Of Dice and Men: The Story of Dungeons & Dragons and The People Who (31 page)

As the game’s four-hour time limit drew close, I couldn’t help but feel disappointed. In my head, I’d built playing D&D with Ernie Gygax into the apex of gaming: I expected to be not only entertained but enlightened. I thought I would somehow become more skillful,
as if mere exposure to a legendary DM could bestow his special powers. But playing D&D with Ernie Gygax isn’t a magical act; it’s just playing a game. And not every game is for me.

D&D means different things to different people: Some folks want action, others want drama. I want problem solving, a sense of achievement, and an interesting narrative. To be a successful DM, I have to remember that. If I’m not having fun, neither will my players.

I also must know my strengths and weaknesses, what kinds of games I can and cannot run proficiently. I won’t succeed through gross osmosis, reading every book on the subject and playing every edition. Play what you know, and love what you play.

Strangely, the key to role-playing mastery has little to do with understanding a character. It’s knowing yourself.

Every hero needs a quest, and every kingdom has one. A kidnapped princess, a missing treasure, maybe a dragon terrorizing the countryside. David was sure the prince would give him purpose and grant him the powers necessary to deliver the king’s justice.

He arrived at the royal palace early, eager to begin a great adventure. But he did not find it there. “You want to be a hero,” the prince told him, “but I cannot tell you where to go. You won’t find fortune and glory following footsteps others have trod.

“Know yourself, and you’ll find your own path.”

David thanked the prince and left the castle.

On the second day of Gary Con I ran into Tavis Allison, one of the designers of a new role-playing game called Adventurer Conqueror King, and his son, Javi. Tavis was at the show selling copies of his game, and playing D&D whenever possible. Javi had just come from one of the convention’s kid-friendly game sessions, D&D for preteen players, run by a twelve-year-old DM.

“I played a wizard, and I named him Gandalf,” Javi said, shaking my hand up and down with exaggerated fervor, until Tavis told him to stop. When the adventure concluded early, he explained, the DM let the players fight each other for fun, and it came down to Javi versus one other kid. “I hit him with a web and then a magic missile, and then I hit him with my staff, until . . .
ka-pssh!
” He mimed something exploding with his hands.

Tavis and I had both signed up to play a game of Dungeon!, the 1975 TSR board game. Its creator, David Megarry, had driven from Minneapolis to teach the game to curious fans. As Tavis and I talked, we watched him set up four different editions of the game on top of a beat-up old Ping-Pong table; the original 1975 version, with its floppy vinyl board and generic Parcheesi-style tokens, looked comparatively ancient next to 1992’s Classic Dungeon, which had a hard-backed board and molded plastic pieces shaped like wizards and warriors.

Megarry looked a bit out of his era as well. His chestnut-colored hair and ubiquitous grognard beard were well on their way to white, and he wore simple wire-frame glasses and a straw boater hat with a black ribbon band. A member of La Compagnie des Hivernants la Rivière Saint Pierre, a nonprofit organization that creates historical reenactments from the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Midwest, Megarry looked like he could have come directly from a fur trading post.

I get a weird sense of cognitive dissonance when I think about David Megarry reenacting eighteenth-century history, because he was a first-person witness to events that have their own historic importance. Megarry grew up in the Twin Cities and got involved in the war-gaming community when he was still a teenager. He played in some of Dave Wesely’s earliest Braunstein games and delved into the depths of Dave Arneson’s pioneering dungeon crawls.

“In fact,” Megarry told the dozen or so players who had gathered around the table to play his board game, “this was the original table that was in David Arneson’s basement. We played Napoleonic miniatures on it, and we came down one Saturday morning, and there was this medieval castle on it.”

Suddenly, the beat-up Ping-Pong table seemed to grow in my vision. I felt my heart pound and the hair on my arms stand up, a physical reaction to a sudden realization: This is where Dave Arneson ran Castle Blackmoor. In a very real way, this was the birthplace of fantasy role-playing.

