974—except with zero confusion over inches, initiative, and what Gary Gygax meant by writing that elves could “freely switch class whenever they choose.” Make that year 1975; Shadowdark has thieves.How does Shadowdark create the experience of early fantasy gaming with rules that echo fifth edition Dungeons & Dragons, from the ability score bonuses, to advantage, disadvantage, and inspiration?

Death always seems near

In my Shadowdark party, two characters started with 1 hp and one had 2. Sixty percent of the group would likely drop from a single hit! Those rock bottom numbers come from the game’s randomly rolled hit points and from the lowly stats that result from rolling 3d6 in order. My character suffered a -2 Constitution adjustment. To be fair, Shadowdark offers PCs one advantage over brown box D&D. Characters who drop to 0 can be revived. But stabilizing a character takes a DC 15 check and spells often fail, so forget the popular fifth-edition strategy of just letting characters drop to 0 before healing because damage beyond 0 heals for free.

This risk of sudden death gives Shadowdark a sense of peril that I’ve never felt in a fifth-edition game. That makes for a tense, exciting game.

Treasure is the goal

Shadowdark awards experience points for treasure gained and not for monsters slain. This mirrors the original D&D game, which awarded characters much more experience for winning gold than for killing monsters.

D&D players could take their characters anyplace they chose, but the XP-for-gold mechanic rewarded them for risking the dungeon crawls that made the original game irresistible fun. The lure of gold joined priests and rogues, law and chaos, together with a common goal. Plus the quest for treasure resonated with players. Gary wrote, “If you, the real you, were an adventurer, what would motivate you more than the lure of riches?” (See The fun and realism of unrealistically awarding experience points for gold.

Battle becomes a last resort

In addition to rewarding players for seeking fun, the XP-for-gold system offers another benefit: It creates a simple way to award experience points for succeeding at non-combat challenges. As a new character, potentially with 1 hit point, you stand little chance of leveling through combat. Players joke that D&D is about killing things and taking their stuff, but in the original game and in Shadowdark, you are better off using your wits to take stuff. So long as your cunning leads to gold, you get experience.

In modern D&D games, fights routinely drag on until one side is wiped out, often because monsters that surrender or run can spoil the fun unless dungeon masters cope with the hassles of broken morale. To most D&D players, an escape feels like a loss, and nobody likes to lose. But when battle is a dangerous setback in a quest for treasure, monsters who break and run give players a quick and welcome victory. Shadowdark offers morale rolls that make fights quick and unpredictable.

Wandering monsters quicken the pace

Wandering monsters can improve D&D play, mainly by giving players a sense of urgency. Gary recommended “frequent checking for wandering monsters” as a method to speed play. In a perilous game like Shadowdark, players can slow the game with meticulous play, searching everything, checking everything, accomplishing nothing. But the game’s wandering monsters turn time into danger. Every passing minute gives foes more chances to find the party. Wandering monsters rarely carry loot and the XP reward that it brings, so idle characters just face danger with scant reward. Players keep moving, risking the next room in search for treasure.

Players choose their difficulty

In the early D&D game, players chose the amount of difficulty they wanted. Every level of the dungeon corresponded to a level of character, so the first level offered challenges suitable for first-level characters. Players could seek greater challenges—and greater rewards—as they went deeper. This system gives players a choice they rarely get in today’s D&D, and it adds a element of strategy. To lure characters to danger, the 1974 game doubled the number of experience points needed to advance to each level, then matched the increase with similar increases in treasure. (See The Story of the Impossible Luck that Leads D&D Parties to Keep Facing Threats They Can Beat.)

The Shadowdark quick start game doesn’t explain this approach, but the structure is there. Treasure and XP rewards escalate as characters rise in level, coaxing players to delve as far down as they dare.

This design frees DMs from the burden of designing encounters that make players feel challenged without killing characters. Instead, players decide on the risks they dare to face, and if an encounter proves unbeatable, players can run. After all, skilled players avoid fights.

Success requires conserving resources and planning for escape

In the 1975 Greyhawk supplement to D&D, the 6th-level cleric spell find the path focused on escaping dungeons. “By means of this spell the fastest and safest way out of a trap, maze, or wilderness can be found.” In the original books, the sample tricks and traps aimed to get PCs lost in the dungeon where wandering monsters and dwindling resources might finish a party. When Gary’s shifting rooms and unnoticed slopes made the PCs hopelessly lost, find the path offered a way out. (See Spells that let players skip the dungeons in Dungeons & Dragons.)

Shadowdark includes rules that make dungeons as risky as the underworlds that made find the path merit a 6th-level spell. All characters need light to see, so the guide explains, “In this game, a torch only holds back the pressing darkness for one hour of real-world time. There isn’t a moment to waste when the flames are burning low.” In darkness, the characters suffer disadvantage and wandering monsters rush to prey on the vulnerable.

A supply of torches and other light sources become essential, and the tracking the supply becomes more than bookkeeping. The game boasts a simple encumbrance system that matches the one Runequest offered as an old-school innovation in 1978. Characters can carry one item per point of strength. Torches and other light sources fill those precious inventory slots.

Shadowdark also lifts the burden of totaling time in the dungeon by dropping 10-minute turns in favor of the simple method of making 1 hour of play equal 1 hour in the dungeon. This speeds play by spurring players to act with the same urgency as their characters.

