TCW XXX

[Intro Music - Airplane Mode by Josh Woodward]

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

Yeah so that means that there was a lot of ground to cover. So we kind of got ourselves to the point where D&D is about ready to actually happen. In the last episode, and today we will go into the, kind of, more this is how D&D itself was created now that all that background is done, and then chart kind of the initial rise and spread of D&D as well. Then we’ll end with a third part showing how this transitioned very quickly into the computer game space, and became such a major influence on the video game industry as a result.

Just as a reminder, this is a three parter that we are live streaming the recording of as we do once a year.

Yeah, Arneson did, yeah, Stratigos C, but I don't know that those rules are as well regarded as Stratigos N, quite frankly. Ethan, you know, it's not to say that Arneson never wrote rules. It's just that he was never as focused on plotting out all the nuts and bolts of a system himself. I mean, obviously, he'd done rule systems before, and he collaborated with Gygax on doing Don't Give Up the Ship. But again, he collaborated with Gygax on doing Don't Give Up the Ship. As Arneson is taking over this Brownstein style of play, he is coming up with lots of rules. I mean, it's not that he doesn't develop rules, but he's very much a, here's a basic framework of what this world is like. But I'm not going to come up with specifics for this, that, or the other thing until it's actually needed in the game. He's more of the referee than he is the rulemaker. You know it's the Totten principle, anything can be attempted and your referee's going to tell you if it's possible or not. Arneson makes up rules and he tries to keep them fairly consistent. And when his players ask to do something they hasn't thought up yet, he's going to come up with rules for it. But he's not the type to just sit down at the beginning of a game or beginning of a project and be like, I am going to try to define a complete system of rules that can be applied to this scenario. Gygax is way more that. But Gygax isn't necessarily an original thinker. Gygax is the ultimate collaborator. Almost everything significant that he did came through collaboration, and there were very few things where he was the one that had the germ of the system. It's always someone else had the germ of that system, and then Gygax is like, let's collaborate, let's codify. And he'll take what that other person did and he will flesh it out to the hilt. I mean, he creates rules too. It's not like he doesn't create anything. But he's the guy that likes taking the germ of the idea and taking the initial thoughts on how something works and building a complete system around them. Now, he's not always perfect at building a complete system. We'll see how incomplete D&D is as a system when it's first created, believe me. We also really wouldn't have D&D without Gygax either, because Gygax was never going to come up with this-- You know, because the Arneson people are like, well, Gygax just took Arneson's idea and stole it. You know, not stole it because they were collaborators, but stole the credit for it over time. He was generous in crediting Arneson early. He became less and less generous-- The more businesslike TSR became, the less open to crediting Arneson Gygax was, basically. The Arneson camp are all very much like, well, Arneson and Wesley and all these people, they invented role-playing. Gygax did not invent role-playing, so it's ridiculous for Gygax to call himself a father of tabletop role-playing. The Gygax folk will say, okay, fine, but who published it? How did that rule system get out there? Arneson didn't found Tactical Studies Rules, despite what certain placards at the Strong that I've been trying to get corrected still say. Arneson didn't print those rules. Arneson didn't have GenCon. Arneson didn't run games at GenCon and write a million articles in various fanzines to, publicize the game. It's like Arneson had a stack of notes. I'm just talking about what the Gygax camp would say. I'm not saying what I would say. Arneson just had a stack of notes on some fun little homebrew thing he was doing at home. And you didn't have a game until Gygax wrote it all down, published it, and publicized it. Both sides, in my opinion, we're not going to wade too far into it, but, you know, we need to give our opinion on it because it's going to color how we cover the creation. Both sides of it have a little bit of a point, and both sides, of it have a little bit of truth within what they're saying. Gygax would have never created the RPG himself. There's nothing in Gygax's history to this point that shows him to be a leader in anything. He experiences something, and then he gets wrapped up in it. He experienced board war games and had the General, and so he started writing into the General. He experienced Siege of Bodenberg at GenCon, and so suddenly he's all about military miniatures. He sees Jeff Paron's medieval rules, which we're going to get into, so he creates Chain Mail, and he sees what Arneson's doing and writes up Dungeons and Dragons. Like, in every case, it's always a reaction to something else that's always going on. So Gygax was never going to have that original thought. You know what? Role-playing games. That was clearly Arneson and Wesley. On the other hand, role-playing games would have probably never left the confines of the Twin Cities Military Miniatures Group and other individual fandoms that Arneson may have mingled with at places like GenCon or other conventions without Gygax being like, let's create something comprehensive out of this. Let's collaborate together to create something comprehensive and publish it. So yeah, Arneson invented role-playing, but 300 people were going to know about it and do anything with it without Gygax, I think it's fair to say.

Having said all of that about this Arneson-Gygax divide, it's time to bring these two elements together into this final creation, because you really have two things that are going on at once. You have the Arneson group that are falling in love with this new kind of miniatures gaming, which is less about controlling huge armies as it is about inhabiting characters. Sometimes those characters' job is still to control huge armies, but there's this idea that you can have objectives in the game outside of military conquest, and not every player in the game necessarily needs to be there to control a military force. Some of them could be other players in the scenario with other objectives and other means of achieving victory.

