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

the vampire.” Today, clerics aren’t just one of the core D&D character classes—they’re a full-blown fantasy archetype, appearing in countless novels, films, and video games. Some random guy in small-town Wisconsin decided to screw with his buddy, and forty years later two hundred million gamers are playing with the result. 5
    After the better part of a year spent playing in Gary Gygax’s Fantasy Game play tests, Mornard moved to Minneapolis to start college at the University of Minnesota. Naturally, he made friends withthe local gamers—and soon found himself in Dave Arneson’s basement.
    Perhaps because the Blackmoor players were more often college-aged, and less often neighborhood children, Arneson’s games were less playful than Gygax’s. “Blackmoor was a much grimmer, grittier place than Greyhawk,” says Mornard. “In Greyhawk, if you were killed, the other players would drag your body home. But in Blackmoor there was no honor amongst thieves. You’d be looted before your body hit the ground.”
    The game played a little differently too. “It was a different way of interacting,” says Mornard. Arneson liked to use miniatures, while Gygax rarely did so. Arneson used to draw maps for his players instead of insisting they do so themselves. And he made people write up their moves instead of shouting them out and talking over each other.
    Based on feedback from play tests in Blackmoor and Greyhawk and from war-gamer friends across the country, Gygax completed a 150-page revision of the Fantasy Game in the spring of 1973 and sent it out to more friends for testing. “The reaction was so intense that I was sure we had a winning game,” he wrote. “I thought we would sell at least 50,000 copies to wargamers and fantasy fans. I underestimated the audience a little.”
    The demand was there, the game worked . . . the only thing missing was a name. “Fantasy Game” was a fine working title but too bland for the final product. So Gygax created a list of words that related to the game and wrote them in two columns on a sheet of paper—words like “castles,” “magic,” “monsters,” “treasure,” “trolls,” “mazes,” “sorcery,” “spells,” and “swords.”
    He read them aloud to his players, including Ernie and Elise, to gauge their reactions. The young girl’s delight at two of the words,an alliterative pair, confirmed the choice: the game would be called Dungeons & Dragons.
    Now they only had to print it. In the summer of 1973, Gygax called Avalon Hill and asked if they were interested in publishing his game. “They laughed at the idea, turned it down,” Gygax wrote. 6 Most of the gaming establishment wanted nothing to do with Arneson and Gygax’s weird little idea. “One fellow had gone so far as to say that not only was fantasy gaming ‘up a creek,’ ” wrote Gygax, “but if I had any intelligence whatsoever, I would direct my interest to something fascinating and unique; the Balkan Wars, for example.”
    No matter; the Dungeon Master wanted to choose his own adventure. Gygax had aspirations to run his own company—he just didn’t have the money to start one. At the time he was ready to start printing game books, Gygax’s income came from repairing shoes in his basement, and Arneson was “a security guard who couldn’t afford shoes.”
    The solution was found in the place where the whole project started. In August, the annual Gen Con convention—now in its fifth year, and bigger than ever—was held in several buildings on the campus of George Williams College, up the road from Lake Geneva in a town called Williams Bay. Members of Gygax’s ever-growing D&D play test flocked to the con and caught the eye of one of Gygax’s old friends. “Don Kaye saw the turnout, noted the interest in the fans,” wrote Gygax, “and after the event was over, asked, ‘Do you really think you can make a success of a game publishing company?’ ”
    Kaye didn’t have cash to