In the game I played, as we lit our last torches, we knew we only had an hour to escape the dungeon with our loot. And the wandering monsters made that escape no sure thing. This made our run to the exit as tense as our descent into the underworld.

Ability checks become unusual

Some gamers say that ability checks make modern D&D less fun. These fans of an older style prefer a game where instead of rolling perception to spot a trap door, characters tap the floor with their 10-foot pole.

Shadowdark includes D&D’s modern rules for d20 ability checks, but the game favors an old-school reluctance to make checks. The Game Master Guide recommends “giving players the opportunity to make decisions that rely on their creativity and wits, not on their dice rolls or stat bonuses.”

Faced with a challenge, players must observe and interact with the game world. Instead of scanning their character sheet for solutions, players rely on their wits and ingenuity. Ideally, the game tests player skill more than character stats.

Characters develop through play.

Before starting my Shadowdark game with my 1 hp character, I joked that I’d just finished writing his 8-page backstory. For modern D&D games, I appreciate players who invest in backstories; for a 1 hp character, such a document is pure folly. Instead, the story of a Shadowdark character evolves from playing the game and from the random luck of the die. Starting with characters rolled using 3d6 in order, Shadowdark asks players and GMs alike to surrender control to the dice. Forget planning a story and nudging characters along. Things like wandering monsters and morale rolls take the game into into an unknowable future. Even when characters advance, they roll their hit points and new talents. This trades the fun of building characters in favor of the challenge of playing a character that fate and the dice delivered. Characters stories begin and end as part in the shared story everyone experienced at the game table. (See D&D and the Role of the Die Roll, a Love Letter.)

Modern mechanics

With so many nods to the D&D of 1975, why play Shadowdark instead? The game gains from a foundation built on the fifth edition rules and the nearly 50 years of innovation in the modern game.

So Shadowdark includes cyclical initiative instead of a reference to a system that only appeared in the Chainmail rules.

In the original D&D game, ability scores hardly mattered. Characters with a high score in the most important ability for their class might get at 10% bonus to XP, but otherwise the scores meant little more than a +1 on certain attacks.

In the Blackmoor campaign that led to D&D, Dave Arneson used ability scores as the basis of tests that resemble modern saving throws or ability checks. “Players would roll against a trait, Strength for example, to see if they were successful at an attempt,” writes Blackmoor scholar D. H. Boggs. However, when Gary penned the D&D rules, he lost that effect. Gary favored estimating the odds and improvising a roll to fit. Now, GMs and player alike prefer a clearer system for deciding whether a character succeeds. The d20 mechanic delivers that transparency. (See How Dungeons & Dragons Got Its Ability Scores and Ability Checks—From the Worst Mechanic in Role-Playing Game History to a Foundation Of D&D.)

Rather than the system of ranges and movement in inches that made sense to a tiny audience of miniature wargamers fluent in inches on a sand table, Shadowdark puts distances into close (5 feet), near (up to 30 feet), and far (within sight during an encounter or scene). You can still play on a grid, but narrative battles play fine too.

Gary’s early games would sometimes put as many as 20 players into a party. The 1975 D&D tournament at Origins gathered parties of 12 for a trip into the Tomb of Horrors. Such large parties designated a caller to speak for the group. Nowadays, gamers speak for themselves. In Shadowdark, everyone takes turns, even outside of combat. No one feels like a spectator. Disciplined parties avoid scattering and becoming easy prey for wandering monsters.

As for elves switching classes, Shadowdark opts for the the 1979 innovation of separating race and class, and the 2020-something innovation of calling “race” something else (ancestry).

As a mix of old and new, Shadowdark lands in a good place.

Why D&D’s d20 Tests Make Experts Look Inept and How to Make the Best of It

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Decades ago, I read game designer Steve Jackson explain why he swapped the d20 to-hit roll in Dungeons & Dragons for the 3d6 roll used in his alternative combat system Melee (1977). Steve considered the 3d6 bell curve so superior that he trashed the d20 without a second thought. His roleplaying games The Fantasy Trip and GURPS use 3d6 core mechanics. Then, I struggled to grasp Steve’s dislike of the d20.

Now, I understand Jackson’s disdain, but I love D&D. Like esteemed game designers such as Jeremy Crawford and Monte Cook, I find reasons to embrace the d20.

In Cook’s designer’s notes for his Numenera RPG, he describes the d20’s flaw. “Using the d20 introduces a great deal of randomness into a game. It’s difficult to use a d20 as a task resolution die and still have character aspects play a big part in success or failure without all of a sudden finding yourself using pretty big numbers.” He gives an example like this: Suppose two archers try to hit a bullseye by rolling a 20 or higher. An untrained person with a decent 12 Dexterity gets +1 and hits 10% of the time. In comparison, a 12th-level ranger trained in the bow and boasting an 18 Dexterity gets a +8, but still only hits the bullseye 45% of the time.

D&D games show this dynamic when the DM asks everyone to roll an Intelligence (Arcana) check to recognize ancient sigils, and then the brainy wizard fails while the barbarian knucklehead succeeds. That outcome may seem funny the first time, but similar scenes play frequently and can feel disappointing. Instead of rewarding the player who chose to make a character good at something, the d20 roll often makes experts look inept.

