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Game Wizards: The Epic Battle for Dungeons & Dragons
The story of the arcane table-top game that became a pop culture phenomenon and the long-running legal battle waged by its cocreators.
When Dungeons & Dragons was first released to a small hobby community, it hardly seemed destined for mainstream success--and yet this arcane tabletop role-playing game became an unlikely pop culture phenomenon. In Game Wizards, Jon Peterson chronicles the rise of Dungeons & Dragons from hobbyist pastime to mass market sensation, from the initial collaboration to the later feud of its creators, Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson. As the game's fiftieth anniversary approaches, Peterson--a noted authority on role-playing games--explains how D&D and its creators navigated their successes, setbacks, and controversies.
Peterson describes Gygax and Arneson's first meeting and their work toward the 1974 release of the game; the founding of TSR and its growth as a company; and Arneson's acrimonious departure and subsequent challenges to TSR. He recounts the Satanic Panic accusations that D&D was sacrilegious and dangerous, and how they made the game famous. And he chronicles TSR's reckless expansion and near-fatal corporate infighting, which culminated with the company in debt and overextended and the end of Gygax's losing battle to retain control over TSR and D&D.
With Game Wizards, Peterson restores historical particulars long obscured by competing narratives spun by the one-time partners. That record amply demonstrates how the turbulent experience of creating something as momentous as Dungeons & Dragons can make people remember things a bit differently from the way they actually happened.
When Dungeons & Dragons was first released to a small hobby community, it hardly seemed destined for mainstream success--and yet this arcane tabletop role-playing game became an unlikely pop culture phenomenon. In Game Wizards, Jon Peterson chronicles the rise of Dungeons & Dragons from hobbyist pastime to mass market sensation, from the initial collaboration to the later feud of its creators, Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson. As the game's fiftieth anniversary approaches, Peterson--a noted authority on role-playing games--explains how D&D and its creators navigated their successes, setbacks, and controversies.
Peterson describes Gygax and Arneson's first meeting and their work toward the 1974 release of the game; the founding of TSR and its growth as a company; and Arneson's acrimonious departure and subsequent challenges to TSR. He recounts the Satanic Panic accusations that D&D was sacrilegious and dangerous, and how they made the game famous. And he chronicles TSR's reckless expansion and near-fatal corporate infighting, which culminated with the company in debt and overextended and the end of Gygax's losing battle to retain control over TSR and D&D.
With Game Wizards, Peterson restores historical particulars long obscured by competing narratives spun by the one-time partners. That record amply demonstrates how the turbulent experience of creating something as momentous as Dungeons & Dragons can make people remember things a bit differently from the way they actually happened.
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First published October 1, 2021
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August 25, 2021
"Weaponized rhetoric, which was originally forged during the battle for Dungeons & Dragons in the first decade of its existence, lays strewn throughout the historical record like unexploded ordinance."
I just checked my watch, dear reader, and ah! Yes, it is old fart o'clock. So let me tell you about teenage me falling in love with Dungeons & Dragons (the ol' red Basic set), eventually ending up as a chronic player of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 2nd Edition. God, how I loved those games. Then we (as in: me and my friends) grew older, we all moved to different cities and that basically put a stop to my tabletop gaming.
Why am I telling you all of this? Just to say, this was in the early to mid 90s, and even then we all had heard/read the stories about Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson (the creators of Dungeons & Dragons) hating eachothers guts! Legendary tales of petty fighting and lawsuits! The stuff this book is made of.
Jon Peterson, who you might know from his rather large tome Playing at the World , a comprehensive history of gaming, has written this almost forensic account of the legal battles between Gygax and Anderson.
And here is your first warning: although this book is in some ways fun, it is also a book about legal stuff, which you might find harder to swallow. Lots of numbers, lots of citing of rules. It never gets overwhelming, but it can be rather.. dry.
