Dave Arneson

• 1. Introduction

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  Dave Arneson was the co-creator of Dungeons and Dragons, and he spent two days watching monster movies, reading Conan books, and doodling on graph paper before an idea took hold that would change games forever. That moment of restless inspiration in the early 1970s led to a set of inventions so fundamental that nearly every role-playing game made since traces its DNA back to what Arneson built in his living room. Hit points. Armor class. The dungeon crawl. The neutral referee who voices every character in the world except the heroes themselves. All of it started with Arneson. Yet for decades, his name appeared far less often than his partner Gary Gygax's in the story of how Dungeons and Dragons came to be. How did a teenage wargamer from Minneapolis become the architect of one of the most influential leisure activities in modern history? And why did it take a lawsuit, decades of independent work, and a wave of scholarly attention in the 2010s before his contribution was fully restored to the public record?

• 2. The Wargamer's Education

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  Arneson's parents bought him a board wargame called Gettysburg, made by Avalon Hill, and the game unlocked something in him that never closed. He taught his friends to play, and then the group began designing their own games and inventing new ways to approach existing ones. Naval warfare held a particular fascination for him. In college history courses at the University of Minnesota, he role-played historical events and found himself most interested in the moments where the record could have gone differently, the same "what if" instinct that drives wargame scenarios.

  In the late 1960s, Arneson joined the Twin Cities Military Miniatures Group, a community of miniature wargamers and figurine collectors in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area. That group included David Wesely, who ran a series of loosely structured wargame scenarios called the Braunstein games. Wesely later credited those sessions, and Arneson's participation in them, as the seedbed of modern role-playing. Arneson was shifting focus away from mass combat and toward individual characters pursuing non-combat objectives, a change in scale and purpose that separated what he was building from anything the wargame world had seen before.

  When Wesely was drafted into the Army, Arneson took over the Braunstein sessions. He began drawing on The Lord of the Rings and the television show Dark Shadows for inspiration, mixing different eras and settings as he went. By 1969, working part-time as a security guard while studying history at the University of Minnesota, he attended the second Gen Con gaming convention in August of that year. It was there that he met Gary Gygax, a Lake Geneva, Wisconsin resident who had founded the Castle and Crusade Society within the International Federation of Wargamers. The two discovered a shared love of sailing ship games, and before long they were collaborating on Don't Give Up the Ship, naval battle rules that were serialized starting in June 1971 and published as a single volume in 1972.

• 3. Building Blackmoor

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  In October 1970, David Wesely left for service in the Army Reserves, and Arneson's circle of players in the Twin Cities began imagining new settings for the Braunstein format. Arneson created a Braunstein in which his players took on fantasy versions of themselves in a medieval land he called the Barony of Blackmoor, a world partly populated by fantastic monsters. As the game grew quickly and the characters developed, Arneson devised quests for magic and gold, caravan escorts, army commands, and expeditions into the dungeons beneath Castle Blackmoor, which he represented on the table with a Kibri kit model of Branzoll Castle.

  Arneson drew heavily on the Chainmail rules, written by Gygax and Jeff Perren and published in the spring of 1971, but he found the Fantasy Combat table within it unsatisfying after a brief trial. He built his own hybrid rules, adapting elements from his revision of a Civil War Ironclad game. The result was gameplay that modern D&D players would recognize immediately: hit points, armor class, character development, and dungeon crawls. Blackmoor also incorporated time travel and science fiction elements, visible later in the DA module series published by TSR and in parallel games run by John Snider, whose ruleset was intended for publication by TSR from 1974 as the first science fiction RPG.

  Arneson described his vision for Blackmoor as "roleplaying in a non-traditional medieval setting. I have such things as steam power, gunpowder, and submarines in limited numbers. There was even a tank running around for a while. The emphasis is on the story and the roleplaying." The setting was first described in print in issue thirteen of the Domesday Book, the newsletter of the Castle and Crusade Society, in July 1972, and later expanded into The First Fantasy Campaign, published by Judges Guild in 1977.

  In February 1973, Arneson and Dave Megarry traveled to Lake Geneva to demonstrate Blackmoor to Gygax's group. Rob Kuntz, who was there, described Arneson running Gygax, Ernie Gygax, Terry Kuntz, and himself through their first Blackmoor session. Kuntz later wrote of the experience: "Gary, myself and a few other local wargamers were the first 'lucky' fellows from Lake Geneva to experience the rigors of Blackmoor. This idea caught on deeply with Gary after an exciting adventure in which our party of heroes fought a troll, were fireballed by a magic-user, then fled to the outdoors... fought four (gulp!) Balrogs, followed a map to sixteen ogres and destroyed them with a wish from a sword we had procured from the hapless troll earlier."

• 4. Dungeons and Dragons

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  Gygax played in Arneson's Blackmoor session in February 1973 and almost immediately launched his own campaign, which he called Greyhawk. He asked Arneson for a draft of the playing rules, and the two collaborated by phone and mail while their respective groups playtested the evolving system. Both Guidon Games and Avalon Hill rejected the game when Gygax and Arneson brought it to them. Arneson could not afford to invest in self-publishing.

  Gygax felt urgency about getting the game into print, aware that similar projects were being planned elsewhere, and the rules were hastily assembled. Arneson's final draft was never used. Brian Blume ultimately provided the funding needed to publish the original Dungeons and Dragons set in 1974, with an initial print run of 1,000 copies that sold out within a year. Gygax and Donald Kaye had founded Tactical Studies Rules, or TSR, in 1973 to serve as the publisher.