Then on the other side, you have Gary Gygax, who has recently fallen hard for military miniatures gaming, having before that been primarily a bored wargamer. And like any convert has become a true believer and a crusader, [chuckle] pun intended, for medieval and ancient wargaming, going so far as to found a new subgroup of the International Federation of Wargamers, the Castle and Crusades Society, with its own periodical, the Domesday Book. Named after the famous census book compiled by William the Conqueror upon his, conquest of England. Why do I know that? Because I'm a nerd. I'm a history nerd loser streaming from his parents' basement.

[Dramatized Nerd Voice] Dad, stop! I'll do that when the stream's over! It can wait!

In case there in a late comes to stream, I am not in my usual location, in my own domicile, which I pay rent on all by myself like a big boy, but my father is having some medical work done here and I am back home helping out, but this all popped up after we had announced our live stream date, so couldn't leave you all hangings. Brought all my sound equipment with me and am broadcasting from my parents' basement, as any good Twitch streamer should.

And is very interested in developing a new set of medieval miniatures rules because that's not really the sweet spot. That's not where most people are doing their wargaming. It's primarily Napoleonic miniatures at this time, maybe a little bit of World War II miniatures and Civil War miniatures, but it's really primarily the Napoleonic Wars that people like doing. There isn't a lot out there for that medieval period. In the midst of all of this, Gary Gygax also establishes his own local miniatures wargaming group, the Lake Geneva Tactical Studies Association, made up of some local folks, some his age, some younger, that are congregating in his basement. And he has been having some employment issues throughout this period as well, and kind of feels like this may be his last kind of final chance to put some effort into trying to break into more of the game creation business, which is something he enjoys doing, but is all very much a hobbyist kind of thing. So it turns out that one of the members of the LGTSA is a guy named Jeff Perrin, who shares a fascination with medieval and ancient wargaming, and has been tinkering with his own set of rules. So just like what will happen with Dungeons & Dragons a little later, Gygax is like, that's great. I really want a new medieval rule set. Let's work together and polish this up, what you've already done, and find some place to release this as a real product. That's what they do. You know, Perrin's kind of made a start on it. Gygax takes what Perrin's already done and kind of organizes it a bit, adds a little touch here and there. He also has fallen in in this time period with a hobby shop owner by the name of Don Lowry, who is starting his own imprint, Gaiden Games, in order to publish things like miniatures rule sets. Again, as we talked about in the last episode, oftentimes there's quite a link between hobby shops and these small independent imprints because rule sets like that are relatively cheap to produce because we're not talking about doing the highest, highest levels of quality. So they're relatively cheap to produce and have the potential to spur miniatures sales at the hobby shop because you put out a miniatures rule set and then, spoiler alert, you need miniatures to be able to play the game. So he's starting his imprint Gaiden games and an interesting little tidbit here. At this time, Mr. Lowry is actually ensconced in a little town, Jeffrey, called Belleville, Illinois.

It's interesting. Why would there be fantasy rules? There's a couple of things going on here. First of all, J.R.R. Tolkien has just hit big in the United States. Just hit big. The Lord of the Rings was originally published in three volumes in the middle of the 1950s in Britain. It had come over to the United States, but it really wasn't that popular. But it suddenly became very popular with the counterculture crowd in the mid-1960s after a series of, unauthorized, paperback versions were released that were much cheaper. The Lord of the Rings had some themes about pastoralism and how nature was under assault by the evil forces of industry, and this good versus evil thing, and this idea that a small group of gorillas, in a way, could impact the world and push back evil. I mean, there's a lot of stuff that really resonated in there with the counterculture crowd. It started achieving major popularity. By the late 1960s, people wearing Frodo lives pens and all of this kind of stuff. Leonard Nimoy doing a little song about a little hobbit named Bilbo Baggins, which I only mentioned because now Jeff is contractually obligated to put that in the show notes.

There's a lot of this going on, and then the other thing that specifically inspired Gygax, and this is a John Peterson discovery, because a lot of this history was buried in fanzines that like five people in the country still had copies of. John Peterson's great contribution, I mean, he writes great books too, but his truly great contribution was that he tracked down all of these obscure little fanzines and read them all and discovered a narrative that had just been lost due to a lack of accessibility. Discovered all sorts of happenings that we didn't know about. There was a guy named Leonard Patt, not to be confused with Fletcher Pratt with an R, the naval rules guy, a guy named Leonard Patt, who released in this tiny little fanzine in 1970, a set of rules he called Rules for Middle Earth. Which was attempting to adapt the creatures and characters, and setting of Tolkien into wargaming. I think part of the reason that Gygax didn't want to talk too much about his afterthought fantasy rules is because it turns out most of them came from Patt. He didn't just lift them whole. He made some changes of his own. But it's very clear, and you can read Peterson if you want a point by point, blow by blow list of the similarities that are way too similar to each other for two people to have come up with in parallel. One of those things maybe is a coincidence, but like a half dozen or more of those very specific things, yeah, no way two people came up with those in parallel. So a set of rules already existed in an obscure fanzine, and Gygax, who himself was a voracious reader, he's always said that he was never as fond of Tolkien, though he also always said that after a lawsuit from the Tolkien estate made him change the names of things like Ents and Hobbits to name like Treants and Halflings. Gygax became very much the businessman and self-promoter, and I wonder how much of his downplaying of Tolkien is due to the fact that the Tolkien estate sued him. He claims he wasn't as big a fan of Tolkien, but I mean, he had read Lieber and Howard and all of these people growing up, Vance. He was a great fan of that literature. I'm sure when he saw these rules, that kind of inflamed his imagination as well, and he was like, I'm making some medieval rules anyway. This is a great little addendum to put in there. So I think that's probably one of the reasons why he never goes into great detail about why he decided to do it.

