Dave Arneson's True Genius/Merlynd the Magician

[GRWelsh]

It's so hard to judge it from the outside. In every business, especially rapidly growing businesses, there are power struggles. Invariably, the losers in such struggles feel like they were treated unfairly. But you never hear the winners say, "Yeah, well, I had unfair advantages." Sometimes being aggressive and strict is what is needed to get results and that is often perceived as tyrannical. So there are always at least two sides in these stories. But screaming at someone in a meeting, humiliating them in public -- that's not cool no matter what the situation is. That's poor management. It may have worked to EGG's detriment that the company grew so quickly and was largely being run by gamers instead of professionals, and that he himself lacked executive leadership and management experience.

[geneweigel]

I honestly did not seek Rob out it's almost like he randomly sent me messages in response to my terrorizing the 3rd Edition News forum with my "final Gygax solution" ramblings. His initial dialogues were of chilling out which I had ignored. He later persisted after I had won his contest that as an employee I had to represent. So he had this thing where everything is strategy. I say (said) fuck all that fake shit. Honestly? Gary had bad strategies relying on proxies that had blandy trend styles that he would rearrange and rewrite to meet his standard in varying degrees. Rob, I believe, worked under that style with varying degrees of success. I think Arneson also worked by proxy. The only one that I can tell for working style is Gary because he was fierce with me. Rob for the little that I dealt with him was not fierce and not involved but a sense of proxy work. Arneson? All I've seen is his final product with the First Fantasy (and the follow up[])being the best of his work.

[geneweigel]

I'm cooked.

I meant before FIRST FANTASY CAMPAIGN by Judges Guild (1980) Arneson had ADVENTURES IN FANTASY ( 1979) which wasn't as bad as the basic Arneson for Lorraine Williams shit shows called "D&D". Those were terrible.

[GRWelsh]

So what happened in November 1972? Rob writes (p. 5):

He [Dave Arneson] and his players from the Twin Cities were the founding Fantasy Role-Players of the world, and almost a good two years before they introduced Dave's concept to Gary Gygax, myself, my brother Terry Kuntz and Ernie Gygax in November 1972.

In PLAYING AT THE WORLD, Jon Peterson writes (p. 71):

Once the depth of Blackmoor became apparent, Gygax expressed an interest in the new Twin Cities games, and invited both Arneson and Megarry (with his "Dungeons of Pasha Cada") to demonstrate their work in Lake Geneva -- no doubt with the understanding that Gygax's endorsement could be a quick inroad to publication via Guidon games. In the fall of 1972, the two ambassadors from the Twin Cities arrived and put on a show from the Lake Genevans... When envisioning how Gygax experienced Blackmoor in Lake Geneva, however, consider that it is no trival matter for a game like Blackmoor to go on the road. In the first place, Arneson certainly could not have brought much by way of miniature table-top setup, and thus the incarnation that Gygax saw may have emphasized the "paper and pencil" dungeons more than some Twin Cities sessions had. Moreover, Arneson could not supply Blackmoor's players. In Blackmoor, as it was played in the Twin Cities, most of the Baddies were nominally under the control of players; the orcs in the dungeon beneath Castle Blackmoor, for example, were answerable to Fred Funk (King Fred I of the Orcs) and the Wizard who lurked in its darkest recesses was played by John Soukop. As a referee running the game for the Lake Genevans, however, Arneson needed to embody all the forces of Chaos himself. Rob Kuntz recorded his memories of the occasion for posterity:

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 (being chased by the Magic-user and his minions), 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. All, what you'd say, in a day's work. [WG: #1]

Two things particularly captured Gygax's imagination during that initial exposure; "the idea of measured progression (experience points) and the addition of games taking place in a dungeon maze." [DR:#7] He was also struck by the manner in which Arneson had expanded character descriptions (presumably the abilities grouped under "personality"), the availability of diverse equipment that characters could purchase and the addition of new monsters.

Jon's citations are given in the Bibliography: DR is THE DRAGON magazine and WG is WARGAMING, organ of Fantasy Games Unlimited, first issue 1977.