That said, there are plenty of delightful anecdotes about grumpy pettiness, to keep diligently reading - here's one regarding a gaming conference giving plaques to publishers, but not to designers, which basically made Dave Arneson's head rotate Exorcist-style:
"Representatives of TSR happily collected plaques for these honors— but Dave Arneson beat TSR to the podium to claim the “All Time Best Role Playing Rules” plaque for himself. At the time, no one wanted to make a scene, but shortly after Origins, Arneson was asked to return the plaque to the Metro Detroit Gamers so that it could be given to TSR, who had lodged a complaint. As Arneson would explain, “I was informed that traditionally all awards were given to the company that published the winning game, orset of rules, and not the author, or designer.” Arneson flatly refused to return the award— instead, he demanded that he be given the plaques for the other two H. G. Wells Awards bestowed on D&D. He widely circulated a letter detailing his reasoning, comparing the situation to “Bantam Books receiving the awards for J. R. R. Tolkien’sworks or 20th Century Fox, Star Wars’s Oscars.”
What quickly becomes clear is that Gygax was a bit of a showboat, someone who liked the fame and the money, and liked being a Personality. Anderson on the other hand was permanently pissed off and feeling he never got the recognition he deserved, eventhough he actually produced precious little work.
For me the most interesting (and fun, dare I say) part of the book is how TSR (the company Gygax set up, that produced the game) grew so large and bloated in the mid 80s, that it basically imploded under its own mismanaged weight. This part is a story of mismanagement and nepotism, and it is quite thrilling to read.
Throughout the book plenty of illustrations are sprinkled, some are quite fun: see the portraits of Gygax and Arneson, or a map of TSR locations presented in the style as one of the maps from the games. There are photos of the people involved, and many a reproduction of legal documents.
Your second warning is finally here: this is not a history of the development and the many iterations of D&D. You'd better find a copy of Peterson's other book, or I direct you to Shannon Applecline's excellent series of books called Designers & Dragons .
BUT.. if you are interested in knowing a bit more about the gnarly personalities behind your favourite games, and you accept that a book about legal battles will contain some legal dryness, and you'd like a clear overview how TSR collapsed.. this is the book for you.
3.5 stars
(Thanks to The MIT Press for providing me with an ARC through NetGalley)
I just checked my watch, dear reader, and ah! Yes, it is old fart o'clock. So let me tell you about teenage me falling in love with Dungeons & Dragons (the ol' red Basic set), eventually ending up as a chronic player of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 2nd Edition. God, how I loved those games. Then we (as in: me and my friends) grew older, we all moved to different cities and that basically put a stop to my tabletop gaming.
Why am I telling you all of this? Just to say, this was in the early to mid 90s, and even then we all had heard/read the stories about Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson (the creators of Dungeons & Dragons) hating eachothers guts! Legendary tales of petty fighting and lawsuits! The stuff this book is made of.
Jon Peterson, who you might know from his rather large tome Playing at the World , a comprehensive history of gaming, has written this almost forensic account of the legal battles between Gygax and Anderson.
And here is your first warning: although this book is in some ways fun, it is also a book about legal stuff, which you might find harder to swallow. Lots of numbers, lots of citing of rules. It never gets overwhelming, but it can be rather.. dry.
That said, there are plenty of delightful anecdotes about grumpy pettiness, to keep diligently reading - here's one regarding a gaming conference giving plaques to publishers, but not to designers, which basically made Dave Arneson's head rotate Exorcist-style:
"Representatives of TSR happily collected plaques for these honors— but Dave Arneson beat TSR to the podium to claim the “All Time Best Role Playing Rules” plaque for himself. At the time, no one wanted to make a scene, but shortly after Origins, Arneson was asked to return the plaque to the Metro Detroit Gamers so that it could be given to TSR, who had lodged a complaint. As Arneson would explain, “I was informed that traditionally all awards were given to the company that published the winning game, orset of rules, and not the author, or designer.” Arneson flatly refused to return the award— instead, he demanded that he be given the plaques for the other two H. G. Wells Awards bestowed on D&D. He widely circulated a letter detailing his reasoning, comparing the situation to “Bantam Books receiving the awards for J. R. R. Tolkien’sworks or 20th Century Fox, Star Wars’s Oscars.”
What quickly becomes clear is that Gygax was a bit of a showboat, someone who liked the fame and the money, and liked being a Personality. Anderson on the other hand was permanently pissed off and feeling he never got the recognition he deserved, eventhough he actually produced precious little work.