The other reason he didn't highlight them so much was a more practical one. There was a big divide in the wargaming community. There were people in that community that were like, if it isn't as realistic as possible to the real world, then it is not something we should be wargaming, and please leave the orcs and the ents and the balrogs and the dragons-- Thete our first dragon mention 43 minutes into the second episode's recording. [Jeffrey chuckles] Keep those out of my wargaming. So it was kind of a little treat thrown in there at the end for the fans, but it wasn't something that he necessarily wanted to hang the entire system on because he knew that that would get some pushbacks from the purists. He did. He added these rules in, largely based on Patt's rules for Middle-Earth, so that you could do fantasy campaigns too, and some of the characters in that were, one for one, super powerful characters that had additional abilities and could lay waste to large groups of ordinary soldiers in a way that you normally did not find in a miniatures wargame.

At the same time this is happening, Arneson is getting sick of his Napoleonic campaign because there's dissension in the ranks. First, it's a huge thing to manage because there's like 26 or something like that players. They're spread all over the country. Like Gygax’s group is also participating in it in Lake Geneva. It’s not just local to the Twin Cities. Its a big headache. Its a lot to keep track of, and some of the players don’t even like the way he’s doing it, and there’s dissention in the ranks. So its just like this is too much headache. I’m getting out of this. I’m gonna do something smaller and more intimate like those Brownsteins games that Wesley and others have been running. And then of course Arneson was participating in them. I mean he was a player in the original Brownstein. Because it’s all part of the same group. I’ve been on a Hammer horror kick recently. I’m gunna set it in this great misserible, boggy, marshy, medieval place under siege by evil forces. By the Egg of Coot to be exact. Basically transports the players from the Napoleonic campaign-- The ones, the local ones, that are going to be part of this new thing. He basically transports them in whole cloth. He kind of aligns it a little bit with Gygax’s Castle and Crusates Society. Because one element of this society, echoing this idea that the early wargaming clubs had, that you had fiefdoms and members, going back to even the Spectre days, like this person has been the Spectre guy conquering Virginia, like you have these own personal fiefdoms as part of this thing. Gygax is part of the Castle and Crusade Society, has already been creating essentially what would become the Great Kingdom of Greyhawk fame. So they kind of attach Blackmoor to the Great Kingdom as well. So he's kind of aligned in that way, but he's doing his own thing in this very marshy, boggy, icky place because it's, you know, I think in part because it's about as far away as he can get from Napoleonic wargaming while still somehow maintaining a space in the realm of wargaming. So he needs rules for that.

At about the same time, this is starting up in 1979, is when Chainmail is getting published, and of course, they're in correspondence. I mean, he sees advanced copies of it even before it's published because Gygax and Arneson have become full-on friends and collaborators by this point. He adapts the Chainmail rules for use in his Blackmoor campaign. Now, in later years, Arneson said, we tried using Chainmail and we used it for a bit and it just didn't work very well. So I actually mostly redid my rules entirely from scratch using another naval game involving ironclads that I had come up with. I have to wonder if he isn't de-emphasizing Gygax somewhat in the same way that Gygax likes de-emphasizing Arneson because they became bitter rivals, and had multiple lawsuits going at each other. I think it's fair to say that, I mean, certainly Arneson was never just going to use Chainmail. I'm sure he was starting to modify it and bring other things in as well. But Chainmail ends up being at least the initial basis for resolving combat in the Blackmoor game, though Arneson may have eventually deviated from it. The thing that Blackmoor got to that earlier Bronsteins didn't is every single Bronstein before this had been kind of a self-contained game. You were given, a scenario--