The thought made my head swim—to play a game on Arneson’s table is to literally touch the history of D&D, to share a physical and psychological connection with its creators. I experienced something like what devout Christians must feel upon entering the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, or, less sacrilegiously, what a baseball fanatic would experience if he got the chance to hit a few balls in Yankee Stadium using Babe Ruth’s bat. I thought I’d purchased tickets to play an out-of-print board game, a fun diversion; instead, I was performing an act of devotion.

I took out my camera and started taking pictures of the table: a close-up of the wood grain, visible through fading green paint; a piece of yellowed masking tape, peeling off on a corner; little nicks and scratches; even a tiny pencil mark, potentially dating back to Blackmoor itself. After a minute I looked over at Tavis. “It’s amazing,” he agreed. “My son, of course, is totally uninterested and went off to play video games.”

Had he stayed, Javi probably would have enjoyed himself. Dungeon! is still a lot of fun. The game simulates exploration of a series of rooms filled with monsters and treasure. Each player takes a premade character, heads out into the dungeon, kills the creatures, grabs their loot, and repeats. Since the monsters and treasures are printed on small cards and placed facedown on the board, players
don’t know what sort of peril is in a room until they enter it—or how big the reward. Color-coded numbers on each monster identify what you must roll on a 2d6 to kill them: My character, Flennetar the Paladin, attacked using the red numbers, so I needed only a 2 to kill a goblin, whereas Longbranch the Elf attacked on white and would need a 3. Miss your target number by a point or two, and you could lose one of your 2 hit points. Miss by a bigger margin, and you’re dead. In addition to providing my combat details, Flennetar’s matchbook-sized character card explained I could move five spaces per turn and needed thirty thousand gold to win. It also detailed a paladin’s unique power—that I could take a turn to heal myself or another player.

If this all sounds familiar, it’s not a coincidence. Dungeon! is a direct relative of D&D, born out of the same gaming sessions that inspired Arneson and Gygax. After a few months of playing Arneson’s Blackmoor games, Megarry began to notice the toll it took on his friend. “I was watching Arneson just be completely drained by the whole process,” he said. “It was an incredible amount of work. He couldn’t play his own game. It seemed unfair.” Megarry began to wonder: Could he make a dungeon crawl that didn’t require a referee, so everyone at the table could have fun?

The game came together in October of 1972, after Megarry broke up with a girlfriend. “After an argument with her, I just went home and sort of sulked,” he said. “But as part of that, I said, ‘Well, I’ll work on this game idea.’ And the minute I started working on it, I couldn’t stop.” He drew the dungeon outline on nine 10" by 13" pieces of poster board taped together at the edges, and glued on squares of colored paper to represent individual rooms. Monsters and treasures were described on tiny chits half the size of a business card. When laid out, the completed prototype—a white background covered with yellow and orange shapes—looks like a Mondrian painting.

His friends loved it, and mixed in a few sessions of Dungeon! between their Blackmoor adventures. Megarry decided to try to get the game published: “I sent a letter to Parker Brothers asking if they would like to look at it, then I got my first rejection letter,” he said. “So Arneson and I went down to see Gary Gygax to show off our stuff.”

Today, we remember Arneson and Megarry’s 1972 trip to Lake Geneva as the occasion when Gygax first saw Blackmoor, the “you got your peanut butter in my chocolate” moment when D&D was born. But Megarry was there too—and his board game must have helped inspire Gygax’s work. David Megarry’s contribution to the origin of role-playing games may not be as fundamental as that of Arneson and Gygax, but it’s still significant. He might not be one of the fathers of Dungeons & Dragons, but he’s at least a favorite uncle.

In 1975—when TSR was flush with cash from the newly released Dungeons & Dragons—Megarry’s board game was finally published. But even though Dungeon! eventually sold half a million copies, Megarry never got rich or famous from the game, or for his part in the history of D&D. His relationship with TSR ended in a series of disappointments.
³
But Megarry isn’t bitter—he made the game to entertain people, and he’s happy knowing he did.

“You can second-guess all you want. But I can come away knowing that I made a fun game that people like, to this day,” said Megarry. “I’m satisfied with that.”

This was the wisdom I’d been searching for. I had spent so much time learning about where D&D came from, about the controversies,
the management errors, the lawsuits, and the edition wars, that I nearly forgot the most important thing about the game: It’s supposed to be fun.

