TCW 222 - D&D & Video Games 1E

[Intro music - Airplan Mode by Josh Woodward]

Welcome to They Create Worlds. I'm Jeffrey and I'm joined by my co-host, nearby, Alex.

Spectre started to organize itself around individual representatives in different states, different communities, and they would start saying things like, you know, Spectre has just conquered Virginia and is moving west. Can anyone stop the onslaught of Spectre? Please play us in a game of Chancellorsville. You know, it's just like this idea that you have these villainous organizations that are overrunning parts of the United States, and you need bold heroes to stand up and stop them, and again, this is just another kind of way to recruit people to play games, and so then you had other organizations that were forming in opposition to groups like Spectre and similar groups that were talking about how they were conquering everything. So you had these individual kind of wargaming clubs organized across these wide swaths of territory, somewhat following the template that had already been established by the already existent sci-fi fandoms that by the 1960s had already been publishing newsletters and holding conventions and doing all of this kind of stuff for years and years.

Once these groups started to organize in this way, these kind of slightly silly, more performative aspects start to melt away, and you get kind of another generation, probably slightly older players, some of whom may have started as high school players and themselves have grown up a little bit now, kind of dumping this performative aspect and kind of dropped the performative aspect of what they were doing and just organized as regional or even national networks of wargame players. They maintained membership lists, collected dues, and also wrote their own newsletters, which with cheaper and cheaper mimeographs and stuff appearing in the 1960s became a more and more viable thing to do. So you had groups of wargamers that were just in mutual interest clubs, and these newsletters would kind of parrot what the general was doing, which was reporting on new games coming out, providing historical tidbits, providing tips on how to play games, helping locate opponents, providing after-action reports of games, but doing it on a lower, more indie level, because the hobby was very small. Avalon Hill were really the only ones involved. SPI would come along in a few years, but are not quite there yet. So there was a certain level of gatekeeping that was done by Avalon Hill. They encouraged a little bit of independent activity. They did start releasing sheets of counters and hex boards and whatnot that people could use to design their own games, but they didn't want to go too far down that road because the hobby was so small that if an indie scene got too professional, there really may not have been room for both Avalon Hill and its competitors. It's not like the modern video game industry where you can have an indie scene and you can have a professional scene and you can have a moder scene. They can all kind of coexist. Doesn't mean that the big companies are always happy that they have that competition. But at the end of the day, there is a big enough market that that can all coexist, even if it does so uneasily. That is not the case in the wargaming hobby of the 1960s.

Avalon Hill did a lot of gatekeeping within the hobby, other than this opponents wanted thing, which just opened the floodgates to everybody. So these regional clubs started making their own newsletters, parroting the general, or Strategy and Tactics, a big miniatures magazine at the time, and allowing for this more indie collaborative spirit to happen. That is kind of where our story really begins, and now we have to talk about a couple of these organizations. I think I'm probably going to talk about them in the opposite order of how we did in our live event, just to provide a little balance so we discuss each side equally. Because, of course, there's really two sets of these gamers that we need to talk about. That is the Twin Cities Military Miniatures Group up in Minnesota, and the International Federation of Wargamers, a technically international, because they had like one British guy that was in it or something, but mostly national group that also encompassed several subgroups like the Lake Geneva Tactical Studies Association in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. In the interest of expediency for the live talk, we focused more on the Gygax side of things than the Arneson side of things, not as a judgment, we're not wading into that, but just because we were kind of charting the spread, and TSR is more important to the spread. Here today, I think we'll talk a little bit first about the good people up in Minneapolis-St. Paul.

The Twin Cities Military Miniatures Group, as the name implies, was a group that was dedicated not so much to the board war gaming that we've been talking about this entire time, but is actually more wedded to the whole miniatures thing that we briefly mentioned at the start but didn't really get into in any kind of depth. Miniatures war gaming is a very, very different beast than board war gaming. For one thing, there's some assembly required. By some assembly, I mean you have to buy all of those little soldiers, put them together yourself, and paint them yourself, and at this point, shout out to my dad, actually, because he is big into all of that kind of thing himself.