For me the most interesting (and fun, dare I say) part of the book is how TSR (the company Gygax set up, that produced the game) grew so large and bloated in the mid 80s, that it basically imploded under its own mismanaged weight. This part is a story of mismanagement and nepotism, and it is quite thrilling to read.
Throughout the book plenty of illustrations are sprinkled, some are quite fun: see the portraits of Gygax and Arneson, or a map of TSR locations presented in the style as one of the maps from the games. There are photos of the people involved, and many a reproduction of legal documents.
Your second warning is finally here: this is not a history of the development and the many iterations of D&D. You'd better find a copy of Peterson's other book, or I direct you to Shannon Applecline's excellent series of books called Designers & Dragons .
BUT.. if you are interested in knowing a bit more about the gnarly personalities behind your favourite games, and you accept that a book about legal battles will contain some legal dryness, and you'd like a clear overview how TSR collapsed.. this is the book for you.
3.5 stars
(Thanks to The MIT Press for providing me with an ARC through NetGalley)
September 17, 2022
Dungeons & Dragons has an outsized impact on those who play it. I discovered the game in the early 1980s. The friendships that I forged over those game sessions have lasted a lifetime. Four decades later, me and a couple other over fifty geeks who first played the game with me back then still roll Initiative a couple times a month.
That’s how I found myself reading a book so far afield from my normal fare — a book about the rise and fall of an unlikely American company and its legal battles along the way. That company was TSR — magic letters to gamers, for they were the logo of the parent company of Dungeons & Dragons. And yeah, this book does track a business and its lawsuits, but it does more than that. It describes the transformation of D&D from an idea in an obscure war gamers club, to a tiny, unlikely start up company, to a full blown cultural phenomenon. A media hyped rumor that a missing teenager disappeared because of the sinister influence of Dungeon & Dragons created a sensation, proved that any publicity is good publicity, and launched TSR into the stratosphere. Dungeons & Dragons went on not only to survive, but to thrive from the early ‘80s Satanic Panic that, while creating head aches for young gamers, ultimately provided more publicity for the hobby. All these stories resonate with meaning for gamers of a certain age.
The book parses the contributions of the two warring creators of Dungeons & Dragons, Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson. They fought each other through a long series of lawsuits to establish the legal rights to the game, but it remained a point of contention in the gaming community over who should get the credit for what. Through examining the legal battles and the unguarded statements of the combatants this book reveals who actually did what toward the game creation. Neither Gygax nor Arneson comes off as particularly mature or wholly honest in this fight, but Gygax certainly appears to be the person who would be more fun at a party.
The plethora of business and legal details make some sections drag, but old time gamers will definitely want to read Game Wizards for the stories it tells.
That’s how I found myself reading a book so far afield from my normal fare — a book about the rise and fall of an unlikely American company and its legal battles along the way. That company was TSR — magic letters to gamers, for they were the logo of the parent company of Dungeons & Dragons. And yeah, this book does track a business and its lawsuits, but it does more than that. It describes the transformation of D&D from an idea in an obscure war gamers club, to a tiny, unlikely start up company, to a full blown cultural phenomenon. A media hyped rumor that a missing teenager disappeared because of the sinister influence of Dungeon & Dragons created a sensation, proved that any publicity is good publicity, and launched TSR into the stratosphere. Dungeons & Dragons went on not only to survive, but to thrive from the early ‘80s Satanic Panic that, while creating head aches for young gamers, ultimately provided more publicity for the hobby. All these stories resonate with meaning for gamers of a certain age.
The book parses the contributions of the two warring creators of Dungeons & Dragons, Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson. They fought each other through a long series of lawsuits to establish the legal rights to the game, but it remained a point of contention in the gaming community over who should get the credit for what. Through examining the legal battles and the unguarded statements of the combatants this book reveals who actually did what toward the game creation. Neither Gygax nor Arneson comes off as particularly mature or wholly honest in this fight, but Gygax certainly appears to be the person who would be more fun at a party.
The plethora of business and legal details make some sections drag, but old time gamers will definitely want to read Game Wizards for the stories it tells.