Michael Witwer also gives a 'dramatized version' in EMPIRE OF THE IMAGINATION (pp.91-95):

Arneson and his companion, Dave Megarry, a member of Arneson's Minneapolis-based gaming group, had a long drive back to the Twin Cities ahead of them, one that would certainly last well into the next morning. Gary's local gaming buddies, including Rob Kuntz and Don Kaye, on the other hand, had only a short walk of a few blocks before they could get some rest and quiet their busy minds. Gary and this eclectic group had spent the last several hours playing a variation of his Chainmail game run by a group of Twin City gamers, headed and refereed by young Dave Arneson. But calling the game they had experienced just a variation of Chainmail would seem generous, as Gary had never seen or played anything quite like it. To be sure, the miniatures combat sequences played very much like his rules, as did the individual character types and classes. It seemed, however, that Arneson had taken Gary's loosely structured Fantasy Supplement to heart, not only setting this particular campaign in a make-believe world of swords and sorcery but also providing an element of gameplay that Gary had never seen used in quite this way. Arneson called this game Blackmoor ... Gary lay in bed recalling the night's events. He and his band of adventurers had, in the course of that evening, explored a dungeon, fought a troll, been chased from the dungeon by a fireball-wielding wizard, encountered a handful of Balrogs, and, to top it all off, skirmished with over a dozen ogres. It wasn't so much the fighting of these creatures that had his head spinning; to be sure, he had both encountered and conquered such creatures as part of his regular miniatures escapades in Chainmail . No, it wasn't the warfare that had his mind turning that night. It was the look and feel of the dank dungeon as they made their way through its dimly lit corridors; it was the plume of smoke that rose above the trees of the ogre camp as they approached. These visions had all been aptly described to them by the game's referee and creator, Dave Arneson. Furthermore, Gary's group was playing along, each adopting a persona with a certain set of skills, weapons, and armor. Each player spoke and acted as his character within the confines of the game, while the referee would describe not only the sights and sounds but also the effects of their actions.

[geneweigel]

I honestly think that all 3 are wishful thinking. If you look at the game play pre-Arneson there is little for him to add. The men ratio is equalled out on the charts as literal point values equating experience. The progression was already in-game with CHAINMAIL switching hero to superhero then add the "power of the magic-user". Add to that the fantasy supplement can be played neutral, chaos or law with the mining being arranged by "a third party is necessary to act as judge of the various attempts at mining or counterming to prevent it". It's like all the nuances of "D" are already present it just has to be played in a dragged out session.

[GRWelsh]

This account quoted below is from an article written by David Kushner and published by WIRED magazine (3/10/2008) shortly after EGG's death, and can be read in full at this link: www.wired.com/2008/03/dungeon-master-life-legacy-gary-gygax/. This article was also the basis for the graphic novel RISE OF THE DUNGEON MASTER: GARY GYGAX AND THE CREATION OF D&D (2017).

When Arneson saw Chainmail, he was very intrigued by its potential for free-form, improvisatory play. It was similar to the game scenarios that one of his game groups in the Twin Cities had been experimenting with. "We didn't have volumes of rules and people arguing about historical accuracy," Arneson recalls. "In one game, we all ended up chasing a South American dictator as he was trying to escape with his comic book collection."

Arneson modified Chainmail for his own group's purposes. He took the action underground, like the claustrophobic sets of the Hammer Film Productions horror flicks he watched. Corridors. Tunnels. Caves. "A dungeon is nice and self-contained," he says. "Players can't go romping over the countryside, and you can control the situation."

Arneson tested his Chainmail mod in play sessions with his group and, based on their feedback, continued to tinker with the rules to make it more fun. "We had to change the combat system because we added more monsters. They were getting big and gruesome."

There was another aspect of the game he wanted to tweak: the fact that it ended. Arneson's group was having too much fun playing these specific roles to want to part with them after a single game. Outside of the individual games, Arneson created an experience system for characters. Your character would earn experience points based on their success from game to game. After a certain number of points, a character would "level up."

To help move the story along, Arneson assumed a more elaborate role than that of the referees used to resolve disputes in war games. He would be the game master – setting the scene, guiding players along their quests. After developing the game, dubbed Blackmoor, for about six months with his group in Minnesota, Arneson and a couple of his buddies trekked back to Lake Geneva in late 1971 to run a game for Gygax and his crew. "Six-level dungeon, you start on the first floor and you go to the others by taking staircases," Gygax says. "We ran into a troll with magic armor, and we fought him and killed him and took it." The Wisconsinites all loved it. Arneson had successfully distilled the involved tactical military campaigns into a virtual world of first-person action.

Gygax effused over the "fun house" aspect of the game, which he said reminded him of exploring the tunnels under the insane asylum as a child. The game session ended at midnight, and Gygax immediately saw commercial potential in this variant of his Chainmail. "I think we can make something special out of that," he told Arneson.