And in fact, it's interesting, one of the most common rule sets was actually created by science fiction author H.G. Wells right before World War I, Little Wars. I say this is interesting because military miniatures from the beginning, has always had a little aspect of storytelling involved in it. Sorry about that, yeah, do it yourself. That was the D.Y.I. I was referring to. Sorry for getting a little jargony there. So I find that interesting because there's always been a little bit of role-playing and narrative in military miniatures gaming, which I find fascinating because two of the earliest proponents of using miniatures for staging games were H.G. Wells, and Robert Louis Stevenson. Two authors. Because of course military miniatures go way back, but most people just wanted them for display purposes. They were not there to be used in wargaming, it's just some crazy people started to use them in that way, and it just kind of spiraled out of control from there.

In fact, the Twin Cities Military Miniatures Group was itself not primarily a wargaming group. It was founded in 1963 by a gentleman named Ray Allard who had no interest at all in miniatures wargaming. He and a bunch of his friends, and these were older people. Most of the founders of this group were older people, some of them World War II and Korea veterans. They were there only for the painting and the display of miniatures. They really didn't care at all about this thing, but there were two younger members of the group that joined either right at or very, very, very soon after the founding. One of them was Ray Allard's son, Ray Allard Jr., and the other was an individual by the name of David Wesley. They were actually drawn to this group by the idea of actually doing miniatures wargaming, which, as I said, is something that existed. There had been a small spark of interest in it in the United States, starting in 1957 when an individual named Jack Scrubby started to publish a magazine, Strategy and Tactics, and also started casting some relatively cheap, in the grand scheme of things, miniatures. There were a small number of people--

Yeah, Scrooby, that's true, Jack Scrooby, S-C-R-U-B-Y is how that's spelled. Yeah, so he was, I do believe Wesley, just to answer what you're saying there, Ethan, Wesley has said that he was at the first meeting, which I see no reason to doubt. I mean, are the people that attended the first meeting what you would call founding members, or just like Allard decided to do this group and put out a call and they showed up? I mean, you know, calling him a founding member probably makes it sound more formal and official than it really was, but he seemed to have been coming to the meetings from the beginning, at the very least. The fact that he was so much younger than any of the others that were there, as he put it himself in one description, you know, Allard himself was 54, he was the oldest, then most of the rest of the members there were in their 30s, and then Wesley and Ray Allard Jr., not to be confused with the founder, were teenagers. I doubt the rest of the group necessarily treated them as quote-unquote founding members, but they hung out, and some of the older guys even occasionally deigned to come by and play battles with them. In general, kind of these two groups, were very separate from each other, though, even though it just started with the two of them, as time went on, other young people also found their way to the group. It wasn't long that Wesley and Allard Jr. were the only ones interested in the wargaming.

There had been kind of a small movement towards this through Jack Scrooby, and strategy and tactics and all of this, but it was still pretty niche, and there were not a lot of rules out there. So, Wesley, he was a pretty smart guy, still is, he's still alive, really wanted to kind of dig deeper into this than some of the current rules that were available, and started basically reading everything that he could find anywhere about wargaming, which eventually led him down the path of discovering the German, the Prussian Kriegsspiel, which, as opposed to being a game, a pastime, where two people or more are just having fun with each other, were actual military wargaming exercises that were meant to instruct in-- Not just instruct in the waging of war, but also to simulate specific plans to see how viable those plans were.