If D&D used bigger bonuses, then experts would get a boost. Suppose the expert archer gained a +25 and hitting the bullseye required a roll of 30. Now, the sharpshooter feels more like Annie Oakley. But that arrangement makes difficult tasks impossible for unskilled characters when we really want success to become rare.

Instead of using big modifiers, fifth edition’s bounded accuracy uses modest bonuses that give every character a chance of success at the price of making experts inconsistent.

Monte describes an alternative. “Now imagine that you used 2d10 instead. 2d10 gives us a more normal distribution. In other words, you end up with a much better chance of getting a 10 than a 20. Using the same bonuses, the archer still hits the bullseye 45% of the time, but the unskilled guy only 3% of the time. That makes more sense.” With a 2d10-based game, clumsy newcomers at Faerûn athletic competitions luck into fewer medals. (In one of my very first posts, I grappled with a related issue.)

This more natural range of outcomes leads game designer Steffan O’Sullivan to write, “I’m not fond of dice systems with a flat distribution. I’m solidly in the bell-curve camp.” O’Sullivan created the Fudge RPG, which became the basis for the popular Fate system. Both games use a set of four special 6-sided dice marked on two sides with a plus (+), two with a minus (-), and two blanks. “When you need to roll dice in Fate, pick up four Fate dice and roll them. When you read the dice, read every + as +1, every blank as 0, and every – as –1. Add them all together. You’ll get a result from –4 to +4, most often between –2 and +2.” No roll requires counting past 4, so even little kids add the results easily. “The fewer mathematical calculations used to figure out a dice result, the more likely you are to stay in roleplaying,” O’Sullivan writes. “So Fudge Dice were born, and I like them a lot. They’re a joy to use and don’t slow the game down at all, one of my early design goals.” The system’s bell curve makes results of -4 and +4 rare, but possible. So a +4 (1.23%) matches my real-life chance of a bullseye, while an Olympic archer scores a bullseye on any roll better than -4.

Despite the virtues of the bell curve, Monte Cook still opted for a d20 for Numenera and D&D creators Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson chose the d20 for to-hit rolls and saving throws. The d20 rolls beautifully, it generates a big range of numbers without adding, and the icosahedron feels deliciously different from the bland cubes in countless games like Monopoly. Gygax became particularly enchanted with the exotic new dice from Japan.

Most importantly, d20s yield predictable odds compared to mechanics that combine multiple dice. Monte Cook explains, “If you’re using a system where the GM has to assign a target number for a task, it’s a lot easier to do that on the fly with a d20 than, say 3d6 or 2d10. Why? Because with a d20, the difference between, say, 17 and 18 is the same as the difference between 8 and 9. They’re basically just 5% increments. With a bell curve, that’s a lot harder to figure for the GM, particularly on the fly.”

In 1974, D&D lacked ability checks. To decide between success and failure, Gary Gygax suggested that DMs estimate the chance of success, and then improvise a roll that fits the odds. A d20 roll made the math easy.

Playing D&D means learning to embrace the d20’s swings. To help gamers love the d20, D&D’s current rules architect Jeremy Crawford offered advice on the October 3, 2019 episode of the Dragon Talk podcast. “Any time the d20 is in the mix, that is a swingy die so get ready for the unexpected. What I encourage groups, players and DMs alike to do, is rather than viewing that as something to chafe against or be unhappy about, embrace it as a storytelling opportunity. Over the years, the longer I play D&D and DM D&D, the more I have come to love the unpredictability of the d20, because so often it will create moments that will challenge the DM and the players to really stretch their storytelling ability to come up with a fun reason for why this transpired. Why did the ace rogue who triggered this battle, why did she end up going last?

“When the d20 throws you a curve ball, catch it and follow through with the curve. Just see where it leads you rather than saying, ‘this is dumb’ or ‘this isn’t how it should play out.’ No, in D&D, what the d20 does is really showing how this is going to play out. Let’s ride it and see where this craziness goes.”

If I were magically transported back to a version of 1974 that somehow lacked Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson, would my attempt to bring dungeons and dragons to the world use a d20? I might choose Fudge Dice, but I would never stop giving those new icosahedrons from Japan forlorn looks.

Related: D&D and the Role of the Die Roll, a Love Letter
When You Describe Outcomes, Flatter Your Game’s Heroes and Monsters
In D&D, Letting Everyone Roll Certain Checks Guarantees Success, So Why Bother Rolling?

If Dungeons Offer Riches, Why Don’t the Authorities Loot Them?

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During the 70s, the debates that raged in the pages of fantasy game fanzines mostly matched the gaming topics argued on Facebook and Reddit today. For example, forty-some years ago, gamers debated if dungeon masters should break the rules for the sake of story.

But we have forgotten some arguments that raged in places like Alarums & Excursions. Today’s post revisits an interesting debate that now seems as contentious as angels on pinheads.

First, some background. The original Dungeons & Dragons rules recommend 20 players as an ideal number for a campaign, although the text says one referee can handle as many as 50 players. Of course, 50 D&D players probably never crowded a basement at once. Smaller parties formed from the available players and mounted treasure hunts into the huge dungeons that dominated play. At the peak of the  Blackmoor and Greyhawk campaigns run by D&D co-designers Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson, such sessions ran several times a week.

Instead of talking about a dungeon master’s campaign or game world, most gamers talked about a DM’s dungeon, because that’s what they played. (See When Megadungeons Ruled Dungeons & Dragons.) Active players took characters from one DM’s dungeon to another. As long as DMs played in similar styles, that worked. (Early fanzines included much talk about coping with PCs coming from incorrectly run dungeons, but no one agreed on, say, the correct ratio of casualties to treasure.)

