24
Critical Role
On August 23, 1969, the second annual Lake Geneva Wargames Convention – Gen Con for short – opened in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. The convention was started the previous year by the International Federation of Wargamers (IFW), a hobbyist club established by Pennsylvania teenager William Speer in January 1966 as the U.S. Continental Army before changing its name in May 1967. The club sought to connect enthusiasts of miniature and tabletop wargaming, a hobby that made up for its small fan base through the fervent devotion of its adherents. As few cities boasted a large circle of wargamers, organizations like the IFW kept members abreast of new developments in the hobby, provided matchmaking services for play-by-mail games, and linked individuals who were interested in taking the hobby a step further and developing their own rules of play.1
In July 1967, the IFW held its first convention in Speer’s hometown of Malvern, Pennsylvania, which flopped because few people opted to make the trek to the East Coast. The club nearly folded after being stuck with a large catering bill from the event, but it persevered under the leadership of new president Scott Duncan. In 1968, the group tried again, but this time opted to hold the convention in the Midwest, both because it was more centrally located, and because many wargamers hailed from that part of the country. The vice president of the IFW, Gary Gygax, offered to front a portion of the cost on the condition the convention was held in his hometown of Lake Geneva, a resort community popular with residents of Chicago and Milwaukee.2
Gen Con attracted nearly 100 people, so a second convention was planned for 1969. Almost 200 people attended this time, including a group of wargamers from Minnesota led by a college student named David Arneson. Ironically, the Arneson group was not there to meet people from other parts of the country, but to find some fellow Minnesotans to swell their own ranks. In the niche world of wargaming, Arneson and his friends decided they would have more luck meeting fellow Twin Cities wargamers by driving eight hours to a gathering in another state as opposed to scouring their own community. Arneson met Gygax at the event, and the two bonded over their mutual interest in Napoleonic-era naval games. They promised to stay in touch and to collaborate on a set of naval rules together.3
In 1971, this collaboration produced a naval miniatures game called Don’t Give Up the Ship published in four parts in the hobbyist magazine International Wargamer before receiving a printed release the next year through Guidon Games, a boutique publisher run by Gygax’s friend Don Lowry.4 Guidon also published a Medieval miniatures ruleset developed by Gygax called Chainmail that became particularly popular with Arneson’s group in Minnesota, spurring a second collaboration with Gygax on a product that introduced a revolutionary new game that defined not just the future course of the board game industry, but of the video game industry as well: Dungeons & Dragons.
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Military miniatures have existed for as long as humanity has possessed the technology to produce small figurines, but their widespread adoption dates to the eighteenth century, when a Nuremburg pewter artisan named Johann Gottfriend Hilpert used the leftover metal from tableware production to create flat figures mounted on broad stands to commemorate the victories of Frederick the Great during the Seven Years’ War. After a brief interruption due to the Napoleonic Wars, Nuremberg became the center of a military miniature industry that grew increasingly popular as the nineteenth century progressed.5
Military miniatures were not linked to wargaming activities at this time: they were intended primarily for display or as cheap toys for children. After the Franco-Prussian War and the accompanying rise of international interest in German kriegspiel, a small group of British enthusiasts took the first halting steps toward linking toy soldiers and rulesets designed to use them to simulate military engagements. The writer Robert Louis Stevenson, for instance, played a series of wargames using miniatures while living in Davos, Switzerland, over the winter of 1881–1882.6 Undoubtedly, other individuals were crafting rules for their own private war games in the same period, though none of them were published.