We're not going to go into a complete history of Kriegsspiel here, because we are actually going to edit ourselves some. Three episodes and all of that. Three. A one, a two, a three. How many episodes does it take to get the center of Dungeons and Dragons? Three. [Jeffrey Chuckles] Three is the number, and that number, shall be three. Ah yes, as Derek IRL points out in chat, I do have a chapter on Kriegspiel in my book. Of course, a lot of that is adapted from Peterson's work in Playing at the World. The original version that goes into all those Kriegspiel details is currently out of print, but when Volume 2 comes out early next year of his revised version, a lot of that Kriegspiel stuff will show up again there as well. So we won't go into all of Kriegspiel today. These Kriegspiel, and derivatives thereof, because of course then this came to America and some Americans made their own modifications, which we'll talk about in a bit, but these Kriegspiel played out a little differently from your traditional miniatures combat between friends, this kind of casual military miniatures wargaming based on Little Wars and the few other systems that existed at the time, because they were attempting to model all of the conditions of war as accurately, as they could within a simulation. Which included not having a clue about where your enemy is. Obviously, if the two of you are staring across each other, across a basement table or a ping pong table or whatever else, you're both there. Everyone's armies are there for both people to see. So these games had something in particular that you did not find generally at this time in miniatures wargaming, amongst casual friends, which is this idea of a referee. Somebody who is a neutral arbiter of the game, who is existing outside of the game but has complete knowledge of what is happening and can communicate the situation to the players as they move around the field of battle and make contact with the enemy. Wesley really starts getting into this kind of thing in his wargaming and his circle of wargaming friends which does expand. It starts with just Aller Jr. and himself, but other people join this group and starts really focusing in on how can we make these encounters as realistic as possible. Their wargaming starts incorporating fog of war. It starts incorporating incomplete information and the methods through which you would acquire more complete information about what's happening around you. Obviously, as you move your soldiers around, your scouts are eventually going to discover the scouts are the main force of the other enemy, and you'll kind of discover where they are there. But there's also the possibility that the locals may have seen troop movements. You may come across a farm, and the farmers there have seen armies moving, and you interrogate them, and they tell you where it is. So there's not role-playing going on yet at this point. You still have primarily, you know, two opposing generals that are moving their armies around, but Dave Wesley starts playing around with this idea of what if there's a referee that has additional information, and what if the players have to interact with other elements on the board to gather that information? And there's no characterization going-- It's not like David Wesley is playing the farmer. It's not an NPC. But we're starting to get into a situation of well, what if they do talk to a farmer and they get some information that way? How are they going to make contact with the enemy? So Wesley starts developing this idea of the referee as an important component of his games.

Now, at some point when all of this is going on, and a lot of the early stuff, the timeline is very vague, but at some point when this is going on, on about 1965, I believe it is, a board war gamer by the name of Dave Arneson, he's still a teenager, he's an older teenager, puts an ad in the opponent's wanted section of The General. This is why we have to, even though board war gaming isn't the main vector through which RPGs are created, this is why we have to do all of that Avalon Hill setup. Because even though the board war games don't directly influence D&D so much, outside of diplomacy, which is a big influence, it's these connections that Avalon Hill and board war gaming fosters that are very important to the development of these groups. So, in about 1965, this teenager, David Arneson, posts in The General looking for an opponent to play Avalon Hill board war games with. He had become enthused with them after his parents had bought him the Chancellorsville game and he just kind of fell in love with his board war gaming. The people at the Twin Cities Military Miniatures Group are also-- You know, they play some of those games too and they get The General. So, Wesley sees that ad. So, Wesley and some of his friends go over to Arneson's house and the Secrets of Blackmoor kind of discusses this first meeting, a documentary that gets more of the story from the Arneson group and de-emphasizes the Gygax group. You know, they kind of just show up at the door and they're like, we're here to see David Arneson and I think it was his mother that answers, like, the boys are in the basement, where all the losers go, in their parents' basement. I have my own place. I'm just here to help, I promise. I am not just an adult, but a fully realized person with my own friends and credit cards and keys.

Then, at some point, and again the dates are really vague here, Wesley tends to put the dates earlier in time, Peterson tends to put them a little bit later, and we're just talking about a matter of a couple of years, we're not talking decades here. Peterson's dating is probably more reliable because Wesley is just going off of memory, and they were, you know, 40-plus-year-old memories at the time. Whereas Peterson has a small amount of documents in the form of fanzines that he can use to date some events. Somewhere between 1967 and 1969, probably closer to 69 than 67, Wesley discovers a particular Kriegsspiel book in the library of the University of Minnesota, because basically, he wants all the information he can possibly get on wargaming to improve his own wargaming, so he's scouring all the libraries nearby in their game sections, military history sections, whatever, to find books. He stumbles across a book by a guy named Charles Totten called Strategos. Again, not to get too bogged down in the history of Kriegsspiel, that's a tangent that we're actually not going to go--

