About Dungeons and Dragons
Dungeons & Dragons had started with 1,000 cardboard boxes in 1974. Most of these boxes were delivered through mail, and others purchased from store shelves. A Dungeon Master in 1974, was called a referee. There were three core rulebooks.
Inspiration for Dungeons & Dragons had started back in 1913, when British science-fiction author H.G. Wells published a rulebook titled Little Wars. This rulebook allowed gamers to fight battles with lead miniature figures modeled after nineteenth century infantry, cavalry, and artillery. These mini figures were found inside British nurseries.
By the 1950s, wargaming had become an American hobby. People eventually also wanted miniatures that represented medieval warfare, though there were no rules for those models. So, Gary Gygax, who was a fanatical and very active wargamer decided to create a set of rules for a medieval wargame himself.
In 1968, Gary Gygax held a gathering of nearly one hundred gamers called the Lake Geneva Wargames Convention, or Gen Con which was the first ever Gen Con. At this Gen Con Gygax had found a game called the Siege of Bodenburg, which sparked an interest for medieval wargaming for Gygax. In 1970, Gygax had founded a general interest wargaming club called the Lake Geneva Tactical Studies Association (LGTSA), and a more specialized group called the Castle & Crusade Society. The Castle & Crusade Society had a mission to publish medieval wargame rules. Gygax had created a set of rules for infantry and cavalry combat in collaboration with fellow LGTSA member and medieval enthusiast Jeff Perren.
In order to visualize the medieval conflicts, Gygax looked towards the historical illustrator Jack Coggins. With Perren and Gygax both drawing their own copies of Coggins’s mounted swordsman about to strike foot soldiers waiting with shields and spears in 1970. This artwork would be used in preliminary articles about Perren and Gygax’s medieval miniature rules, appearing in obscure venues. Such as the Castle & Crusade Society’s newsletter, the Domesday Book. A year later, Don Lowry founded Guidon Games, deciding to sell Perren and Gygax’s medieval rules under the title Chainmail, for two dollars a copy. Lowry had drawn a rendition of Coggin’s mounted knight that was used for the Chainmail cover. Effectively the first true Dungeons & Dragons artwork was Lowry’s copy of Coggin’s battle scene, later Dungeons & Dragons rulebooks relied heavily on the Chainmail system.
Gary Gygax decided to give gamers who purchased the Chainmail rules a new expansion to play with, called the Fantasy Supplement. The “Fantasy Supplement” provided no illustrations, other than on the cover.
Dave Arneson, a college history major had joined the Castle & Crusade Society, participating in creating a shared backdrop for a Castle & Crusade Society wide medieval wargame, called the Great Kingdom. Arneson developed a part of this landscape called Blackmoor. Arneson created a dungeon underneath the castle he had placed in Blackmoor, with monsters from the Chainmail rulebooks, intending for a small group of individual characters to be controlled by the players. As well as adding to the Hero and Wizard classes in Chainmail, Arneson would add a new class that was more of a priest, along with the concept that as characters survived through adventures, they would gain experience and level up. Arneson would share information on Blackmoor in his own fanzine, Corner of the Table, and C&C’s fanzine, the Domesday Book. Gygax soon started making his own dungeon called Castle Greyhawk, and a private correspondence with Arneson creating a draft of a new game that would be known as, Dungeons & Dragons.
Due to Guidon Games not having much to pay for artwork, Gygax had to gather art for D&D with effectively no art budget. Guidon Games could not financially publish D&D. So, Gygax had partnered with his friend Don Kaye to create their own imprint called Tactical Studies Rules (TSR).
All of the art for the original Dungeons & Dragons had been produced mostly by people who were doing Gygax a favor. No one was a professional artist. The game had gone over the budget, so Gygax and Kaye needed a third partner to raise more money. This third partner would be Brian Blume, helping make Dungeons & Dragons a reality.
