Of Dice and Men: The Story of Dungeons & Dragons and The People Who by David M. Ewalt

experience and become more powerful.
    Gary Gygax took those ideas and turned them into a commodity. “I asked Dave to please send me his rules additions, for I thought a whole new system should be developed,” he wrote. “A few weeks after his visit I received 18 or so handwritten pages of rules and notes pertaining to his campaign, and I immediately began work on a brand new manuscript.”
    Over the next two months, Gygax labored at a portable Royal typewriter crafting the rules for a new kind of game, where players roll dice to create a hero, fight monsters, and find treasure. By the end of 1972, he’d finished a fifty-page first draft. He called it the Fantasy Game.
    The first people to play it were Gygax’s eleven-year-old son, Ernie, and nine-year-old daughter, Elise. Gygax had created a counterpart to Arneson’s Blackmoor, which he called Castle Greyhawk, and designed a single level of its dungeons; one night after dinner, he invited the kids to roll up characters and start exploring. Ernie created a wizard and named him Tenser—an anagram for his full name, Ernest. 3 Eliseplayed a cleric called Ahlissa. They wrote down the details of their characters on index cards and entered the dungeon. In the very first room, they discovered and defeated a nest of scorpions; in the second, they fought a gang of kobolds—short subterranean lizard-men. They also found their first treasure, a chest full of copper coins, but it was too heavy to carry. The two adventurers pressed on until nine o’clock, when the Dungeon Master put them to bed. Fatherly duties completed, Gygax returned to his office and designed another level of the dungeons.
    The next day the play tests continued, and Ernie and Elise were joined by three players plucked from Gygax’s regular war-gaming group: his childhood friend Don Kaye (Murlynd) and local teenagers Rob Kuntz (Robilar) and his brother Terry (Terik). He also sent the manuscript to a few dozen war-gaming friends around the country, requesting feedback. “The reaction . . . was instant enthusiasm,” wrote Gygax. “They demanded publication of the rules as soon as possible.”
    The local gamers also clamored for more. As they got farther into the depths of Castle Greyhawk, they faced greater challenges and began to feel like they were a part of a legend: Thanks to Dave Arneson’s innovation of persistent characters, the dungeons had a living history. If Tenser killed a pack of kobolds on Tuesday, Robilar might find the corpses on Thursday. It was a brand-new way to create a story.
    Gygax began running regular sessions of the Fantasy Game for a growing group of players; simultaneously, David Arneson tried out the rules with his Blackmoor players in Saint Paul. Arneson and Gygax spent a year testing the Fantasy Game with their respective gaming clubs and then discussing what did and didn’t work.
    “I don’t know if any game ever has been play-tested as much as this game,” says Michael Mornard, the only person to play a regular character in both Gygax’s Greyhawk campaign and Arneson’s Blackmoor. Mornard grew up in Lake Geneva and was sixteen when he met Gygax, through his classmate and fellow war-gaming enthusiast Rob Kuntz. In late 1972, Mornard was playing a miniatures battle with Kuntz and Don Kaye at Kaye’s Lake Geneva home when he heard about the Fantasy Game.
    “Either after or between turns of the battle,” says Mornard, “Rob tells us, ‘Gary’s got this new game he’s working on. You’re a bunch of guys exploring an old abandoned castle full of monsters and treasure.’ And Don says, ‘That doesn’t sound very interesting.’ ” Mornard felt otherwise. “I was like, ‘What do I have to do to get in?’ ”
    A few days later, Mornard went over to Gygax’s house for his first foray into the depths of Castle Greyhawk. He rolled up a character with 15 strength and 15 intelligence, and decided to make him a fighter (or, as the class was known at the time, a