Read
April 17, 2021I first became aware of Jon Peterson* through references in Die interviews to his Playing At The World, a general history of RPGs and wargames which I've still yet to read. This, on the other hand, popped up on Netgalley so I thought I might as well. It zooms in on one strand of the previous book's big picture, the contested history of Dungeons & Dragons, and the rise and fall of its publisher TSR. As such, it's inevitably aimed at a niche within a niche; roleplaying, and even D&D specifically, may be more popular than ever before, but while an interest in that might be a necessary condition for reading this, I'm not sure it's a sufficient one. There's a certain amount of hand-holding to get the reader through some of the business with stock options and office politics on which the story turns, but again, that's going to winnow the audience further. Fundamentally, though, I suspect you need to be at least a bit of a grognard** to care about the history of a defunct games publisher, and in particular about the collaboration-turned-rivalry of Dave Arneson and Gary Gygax. Your classic Severed Alliance model, in other words, except imagine it as taking place in a world with the added stakes of the Smiths being the first ever indie band, set against the faint bathos of indie only tentatively becoming cool 30 years later.
As is usually the way in a dispute over rights, both Gygax and Arneson had their partisans, but what really comes across here is the degree to which a) D&D could never have happened without both of them and b) they were both absolute nightmares. Arneson could clearly run a table (and yes, it is entirely deliberate that I'm posting this exactly half a century since he first did just that), but every time he attempts to codify that as something other people could use, it sounds a lot like Homer Simpson's tax return. One of the most frustrating moments in the book comes when Peterson talks about the manuscript of Arneson's long-promised Blackmoor campaign finally being battered into shape by Tim Kask – "Decades later, he still seems traumatized by it", and as an editor myself I would love to know more of the gory details there. Equally, Gygax can codify, ramify, but that without the kernel is nothing. Yet once they fall out, each is happy to suggest the other deserves no credit whatsoever. Add in that both of them come across as very much the old-school, barely socialised flavour of nerd, the sort who'd say 'stout yeoman of the bar' while ordering a drink and think this absolutely brilliant, and as often as not I just wanted them both sent to their rooms to think about what they'd done.
Still, it is interesting to be reminded how much that very nerd stereotype was shaped by D&D. When its precursor Chainmail introduced fantasy elements to wargaming, this was regarded as an outlandish and suspect move by a hobby which at that point was all about historical re-enactment. And if it turned out there was a small audience, well, that still only made D&D, as per one early rights deal and a chapter title here, a $300 idea. Even that being a comparatively high number; at one point a licensing deal is made for miniatures based on Edgar Rice Burroughs' Mars stories, but nobody even bothered to consider money from the attendant rules, seen as pretty much promotional items – "They were one step up from packaging."
Equally, other people may have known, but I certainly didn't, that despite the Satanic panic which would do so much in bringing the game to prominence, both Arneson and Gygax were devoutly religious, the latter being a Jehovah's Witness. Which, alongside family, and work, was one of the reasons he mentioned in his many early attempts to step back from his hobby interests, worried they were taking too much of his time. Imagine if he'd ever been able to stick to that! But even on this tiny local scale, he was that bit too addicted to being king of the scene, just as Arneson was a little too fond of playing the malcontent. It's a classic example of fame not sending people wrong as such, just allowing them a far bigger platform on which to demonstrate everything they already were. In these early days, there are definitely times when Game Wizards felt like it was giving a little more detail than I wanted on the editions and allocations of their earlier work together, but I can hardly complain about that given the topic, and it does lay groundwork for the ensuing rupture. Before long we're into a fascinating tangle of geek pettiness (they name villains after each other in their scenarios!) and intellectual property law, which at one stage involves two descriptions of an owlbear being presented as legal evidence, something that couldn't help reminding me of South Park's Chewbacca defence. All of this turning on the fact that technically you can't copyright an idea, so what counts as the "set of game rules or game" from the 1975 royalty agreement? Just the original book, or supplements and revisions? Is Advanced Dungeons & Dragons the same game as Dungeons & Dragons? These are vexed questions even if you've played the damn things, never mind if you're some poor bloody legal professional suddenly hip-deep in kobolds. Nor does it help that by all accounts the very first version of the game was fine if you'd seen it played, but lacked explanation of the how and why if you just picked up the book – explaining decades of RPGs feeling obliged to explain that somewhat awkwardly in the intro ever since.
