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

referee, assigning players individual characters with unique objectives, and giving them the freedom to do whatever they want—lit a fire in the Twin Cities gaming community. His Braunstein role-playing adventures appealed to players who were tired of long, complicated war reenactments and gotthem thinking about where the games could go next. It wasn’t long before others began to follow his example.
    David Arneson 1 was born in 1947 and grew up in Saint Paul, Minnesota. When he was a teenager, his parents bought him a copy of Avalon Hill’s Gettysburg, and he got hooked; later, he moved on to the hard-core stuff, including Civil War simulations and Napoleonic naval battles. Upon enrolling at the University of Minnesota to study history, he joined the Midwest Military Simulation Association to further indulge the habit, and his basement game room—a small space dominated by a big Ping-Pong table, with just a few feet of clearance on each side—became home base for the role-playing game crowd.
    Seated on a cushy couch “throne” at the head of that Ping-Pong table, Arneson began making his own refinements to traditional war-game rules—mostly by breaking them. During one battle set amid the Roman conquest of Britain, he got bored and decided to spice things up.
    “I’d given the defending brigands a druid high priest,” Arneson explained in a 1983 interview. “In the middle of the battle, the dull battle, when the Roman war elephant charged the Britons and looked like he was going to trample half their army flat, the druidic high priest waved his hands and pointed this funny little box out of one hand and turned the elephant into so much barbecue meat.” Arneson removed the war elephant from the game, explaining that the druid had killed it with a Star Trek –style phaser gun. “That was absolutely the only thing in the game that was out of the ordinary, but they weren’t expecting it,” he said.
    The players were nonplussed—save for the delighted commander of the British druid. But Arneson wasn’t put off from sneaking elements of fantasy into his war games. In December 1970, after atwo-day binge of watching monster movies and reading Robert E. Howard’s Conan the Barbarian books, Arneson invited his friends over under the pretense of playing a traditional Napoleonic war game. Instead, he introduced them to the city of Blackmoor.
    “They came down to the basement and there was a medieval castle in the middle of the table,” says Megarry. “And then he says, ‘We’re going to do this instead.’ ” The players, Arneson explained, had been sent through time and space to a medieval city and had to control original heroic characters, each with their own attributes, powers, and goals.
    “My very first character was a thief,” says Megarry, “and my nemesis was Dan Nicholson, the merchant. His role was to try to get stuff into town and then sell it. And my role was to try to steal his stuff and make my money that way. It gave us a framework of how to operate in this world.”
    Characters in place, Arneson sent the players to explore the dungeons beneath the castle and town. Inside, he hit them with another twist: The subterranean passages weren’t defended by human soldiers but inhabited by fantastic monsters—like a dragon, which Arneson represented on the table using a plastic toy brontosaurus with a fanged clay head. The fantasy role-playing game was born.
    “Frankly, the boys in my club were bored,” Arneson said. “They wanted to try something new. To me, it was a logical extension to go into fantasy. It was less restrictive than history.”
    Much of the appeal of the game came from the excitement of exploring the winding corridors underneath Blackmoor. “There was that thrill of discovery,” says Megarry. “You have to make a decision . . . left or right, or staircase in front of you going down?” The game was so popular, people wanted to play even when they couldn’t make it to