Originally, there was no standard way for players to record the stats of their characters, but eventually the character sheet became a standardized form to record the stats for player characters. TSR sold dice separately from the Dungeons & Dragons boxes. Sales of dice were a form of independent revenue. Many who wanted to play Dungeons & Dragons had pirated the limited rulebooks with the help of Xerox machines, but they couldn’t photocopy the dice needed to play.
Gygax had written stories and articles to advertise D&D to small wargaming fanzines, who wanted new content. The Greyhawk supplement had introduced two new classes, the thief and the paladin. At the end of January 1975, Don Kaye had died at 36 years old, forcing Gygax to become company president.
One of the first D&D imitators was something called Tunnels & Trolls. Imitators were castigated and threatened with legal action. Reviews of D&D began to call it a role-playing game to avoid legal action from TSR. The term role-playing game soon became a label for the genre that grew from D&D. One of the first publishers that made D&D available overseas was the startup UK publisher Games Workshop.
Gary Gygax had seen artwork done by Dave Sutherland in another of TSR’s role-playing games called Empire of the Petal Throne and decided to recruit Sutherland to make art for The Strategic Review. Sutherland provided illustrations for D&D’s second supplement, and Dave Arneson’s Blackmoor. The Blackmoor supplement had introduced two new character classes, these being the monk and assassin. The Blackmoor supplement also replaced the referee title to Dungeon Master.
Sutherland became TSR’s first art director in early 1976.
The Eldritch Wizardry supplement released in May 1976, introduced the druid class as well as rules for psychic mind powers called psionics. This supplement had the first full color art, illustrated by artist Deborah Larson. Eldritch Wizardry had gained a lot of attention due to its depictions of demons with inspiration from real world mythological sources, including Orcus and Demogorgon. Sutherland had illustrated Orcus and Demogorgon under Gygax’s direct guidance.
The Dragon, or as it is later called Dragon magazine, was a place for creators and fans of Dungeons & Dragons could discuss the game and submit art.
The owlbear and rust monster were both first introduced in Greyhawk, but only the owlbear had an illustration.
Towards the end of 1976, Dave Arneson left TSR due to a bitter dispute with management.
The Players Handbook was unveiled in the summer of 1978. The Players Handbook was made to help introduce new players to the game.
In 1979, TSR had run out of dice due to high sales and had to resort to cardboard with numbers drawn on to substitute dice.
Erol Otus, an artist for D&D who had made controversial art pieces for the Palace of the Silver Princess, most notably his three-headed hermaphrodites. Causing the module to be recalled and pulped, even to where executive Kevin Blume would circulate a memo years later for any employee who had a copy of the original Palace of the Silver Princess module, to destroy it.
In August 1979, sixteen-year-old Michigan State University student James Dallas Egbert III had disappeared from the school campus, and happened to play D&D. The parents of Egbert had hired an investigator named William Dear to find their child. Dear was known for his unconventional, yet effective methods. The investigator found Egbert’s Advanced Dungeons & Dragons products featuring occult imagery, heard that Egbert and his friends played in the steam tunnels underneath the campus, and observed a session held by students. After this the investigator had a theory that D&D blurred the lines of fantasy and reality, to where Egbert assumed the role of his character and was adventuring the schools steam tunnels. Due to the school's reluctance to let Dear search the tunnels, he informed East Lansing detectives and the press about his theory. The media caught on to the story quickly with D&D being called a bizarre intellectual game, and many related headlines including the word cult. TSR staff were asked to find a secret D&D code or map that wasn’t there in pictures of Egbert’s bulletin board. When Dear was finally allowed to search the school steam tunnels, he found nothing. Egbert eventually surfaced in Louisiana having run away because of academic pressure and other personal problems. However, this situation brought new attention to D&D and its subjective imagery. New allegations had emerged about how D&D was a recruitment tool for Satan worship and witch covens.
The World of Greyhawk folder was the first campaign setting TSR released.
Gygax in 1980, had swapped the module in the D&D Basic Set from Carr’s In Search of the Unknown for his own Keep on the Borderlands.