In 1893, a British toymaker named William Britain, Jr. introduced a new type of metal figurine that was three-dimensional rather than flat but could be produced cheaply due to a new manufacturing process. Toy soldier fever swept Britain over the next two decades, and the first published rulesets for miniatures wargaming appeared. The foremost of these was developed by noted author H.G. Wells, who took great delight in sharing in the play activities of his two young children and crafted a set of rules suited for structured play with their toy soldiers that were suitable for adults. He called his ruleset Little Wars and syndicated it from December 1912 in Windsor Magazine before publishing it as a booklet in 1913.7
Little Wars did not spark a civilian wargaming revolution in its own time, as pretend wars were soon overtaken by the horrors of two actual globe-spanning conflicts. It did gain adherents, however, most notably a group of miniatures collectors that established the British Model Soldier Society (BMSS) in 1935. Although dedicated to collecting generally rather than wargaming specifically, Little Wars was a common topic of conversation in the society’s newsletter, and one of its members, Captain J.C. Sachs, developed a new set of rules derived from Little Wars that incorporated twentieth-century military equipment not found in the original rules.8
With World War II safely in the distance, Little Wars was reprinted in the mid-1950s, and members of the BMSS began publishing their own custom rulesets in their newsletter once more. Though the organization remained primarily British, some of its roughly 400 members resided in other countries, including the United States. American wargaming enthusiast Jack Scruby grew emboldened by a survey conducted by the BMSS indicating that at least a quarter of its membership was interested in wargaming and launched a new quarterly publication in 1957 called War Game Digest. Through his magazine, Scruby built the first community dedicated specifically to wargaming.9
Miniature wargaming was destined to remain a niche hobby due to the time and expense required to field large armies, but another form of wargaming gained a measure of popularity in the 1960s. The architect of this movement was Charles Roberts, an enlisted reservist with aspirations to become a full-time soldier. In 1952, Roberts became a commissioned officer in a National Guard unit and applied for a Competitive Tour of Duty, a posting that would allow him to convert his guard commission into a regular army commission. Taking his training seriously, Roberts decided to enhance his study of military principles through board games that could simulate a variety of tactical and strategic scenarios to complement his field exercises. No such games existed at the time, so Roberts created his own.10
With the Korean War winding down, the Army ended the Competitive Tour Program, and with it Roberts’s aspirations of joining the regular army. He found his board game to be a valuable tool, however, and published it in 1954 under the name Tactics through a venture he named The Avalon Game Company after the town in Maryland where he lived. Assembling games in his garage and selling them through mail order, Roberts essentially broke even on sales of roughly 2,000 units.11 This initial foray into publishing convinced him there was a market for his products, so in 1958 he entered the business full time with a revised version of his game called Tactics II and a recreation of Gettysburg. He also incorporated his business that year as Avalon Hill after discovering that his original company name had already been taken.12
In 1961, Avalon Hill released an updated version of Gettysburg that replaced squares on the game board with hexes. The publicity surrounding the centennial of the Civil War helped generate interest in the game, and it sold 140,000 copies over the next few years. Sales of other games remained modest, however, and a recession in the early 1960s coupled with the rise of discount stores to prominence drove many Avalon Hill’s distributors out of business. The company was nearly forced to declare bankruptcy, but Roberts reached a deal to hand it over to his largest creditors in December 1963: his box designer, Smith Box Company, and his printer, Monarch Services, owned by Eric Dott. J.E. Sparling became the new president of Avalon Hill and cut expenses to the bone to keep the company going.13 One of Roberts’s last acts before departing his company was to lay plans for a bimonthly magazine called The General that advertised Avalon Hill products, featured columns on game strategy and design, and provided a directory of wargamers to help subscribers locate opponents. The General proved a critical nexus for wargaming enthusiasts around the United States and facilitated the creation of clubs like the IFW to birth a national fandom out of a niche hobby.14
Although most wargamers focused on the Napoleonic Wars or the twentieth century, there were a small number of adherents who preferred the Ancient and Medieval periods. One game that gained popularity with this set in 1967 was The Siege of Bodenburg, which was created by New Jersey hobby store owner Henry Bodenstedt and serialized in a magazine called Strategy & Tactics founded as a competitor to The General that same year. This miniature war game depicted a fictional siege of a German fortress by invading Turks and was developed to boost the sale of miniatures Bodenstedt carried in his store. While not the first Medieval miniature game, it became significant after a demonstration at the first Gen Con ignited a new interest in miniatures wargaming for avid Avalon Hill war-game player Gary Gygax.15
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Born July 27, 1938, in Chicago, Illinois, Ernest Gary Gygax moved with his family to Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, when he was eight years old. An avid player of card and board games from the time he was five, Gygax also enjoyed his father’s bedtime stories of magic-wielding heroes and exploring the tunnels under the abandoned Oakwood Sanitarium.16 As a teenager, Gygax immersed himself in the sword and sorcery fantasy and pulp fiction authors of the day such as H.P. Lovecraft, Firtz Leiber, Jack Vance, and Robert E. Howard.17
A poor student more interested in games than academics, Gygax dropped out of high school at 17 and enlisted in the Marines. When he was medically discharged months later, he took a job as a shipping clerk in Chicago. In 1958, Gygax experienced two significant life events: he married his childhood friend Mary Jo Powell, and he played Avalon Hill’s Gettysburg for the first time.18 The game inspired a fierce passion for wargaming, and he began consistently playing Avalon Hill games on evenings and weekends.
At Mary Jo’s encouragement, Gygax attended night school at Wright Junior College to complete his high school education. In 1962, he secured a job as an underwriter for the Fireman’s Fund and moved his family back to Lake Geneva.19 In 1966, he joined the IFW and became a frequent contributor to both The General and the small fanzines popping up all over the country.20 His tireless advocacy of wargaming and interest in collaborating with nearly anyone who was developing their own ruleset led to his central role in organizing the Gen Con convention at which Siege of Bodenburg was demonstrated.