Ethan’s saying Wesley actually says he found Strategos in 1964 now, and yeah, that's true, and it's possible he found it a little earlier because they also talk in Secrets of Blackmoor about how they used the book as a recruitment tool, because this is back in the day when library stuff was all on paper and the idea of redacting PII, personal identifying information, did not exist. You could look on the card in the back of the book and see who checked out a book before you. It was just there. They do claim that they actually used Strategos to recruit more members because they figured anyone that checked out that book was probably interested in wargaming just like they were, and so they would track down people who checked out the book to swell the ranks of the Twin City Military Ministers group. It might have been a little earlier. 64 seems awfully early, and I know, Ethan, you're just reporting what Wesley has said, and as you said earlier in the chat, they definitely seem to have a tendency, kind of the same as Nolan Bushnell in a way, they have a tendency to try to date, stuff as early as they possibly can because it feels more pioneering and whatnot that way. 64 seems a little early. 67 is probably reasonable for when he first discovered it, 66, 67, and then of course it took a few years after that for him to create his own game based on some of the concepts in there, which is obviously something that we're going to address here in a moment.

So again, we don't want to get too bogged down in the history of Kriegsspiel, but one thing that's set apart the military of the United States from the military of, say, Prussia, which then, of course, becomes the German Empire, is that Prussia slash Germany was a military state. Truly a military state, where the military dominated all walks of society, and, of course, it was the acumen of the military that allowed for the unification of Germany by blood and by iron, as Bismarck famously said. They had a very large professional military with a large general staff and lots of infrastructure, and so their war games were really based on harnessing that incredible military machine. The United States had a very, very, very small military. Especially when you consider the size of the United States, which is rather big. Most of that military was spread out amongst a series of relatively isolated forts across the western frontier, doing their best to quote-unquote settle the American West, which mostly meant relocating the people that were already quite settled there, thank you very much. He saw that American military professionals needed a different kind of war game because the caliber of the officer was not necessarily quite as great, and the need was more for small scale military engagements, like there was a need for captains and majors to be able to lead small detachments rather than the need for a general staff to be directing army commanders in massive campaigns across the entirety of Europe. He kind of broke his game, Stratagos, down into something that was a little more manageable and a little more personal in that way. One element that he brought into it that was somewhat different, according to Peter Peterson's research, obviously I haven't researched all the varieties of Kriegsspiel in great depth myself, but one of the things that Peterson and Wesley himself also found back in the day that was very different about Stratagos than other war games is it had a referee, because there's always a referee in these kind of professional military situations. Not only did the game have a referee, but it specifically said that the players can attempt anything they can think of, and the referee will determine whether that thing is successful. Totten in his own book really kind of downplays that, because he goes on to say yes, they can attempt anything, but most things are going to be unadvisable. I don't think Totten was in any way trying to create a new concept of the referee's role in a war game. He was just saying, yeah, there's a referee, so basically tell the referee anything that you want, that you want to try, and, you know, the subtext is kind of most of the time, the referee is going to tell you that's dumb, we're not going to do that. So he's just kind of reinforcing the idea that you can ask. He's not saying that the referee is then going to take every single one of your requests seriously, which is a completely different thing. Yes, Crayter says, I seduce the opposing general. Totten would most certainly say yes, you can ask the referee that, but he's not going to allow that. [Chuckles] You know, he's just going to say, go back and come back when you have something real for me.

Now we need to step back from Wesley a little bit and talk a little bit about what Arneson is doing at the same time because Arneson is very much emerging as a leader of this group as well. By the late 60s, Arneson is a college student. He's studying history at the University of Minnesota, so he's still local. He is starting to have really grand ambitions about the kind of games that they can play. You know, he's been introduced to Strategos and all this other stuff, as Wesley has, of course, because he's part of the same group. He's also been introduced to Diplomacy, which is a war game still. Where, ostensibly, the point of the game is it's set in kind of the Great Powers period on the eve of World War I in Europe. You've still got armies on the board and the idea is still at the end of the day that you are moving your armies around and conquering on the board. But the twist in Diplomacy is that you are actually each taking on the role of the ruler of a nation. You're not just a nameless, faceless general on the battlefield or this godlike figure that's puppet master that's controlling all the generals. Like you are actually embodied the ruler of the nation. Diplomacy games, partially by design and partially because of the temperament of players, involve a lot of deal making and alliance making and backstabbing. All of the stuff that Jeoffrey absolutely hated about playing the Game of Thrones board game with our group of friends.