The successful and iconic modules in the early 1980s were re-faced and occasionally recompiled versions of older modules.
BY 1982, TSR had for the first time of staff exclusively of professional artists.
In 1982, a grieving mother by the name of Patricia Pulling was searching for answers about her son's suicide. She had begun working on an anti-D&D organization that would seek to work with local governments, law enforcement, churches, and censorship groups in order to remove D&D’s influence nationwide. This organization would later be known as Bothered About Dungeons & Dragons (BADD).
TSR in 1983 saw its first financial loss. As well as corporate reorganization in June of 1983.
In 1983, Games Workshop released Warhammer fantasy miniatures onto the market. So TSR decided to create Battlesystem, a fantasy set of combat rules that shipped with two lead miniatures. This was the first time TSR tried to bring fantasy miniatures into D&D since Swords & Spells.
Dungeons & Dragons: The Animated Series was a television series that appeared on television screens on September 17, 1983. The show followed six adolescents that were transported into a world called The Realm and were tasked with finding a way home while battling the forces of evil. The show lasted twenty-seven episodes in two and a half seasons, before it was cancelled on December 7, 1985, due to poor ratings.
In 1984, TSR released the Dragonlance novel series and adventure modules. However, TSR was struggling financially and had to start downsizing, though the common buyer would not know this.
D&D despite the name did not have a framework that would allow players to regularly include dragons in their campaigns. Until TSR released the first of their Dragonlance products, module DL1: Dragons of Despair, in March 1984.
Dragonlance’s success saw it be one of the fanbases most beloved campaign settings.
TSR, even though they had already layedoff numerous employees, in 1984 had to layoff its president Kevin Blume. TSR was trying to soften the D&D brand to stray away from the rumors of suicide and Satan worship, rebranding and issuing new versions of old rulebooks. However, Gary Gygax did not like this softening of the D&D brand and made his standpoint clear in Dragon magazine. Gygax’s arguing with TSR management lead to a hostile takeover ousting Gygax from the company. Following a legal battle Gygax wanted to challenge the transfer of stock but ended up losing the case as well as Dungeons & Dragons. Meaning that from that day forward D&D would be managed by a second generation of creators.
TSR in 1986 began to stabilize with the sale of new products, notably the Dragonlance novels. TSR had gotten Dave Arneson to create modules based in his world, with the release of Adventures in Blackmoor.
In 1987, TSR had chosen to license Strategic Simulations, Inc., to create computer versions of D&D.
In order to gather more data on how to best make a second edition to AD&D, Zeb Cook had made an article in Dragon #118 titled “Who Dies?” which had teased the removal of some of the character classes. This created an expected uproar from the fanbase, providing data on how to best revise the Players Handbook.
Spelljammer arrived with second edition, providing players with the experience of fantasy D&D in space.
In 1991, TSR compacted and distilled the basic rules of D&D into the Dungeons & Dragons Rules Cyclopedia.
TSR in 1995 had revised its second edition core rulebooks for AD&D to celebrate its twentieth anniversary, making those rulebooks with the only version of the D&D logo after 1983 without the ampersand disguising as a dragon breathing fire.
In 1998, the first AD&D video game produced by BioWare was Baldur’s Gate.
At Gen Con XXIX, the first copy of the AD&D Core Rules CD-ROM, was carried on a black pillow while escorted by a kilted bagpiper towards the TSR Castle exhibit.
TSR competitor Wizards of the Coast bought TSR and all its intellectual property in June 1997.
D&D third edition saw a slow and small rise in players, due to the complexity of the rules. Which is why Wizards of the Coast had released in 2003, D&D v3.5 that had included much needed changes.
On October 16, 2004, Wizards of the Coast celebrated D&D’s thirtieth anniversary by holding the first Worldwide Dungeons & Dragons Game Day.
Works Cited
Witwer, Michael, et al. Art &Arcana A Visual History. Wizards of the Coast, Ten Speed Press, 2018.