Popular dungeons saw lots of traffic from twenty or more players, each with a collection of characters at different levels, some recuperating from injury. Gamers started to notice that these dungeons resembled tourist attractions that drew crowds hoping a few risks would lead to a quick score, much like Las Vegas.

Dave Arneson and his group saw how much his dungeon resembled a tourist trap and they exaggerated it. The elves who managed the site of Blackmoor dungeon created a faire at the entrance boasting “hundreds of fabulous deals (some worth what you pay for!)” The elves constructed turnstiles at the dungeon entrance and charged 1 gp admission.  “You can also sign the Adventurers Book, which gets you a genuine ‘I Visited Blackmoor Dungeon’ button when you come out the main entrance. No winners yet.”

In the First Fantasy Campaign (1977), Arneson described the entrance to his dungeon.

After the second destruction of Blackmoor Castle, the EIves were made responsible for the care and protection of the area and it’s defense. Our
Elf player took a number of steps to do this:

  1. They have set up a barricade at the foot of the hill leading to the Castle that forces each entrant to pass a test of Purity (generally anti-Vampire), including a drink of Holy Water for each (provided at bargain rate by the Church of the Facts of Life run by Bishop Carr).
  2. Making it through that, the would-be adventures enter the Castle where the Elves have set up a great fair that fills the courtyard. There are  hundreds of fabulous deals (some worth what you pay for!) and some shady types (cutpurses and the like). This lets the Judge wheel and deal with the players to empty their purses and make them wonder what is going on.
  3. There are now turnstiles into the Dungeon (1 GP admission as well as taking an Elven Tour (since canceled when the two Dwarves let Fang out of his box) (see attached short tout sample). You can also sign the Adventurers Book, which gets you a genuine “I Visited Blackmoor Dungeon” Button when you come out the main entrance. No winners yet.
  4. Each of the regular exit/entrances from the Dungeon are heavily guarded by Elves armed with Holy Water Hoses, and other anti-Evil charms plus an Elven Prince and two Elven Lords! So, if you can reach a door and are still good, the pursuit will break off and the Elves let you in.

Other DMs treated dungeons as tourist attractions, although with less silliness.  In the Forgotten Realms, a famous tavern called the Yawning Portal monetizes the main entrance into the Undermountain dungeon. The innkeeper “Durnan charges adventurers 1 gp each to descend into the well, whether they opt to use the rope or not. The return trip also costs a piece of gold, sent up in a bucket in advance.”

The debate came when game masters wondered how authorities would react to the heavily trafficked dungeons that made homes to monsters and sources of treasure.

Arduin Grimoire Volume IX End War

Ed Simbalist and Wilf Backhaus, the creators of Chivalry & Sorcery (1978), favored adventures outside dungeons. They imagined a society that eliminated dungeons. “A large concentration of ‘evil’ will attract the Church and might bring down a ‘Crusade’ against it. A large concentration of loot will attract the King, a personage always in need of money. Nor is it possible to keep such a dungeon complex secret for long. Myths and legends about such a place and what is to be found in it soon become common knowledge.”

Meanwhile, Dave Hargrave loved dungeons. Page 1 of The Arduin Grimoire Volume IX includes the topic, “Dungeons and why the authorities don’t shut them down,” which counters the opinion voiced in C&S.

Nowadays, few campaigns run in the style that made Blackmoor seem like Six Flags, so few wonder why the Lords of Waterdeep never send their troops into Undermountain for coin. But if anyone asks, some of Dave Hargrave’s points seem plausible.

Dungeons and Why the Authorities Don’t Shut Them Down by Dave Hargrave

I am sure the question of why local authorities don’t just run troops into the “dungeons” of the land has come up now and again. I mean, what could be a more intelligent and logical method to deal with the creature-ridden madness and loose magik of these places? Here are a few reasons to wet your appetite on why they don’t just do that.

  1. With such a large contingent of troops away from their stations, it would be easy to attack the kingdom directly since there would be fewer defenders to face.
  2. It would be too easy for a “bad guy” associated with such a place to trap the soldiers in the dungeon, perhaps sealing them away forever. This directly relates to point one above.
  3. With the high casualties of this kind of action, soon there would be few willing to join the constantly thinning ranks of the army, no matter what the price. Most men are not fools when it comes to dying for no good cause. Again, this directly relates to point # 1.
  4. The troops mucking about in one of these places could open some old gate or cause some awesome and terrible bane to come forth upon the land, thus turning the people against the fool who caused such a calamity.
  5. The “dungeons” act as a constant “honey pot” that ensnares the more adventurous (read that as trouble makers) and any loot they manage to bring out, is, of course, taxable. A hell of a lot cheaper way to make money.
  6. With such a spot to attract undesirable things, it is easier to be aware of just what nasty beings are about. You don’t have to go hacking about the dark and dreary countryside; you know where all the uglies are hiding.

There are still other reasons, but I hope I have made my point. It just isn’t worth all the risk for a king to send his troops into such a mess.