Arneson soon agreed to collaborate again. Back at home, he ran off a copy of his notes on his dad's Xerox machine and mailed them to Gygax,who "couldn't make heads or tails" of the "generally useless" notes. "He sent me a couple of drafts to look over, and we talked on the phone a lot," Arneson says. "You should see the phone bills we ran up." But Gygax boiled down the disparate elements into a cohesive set of rules. "He could type, and I couldn't," Arneson says.

The two had what amounted to philosophical differences. "He thinks you can write a rule to cover any situation," Arneson says. "I don't. There are just too many possibilities, especially when you're asking people to use their imaginations." Gygax broke the characters down into a variety of classes, such as magic users and clerics, and expanded the list of weapons, from morning stars to flails. "He was always big on having different weapons have different effects," Arneson says. "Years later,he literally had a small book on different kinds of polearms, which I regard as the ultimate in silliness. It's a pointy thing on the end of a stick!"

Gygax didn't see himself as rigid and rule bound. In his mind, he was creating a coherent framework, a comprehensible rule set…a salable product. Once he had a near-final set of rules, he went into his study,a small room off his kitchen. He placed an 8 1⁄2 by 11- inch sheet of graph paper on his desk and began sketching out a dungeon. He drew little passageways and rooms, numbering each room to correspond to 16 encounters. Designing the game was like building a haunted mansion and setting traps with monsters and treasure.

[GRWelsh]

The account below is from the article "Dungeons & Deceptions: The First D&D Players Push Back On The Legend Of Gary Gygax," by Cecilia D'Anastasio. It can be read in its entirety here:kotaku.com/dungeons-deceptions-the-first-d-d-players-push-back-1837516834.

Not mindful of the language of product sales, of intellectual property, Arneson apparently wanted to share his innovation with a likeminded, and well-connected, new friend. He and Gygax had already collaborated on another game, a Napoleonic naval battle ruleset called Don’t Give Up the Ship, and curious about the campaign and its ruleset, Gygax invited Arneson and one member of his gaming crew, David Megarry, who had designed the adventure board game Dungeon, to his Lake Geneva basement to demonstrate Blackmoor. To get there, they drove through a snowstorm in November of 1972. Megarry and Arneson arrived to find Mary Jo Gygax clearing away the dinner plates while Gary sat at the typewriter, Kuntz recalled. Rob Kuntz was there, too, and joined them as the sixth player in Gygax’s first game of Blackmoor, alongside his brother Terry, Gary Gygax, his son Ernie, Arneson, and Megarry.

“Arneson set up his 3-ring binder as a screen between us and him,” wrote Kuntz in an unpublished work called A Tale of Two Daves, Two Gygaxʼs and Two Kuntzʼs, which he shared with Kotaku. “He noted that Dave Megarry, a regular in his game, would be our guide for the adventure. Megarry did most of the interfacing and explaining what it was we were about to do with imaginary characters. Arneson noted that we could be either heroes or wizards. Gary chose to be a wizard and the rest of us heroes.”

Kuntz continued, explaining how players received no rules and no maps. Mostly, it was Arneson rolling the six-sided die behind his binder. “Arneson controlled everything behind the scenes with a screen and told us what he saw,” Kuntz said.

“Arneson described a typical medieval inn and an affable innkeeper who served us; and he also warned us from starting any trouble in his establishment as its patrons were a quiet and simple folk. We all had drinks and checked out the surroundings. A little into this I informed Arneson that my character (we had no names, so it was Garyʼs character, Robʼs, etc.) was stepping outside to get some air.”

“Arneson said, ‘Okay. You come back in.’ I was confused while thinking that he had understood that I stepped out and got air and then, later, came back in. I questioned this and he clarified by noting that when I stepped through the entryway that I indeed found myself walking back into the inn. Magic! I had never exited the inn. We all caught onto the problem at once. We were trapped! Megarry and Arneson either smiled or snickered as we realized what ‘Come Back Inn’ really meant.”

Eventually, the group figured out how to escape the Come Back Inn. Kuntz went on to describe how the adventure continued, with Megarry playing guide, leading them into a castle, an encounter with some humorous magical elves, and then a battle with a troll.