Ethan is saying, you know, the 1972 letter says he used, quote, fairly minor modifications to chain mail. Yeah, that's before they hated each other, and it's probably a little closer to the truth. As Ethan also says in the chat, I mean, they were definitely using multiple systems because there was multiple types of combat going on. I mean, it's not like all of Blackmoor was based around Chainmail, but I do think that Arneson probably, at the risk of wading into the great debate again, I do think that Arneson probably in later years deliberately downplayed the use of Chainmail in Blackmoor due to this rivalry. Peterson is probably a little bit on the pro-Gygax side, so I guess you may have to watch Peterson a little bit when it comes to the debate between the two, but Peterson definitely does not appear to give any credence to Arneson's statements in more recent days, in the 2000s, shortly before he died, and definitely prefers to go back to the correspondence that they were having at that time before the enmity developed. Whether Peterson is showing a bias there or not, that's beyond the scope of this podcast. That's just to say it's complicated. But regardless, Chainmail was being used to some extent within the Blackmore campaign for combat resolution. As I was saying, though, the thing that was different is like previous Braunsteins, which had been in a variety of settings. There had been a Western one called Brownstone. There had apparently been one that took place in a Banana Republic deal in South America. Like there were multiple Brownsteins that were played, but each one was in itself self-contained. You had a scenario, you had a set of characters, and yeah, you might not resolve the whole thing in a single day, but it was a single campaign with specific objectives for the characters to reach, and then it was over with. Then you moved on to another Brownstein when that one was over.

Well, the first session of Blackmoor was so fun to all the players that they wanted to keep going. They wanted to continue to do this thing. And they wanted to use the same characters to do it. They didn't want to start a new scenario. Arneson came up with the unique idea, which had a basis in the victory points of war games. It's not like it was completely out of whole cloth, but had the unique idea that, OK, if we're going to keep using the same characters, let's have a progression for it. In war games, you had the concept of the war game campaign, which is where you would fight multiple battles and you would win victory points in those battles, and then you would tally up the victory points at the end to see who won the campaign. There was an idea of progression there. Of course, even the Braunsteins used victory points as a method of tallying up how each individual character did at succeeding in their objective. So there are already points running around even in Braunsteins. But his idea is, let's use these points, instead of calling them victory points, we'll call them experience points. And by accumulating experience points, you will eventually go up in level and you will improve your abilities. He probably took a little bit of inspiration on this from Chainmail as well. Now, Chainmail did not have experience points and levels or any of that stuff. That invention is 100% Arneson. Chainmail did have heroes and superheroes. Different levels of hero, different with one more powerful than the other. Chainmail did not have rules to transition from one to the other. There was no character progression in Chainmail. But it may be that seeing this idea of having different levels, different powers of heroes laid out in Chainmail might have been part of what he was thinking of when he came up with a system of progression.

That's one of the things that set Blackmoor apart, is now instead of just having a single Bronstein session, a single Blackmoor game, we're going to have continuing games. The other is, of course, the side activity he came up with, which is the main objective of this thing is still to defeat the evil Egg of Coot who's invading the Duchy of Blackmoor. But as part of improving your character, I'm also going to create a dungeon below Castle Blackmoor that players can explore to accumulate treasure. We don't have a very good explanation from Arneson as to why he decided to do this. I wish we did. He'd been interviewed over the years. You know, he died in 2009, died relatively young in 2009. He was only born in 47. He's given interviews over the years, but I'm not satisfied with anything he's ever said. One time he said, well, you know, I was going to use this castle miniature as the main Castle Blackmoor on the table, and the miniature was kind of small, and it felt constraining that that was the entirety of the space. So I was like, so what if I had dungeon levels underneath it? Other times he said, you know, I was binge-watching Hammer Horror films and a lot of these, take place in these kind of tunnels and catacombs, and so, you know, I was inspired to just start sketching out some catacombs while I was watching Hammer Horror films. That is what caused me to do it. Then as well, there was a game played at GenCon in 71 that did involve some mucking around in some sewers and doing combat, which maybe that also inspired him. We don't have a very satisfactory answer. Certainly the fact that Chainmail had a bunch of monsters in it probably also influenced him. It's like, oh, there's all these cool monsters. How do I use these? It's like, I'll put them all in a dungeon because the initial version of the dungeon under Blackmoor basically used all of the monsters from Chainmail to populate it, which were primarily from Tolkien.

That's Blackmoor. There are some updates on it in the fanzines. Gygax is aware of what's going on. The dungeon crawling is so fun that another Twin Cities guy named Dave Magari even creates a board game that kind of distills the dungeon aspect of it into a board game. It's not an RPG. It's not a tabletop RPG because it is on a board. This stuff's all going on, and of course, he's in correspondence with Gygax. Arneson is, as he always is. And so he's telling him about this game, and then they have a fateful meeting. Because Lake Geneva and the Twin Cities aren't that far from each other, like four or five hours, something like that. Arneson and Magari come down to Lake Geneva to demonstrate Blackmoor, to run a Blackmoor session, as well as to demonstrate Dungeons of Patakasha, the board game that Magari has made based on all of this. Gygax is once again instantly smitten. He loves it. He loves it so much that he basically starts his own Brownstein, or what you would more properly call a Blackmoor at this point, based on his Great Kingdom, World of Greyhawk. And he wants to publish Magari's game because he's also-- He's working for Gaiden Games for Lowry's company as a solicitor of product that Gaiden can publish because Gygax is so well-connected. He wants to publish Magari's board game and he would like to collaborate with Arneson to turn his Blackmoor rules and his Blackmoor system into an actual publishable set of rules that, again, would be published by Gaiden Games.