It's not all geek-specific stuff, of course. I'm sure some of it would be interesting to people who just like reading business stories, or at least as sure as I can be given people who read business books scare and confuse me. Like the way the company expands too fast, in too many directions, suddenly getting involved in everything from needlework to marine salvage, and most ruinously Hollywood. At one point the Dragonlands West outpost is costing $120,000 just for rent, never mind the lavish parties, while the firm's core is cutting employees. All this in pursuit of a film for which Gygax has such grand ambitions – complaining about what let-downs the animated LotR and Milius' Conan were, insisting that a D&D film should instead be fit to sit alongside Raiders or Star Wars. Which is even funnier if you've ever seen Jeremy Irons hamming his way through the one that eventually limped out many years later***. Still, they did have James Goldman of the incomparable Lion In Winter on board for a while, so I would love to get a copy from a world where that panned out.
Even what they did accomplish, though, however briefly, is quite something (one tragic sidenote in this is early partner Don Kaye, dead of a heart attack at 36, never living to see what TSR would become). Some of what goes wrong is absolutely elementary stuff, like Gygax' marriage breaking up over an affair with a secretary; the nepotism; or the employees cheated over stock options – just basic shabbiness which might tempt a fast-growing business in any sector. As also the way that Arneson, the ousted co-founder, is making more on his royalties than anyone else bar Gygax is making from the product, but still feels cheated; Gygax, meanwhile, is equally ungracious in victory, getting pissy about teenagers' fanzines and generally acting like the whole hobby only exists on his sufferance. The fall, though, is less down to the infamous lost teen in the steam tunnels (he wasn't), or any of the tendentious suicide cult scare stories, which served mainly to get TSR the Random House hook-up that really takes it overground, even if they did also oblige a couple of rewrites and redesigns around the edges. Nope: D&D's apparently unstoppable rise is halted less by god-botherers than the arrival of another revolutionary game, Trivial Pursuit - among whose many wrong answers was ascribing the creation of D&D to Gygax solo.
While all of this is going on, you'd think it would become easier to sympathise with Arneson when he does stuff like grab an industry award for D&D before TSR's representatives could get to the stage. Subsequent clarifications by the awarding body point out that a game is the work of many, so the award should go to the corporation which put it out - but equally, could you not say that of film awards? Which don't work that way. A certain creator rights muscle starts twitching on his behalf...but then a couple of years later, he's happy to accept a plaque for a board game his Adventure Games outfit had released, designed by a freelancer, without feeling a commensurate need to step aside and let any creator who isn't him have their due share of the glory. His post-D&D efforts in general sound like they were a right mess, especially the misbegotten Adventures In Fantasy, of which one early review said "The price is high, the graphics are terrible, the rules are worse, and many of the systems are overly complicated." And such small portions! At first I was put in mind of the career of another geek god whose own work I don't much rate, Jack Kirby, who would himself turn out some right nonsense after his similar break with company man Stan Lee. But say what you like about the Eternals or the New Gods, and I frequently do, at least Kirby kept plugging away, putting stuff out there, unlike Arneson's decades of blown deadlines and games that never quite cohered. Maybe a better comparison would be Siegel and Shuster's attempts to recapture the magic after they'd lost the rights to Superman, not least the abortive, appalling Funnyman.
I feel like I'm going in circles a little here, but part of that is trying to capture the very particular and peculiar thing this book is, something that a very small number of potential readers will absolutely lap up but most people probably shouldn't go anywhere near. What makes it stranger still is that D&D was never even really my game – and yet somehow, as the wellspring of the whole RPG field, I have a sort of osmotic connection to it nonetheless (and perhaps into the bargain feel some astrological significance to having been born the one year GenCon took place at the Playboy Club). There are other games that form part of this story of which I have literally never heard, like the long-delayed SF RPG Star Frontiers – and, though it missed its moment and came into a market already claimed by the likes of Traveller, this was a game which did well enough to be worth suing over in its own right. Despite all of which, there's a Venn of things that interest me in whose intersection this mess of flawed humans and ugly capitalism underpinning a whole new field of fantasy finds a definite place. And as someone who couldn't even currently lay hands on the fanzines and geek ephemera from my own past, I'm awed at the thoroughness with which Peterson has been able to excavate and reconstruct a decade plus of an entire scene.