“After a brief struggle the five of us overcame it and Megarry started looking for treasure,” Kuntz said. “Here was encountered another aspect which we all take for granted today but which was foreign to us then. To vanquish an opponent was not new to us due to our grounding in wargames. But that the opponent could have treasure that we might immediately secure and use, well, this was a novel concept.” The group found a magical sword that could grant wishes. Megarry suggested the group keep the sword for the future.

The foursome played Blackmoor long into the night. Arneson and Megarry crashed on the couch, leaving at 9 a.m. the next morning. At 9:15, Kuntz said, Gygax called him up. “‘I want you to come over. We need to discuss what we just experienced with Arneson,’” Kuntz said Gygax told him.

As Kuntz tells it, Gygax had taken out some paper and colored pencils. They sat together at his dining room table. “I really believe what we experienced the night before can be turned into a game for creating stories,” Kuntz recalls Gygax saying. “Be the adjudicator. I’ll be the player.” Gygax and Kuntz ran through two one-hour sessions of Blackmoor, but as Kuntz recalled it, neither game proceeded to their satisfaction. Kuntz believes it is because Arneson had been running Blackmoor for months now and had been able to furnish players with an immersive experience from repetition and recollection. Regardless, Kuntz describes himself as the first “dungeon master.”

Kuntz remembers Gygax writing down his own recollections from the Blackmoor game in a frenzy. He remembers when Gygax later asked Arneson to send over his notes for Blackmoor. Arneson didn’t have a concrete ruleset; he was making things up as he went along. But, Kuntz said, he did manage to cobble together 18 pages of handwritten notes, a lot of which were simply stats for Chainmail monsters.

Arneson, who referred to himself as a “hunt and peck typist,” wasn’t much for polished rulesets. “The game was in Dave’s mind, in practice with his home players. It didn’t exist as a full-blown set of rules,” said Stormberg. “It was a eureka moment for Gary.”

Gygax read through Arneson’s notes. “Halfway through the reading,” Kuntz said, “Gary… nonchalantly said, ‘This needs to be rewritten.’ Not one nice thing to say about Dave, the adventure the rules. This is when it all switches.”

“He was jealous. Just stone-cold jealous.”

[geneweigel]

I think it's wishful thinking. The magical weapons were already portable in CHAINMAIL: " Magical Swords: Because these are almost entities in themselves, they accrue real advantage to the figure so armed."

There is even hints at treasure gradation off the charts:

"Ensorcelled arms are of two kinds, enchanted arrows and magical swords, although Odin's spear Thor's hammer are properly in the general category."

Here is another example of treasure acquisition:

"Treat Elves armed with Enchanted Arrows as Hero-types for purpose of missile fire against fantastic targets."

[geneweigel]

There is much ground covered by Gary in CHAINMAIL that there is little to do except give Arneson a chess finesse award for doing voices for the pieces.

[Scott]

I hate how Dave vs. Gary is such a big thing now. It's all opinion, or biased, or profiteering. I just want to hear the gaming stuff.

[GRWelsh]

I agree. I respect Rob for wanting to give credit to Dave for his conceptual breakthroughs and to correct the misunderstanding that Dave contributed very little to D&D. But it seems like an over-correction and also a misunderstanding to imply Dave invented the fantasy RPG and EGG essentially co-opted it and stole it from Dave. Neither of those extremes is supported by the evidence. At the end of the day, we have to consider that in 1974 both EGG and Dave were happy to have their names printed on the original D&D box as co-authors. EGG wrote, in the Forward:

Dave Arneson decided to begin a medieval fantasy campaign game for his active Twin Cities club. From the map of the "land" of the "Great Kingdom" and environs -- the territory of the C&C Society -- Dave located a nice bog wherein to nest the weird enclave of "Blackmoor", a spot between the "Great Kingdom" and the fearsome "Egg of Coot." From the CHAINMAIL fantasy rules he drew ideas for a far more complex and exciting game, and thus began a campaign which still thrives as of this writing! In due course the news reached my ears, and the result is what you have in your hands at this moment.

[geneweigel]

I think an intelligent Blackmoor/Greyhawk project is definitely something to consider where a forensic cutting away into what exactly is Arneson's CHAINMAIL technique and add ons.

One thing that seems vague is the "World of Blackmoor" is it really a place? Or is it the CHAINMAIL shared map de-Greyhawked? And vise versa for WOG?