Oh, McGarry. That's fair. David McGarry. Ethan correcting the pronunciation as he often does, which I appreciate as well. So that's what begins this collaboration. Arneson is building a somewhat coherent system. It's not just bits and bobs and odds and ends, but he kind of only codifies rules as he needs them and then fits them in where it makes sense, as we talked about at the top. He's not really consciously trying to create a complete rule set. Now, Gygax is saying, let's systematize this. So Arneson has a bunch of rules and notes, the infamous notes that Gygax supporters might say, well, Arneson just had a bunch of notes. Gygax turned it into a game. But I mean, notes trivializes it because they're notes in the sense that they're not meant to be read as a coherent manuscript from start to finish. But there are fully thought out rules in this. It's not like it's just concepts of rules. They are rules. They're just not in manuscript form. So notes is how it's often referred to, particularly by Gygax, which is in one sense accurate, but is in another sense, maybe a little unfair. He kind of gets together his notes, as we might call them, and sends them to Gygax, starts systematizing them, you know, just kind of putting them in order. Maybe filling in a gap here and there where one exists, and adding way too many pole arms, because Gygax clearly has a pole arm fetish.

Ethan is reporting back that OD&D, which is the colloquial term that people use for original D&D, the original publication in 74, has polearm Halberd, Lance, if that counts. No, I don't think it counts, and Pike. That's all you get in OD&D. Yes, that is not the, like, you know, practically dozen versions that are in second edition, but polearm, Halberd, and Pike is probably more than the average person cared about. I'm still going to say Gygax was obsessed.

Well, those early rule sets don't do very well. Not a lot of clamoring for English Civil War's rules. So, I mean, they're kind of scraping by, but they're not getting the money together to be able to publish this game. So, at the very end of the year, like in December, I think, of 73, yeah, it was the only 73 product. I think Tractics or whatever it's called was published around the same time as well, but around the same time as D&D. But yeah, Cavaliers and Roundheads was the only 73 product, because I mean, TSR, Tactical Studies Rules, was only founded in like October or something like that. Near the end of the year. But they had plans to do other things. They were talking about publishing Fight the Skies. They were talking about publishing Tractics. Like, there was a lot of stuff in the air, but that's the one thing that got published. So they end up in December bringing a third partner, Brian Bloom, who was also an avid wargamer, who was a member of the LGTSA, whose family had a little more money. So they bring in Brian Bloom to be able to finance actually creating this thing. So in late January, it really officially goes on sale in February, but a few copies trickle out in January. 1974, we get this boxed set, Dungeons & Dragons, for a whopping $10 dollars.

Kind of just like how in the early computer industry it's like you were buying the hardware and the software was the throw-in. Nobody saw value in software. You're buying the miniatures and the rules are the throw-in, sometimes just printed for free in fanzines. I mean, you're paying a subscription for the fanzine, but you're not paying an additional cost for the rules. Or something that you're buying very cheaply in a hobby shop. To make the rules the centerpiece of what you're buying by making them that expensive, Thats like-- That's ridiculous. Yeah as S.M. Oliva says, miniatures and miniature accessories. The miniatures were the thing. The rules were like the accessories. The add-on. This is taking the rules and putting them front and center. You know people are still thinking in terms of war games because it even calls itself a war game on the box. So for a set of war game rules, that truly was considered highway robbery at that price. Fair enough. I've never watched King of the Hill.

Of course, there are all of these fanzines that are done by these various groups. And so then these people start writing their own reviews and their own recaps of games. You see, there's a slight overlap, as we said, between fantasy aficionados and war gamers. You know, it's not a completely great pairing, but there's also a huge overlap between science fiction and fantasy aficionados and the idea of role playing. We're not going to get too deeply into this, but you have other groups that have nothing to do with war gaming that are doing things that are a little like role playing. There's this science fiction and fantasy club in Los Angeles that is running this quote-unquote game called Coventry that is basically a bunch of people sitting around and inhabiting characters and doing role playing. There's another game called Midgard, I think, that's kind of doing something similar. And then, of course, you have the Society for Creative Anachronism, which basically go around pretending that they're living in medieval times and set up nobility and get together and have feasts and tournaments and all of this other stuff. These groups didn't have a comprehensive rule system that encompassed what they were doing. But members of these groups would get introduced to D&D by some person, you know, one of these overlap people. There were only a few individuals that were at the intersection between Miniatures Wargaming and other sci-fi and fantasy fandoms. But then those individuals introduced those rules to their friends in those fandoms because this really crossed over. This is a game that truly crossed over because a lot of the wargaming people, not all wargaming people liked it because it was not a traditional wargame, but if you were a wargaming person, you might be attracted to it as a rule system for simulating this particular type of battle and exploration. Whereas if you're part of this science fiction fantasy fandom, you're interested in it for its ability to allow you to assume a character and tell stories through that character. So, it had real crossover appeal amongst different parts of fandom that allowed it to spread beyond just the role-playing community and allowed to get wrapped up in some of these other types of games that were going on, like Midgard and Coventry, that were kind of like role-playing games in a way just without the stats and without the rolling of dice and without the game mechanics. It kind of met at the intersection of these areas. So, it became really popular within these circles within a short amount of time.