  Arneson's Blackmoor campaign contributed directly to an expansion released in 1975, the Blackmoor supplement for D&D, which included a sample dungeon from Arneson's original campaign. The supplement introduced new character classes for monks and assassins, additional monsters, and a scenario called "The Temple of the Frog" -- the first published role-playing adventure designed for other referees to run at their own tables. Arneson formally joined TSR as their Director of Research at the start of 1976, but left before the year was out to pursue independent work.

• 5. Lawsuits and Recognition

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  TSR had agreed to pay Arneson royalties on all D&D products, but when the company released Advanced Dungeons and Dragons in 1977, it argued that AD&D was a sufficiently different product and withheld his royalties. Arneson filed the first of five lawsuits against Gygax and TSR in 1979. The suits were resolved out of court in March 1981 through a confidential agreement: both men would be credited as co-creators on D&D product packaging from that point on, and Arneson would receive a 2.5% royalty on all AD&D products. That arrangement provided him with a comfortable six-figure annual income for the next two decades, though tensions between Arneson and Gygax never fully eased.

  In 1997, after Wizards of the Coast purchased TSR, Peter Adkison paid Arneson an undisclosed sum to release D&D from the remaining royalty obligations. That transaction allowed Wizards to drop the "Advanced" designation and market the game simply as Dungeons and Dragons again.

  Public recognition arrived in stages. In 1984 Arneson was inducted into the Academy of Adventure Gaming Arts and Design's Hall of Fame, also known as the Charles Roberts Awards Hall of Fame. Pyramid magazine named him one of The Millennium's Most Influential Persons in 1999, qualified as "at least in the realm of adventure gaming." Flying Buffalo featured him as a "famous game designer" on the king of hearts in their 2008 Famous Game Designers Playing Card Deck. Scholarly attention came later: Playing at the World, a 2012 work by Jon Petersen, helped restore both Arneson and David Wesely to the broader conversation about the origins of tabletop role-playing games. Robert Kuntz published Dave Arneson's True Genius in 2017, and the 2019 documentary The Secrets of Blackmoor gathered interviews with the original Blackmoor players and acknowledged Arneson's innovations on record.

• 6. Life Beyond TSR

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  Away from TSR, Arneson built a varied independent career. In 1977 he published Dungeonmaster's Index, a 38-page booklet indexing all of TSR's D&D properties to that date. He co-wrote Adventures in Fantasy in 1979 with Richard L. Snider, an original Blackmoor player; the game was a deliberate attempt to recover what Arneson felt had been the original spirit of role-playing fantasy before D&D evolved away from it.

  In the early 1980s he founded Adventure Games, a company staffed largely by friends who shared his interest in American Civil War reenactment. The company published the miniatures games Harpoon in 1981 and Johnny Reb in 1983, along with a new edition of Adventures in Fantasy in 1981. It also published several books tied to the Tékumel setting, a connection rooted in Arneson's friendship with author M. A. R. Barker. Adventure Games turned a profit, but Arneson found the workload unsustainable and sold the company to Flying Buffalo in 1985; because he owned part of Flying Buffalo, he was comfortable letting them absorb the remaining stock and intellectual property.

  While Gary Gygax was still president of TSR in the mid-1980s, the two reconnected long enough for Arneson to contribute to the DA series of D&D modules set in Blackmoor, published between 1986 and 1987. TSR's editors reworked Arneson's manuscripts to fit the Mystara campaign setting, crediting him as co-author on three of the four published modules. A planned fifth module was dropped before publication. In 1986 Arneson also wrote a module called "The Garbage Pits of Despair," which appeared in two parts in Different Worlds magazine issues 42 and 43.

  Later, Arneson and Dustin Clingman founded Zeitgeist Games to produce an updated d20 System version of the Blackmoor setting. Goodman Games published Dave Arneson's Blackmoor in 2004. Code Monkey Publishing released a further edition in 2009 for 4th edition D&D, the same year Arneson died.

• 7. Teaching and Later Work

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  Living in California in the late 1980s, Arneson had a chance to work with children in special education. After returning to Minnesota, he pursued teaching and began speaking at schools about using role-playing and multi-sided dice as tools for teaching math. In 1988 he had remarked that computer RPGs still amounted to "hack and slash" and failed to teach newcomers how to play; he cited Ultima IV as a rare exception and expressed disappointment that SSI's Gold Box games had not pushed the genre further.

  He founded 4D Interactive Systems, a computer company in Minnesota, and worked on several games before moving into consulting. In 1989 he wrote DNA / DOA, the first published adventure for the FASA fantasy-cyberpunk game Shadowrun, released the same year the game itself launched. He also wrote columns and reviews for Computer Gaming World magazine through the early 1990s, covering titles like Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Zork Zero, and Uncharted Waters.

  From the 1990s onward, Arneson taught at Full Sail University, a private institution focused on multimedia subjects. His course there was called "Rules of the Game" and tasked students with accurately documenting and creating balanced rule sets, balancing mental challenges for players against the in-world challenges faced by their characters. He retired from that position on the 19th of June 2008. Around 2000, he was also collaborating with videographer John Kentner on an unreleased documentary called Dragons in the Basement, covering the early history of role-playing games with interviews from original players and designers including Marc Miller and M. A. R. Barker.

  Arneson died on the 7th of April 2009, after two years of battling cancer. His daughter, Malia Weinhagen, summed up her father's purpose plainly: "The biggest thing about my dad's world is he wanted people to have fun in life." On the 30th of October 2010, Full Sail University dedicated its student game development studio as Dave Arneson's Blackmoor Studios.