I won’t master the game by memorizing obscure historical arcana. I won’t find the key to a successful campaign in rule books or in obsessively detailed homemade maps. I just have to think about my friends and make sure they’re having fun.

As he departed the temple of the creator, David thought back on what he’d left at home—family and friends, people he cared about but left behind.

With a grimace, he realized his error. He wouldn’t find happiness choosing his own adventure; he’d find it sharing adventures with friends.

He needed to think, to figure out where to go next. He wandered the city aimlessly, unsure where his feet were taking him.

After the game, I got in my rental car and drove a few miles east into downtown Lake Geneva. During the summer, the resort town is flooded with tourists. But in the third week of March it was half-empty, with only a handful of locals on the sidewalks, quietly strolling and enjoying unusually warm weather.

I parked on the street next to the public library, a one-story brick building on the north shore of Lake Geneva. The back side of the library faces the lake, and floor-to-ceiling windows look out onto a small park. I followed a neat walkway past the building and down the shoreline for about a half mile. It’s a nice walk—the thick grass of the park slopes up on one side of the path, and the placid lake sits just a few feet away on the other.

Halfway down the path, I sat on a park bench and looked out on the water. There were two men fishing on a rowboat a few hundred feet from shore, but I could see them only in silhouette against the
rippling water. Birds chirped and sang in the trees. An older couple walked past, hand in hand, quietly talking.

Someday soon, Library Park might be home to the Gary Gygax Memorial. Gary’s widow, Gail, has been working on the project for several years. Eventually, she hopes there will be a small statue here, perhaps a bust of Gary surrounded by the tools of his trade: a fantasy castle, a coiled dragon, some polyhedral dice.

The city government has tentatively approved the location, but there are years of planning and permits and approvals before the memorial becomes reality. Fund-raising, too—although with Gary’s rabid fan base, coming up with the cash shouldn’t be a problem. Wizards of the Coast has already promised to donate the proceeds from a special-edition reprint of the original AD&D core rule books.

After a while, I walked out of the park and past the library to the Riviera, a banquet hall built back in 1932, when Lake Geneva was a swinging summer party destination for Chicago’s rich and famous. In front of the old building, there’s a fountain surrounded by a memorial walkway—one of those things where local businesses and families make donations to get their names or a short message carved on bricks in a path. There’s one inscribed “to the world’s best husband,” one for “The Birkenheier Family,” another with the logo of a local bank. Then, near the base of the fountain, directly in front of the doors of the Riviera, there’s a large square brick depicting a dragon sleeping on top of a twenty-sided die. “In loving memory of E. Gary Gygax,” it reads. “Creator of Dungeons & Dragons. Donated by his family, friends, and fans.”

I stood there for a while, thinking. Then I walked a little farther along the shoreline and turned left on Center Street, heading away from the lake and uphill into town. Four blocks in, on the corner of Wisconsin Street, is the house Gary lived in when he created Dun
geons & Dragons. It’s a little white house with a gray roof, set back from the road behind a small garden. Since it was March, nothing was growing. But there was a small plaque in the dirt, resting against a wall of rocks: “If tears could build a stairway and memories a lane, I’d walk right up to heaven and bring you home again.”

I lingered on the corner and imagined Gary sitting on the porch, smoking a cigar and thinking about wizards. Then I crossed the street and walked a few blocks to Sage Street.

Don Kaye’s house on Sage Street is where TSR got its start. It’s gone now, bulldozed to make room for an elementary school. As I walked past, I saw a mom and dad leading their kids into the school for some after-hours event. The dad was wearing a tuxedo T-shirt, and I laughed at his silliness, but then remembered I was wearing a shirt with a picture of the Ghostbusters chasing the Pac-Man ghosts, Inky, Blinky, Pinky, and Clyde.

I kept walking. A lady gave me a wave and a smile as I walked past her house on Marshall Street. A little farther on, I stopped to consider a house on the corner of Williams Street—the original home of the Dungeon game shop. Now it’s someone’s home, just slightly gray and faded. It’s next door to a Laundromat, and on the opposite corners there’s a Pizza Hut and a gas station.