Now, remember, we're talking about really niche circles. So, really popular within these circles doesn't mean that it's really popular with the general public. But, they're selling, you know, a few hundred units a month, a few thousand units a year, whatever. They're getting some steady enough sales to kind of keep this thing going. At this point, it's mostly, in the first few years, it's probably college age, and, you know, maybe a few people a little bit older and just a little bit younger, but kind of college age, I think, is the crux. And the reason for that just comes down, I think, to the wargaming hobby in general. Because for wargaming, you need a few things. First of all, you need a decent amount of spare time on your hands, because you're having to collect these miniatures, paint these miniatures, set up your table with the specific campaign that you're going-- Or battle that you're going to be doing. And then the battles themselves take a long time to play out. You need a fair amount of time on your hands. You also need a fair amount of space on your hands because you need a place where you can set up the table or multiple tables and have everyone gathered around in order to play. Then the other thing is, is you're probably a bit of a bookworm, scholarly, nerdy type. Because people tend to be attracted to this because of their interest in history and their interest in various types of military units. It's not that you have to be like a super genius to play these games. It's just that you probably have a little bit more of a scholarly, nerdy bent if you're attracted to this. If you don't know the difference between a Hussar, a Curossier, and a Lancer, you are probably not doing Napoleonic wargaming. The vast majority of the general public, quite frankly, does not care about the difference between a Hussar, a Curossier, and a Lancer.

Obviously, it's not all college students. You do have some older, older adults that maybe have a job that affords them enough free time, and they own their own home with a basement that they can invite friends over to. I mean, obviously, Gary Gygax was not a college student in this time period, though Dave Arneson was, for much of it. But college students tend to have more time. College students tend to be people who kind of like knowledge and are kind of nerdy sometimes. Not all college students. I'm not generalizing here, but, you know, that's a trait that some college students have. College students had the time. They had the concentration of people of similar age and interests all gathered in one place, and they had the university facilities where they could set up their games and they could become official clubs. You could have a war gaming club at the university and that kind of thing. So a lot of this was happening with college students. And you had a few other, you know, older people, and you also had a few precocious high school students that were hanging on. But I think the average age kind of averaged out to college age kind of students.

So a lot of this stuff, which is going to become important in the third, and I repeat, final episode. So a lot of this stuff was happening in college campuses at this time at first. Maybe trickling out a little bit from there, but largely a lot of the major activity was at colleges. This persisted for the first couple of years until TSR, which, you know, not to get into corporate shenanigans too much, but in 1975, reorganized as a corporation called TSR Hobbies when Donald K., very tragically, died quite suddenly of a heart attack. I mean, he was only in his 30s. You know, he died of a heart attack. His early 30s at that. Born in 1938, and we're talking 1974 or 75 when he died. Then the Bloom family bought out Donald K.'s widow shares of the company, and then they reorganized it as TSR Hobbies Incorporated. In the middle of the decade, TSR Hobbies Incorporated took a concerted effort to make a coherent rule system out of this, because for the first couple of years following up on D&D, they released additional supplements to that original box set. The first one of these came out in ‘75 was World of Greyhawk, and you would think, based on the modern conception of campaign settings, that a book called World of Greyhawk would be about the Great Kingdom and this setting of Greyhawk. But in fact, there's very little of that in there. It's mostly just filling in a bunch of rules that were missing from the OD&D box set. It's pretty crunchy. They released, like, an Eldritch Wizardry book, and a sword and sorcery book, like Deities and Demigods. They released a bunch of supplements to this thing that were kind of trying to plug the holes in the original Dungeons & Dragons. You know, they were gaining traction, and they were selling well. They were having some success with that. But then in 1977, they started a process of completely redoing things and creating a more coherent system instead of this kludge that they had, where a box set plus several supplements plus random articles in Dragon Magazine and its predecessor, the Strategic Review, like, constituted the rules.

I mean, it was kind of the Wild West, which in a way was good because that's a lot of the reason why there were competing role-playing games that even appeared. Because a lot of the early competitors that appeared, like Bunnies and Burrows and Tunnels and Trolls and RuneScape and whatnot, a lot of them, not all of them, but a lot of them, just started out with individual clubs creating their own D&D variations to either suit their play style better or fill in holes where they saw holes in the original rules, and then these variations grew into full-fledged systems that then published themselves. The messy incompleteness of D&D was probably important to the spread of the concept of the role-playing game as being a genre as opposed to D&D being a one-off. But on the other hand, it was inhibiting its acceptance by the wider community. D&D was never going to go mainstream when it remained an impenetrable mess. You know, some particularly nerdy people were going to get into that, and they might be able to get a few slightly less nerdy people into it by saying, don't worry, I'll explain all the rules to you, just go with it. But you're not really going to get mainstream acceptance of Dungeons & Dragons in this way. So they start a plan to fundamentally revise Dungeons & Dragons and make it more accessible. And they do this through a two-pronged approach. First of all, they commission a new version of basic Dungeons & Dragons. A new version of the original 1974 release that is far better organized and thought out and fills in gaps, incorporates some stuff from supplements that came afterwards to create a more consistent experience. They see this new version of basic Dungeons & Dragons as basically being an introduction to the concept of D&D and role-playing games. It's really meant to just guide you through like the first three levels or so of play. Which back then, you know, there's been a lot of progression inflation over time. Back then, that was a lot more game playing and, you know, half the challenge was just getting through the first level without dying. A lot of early dungeon crawls were just death traps.