Although, if I have successfully convinced you that this isn't the read for you, I can at least leave you with some comedy names. Several members of the Kuntz family play parts in TSR's early days, and there's also spokesman Dieter Sturm, whose splendidly improbable moniker may go some way to explaining the sort of 'European' names deemed acceptable for inhabitants of Ravenloft.
*If you were called that, wouldn't you be very wary of getting your RDA of vitamins &c, in case you suddenly started extruding weird screeds about lobsters and chaos?
**A term which Game Wizards does use once without glossing, something that probably says a fair amount about the likely audience. Equally – it is only used that once, in a quote, so you could probably get away without knowing it...
***Although I suppose there have been more Star Wars films since Gygax' promise, and the D&D film is ahead of 4/9 of the Skywalker Saga, so looked at that way...
As is usually the way in a dispute over rights, both Gygax and Arneson had their partisans, but what really comes across here is the degree to which a) D&D could never have happened without both of them and b) they were both absolute nightmares. Arneson could clearly run a table (and yes, it is entirely deliberate that I'm posting this exactly half a century since he first did just that), but every time he attempts to codify that as something other people could use, it sounds a lot like Homer Simpson's tax return. One of the most frustrating moments in the book comes when Peterson talks about the manuscript of Arneson's long-promised Blackmoor campaign finally being battered into shape by Tim Kask – "Decades later, he still seems traumatized by it", and as an editor myself I would love to know more of the gory details there. Equally, Gygax can codify, ramify, but that without the kernel is nothing. Yet once they fall out, each is happy to suggest the other deserves no credit whatsoever. Add in that both of them come across as very much the old-school, barely socialised flavour of nerd, the sort who'd say 'stout yeoman of the bar' while ordering a drink and think this absolutely brilliant, and as often as not I just wanted them both sent to their rooms to think about what they'd done.
Still, it is interesting to be reminded how much that very nerd stereotype was shaped by D&D. When its precursor Chainmail introduced fantasy elements to wargaming, this was regarded as an outlandish and suspect move by a hobby which at that point was all about historical re-enactment. And if it turned out there was a small audience, well, that still only made D&D, as per one early rights deal and a chapter title here, a $300 idea. Even that being a comparatively high number; at one point a licensing deal is made for miniatures based on Edgar Rice Burroughs' Mars stories, but nobody even bothered to consider money from the attendant rules, seen as pretty much promotional items – "They were one step up from packaging."
Equally, other people may have known, but I certainly didn't, that despite the Satanic panic which would do so much in bringing the game to prominence, both Arneson and Gygax were devoutly religious, the latter being a Jehovah's Witness. Which, alongside family, and work, was one of the reasons he mentioned in his many early attempts to step back from his hobby interests, worried they were taking too much of his time. Imagine if he'd ever been able to stick to that! But even on this tiny local scale, he was that bit too addicted to being king of the scene, just as Arneson was a little too fond of playing the malcontent. It's a classic example of fame not sending people wrong as such, just allowing them a far bigger platform on which to demonstrate everything they already were. In these early days, there are definitely times when Game Wizards felt like it was giving a little more detail than I wanted on the editions and allocations of their earlier work together, but I can hardly complain about that given the topic, and it does lay groundwork for the ensuing rupture. Before long we're into a fascinating tangle of geek pettiness (they name villains after each other in their scenarios!) and intellectual property law, which at one stage involves two descriptions of an owlbear being presented as legal evidence, something that couldn't help reminding me of South Park's Chewbacca defence. All of this turning on the fact that technically you can't copyright an idea, so what counts as the "set of game rules or game" from the 1975 royalty agreement? Just the original book, or supplements and revisions? Is Advanced Dungeons & Dragons the same game as Dungeons & Dragons? These are vexed questions even if you've played the damn things, never mind if you're some poor bloody legal professional suddenly hip-deep in kobolds. Nor does it help that by all accounts the very first version of the game was fine if you'd seen it played, but lacked explanation of the how and why if you just picked up the book – explaining decades of RPGs feeling obliged to explain that somewhat awkwardly in the intro ever since.