Inspired by the Medieval miniatures game, Gygax built his own sand table in his basement in 1969 and formed a local wargaming group dubbed the Lake Geneva Tactical Studies Association (LGTSA). Members included his childhood friend Donald Kaye, a local teenager named Robert Kuntz, and a college student named Jeff Perren. Despite his youth, Perren had been involved with the hobby for years and had contributed articles to Jack Scruby’s pioneering War Games Digest. He shared Gygax’s newfound love for Medieval wargaming and even developed his own simple ruleset for recreating the battles of the period.21 Gygax, meanwhile, began beating the drum for a comprehensive set of Medieval rules in the various magazines and fanzines of the day and established with Kuntz a new organization called the Castles & Crusades Society to link Medieval enthusiasts that counted 40 members within a year. Gygax edited a fanzine for the organization called the Domesday Book in which he published a set of Medieval rules based on the rules Perren brought with him to the LGTSA.22
In 1970, Gygax lost his job as an underwriter.23 At first, Gygax hoped this would become an opportunity to work on creating games full time, though this was not realistic with the small size of the hobby and his need to support a wife and six kids. He became a cobbler, which at least allowed him to work from home and gave him extensive opportunities to continue indulging in his hobby.24 In this he was aided by Don Lowry, a military history enthusiast and former Air Force Officer running a prominent mail-order hobby shop out of Belleville, Illinois. Lowry started publishing rulesets with the aim of boosting miniature sales, which proved successful enough that he established a small publishing firm called Guidon Games. Gygax published several games with Lowry, most notably an update to the Medieval ruleset he had collaborated on with Jeff Perren.25
Released in 1971 as Chainmail, the latest edition of the Gygax and Perren’s rules included a special 14-page supplement in the back added by Gygax that provided rules for depicting battles in fantasy settings, particularly the world of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings saga. Why exactly these rules were included is lost to history, but Gygax was an avid reader of fantasy and had been trying to gauge interest in a ruleset to depict Tolkienesque battles over the previous couple of years. The supplement was roundly criticized by the majority of the wargaming establishment, presumably due to its deviation from history and incorporation of the fantastic, but it did gain some adherents, notably Gygax’s new friend Dave Arneson.26
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Born October 1, 1947 in Hennepin County, Minnesota, David Lance Arneson received his introduction to wargaming the same way Gygax did, through the Avalon Hill Gettysburg game, which his parents bought him in the early 1960s. In 1965, he put out a call for opponents in The General that led him to the Twin Cities Military Miniatures Group (TCMMA). Founded by David Wesely, the TCMMA engaged in traditional war gaming, but also experimented with other styles of play. One of its more interesting variants was a Napoleonic game developed by Wesely called Braunstein. Wesely had been interested in the Napoleonic period for some time and had adapted his own ruleset from the classic Charles Totten military training game Strategos that he named Strategos N. One of the key elements that Wesely borrowed from that game was the concept that any action could be attempted by the players, after which a referee would decide how successful these actions would be based on an application of the rules. In the context of the original Strategos, this “anything is possible” approach applied strictly to military actions, but in Braunstein Wesely took this concept in a new direction.27
At its core, the Braunstein scenario was a typical miniatures engagement between French and Prussian forces over the control of the small fictional town of Braunstein. In order to give other members of the TCMMA a chance to participate, however, Wesley allowed them to assume the roles of various townsfolk such as the local lord, a radical student supportive of the French Revolution, and the chancellor of the local university. While none of these players commanded military units, they were free to determine the actions of their characters with little restriction, with Wesley acting as referee and determining whether they were successful or not. Braunstein ended without any military action taking place, but the players, including Arneson, had so much fun they clamored for more. Wesley ran several more campaigns, which were all referred to as “Braunsteins” even though they featured different time periods and locales to denote them as games with a large cast of characters and open-ended objectives.28
In late 1970, Dave Wesley’s Army Reserve unit was called up, so Arneson took over the running of the Braunstein games. By now, Arneson had joined the Castles & Crusades Society and become more involved with Medieval wargaming. In early 1971, he decided to run a Braunstein in which combat would be adjudicated by the Chainmail ruleset. Informed by his love of author Robert E. Howard’s books and the Chainmail fantasy supplement, Arneson decided his new Braunstein would take place in a fantasy setting called Blackmoor.29
The first Blackmoor game revolved around defending the Barony of Blackmoor from the marauding forces of the “Egg of Coot.” In this sense, it was a traditional miniatures war game, but as in previous Braunsteins each player took on a role in the campaign, and not all of them were martial. The assembled players had such a good time that when the campaign ended, they desired further adventures in Blackmoor. Arneson not only obliged, but also decided to both provide continuity in regard to events taking place in the game and allow the players to improve certain core abilities of their characters through the accrual of ”experience points.” By appending character advancement to the existing Braunstein formula of allowing players to attempt any action, Arneson created a new type of game.30