I think that the codification of the rules in this way in a more coherent structure, they were not quite so impenetrable. Especially with this idea of having the basic thing, you could start with and then moving on up to the bigger thing, allowed the game to start trending a little younger because a funny thing happened. And this is according to TSR's own demographic research, which Peterson had access to when he wrote his book, Game Wizards on the History of TSR. A funny thing started happening around 1978 is that the age of the average player started getting much, much younger. It wasn't college students and 20, 30, year old nerds that were playing this game anymore. It was high school students and even younger than that. It was even like a lot of middle schoolers.

Obviously, the 80s nostalgia-fueled show Stranger Things integrates Dungeons & Dragons very much into its ongoing plot and stories. That set of kids start out as a group of middle school students. Now, in the last season, there'll be a bunch of, like, 25-year-olds pretending they're high school students, but that's a whole other story. Stranger Things, you know, depicts this group of middle schoolers that's really into this game, and that's really accurate. There's a shift that happens right in here, starting in 78 and moving into the early 80s towards a much younger audience for the game. And the second part of that is fueled for reasons that we're going to talk about in a second. But the first part of that, I think, had to come from just a more coherent and consistent set of rules that was easier for new players to get into. Because that new basic D&D set was a really well done thing. And then there was a lot of thought that went into the AD&D books graduating up from there.

You have this demographic shift that comes, and that's fueling a little better sales, but it's still just kind of going along. I mean, the company's doing fine. The company's OK, but it's still pretty small time on the whole. It's still pretty obscure. Then, there's a little disappearance that happens with a teenaged, like 16-year-old precocious college student up in Michigan by the name of James Dallas Egbert III. This is really the point in 1979 when the D&D story goes into overdrive. So, like I said, James Egbert was this very smart guy. He was in college at 16 years old at Michigan State University. But as probably shouldn't be that great a surprise, considering how being a prodigy can come associated with a lot of other social problems, he had some real issues with depression and loneliness and unrealistic expectations from his parents, and all of this kind of baggage. That's sad. I mean, it's tragic. The pressure of it all got to him in August 1979. He decided to run off to parts unknown for reasons unknown. We know them now. We'll tell the story chronologically. But he vanished from his dorm. You know, the police were kind of at a loss and his parents brought in this private investigator who was a real, kind of self-aggrandizing character by the name of William Dear. While I do think that Deere was legitimate and obviously trying to locate Egbert, because, I mean, he's working for the parents and they're not going to pay him if he's not doing anything, he was also very much into self-promotion. And he saw that this was going to be a major story. You know, teenage computer prodigy, computer science prodigy disappears from college dorm. He did a lot of self-aggrandizing, self-promoting things as part of his investigation. Flying over the campus in his airplane, doing searches, and constantly speaking to the press, doing lots of stunts like that.

One thing that became clear in the course of the investigation is that Egbert had, from time to time, played Dungeons and Dragons. Remember, this is still incredibly niche, Dungeons and Dragons. TSR is doing fine, and they've sold several tens of thousands of units at this point, probably. But they are still small, small potatoes. Most people have no idea what the heck Dungeons and Dragons is. Egbert's parents don't know what it is. The local police don't know what it is. Dear doesn't know what it is. So they come to learn, eventually, that it's this-- So at first, actually, at first they don't even realize it's actually a commercial product. This is going to change in a couple of years, as we'll get to in a second, but at this time, you couldn't just walk into your local mainstream bookstore and buy a copy of Dungeons & Dragons. This was being sold via mail order. It was being sold via hobby shops. It was not being sold in mainstream venues. So at first, when the local police heard about this Dungeons & Dragons thing, they thought this was something that Egbert and his friends had made up themselves. They didn't even realize it was a real commercial product.