The Movies and Stories than Inspired Dave Arneson to Invent the Dungeon Crawl

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Around 1971 Dave Arneson and his circle of Minneapolis gamers invented games where players controlled individual characters who grew with experience and who could try anything because dice and a referee determined the outcomes. The group tried this style of play in various settings, but Dave invented one that proved irresistible: the dungeon.

Dave’s Blackmoor game—the campaign that spawned Dungeons & Dragons—began with a gaming group playing fictional versions of themselves in a fantasy world. The characters became champions in a series of miniature battles featuring armies clashing above ground. Without dungeons, the Blackmoor game might have stayed miniature wargaming rather than becoming D&D and a game nearly as well known as Monopoly. But by creating the dungeon crawl, Dave invented a new activity that transformed the campaign and ultimately made a lasting addition to popular culture.

The dungeons under Castle Blackmoor began as a minor diversion to the campaign’s fantasy battles above ground, but the Blackmoor bunch spent so much time underground that Arneson ultimately declared the above-ground conflicts lost to forfeit. In a recollection of that first dungeon adventure, player Greg Svenson writes, “By the end of the weekend I had fallen in love with the game.” Dave Megarry of the Blackmoor game wanted to capture the dungeon experience during Arneson’s down time, so he created the Dungeon! board game.

The dungeon crawl contributed as much to the initial popularity of D&D as roleplaying. In the dungeon, D&D brought a fun and evocative activity for a group of players. See (How the Dungeon Powered the Success of D&D and the First Role-Playing Games.

The strangest thing about focusing a game on parties of adventures who explore monster-infested dungeons for treasure is that this activity never happens in the fantasies that inspired the game. At best, you can find elements: traps and treasure in the mummy’s tomb, orcs in Moria, and so on.

The Kibri Castle Branzoll like the one owned by Dave Arneson

The Blackmoor campaign first adapted the Chainmail rules, co-written by D&D co-creator Gary Gygax. But Chainmail never mentions dungeons. At most, the rules suggest using graph paper to map efforts to tunnel under fortifications.

Dave’s Blackmoor games featured a toy castle, which served as the focus for the above-ground battles. Castles can have dungeons, although in 1971 the dungeon of popular fiction was an underground jail rather than a sprawling compound stocked with monsters and treasure.

Nonetheless, in 1972’s second issue of the campaign newsletter, the “Blackmoor Gazette and Rumormonger”, Arneson reported on dungeons below the castle where “heroes went looking for adventure and treasure.” In Playing at the World, Jon Peterson writes, “By this point, Arneson had mapped, on a pad of graph paper, a dungeon six levels deep beneath the castle, with each level containing progressively more formidable adversaries.”

How did Dave Arneson invent the dungeon crawl? By the time people started asking about it, he no longer remembered all the details. Enough clues remain to reveal the specific stories and movies that probably inspired his creation, likely during a June weekend in 1971.

The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings offer obvious inspiration. J.R.R Tolkien imagines parties of heroes who keep finding themselves in sprawling, underground compounds.

The Hobbit takes readers into the goblin king’s warrens under the Misty Mountains, where Bilbo gets lost in the tunnels and encounters Gollum. Later, Bilbo and his party reach the abandoned dwarven city under the Lonely Mountain, where Smaug sleeps in the “great bottommost cellar or dungeon-hall of the ancient dwarves right at the Mountain’s root.” Even though the tunnels under Lonely Mountain do not fit the definition of a dungeon as an underground jail, Tolkien takes a bit of poetic license and refers to the halls as a dungeon. The Lord of the Rings revisits the dungeon again with Moria, the vast underground compound where the fellowship encounters both orcs and the demonic Balrog.

Dave cites a different inspiration for dungeons. In a 1978 interview that appeared in Wargaming issue 4, he explains. “A local TV station had on several old monster movies, which I watched while eating popcorn and reading old Conan novels. It was then that Blackmoor Dungeon was first conceived.”

Different Worlds issue 3 June/July 1979

His next account of inventing the dungeon crawl comes from his “My Life in Role Playing” article for Different Worlds issue 3, from June/July 1979. “How did it all start in Blackmoor? I can’t really say. I had spent the previous day watching about five monster movies on Creature Feature weekend (ch. 5), reading a Conan book (I cannot recall which one but I always thought they were much the same) and stuffing myself with popcorn, doodling on a piece of graph paper. I was also quite tired of my [Napoleonic] Campaign with all its rigid rules, etc., and was perhaps rebelling against it too (in fact I’m sure I was!!).”

Dave forgot the Conan book and never names the movies that sparked his imagination, but clues lead to some likely answers.

To start, the Horror Incorporated Project compiles a list of all the creature features broadcast on KSTP-TV in Saint Paul – Minneapolis throughout the 1970s.

Blackmoor started with Dave’s toy castle. “I had this neat German plastic kit and I just imagined what sort of fantasy setting it would make,” he recalled in a 2009 interview in Kobold Quarterly issue 9. Meanwhile, on Saturday May 29, 1971, The Black Room (1935) aired on the local station. The movie features a baron’s castle that, like Castle Blackmoor, sits atop a rocky hill and includes a bricked, secret room. But most revealing, the names of the movie and of Dave’s creation just swap two letters. “All this happened a few weeks before the first adventurers caught sight of [the castle].”

So Dave had a castle backdrop for fantasy miniature battles, but perhaps no dungeons yet.