It's GenCon 2 that Arneson and his group from the Twin Cities come down, primarily in an attempt to find people that they can play with locally in Minnesota, because this hobby is so spread out and so niche that the best way to find people interested in playing with you in Minnesota is to travel to Wisconsin, because everyone's going to Wisconsin, and somebody from across town that you didn't know existed may also be coming here. But I think also, even though the sources don't say this, the timing lines up right, I think also probably just to line up players for his grand Napoleonic simulation as well, which was going to be played by mail, at least in part, so, you know, they didn't have to be local. Now, I believe at this point, Gygax and Arneson were already familiar with each other. Gygax's group in Lake Geneva does join the Napoleonic campaign. Again, the timelines can be a little fuzzy. I don't know if they joined the campaign after GenCon or before GenCon, but they did join that diplomacy variant that I talked about earlier, that adapted it to the Napoleonic era, was actually created by one E. Gary Gygax, which certainly implies that they at least knew of each other. They hadn't met, but they at least knew of each other. This was definitely their first meeting in person and their first opportunity to actually get to know each other. One area of the Grand Napoleonic Campaign that hadn't really been very fleshed out yet was naval combat. There wasn't a huge amount of naval combat in the actual Napoleonic Wars. I mean, obviously you had some Mediterranean campaigns, you had Nelson's famous victories at the Nile and at Trafalgar, but you had stuff going on around the world and fictionalized Master and Commander where you had ships on far-off stations raiding colonies, but it wasn't primarily a naval campaign, but Gygax and his group were enlisted to play the United States in this Grand Napoleonic Campaign.

The U.S. was tangentially involved in the Napoleonic Wars. I mean, the War of 1812, which we just learned today has at least 91 war games dedicated to it, was essentially an outgrowth of the tensions that were simmering throughout the Napoleonic Wars and the global conflict between France and Britain. Of course, they were going to be far more active participants when you actually have people playing these nations who aren't just going to sit over there and be like, “oh guys, you better stop interdicting our ships or maybe someday we'll get mad enough to do something about it with the military that we don't really have.” You know, they have to actually be actively involved, which meant that there was definitely going to be a lot more naval operation happening.

Ethan says, I missed being able to see the Master and Commander boat in San Diego. It was out for repairs. That would have been really cool. By the way, love that movie. Great movie. I would love to see that boat too. They didn't have naval rules yet. Again, just like all military miniatures campaigns in one way or another link themselves back to H.G. Wells' Little Wars, most naval engagements link themselves back to a set of naval rules created by a guy named Fletcher Pratt in the early 20th century. and again, these rules were for more modern naval warfare. They weren't for warfare way back in the day here. So there weren't any good rules. So Arneson was looking into creating a set of rules, and Gygax is the eternal I-want-to-collaborate-with-everybody-on-everything guy. So they decide to, together, do a set of naval rules together that they call Don't Give Up the Ship. This is the first collaboration between these two, and like I said, they're also going to be playing together in this campaign. We got this thing percolating here. The other thing that happens at GenCon, and this happens at GenCon 1, not GenCon 2, I'm a little out of order here, but the other thing that happens at GenCon for Gary Gygax is he discovers Miniatures Wargaming for the first time, because he was really more of a bored wargamer. I mean, it's possible he saw something in passing at some point, and certainly since he was reading all the fanzines, he may have read after-action reports that were written by other people, but he was a bored wargamer. He was not a Miniatures Wargamer. At the first GenCon, there was a demonstration of a game called Siege of Bodenberg. As I said, a lot of military miniature stuff was really underground. The Avalon Hills and the SPIs of the world were not developing rules in this space. Rules were coming from a variety of places, and one source of a lot of these rules would be the owners of hobby shops. The reason for that is these hobby shops would stock miniatures. Then they would either create or commission rule sets that just so happened to use all the miniatures that we sell in our store. Total coincidence that, of course, Jeffrey.