It's not all geek-specific stuff, of course. I'm sure some of it would be interesting to people who just like reading business stories, or at least as sure as I can be given people who read business books scare and confuse me. Like the way the company expands too fast, in too many directions, suddenly getting involved in everything from needlework to marine salvage, and most ruinously Hollywood. At one point the Dragonlands West outpost is costing $120,000 just for rent, never mind the lavish parties, while the firm's core is cutting employees. All this in pursuit of a film for which Gygax has such grand ambitions – complaining about what let-downs the animated LotR and Milius' Conan were, insisting that a D&D film should instead be fit to sit alongside Raiders or Star Wars. Which is even funnier if you've ever seen Jeremy Irons hamming his way through the one that eventually limped out many years later***. Still, they did have James Goldman of the incomparable Lion In Winter on board for a while, so I would love to get a copy from a world where that panned out.
Even what they did accomplish, though, however briefly, is quite something (one tragic sidenote in this is early partner Don Kaye, dead of a heart attack at 36, never living to see what TSR would become). Some of what goes wrong is absolutely elementary stuff, like Gygax' marriage breaking up over an affair with a secretary; the nepotism; or the employees cheated over stock options – just basic shabbiness which might tempt a fast-growing business in any sector. As also the way that Arneson, the ousted co-founder, is making more on his royalties than anyone else bar Gygax is making from the product, but still feels cheated; Gygax, meanwhile, is equally ungracious in victory, getting pissy about teenagers' fanzines and generally acting like the whole hobby only exists on his sufferance. The fall, though, is less down to the infamous lost teen in the steam tunnels (he wasn't), or any of the tendentious suicide cult scare stories, which served mainly to get TSR the Random House hook-up that really takes it overground, even if they did also oblige a couple of rewrites and redesigns around the edges. Nope: D&D's apparently unstoppable rise is halted less by god-botherers than the arrival of another revolutionary game, Trivial Pursuit - among whose many wrong answers was ascribing the creation of D&D to Gygax solo.
While all of this is going on, you'd think it would become easier to sympathise with Arneson when he does stuff like grab an industry award for D&D before TSR's representatives could get to the stage. Subsequent clarifications by the awarding body point out that a game is the work of many, so the award should go to the corporation which put it out - but equally, could you not say that of film awards? Which don't work that way. A certain creator rights muscle starts twitching on his behalf...but then a couple of years later, he's happy to accept a plaque for a board game his Adventure Games outfit had released, designed by a freelancer, without feeling a commensurate need to step aside and let any creator who isn't him have their due share of the glory. His post-D&D efforts in general sound like they were a right mess, especially the misbegotten Adventures In Fantasy, of which one early review said "The price is high, the graphics are terrible, the rules are worse, and many of the systems are overly complicated." And such small portions! At first I was put in mind of the career of another geek god whose own work I don't much rate, Jack Kirby, who would himself turn out some right nonsense after his similar break with company man Stan Lee. But say what you like about the Eternals or the New Gods, and I frequently do, at least Kirby kept plugging away, putting stuff out there, unlike Arneson's decades of blown deadlines and games that never quite cohered. Maybe a better comparison would be Siegel and Shuster's attempts to recapture the magic after they'd lost the rights to Superman, not least the abortive, appalling Funnyman.
I feel like I'm going in circles a little here, but part of that is trying to capture the very particular and peculiar thing this book is, something that a very small number of potential readers will absolutely lap up but most people probably shouldn't go anywhere near. What makes it stranger still is that D&D was never even really my game – and yet somehow, as the wellspring of the whole RPG field, I have a sort of osmotic connection to it nonetheless (and perhaps into the bargain feel some astrological significance to having been born the one year GenCon took place at the Playboy Club). There are other games that form part of this story of which I have literally never heard, like the long-delayed SF RPG Star Frontiers – and, though it missed its moment and came into a market already claimed by the likes of Traveller, this was a game which did well enough to be worth suing over in its own right. Despite all of which, there's a Venn of things that interest me in whose intersection this mess of flawed humans and ugly capitalism underpinning a whole new field of fantasy finds a definite place. And as someone who couldn't even currently lay hands on the fanzines and geek ephemera from my own past, I'm awed at the thoroughness with which Peterson has been able to excavate and reconstruct a decade plus of an entire scene.
