Dungeons & Dragons is 50. These books show how it really got started.
In 1966, Gary Gygax, an insurance underwriter living in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, placed a notice in the “Opponents Wanted” section of the Avalon Hill General, the in-house promotional magazine of the era’s premier war gaming company. Like many gamers, Gygax was part of some local and regional clubs but was always searching for new people to compete with or against. He wrote, “Opponents wanted for face-to-face play. Any AH (Avalon Hill) Wargame, other type war game, or any form of chess.” But then he added a telling sentence: “Will cooperate on game design.”
And cooperate he did. Over the next few years, his labors helped lead to the first edition of Dungeons & Dragons, in 1974. But though his name remains the most famous associated with the title, he couldn’t have done it without an adventurous army of Midwestern gamers, especially Dave Arneson, a just-graduated history major at the University of Minnesota and Gygax’s co-author. The game slowly caught on as people began to understand that it offered something new – a product where play was as collaborative as the process through which its rules had been written, and where the only true limit was the imagination of the players. Today, the elements that first coalesced in D&D underpin not only much of the global gaming industry but also the gamification of everyday life.
As D&D turns 50, games historian Jon Peterson wants us to take the history of this iconic game seriously. And he’s done the work, meticulous archival research into the core primary documents through which D&D came together – letters, memos, early drafts, trade publications, and an avalanche of newsletters and fanzines – to argue that this revolution in gaming emerged out of a broad network of interlocking gaming communities. These individuals and clubs often came together in a spirit of innovation and improvisation, constantly debating and tinkering with the rules others had put forward. Sometimes, of course, they were motivated as much by conflict, petty gripes and greed. That word in Gygax’s first ad, “cooperate,” is revealing, but it doesn’t tell the whole story.
In “Playing at the World, 2E: Volume I: The Invention of Dungeons & Dragons,” Peterson opens by breaking down D&D to its core elements, then locates where those elements first appeared in precursor games. Tractics, a World War II tank game, first used polyhedral dice (that is, dice used to create random numbers in ranges other than one to six). Braunstein, a war game set in a fictional Prussian town, allowed gamers to role-play as nonmilitary characters and affect the outcome of the conflict. Eventually Arneson hosted a “medieval Braunstein” with fantasy elements that he called Blackmoor, a critical precursor of D&D.
After 1974, Peterson shifts to tracing the continued evolution of D&D in many iterations (and the struggles of Gygax’s company, TSR, to maintain control of its core product). The 1974 edition was confusing and limited, and even as TSR started putting out additional material, gamers around the country improvised their own, much as Gygax and Arneson had fiddled with other products to make their game. Sometimes, those improvisers wrote back to TSR, such as when a Californian gamer called Gygax to suggest the game’s “thief” class. The very term “role-playing game” came out of an attempt by TSR to make it clear that while there was a mass of new games, and they all involved role-playing, they were not all D&D.
Peterson proves an able guide through those conflicts and communities, carefully selecting which individuals and publications to highlight, building toward a taxonomy of role-playing games and their core elements. He has previously written a corporate history of D&D (“Game Wizards: The Epic Battle for Dungeons & Dragons”). But this book – a wholesale revision of a self-published tome from 2012 that Peterson himself characterizes as having “a reputation of an impenetrable labyrinth” – is a highly readable history of ideas, rather than a biographical approach to Gygax, his co-authors or the companies they founded.
Another recent volume, “The Making of Original Dungeons & Dragons: 1970-1977,” engages with the same history but shows rather than tells. Produced by a team at Wizards of the Coast (the company that purchased TSR and Dungeons & Dragons in 1997), it is a sumptuously curated collection of facsimiles of early D&D-related texts, along with commentary from Peterson. Jason Tondro, who led the project, used to be a professor of premodern English literature before he left academia, and he clearly brought that training with manuscripts and curation to this work. The book is gorgeous, packed with gems like doodles of monsters from Gygax and, more central to the story, items such as an announcement in a local newsletter in 1971 of Arneson hosting “medieval Braunstein.” But most of the book is taken up with complete editions of core texts, including Chainmail, Gygax’s medieval war game, to which he appended (controversially) a “fantasy supplement.” It also includes the first unpublished draft of D&D, reproductions of the published first edition and most of the major supporting texts that followed in the next few years.
D&D, as a game, is played by more people than ever before. After a moribund period in the aughts, the release of new, easier-to-play editions, paired with the rise of online live streams of gaming sessions, helped draw new people to the hobby. That’s how it was in the beginning, too; you just had to see the game to understand its potential. In the ’70s, that meant going to a convention or a local gaming group, or at least reading a fictionalized transcript of a gaming session: “The Making” includes a reproduction of one such account that Gygax wrote for a Swiss fanzine. Now, with streaming, it’s easier to learn to play, and as many folks discovered during the early years of the COVID pandemic, role-playing games translate very well to Zoom and other virtual platforms.
But if D&D hadn’t bounced back, or if someday it fades away, the history provided in these volumes would still be valuable. If you look around, you’ll find the influence of D&D everywhere, from corporate culture to the classroom, from exercise apps to customer loyalty programs. Understanding how we live now means understanding how concepts like experience points, leveling up and role-playing entered our culture. Where TSR had once tried to maintain control of D&D, the monster born in the Midwest has long since spread its wings and taken to the skies. But the story of how it was hatched – and the many gamers who helped raise it – is as relevant as ever.
David Perry is a journalist and assistant director of undergraduate studies in the history department at the University of Minnesota. He is a co-author of “The Bright Ages: A New History of Medieval Europe.”