Out of these things, combined with his Totten, combined with his referee and anything can be attempted that he's got, he thinks to himself, what if I have a multifaceted game where there are two armies, but there are also other participants in the area, something that they kind of used before in the terms of like asking a farmer, you know, where the enemy came from. But instead of these just being like abstract kind of ideas like that, actually have individuals take on other roles besides the army commanders that could also be involved in this scenario. Their objectives don't need to align with the objectives of the armies. They can have their own objectives. These objectives don't necessarily have to be achieved through military conflict, and it could be possible for multiple individuals to complete their objectives within the same game. It doesn't have to be two sides where just one side wins and just one side loses.

Then there was one other element that Wesley brought in. Of all places, just a traditional board game. Not a fancy German, lots of fiddly bit board games or an Avalon Hill war game. Just an ordinary mainstream board game from Parker Brothers called Careers. Because what Careers had that influenced him is it had an unusual system of determining victory. As part of the goal of the game, you had to accumulate victory points. But there were different ways that you could accumulate victory points in the game, and at the start of the game, you secretly determined how many victory points you were going for in each of these three major categories. Then the other players didn't know that that's what your objective was throughout the game, and you only reveal at the end or whatever, I guess. I've never played careers, but that's my understanding based on how it was described. So from this, he came up with the idea that victory will be determined by victory points, and every player gains victory points in different ways. They all have different objectives, and those objectives are known only to them. I mean, they can reveal them to other people if they want, but I mean, each character is going to have a custom sheet that tells them who they are, what their role in the game is, and what their conditions for victory are, kind of based on this idea of the victory points in careers. So he comes up with a game that is set in a university town called Braunstein. It's vaguely somewhere in western Germany, probably around the Rhineland someplace, where Prussia, it's complicated, Germany's complicated in this period. It's not important. It's a Holy Roman Empire, which, as Voltaire said, was neither holy nor Roman nor an empire. But the Prussians, even though they're an eastern power, have a few scattered holdings in the west. So this Braunstein is part of the Prussian holdings in the west. The French are going to invade. So there's going to be a French army moving through, and there's a militia commander commanding the local Landwehr who needs to hold off the French forces until help arrives. So far, this is a very standard war game scenario. But this town of Braunstein also is a university town. There's a university there, and the university students, being young radicals, have some sympathies towards the French, because this is pre-Napoleon. This is still the 1790s, the revolutionary period. So there had recently been a kind of pro-revolution student uprising in town, and some of the students were imprisoned. This is part of the scenario.

So the chancellor of the university is also, caught in a bind because he wants to make sure that his students are n ot mistreated by the military. You don't just have characters taking on the leader of the French army, the colonel of the local Landwehr. You also have the chancellor of the university as a character. You have one of the ringleaders of the student agitation as a character. You have another student that's actually sympathetic to the regime, and so is pro-Prussian, and wants to help the local, Lanzwehr, in taking care of all of these revolutionary sympathizers. So you have all of these townsfolk characters that are not leading armies and whose goal is not to achieve victory on the battlefield. They have a set of objectives that Wesley has spelled out for each character. The idea of this game is there's complete fog of war, so nobody knows what's going on, and characters that are performing actions or are interacting with each other will go into a side room in groups of one or two or three and talk to Wesley, and serving as the referee, they'll tell him what they're doing, and in the spirit of Totten, anything can be attempted. Then it'll be up to Wesley to decide how successful that is.

So what we have here is basically a role-playing game. It's fascinating because the game is actually a failure, and Wesley considers it a failure. They never get to the military action. You know it is still a military war game, so at some point there was still supposed to be a battle. It turns out people were having so much fun taking on these roles and scheming with each other and talking to each other that they were continuing to role-play and interact with each other outside of Wesley's purview. So at one point, one of the students and the Lansford colonel come in together and they're like, we're fighting a duel now. Wesley's like, uh, wait a minute. You're over here with your troops and you're over here at the university. Like, you're not even the same place. How can you fight a duel with each other? It's like, oh, no, no, no, no. I went to see the colonel and we've been talking and he won't do what I want him to do, and so now we've insulted each other's honor and we're fighting a duel. [Jeffrey laughs] So Wesley has to come up with rules to do a duel, which is not part of this. And like, they're not even together. And so he feels he's lost control of the game because it's spiraling out of control without him. I mean, you know how players get, Jeffrey, when they start talking to each other.