If I wish anything I wish that Arneson was onboard instead of whatever happened. I think Kuntz suffers from some form of "oppositional defiance disorder" where nothing reasonable regarding old days is good enough. And he is perfectly willing to go to his grave having some last word on the subject. What Rob can't grasp is there are people that are hostile towards original D&D that have zero to do with his relationships with Dave and Gary. He thinks he is fighting the good fight but he is surfing the waves of broken TSR sewage over and over. He needs to get behind Gary 200% then work on saving Dave. Otherwise it's just Forgotten Realms players in disguise justifying their gameplay with a Kuntz false flag.

[GRWelsh]

May 10, 2020 16:30:15 GMT -5 geneweigel said:

One thing that seems vague is the "World of Blackmoor" is it really a place? Or is it the CHAINMAIL shared map de-Greyhawked? And vise versa for WOG?

My understanding is that Blackmoor started out as a town located on the northern marches of the "Great Kingdom" which was on an unnamed mythical world EGG created for the C&C Society. The C&C Society was formed by EGG and Rob in 1970, and included Jeff Perren and soon after Dave Arneson as well. The C&C Society had a focus on medieval warfare and had its own fanzine called The Domesday Book. Issue #1 was dated March 1, 1970. Issue #2 named EGG the Earl of Walworth. Issue #5 had the LGTSA Medieval Miniatures rules which would be expanded on to become CHAINMAIL. Issue #9 had the map of the Great Kingdom drawn by EGG which was used in the play-by-mail game. Just north of Nir Div is where Walworth was located. There is a slightly later and different version of this map circulating around on the internet, referred to as Dave Megarry's copy. Issue #13 had details on Blackmoor and a map of its environs, later reprinted in the FIRST FANTASY CAMPAIGN (1977) published by Judges Guild. What I'm not sure about is if Greyhawk was considered to be located on this C&C Society map, and even though EGG participated in this play-by-mail game maybe Greyhawk hadn't been invented yet. By late 1972, EGG was creating his Greyhawk Dungeon which he would consider to be on a continent that looked much like North America, on a parallel earth as described in "Secret of the Gnome Cache" story in THE DRAGON. When preparing the World of Greyhawk for initial publication in the Folio (1980), EGG obviously drew inspiration from the old "Great Kingdom" map when creating his map of the Flanaess, and placed both Greyhawk and Blackmoor on it, seemingly as a nod to the mythical world he created for the C&C Society campaign which is where Blackmoor originally was.

[GRWelsh]

Here's another interesting quote, from the Forward to D&D Supplement II: Blackmoor written by EGG and dated Sept. 1, 1975 (boldface added by me):

"BLACKMOOR" also contains some interesting and amusing information regarding the actual campaign of that name. It is the oldest and longest running DUNGEONS & DRAGONS game... Dave is also the innovator of the "dungeon adventure" concept, creator of ghastly monsters, and inscrutable dungeonmaster par excellence.

[GRWelsh]

Last year in this thread I wrote: "I'd love to read a long essay devoted solely to that November 1972 gaming session." Well, it seems Rob has published a 15 page monograph on exactly that! So, thank you, Rob! It is titled "The Game That Changed Everything." I just ordered it from his TLB website and will post my impressions once I get it.

www.tlbgames.com/collections/the-red-book-line/products/game-that-changed-everything-deluxe

I'm writing in this thread rather than starting a new one because it is in this thread that I posted everything else I could find about that November 1972 gaming session, including Rob's own impression of it published in 1977.

[GRWelsh]

I finished the monograph and I'd say it had about 20% new information beyond what is already cited in this thread and elsewhere previously provided. However, I am happy to have a hard copy to commemorate this event, that rightfully deserves to be remembered as iconic. A few things that stood out to me were:

- Dave Megarry acted as the caller or intermediary between Dave Arneson/DM and the players.
- The players could choose to be either heroes (fighters) or magic-users using pregenerated characters.
- The adventure included town, dungeon and outdoor wilderness play.
- EGG was a magic-user high enough level to be able to cast lightning bolt, and the others were all heroes.
- Terry Kuntz's character was killed by the fireball from an enemy wizard.
- The party encountered four balrogs and fought and slew them with the aid of lightning bolt.
- Later they encountered at least eight balrogs, but avoided that encounter.
- The next morning, EGG put Rob on the spot to replicate the previous night's adventure model by making something up with no preparation!*

*This was disappointing to them both, but Rob cannot be faulted for trying to recreate on the fly the dungeon mastering skills that Dave Arneson had been refining for nearly two years at that point.