Two weeks later, House of Dracula (1945) aired. This one movie might seem like five because it features all of Universal’s most famous monsters, Dracula, the Wolfman, and Frankenstein’s creation. In a remarkable piece of detective work, Daniel H. Boggs lists several similarities between the House of Dracula castle and Blackmoor. Both stand on rocky pinnacles overlooking a graveyard, a village, and the sea. Both include laboratories and torture chambers. Tunnels underneath both lead to seaside caves.

Castles with underground tunnels, monsters, and torture chambers offer much inspiration, but the Conan book surely provided even more.

While Robert E. Howard never has Conan willingly enter a dungeon, the barbarian often finds himself trapped in dungeons, forced to overcome monsters to earn freedom.

Weird Tales 1935 -The Hour of the Dragon

In “Hour of the Dragon,” Conan is imprisoned in the dungeon under the palace of King Tarascus in the Nemedian empire. A sympathetic slave girl gives Conan a rough map of the tunnels, and then warns, “Beyond these dungeons lie the pits which are the doors to Hell.” To escape, Conan defeats a monster that was one of “the goblins of Hyborian legendry, and were in reality ogres of the natural world.”

In “Rogues in the House,” Conan is lost in the pits below the house of the Red Priest, where he evades the traps that slay companions who lack Conan’s “steel-spring quickness.” Although the covered city of “Red Nails” lies above ground, its interior shares the ambiance of a dungeon.

Still, one story presents a dungeon that best resembles those in D&D. In the “Scarlet Citadel,” Conan escapes from “tunnels and dungeons” where an evil sorcerer “performed horrible experiments with beings human, bestial, and, it was whispered, demoniac, tampering blasphemously with the naked basic elements of life itself.” With a torch and sword, Conan explores a maze of tunnels while overcoming monsters.

In 1971, Dave Arneson started with a toy castle, a location inspired by creature features,  and the notion that something might lurk underneath. “[The model] was too small for the scale I wanted,” Dave said. “But it was a neat kit and I didn’t want to abandon it, so the only way to go was down [into the dungeons].”

He added a treasure hunt from Tolkien, traps from Robert E. Howard, lurking monsters from both authors—and perhaps from some creature features—to invent a new activity for the characters in his Blackmoor campaign. When Gary Gygax played one of Dave’s Blackmoor games, the experience so fired Gary’s imagination that he went on to flesh out the game that would become Dungeons & Dragons. In the process, Gary’s imagination and broad knowledge of sword and sorcery would add countless details inseparable from the game. Ultimately, the dungeon crawl proved so compelling that it took root in popular culture.

Game Wizards: The Epic Battle for Dungeons & Dragons

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Jon Peterson’s earlier books aimed for readers with an unusual appetite for role-playing game history. Playing at the World sprawls past 425,000 words, rooting the design of Dungeons & Dragons in chess variants and Prussian wargames. The Elusive Shift tells how fans mainly writing in amateur zines shaped the often esoteric theory behind roleplaying games. Thanks to my taste for such arcana, I jumped to get a copy of Peterson’s most recent book, Game Wizards: The Epic Battle for Dungeons & Dragons, but I didn’t expect this book to keep me up at night reading and telling myself I would only stay up for a few more pages. This book can captivate anyone interested in the business of roleplaying games or in the people who created D&D.

Game Wizards focuses on battles that go from the game table to the boardroom and courtroom. The book reveals the pride and ambitions of the men who created D&D, and of their feuds over credits, awards, and money. This tale even includes backstabbing, though thankfully not the sort with knives.

Jon Peterson pulls the story from letters and other documents written by Gary Gygax, Dave Arneson, and other players as the events occurred. “Many of the direct quotations in this piece are thus taken from their correspondence.” Much of this book’s magic stems from the breadth of sources Peterson uncovers, from the contract establishing the original game’s royalty agreement to an audio tape Arneson recorded of a Gygax television appearance. “When Gary enumerates the character classes available in the game, at the point when he mentions that there is a thief class, you can hear Arneson mutter, ‘That’s you.’” Arneson and Gygax were then battling over credit and royalties for their creation.

The story starts in 1969, when Arneson attended the second GenCon, which Gygax hosted in his hometown of Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. The two gamers first partnered to create a set of rules for naval miniatures titled Don’t Give Up the Ship.

By the early 70s, Arneson and his group of Minneapolis gamers invented a style of campaign that broadly resembled D&D. When Gygax played Arneson’s Blackmoor game, its innovations inspired Gygax to turn the seed into a publication. “I’ll whip out a booklet for your approval, so groups can play their own games,” he wrote Arneson. Later Arneson described the role of Gary and his circle of gamers in creating D&D.  “At the time, they had a lot more spare time than I did and they had a lot of ideas, so they came up with their own version of the rules. They sent theirs to us and we fooled around with them for a while.” When Gygax had reasons to exaggerate his role, he claimed, “D&D, I wrote every word of that. Even my co-author admits that.” Arneson admitted no such thing. Still, Gygax’s tireless work as a writer, publisher, and well of ideas proved essential too.

Gary Gygax started Tactical Studies Rules to publish D&D and other games. In September 1973 Gygax wrote to Arneson, “We’re getting ready to roll.” When the costs of printing the first D&D sets ballooned, Brian Blume invested $2,000 dollars to become a partner in the company. In 1975 the company was incorporated as TSR Hobbies with Gygax and the Blume family holding nearly equal shares.