But the players loved it. The members of the Twin City Military Miniatures Group loved it, and they were basically like, when can we do this again? They started running these types of games, which they called Bronsteins, because the first one was set in Bronstein. They weren't all set there, but that's the name that they took on, which inhabited this weird middle ground between what was acknowledged to be a war game and a military miniatures game and what would later become an RPG. It's not codified enough yet that you can call what they're doing in RPG as we think of an RPG today. But it was basically de facto the first role-playing game.

Not the first time anyone had ever played a game where they took on roles. I'm sure that's happened before, and I mean, the concept of role-playing has been used before, like the concept of role-playing existed before this. Not a role-playing game, not an RPG like we think of Dungeons and Dragons, but the idea of role-playing and psychiatry and in think tanks working through problems that existed. But we've basically, gotten to the point where we have something that's kind of akin to a role-playing game. Then in October 1970, you know, they've done a few of these, and then October 1970, Wesley, who's a reservist, I think, in the military, gets called to duty. So his kind of informal leadership role of the group, particularly in the running of this Bronstein stuff, has to come to an end. Now he doesn't leave the group and he still comes back frequently because he's stationed nearby and he comes back frequently on furlough. He's not just out of the picture, but this informal leadership role he can take on, he's been taking on, is no longer something he can do. So in his place, Dave Arneson becomes kind of the leading figure in running these Bronstein type games.

At the same time, he's getting kind of fed up with his grand Napoleonic campaign. There's been some dissension. You know, it's gotten huge. I mean, there are like almost 30 people involved. Some people, don't like the way he's refereeing it. And another game kind of splits off from his game. There's a splinter and it's just becoming a headache and he's becoming sick of it. So he decides that he's going to refocus his efforts on doing a new Braunstein, where they're basically going to take the people from the Napoleonic game, the people that are local, like the close people, not all 26 people have been part of it, but the close people, basically their characters are going to be dropped en masse into a new world. Because remember, in this Napoleonic campaign, there's not a lot of role-playing going on, but they're technically playing the roles of heads of state, and they're not playing the historical heads of state. They're putting some of their own personality into these rulers, and they're basically all going to be dropped into this new world. As he put it, he had been reading a lot of Conan recently and watching a lot of Hammer horror films. As a result of this, according to him, he thought that it would be great to drop them into this kind of spooky, marshy, fantasy kind of a place for this new Bronstein.

This becomes, in 1971, when it starts, this becomes something entirely new, a new Bronstein called Blackmoor. It just so happens that at the same time that he's starting Blackmoor, our newly ancient and medieval-obsessed miniatures wargamer Gary Gygax is working on a new set of rules for military miniatures that is going to have just a little bit of a twist in the back.

Check out our show notes at podcast.theycreateworlds.com, where we have links to some of the things we discuss in this and other episodes. You can check out Alex's video game history blog at videogamehistorian.wordpress.com. Alex's book, They Create Worlds, The Story of the People and Companies That Shaped a Video Game Industry, Volume 1, can now be ordered through CRC Press and at major online retailers. You can email us at feedback@theycreateworlds.com. Please consider supporting us on Patreon at patreon.com/theycreateworlds. If you do sign up, please do so through the website and not through the iOS app. This saves you from the 30% Apple markup. We understand that you may not be financially able to support us, but you can still support us by leaving a review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or the podcasting service you use. We now have the podcast available on YouTube. Please like and subscribe. Intro music is Airplane Mode by Josh Woodward found at joshwoodward.com/song/airplane mode used under a Creative Commons attribution license. Outro music is Bacterial Love by Role Music found at freemusicarchive.org used under a Creative Commons attribution license.