There where, there was a system of steam tunnels under Michigan State. As there were under a lot of old college campuses, old infrastructure, you know, Stanford is very famous for its steam tunnels. It came out that Egbert also liked exploring the steam tunnels, which is something that college kids, I mean, it wasn't a common pastime, but it was something that college kids at campuses with these old steam tunnels would do as they would treat it as a form of spelunking and go exploring, which could potentially be somewhat dangerous. Then they got this mixed up with the fact that, oh, they were playing D&D in the steam tunnels. And maybe that's what happened to him is he got in the steam tunnels playing the game and he's still down there, you know, alive or dead or whatever. So they got that all conflated too. So they start getting this national media coverage. Originally, the media coverage is somewhat negative because it is this, oh, you know, boy disappears playing game with cult kind of thing. But after a period of time, Egbert is discovered. He is discovered down in Louisiana. He had actually decided-- He had resolved to kill himself. I mean, it's a tragic story. I would never make light of that. He had resolved to kill himself. He, I guess, decided that he should go far away from his home to do it. You know, that's the length of the country, Michigan to Louisiana. He had attempted to kill himself by ingesting something, had failed. And I think it's Louisiana, but we will fact check. Yes, Morgan City, Louisiana. He failed and then just decided, you know, he still didn't want to go back home. I think he was feeling a lot of pressure being this prodigy. He just kind of wanted to vanish. So he decided, well, I failed to kill myself, but I'm still not going back to that life. So he took a job working on oil rigs in Louisiana, just as an oil field worker, a laborer. That's where he was finally discovered.

Now, Dear never officially retracted all of the stuff, all of the nonsense that he was saying about D&D. But he wrote a book about it. The Dungeon Master got turned into a fictional book. And then it got turned into a ridiculous movie starring a young Tom Hanks, Mazes and Monsters, about a kid who can't distinguish between the fantasy of the game and reality and all of this. But that track actually died down. Like once the kid was found and most people could realize that it was not D&D that did this, the whole D&D is evil thing died down in this moment in 79. We'll get back to the rest of it. But the media was still fascinated by it because this case still led a lot of journalists in the mainstream media to discover this thing. And it was very interesting because it was so different than any other game out there.

After the initial panicky, it's a cult, people die in the game and die for real kind of stuff, there started to be a lot of coverage about, hey, there's this really interesting new game out there called Dungeons and Dragons that is like nothing you have ever played before. So it started getting just publicity, not negative publicity anymore, just legitimate publicity. This legitimate publicity attracted the attention of Random House, the major book publisher. Random House was like, oh my gosh, this was amazing and this sounds amazing and you say it comes in books? So Random House, as a result of this Egbert publicity, according to Peterson, contacted TSR and TSR worked out a distribution deal with Random House and Random House started putting it in mainstream bookstores. Now the general public could find it and the mainstream media was covering it and sales of D&D and AD&D, the new one that was already out by this time as well, just shot into the stratosphere.

They hit the big time and this is the period of time when it also became a licensing juggernaut. You know, in the early 80s, move on a couple of years from this, this is when we get the D&D cartoon as a Saturday morning cartoon. Mattel, you know, there's this hot new thing called the video game industry that's gaining some popularity and so TSR does a deal with Mattel to put out D&D related games on the Intellivision system. The licensing is entirely like, oh, there's big money out here. Like, Gygax and his people are not computer nerds. Arneson, interestingly enough, later becomes one, but he's not really one at this time. By this time, Arneson did briefly join TSR in 1976. He was not a co-founder. You know, that Strong Museum, he was not a co-founder. But he did join briefly in 76. He got some stock, a very small amount of stock. It was enough to allow him to attend shareholder meetings and continue feuding for years to come. Yeah. First mention of video games, like two hours in to the second two-hour episode. It's like, what is this podcast about?

Just to kind of recap there. So D&D is published in 74. It gains traction in certain circles, 75, 76, largely passing through word of mouth, either through recaps of gameplay sessions in fanzines or through people being guided through games, whether that's at GenCon or Origins, which we haven't really talked about, but it was the other major, major gaming convention. At that time, before D&D hit the stratosphere, was actually the larger of the two game conventions. Of course both still exists today, Origins and GenCon. Either playing it there and becoming enamored with it, grew slowly and steadily. A revision of the rules helped a younger generation get into it at the end of the seventies, right before a highly sensationalized story about Mr. Egbert, who did tragically then die in 1980, not long after he was found. He didn't last long. It is a tragic story. Shot through the roof. It got mainstream distribution and attracted mainstream interest from children, you know, middle, high school students from all walks of life at this point, and then started getting a little bit of a backlash from the satanic panic that was really starting up in the early 1980s. That kind of sets the scene for where Dungeons and Dragons and TSR were in the larger public consciousness in the late seventies and early eighties and kind of the first six, seven, eight years after Dungeons and Dragons launched in January of 1974. So, with that context in mind, in our third and final, yes, final, episode we will look at how in this same period, parallel to the growth of Dungeons and Dragons, the game itself amongst different segments of the population, we're going to see the rise of the first computer games based on Dungeons and Dragons and how many of those early games that came about in the seventies would influence a lot of what happened in video games in the early nineteen eighties and beyond.

Check out our show notes at podcast.theycreateworlds.com where we have links to some of the things that 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 the Video Game Industry volume one can now be ordered through CRC press and at major online retailers. Feel free to 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 able to financially support us, but you can still support us by leaving a review on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or the podcasting service that you use. We now have the podcast available on YouTube please feel free to 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.