The revolutionary D&D game spread from Lake Geneva by word of mouth, from tabletop to tabletop, and especially from the gamers attending conventions like GenCon. In 1974, one GenCon visitor reported, “This year’s convention was centered mainly around the new set of Gygax and Arneson rules Dungeons & Dragons.” It was “the hit of the convention with gamemasters having games going in all parts of the Hall.”

By 1976, sales had grown enough for TSR to hire Arneson as Director of Research—and to work shipping. “Everyone who worked in the building had a nominal job, but had to pitch in wherever the need arose. In a personal letter dated February 2, Arneson explained his situation at the beginning of his employment at TSR: ‘My work here in Lake Geneva is going quite well and keeps me very busy from 8:30 to 6:00 every day of the week. In addition to my job as Director of Research I am also in charge of the Shipping Department.’”

But by summer Arneson felt growing dissatisfaction. None of his work related to D&D. Instead he had spent four months doing shipping and editing other designers’ rules.” He felt “no prospect of any of my work being published by TSR.”  Arneson would accuse Gygax of taking the company’s choicest design assignments. When work started on a D&D set for beginners, drafts of the future basic rules listed the authors as Gary Gygax and Eric Holmes with no mention of Arneson. Also, Gygax excluded Arneson from work on the design that would become Advanced Dungeons & Dragons.

Still, naval miniatures ranked as Arneson’s first love. Before hiring on, he had promised two sets of naval rules to TSR in exchange for company stock, but his drafts languished unfinished. “Gygax repeatedly asked for urgent revisions to them both, and Arneson repeatedly avowed his faith in their imminent publication to his friends, even as late as October 1976, but they simply never materialized. As of the summer of 1975, TSR had announced both as forthcoming titles in the third Strategic Review.” Clearly TSR planned to publish the games, but Arneson’s projects stagnated, frustrating Gygax. By September, Arneson routinely left TSR offices at lunch to work afternoons at his apartment. Despite the time away from shipping, he produced virtually nothing for TSR. Before long, he and the company started squabbling over unexcused time away.

In November, Arneson resigned from TSR. He and Gygax drew battle lines over their creation. Arneson argued that D&D stemmed from his essential ideas. He planned a company and roleplaying game to rival TSR and D&D.

Copyright law sided with Gygax, the author who penned the game’s rules. He planned a new Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, which he presented as a completely different game, free of any royalty obligations to Arneson. Their war for hearts and minds extended to convention appearances and magazine interviews. The creators fought in shareholder meetings and in courtrooms. Reaching a settlement would take years.

While Arneson battled for credit and royalties on one front, Gygax fought with TSR on multiple fronts.

In 1979, a 16-year-old college student named Dallas Egbert disappeared from his dorm at Michigan State University. His parents hired a publicity-seeking private detective named William Dear to find the boy. The investigator blamed D&D for Ebert’s disappearance and his lurid speculation stormed to the national news. By the time Egbert turned up safe, few were paying attention. (See The Media Furor that Introduced the “Bizarre Intellectual Game” of Dungeons & Dragons to America.)

Even as Gygax and TSR staff fought to clear up negative myths about the game, the publicity drove a sales boom. “At the beginning of 1981, no ceiling for sales of Dungeons & Dragons was in sight: the game was like a magic item that relentlessly generated gold.”

The gold rush inspired a spending spree: The Blume’s added much of their extended family to the payroll. In 1982, TSR funded an effort to raise a shipwreck from Lake Geneva and announced sponsorship of the U.S. Bobsled Team. “It would be a year of lavish gestures like this, of a company spinning virtually out of control. Events piled on events so rapidly that its management structures simply had no way to manage them. It ensured the foundering of the company Gygax and Blume had created in 1975.”

By 1983 the bubble burst, leaving D&D sales stagnant. Weary of battling the Blumes over business decisions, Gygax left Wisconsin to live in a Los Angeles mansion that cost TSR $10,000 a month, $25,000 adjusted for inflation. To be fair, the D&D movie Gygax hoped to produce could renew TSR’s growth, but to the gaming industry, the move looked like a retreat to an opulent lifestyle in Hollywood.

Game Wizards wraps in 1985, with TSR on the brink of bankruptcy, but Gygax back from Hollywood and poised to take sole control of the company from the Blume family. By then a new player, Lorraine Williams, had entered the game. As granddaughter of the original publisher of Buck Rogers, Williams brought wealth plus experience licensing intellectual property. Gygax interested her in making the investment TSR needed to avoid bankruptcy.

Before Gygax could take full control over TSR, Williams made other plans. “‘Gygax and I were not talking very much during the time because we had very fundamental differences,’ she would remark. Furthermore, informing Gygax that she intended to purchase the Blume family shares would be, as she put it, ‘an invitation for him to get in and just try to screw it up, and to once again try to thwart the ability of the Blumes to sell their stock and to get out and to go about their lives.’” Williams purchased a controlling interest in TSR and forced its founder out.

In Game Wizards Peterson reveals the conflict with a turn-by-turn account played over years. It makes a story as riveting as any yarn played out at the D&D game table.

Related: The time Dungeons & Dragons split into two games

The Dungeon Mapper: From Half of D&D to a Forgotten Role

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In 1977, when I found the Dungeons & Dragons Basic Set, I noticed that the dwarf description included a lot of fluff: stocky bodies, long beards, and an ability to detect slanting passages, shifting walls and new construction. I figured the slanting-and-shifting thing would never affect the game unless some dwarf skipped adventuring for a safer job as a building inspector. “Your rolling-boulder ramp isn’t up to code. Someone might not trip.”