Subsequent Blackmoor campaigns continued to focus on combating external threats, but over time a secondary activity evolved. The centerpiece of the barony was a Sicilian castle model Arneson used as the central hub for the game. The scale of the castle was too small for all the activities Arneson wanted to set there, however, so he began mapping out an elaborate series of caverns and dungeons beneath it,31 inspired in large part by the British horror movies developed by Hammer Films. In between fights with the forces of Egg of Coot and other marauders, players would descend into these caverns to fight monsters and acquire treasure. These activities became so popular that some players began focusing more on dungeon exploration than the primary campaign objectives.32
In fall 1972, Dave Arneson travelled once again to Lake Geneva to meet with Gygax, who had read reports of Blackmoor in the fanzines and wanted to play it for himself. Also tagging along was fellow TCMMA member Dave Megarry, who had distilled the dungeon exploration of Blackmoor into a board game called Dungeons of Pasha Cada. Gygax and several other members of the LGTSA played both games. Gygax was taken with both the character progression and dungeon exploration aspects of Blackmoor and asked for a copy of the rules.33
Unlike Gygax, Arneson was less enamored with creating complete rule systems as he was with developing ad hoc solutions and additions on the fly as new situations presented themselves. As a result, Blackmoor did not have a ruleset so much as a series of notes on courses of action that built off the foundation of Chainmail but were not integrated in a systematic way. Using these notes as a base, Gygax typed up a complete ruleset for a fantasy game that incorporated multiple players each taking on the role of a single hero, differing character traits based on the hero’s chosen profession or “class,” dungeon exploration, the ability to upgrade to more powerful equipment, and character progression based on the accumulation of experience points over multiple play sessions.34
The rules continued to evolve throughout early 1973 as Gygax tried them out on the LGTSA and Arneson used them in his continuing Blackmoor campaign. Although technically a collaboration, Gygax asserted more and more control over the process as development continued and incorporated Arneson’s input less and less. In mid-1973, Gygax completed a second draft that was twice the length of his initial version. Now that the ruleset was close to completion, it required a name. Gygax began experimenting with word pairings like “Swords & Spells” and “Men & Magic” and polled his friends and acquaintances on which sounded best. The consensus choice was Dungeons & Dragons.35
Gygax began looking for an outlet to publish his new fantasy game but could find no takers. In the past, Gygax had released product through Guidon Games, but Lowry moved to Belfast, Maine, in 1972, and his company never recovered its financial footing. Gygax also approached Avalon Hill but was rebuffed because the game was just too different from the successful games on the market. Gygax was not sure where to turn next but discovered a new path forward at Gen Con VI. Unlike in past years, the convention was not sponsored by the IFW – which was in the process of falling apart – but by the LGTSA. When the convention proved successful despite the lack of national backing and publicity it had enjoyed in the past, Gygax and his friend Donald Kaye decided to form their own company to publish Dungeons & Dragons themselves. In honor of the LGTSA, they named their company, formally established on October 1, 1973, Tactical Rules Studies, or TSR.36
Despite establishing a company together, Gygax and Kaye were unable to begun producing Dungeons & Dragons right away. Over the course of development, the game had expanded to fill three booklets, and TSR did not have the money to publish such an elaborate product. They published a set of English Civil War rules authored by Gygax and Perren called Cavaliers & Roundheads in the hopes of raising the necessary funds, but the game sold poorly. TSR was saved by another member of the LGTSA named Brian Blume. A tool and die maker and avid Avalon Hill wargamer, Blume joined the LGTSA in 1973 after becoming impressed at the organization’s work in putting on Gen Con VI. A believer in the future of fantasy gaming, Blume agreed to fund the initial print run in exchange for a one-third stake in TSR.37
Dungeons & Dragons went on sale in February 1974 at a cost of $10 for the three booklets.38 At first, the game garnered little attention despite Gygax’s attempts to publicize it in various fanzines. The turning point came at Gen Con VII in August when Gygax was able to demonstrate the game for the larger wargaming community for the first time. Dungeons & Dragons became the talk of the show, and many of the 300 attendees bought rulesets to take back to their own communities.39
By the end of October 1974, the first print run of 1,000 copies had sold out. TSR did a second run of 2,000 copies in November, which lasted until May 1975.40 As the decade progressed, D&D slowly but steadily grew in popularity as more rules supplements were released and the game struck a chord with not just wargaming clubs, but also groups of students on college campuses across the United States. As had occurred with war games, a gaming culture coalesced around the game as individuals formed local clubs, created their own rules modifications and scenarios, and kept current with national trends and events through Dragon Magazine, launched by TSR in 1976. Members of this new gamer culture were often attracted to computer programming with its own complex system of rules that could be shaped by the programmer, so it was not long before these individuals were applying the concepts of Dungeons & Dragons to computer programs as well.