Years later, I realized the dwarven fluff actually helped players draw the accurate maps needed to keep characters alive. Sloping floors and shifting walls made more than a nuisance. In the mega-dungeons of the era, greater threats prowled on lower levels, so tricks that lured characters too deep threatened their lives. Lost explorers deep in a sprawling multi-level dungeon could run out of resources before they got out. Originally, the spell find the path found an escape path.

Level 1 of the dungeon under Greyhawk Castle photographed in 2007 by Matt Bogen

In early D&D, one player assumed the role of mapper and transcribed a description of walls and distances onto graph paper. The original rules present mapping as half of the game. In the example of play, the referee—the title of dungeon master had not been coined yet—spends half the dialog reciting dimensions. The rules’ example of “Tricks and Traps” only lists slanting passages, sinking rooms, and other ways to vex mappers. The text’s author, Gary Gygax, suggests freshening explored parts of the dungeon by adding monsters, but also through map “alterations with eraser and pencil, blocking passages, making new ones, dividing rooms, and filling in others.”

Despite the emphasis, many gamers found mapping less compelling. By 1976, the first D&D module Palace of the Vampire Queen included players’ maps to spare explorers the chore of transcribing dimensions. By fourth edition, labyrinths had changed from mapping challenges into skill challenges. Such mazes were no more fun, but they saved graph paper.

Today, only players who play D&D in an older style draw their own maps as they explore a dungeon.

Did anyone ever think translating distances to graph paper added fun? Or was mapping another way to thwart players who tried to steal the quasi-adversarial referee’s treasure. (In that original example of play, the Caller finds hidden loot, and the Referee responds by “cursing the thoroughness of the Caller.” Rules question: Must the Referee curse aloud or can he just twirl his mustache?

Blackmoor scholar Daniel H. Boggs describes mapping’s appeal. “If the DM is running the game with a proper amount of mystery, then mapping is one of the joys of dungeon exploring. In my experience, there is usually at least one person in the group who is good at it, and it is lots of fun to see your friends pouring over maps trying to figure out where to go or where some secret might be.”

In 1974, D&D seemed so fresh and intoxicating that even duties like mapping found love—just less love than the game’s best parts. Then, exploring a hidden version of the game board seemed revolutionary. Even the wargames that relied on umpires to hide enemies from opposing players let everyone see the terrain—and only a tiny community of enthusiasts played such games. In 1975, when Tunnels & Trolls creator Ken St. Andre attempted to explain dungeoneering to potential players, he could only reach for a slight match. “The game is played something like Battleship. The individual players cannot see the board. Only the DM knows what is in the dungeon. He tells the players what they see and observe around them.”

As fans of competitive games, D&D co-creators Dave Arneson and Gary Gygax relished tests of player skill more than many D&D players do now. To the explorers of the mega-dungeons under Blackmoor and Greyhawk, map making became proof of dungeoneering mastery. In the game’s infancy, different groups of players mounted expeditions as often as Dave and Gary could spare them time. Separate groups might compile maps and keep them from rivals.

While recommending slanting passages and sinking rooms, Gary seemed to relish any chance to frustrate mappers. Describing a one-way teleporter, he crows that “the poor dupes” will never notice the relocation. “This is sure-fire fits for map makers.”

Dave favored fewer tricks. Daniel Boggs writes, “Arneson would actually help map for the players by drawing sketches of what players could see in difficult to describe rooms.” In early 1973, Dave Megarry, a player in the Blackmoor campaign and designer of the Dungeon! board game, mapped much of Blackmoor dungeon during play. Megarry’s maps proved more accurate than the versions published in The First Fantasy Campaign (1980), a snapshot of Arneson’s Blackmoor game.

Still, Dave Arneson expected players to show mapping skill and deal with setbacks. In a 2009 post on the ODD74 forum, he wrote, “A referee ‘happy moment’ was when the mapper was killed and the map lost. ‘OK guys now where are you going?’ What followed was 15 minutes of hilarious, to me, fun. A non-player character gave them a general direction. Another was when the mapper died and the players couldn’t figure out how to read the map. Again an NPC saved them.”

“In terms of tricks, Arneson primarily relied on complexity,” Boggs writes. Despite ranking as the first dungeon ever, Blackmoor includes rare vertical twists. “The combination of connecting shafts, pits, elevators, and literally hundreds of stairs across levels is just astounding. There is also the fact that the dungeon is segmented, so portions of certain levels could only be accessed by stairs on other levels or via secret doors. Secret doors abound in Blackmoor dungeon and most of Arneson’s dungeons.”

Nowadays, the task of transcribing explored rooms and halls to graph paper lacks its original novelty, but turning unexplored space into a map brings as much satisfaction as ever. Sometimes as my players explore, I draw the map for them on a grid. For some sessions, I bring a dungeon map hidden by scraps of paper fastened with removable tape. Players can become so eager to reveal rooms that they vie for the privilege of peeling away the concealment. While running Waterdeep: Dungeon of the Mad Mage, I loaded the maps on a tablet and concealed them under an erasable layer. All these techniques eliminated the chore of mapping for the pure fun of discovery.