Although, if I have successfully convinced you that this isn't the read for you, I can at least leave you with some comedy names. Several members of the Kuntz family play parts in TSR's early days, and there's also spokesman Dieter Sturm, whose splendidly improbable moniker may go some way to explaining the sort of 'European' names deemed acceptable for inhabitants of Ravenloft.
*If you were called that, wouldn't you be very wary of getting your RDA of vitamins &c, in case you suddenly started extruding weird screeds about lobsters and chaos?
**A term which Game Wizards does use once without glossing, something that probably says a fair amount about the likely audience. Equally – it is only used that once, in a quote, so you could probably get away without knowing it...
***Although I suppose there have been more Star Wars films since Gygax' promise, and the D&D film is ahead of 4/9 of the Skywalker Saga, so looked at that way...
March 13, 2022
Peterson traces the humble beginnings of the creation of Dungeons & Dragons between Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson in the 1970's through the work, success, drama, lawsuits, conventions, and eventual new ruler-ship into the mid-80's using documents, interviews, media outlets and footage, and articles in book that has each chapter as a year of game inception to major business and back to earth again.
I would really like to see a volume 2 detailing events from 1986 to the present. I found the whole read fascinating as things played out.
I would really like to see a volume 2 detailing events from 1986 to the present. I found the whole read fascinating as things played out.
July 20, 2021
Reviewed for Kirkus: https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-re...
January 6, 2023
There is no better indication of how modest everyone's expectations were for D&D than the language in the game's royalty agreement, dated January 4, 1974. Gygax and Arneson would split a twenty percent royalty on "the selling price of the set or a single booklet or any attendant part of the set other than art work," virtually the same agreement they had struck with Guidon Games. In exchange for that, "the co-authors shall assign to the publisher the copyright, the right to publish, sell and distribute the set of game rules to be entitled Dungeons & Dragons as booklets, and any other similar rights." In the entirely plausible eventuality that the game met total indifference upon its release, the agreement permitted the authors to repurchase its rights from TSR if it went out of print at "a fair price based upon market demand at such time, but in no event exceeding three hundred dollars ($300)." What TSR thought they had in D&D was, at best, a $300 idea.
- From Game Wizards: The Epic Battle for Dungeons & Dragons by Jon Peterson
Game Wizards is an exhaustive dive into the prehistory and history of Dave Arneson and Gary Gygax, as well as TSR and its many precursors and subsidiaries, and how this shaped Dungeons & Dragons. Encompassing everything from Arneson's pride-driven copyright issues to Gygax's insecurity-driven financial mismanagement to widespread nepotism that nearly drove the company into the ground, even from hindsight of 2023 it's almost hard to believe that D&D survived everything to become the well known and well beloved game that it is. (Also covered is the satanic panic, and that had minimal impact on TSR as a company - let alone D&D as a game - in comparison to the rest. It's fucking bonkers, and not just because businesspeople in the '80s thought they could do whatever the they wanted and get away with it.)
This is text is very dry, as it's clearly written to be something more like a reference text (it has over a hundred and fifty pages of listed sources and indexing) than a pop history or anything else meant for general audiences, and because of that I would only recommend it to those looking for such a work. To such individuals, Game Wizards would be an invaluable compilation and parsing of documentation (both TSR's internal documents and legal papers), angry claims, and spiteful rumors, of which there a lot.
- From Game Wizards: The Epic Battle for Dungeons & Dragons by Jon Peterson
Game Wizards is an exhaustive dive into the prehistory and history of Dave Arneson and Gary Gygax, as well as TSR and its many precursors and subsidiaries, and how this shaped Dungeons & Dragons. Encompassing everything from Arneson's pride-driven copyright issues to Gygax's insecurity-driven financial mismanagement to widespread nepotism that nearly drove the company into the ground, even from hindsight of 2023 it's almost hard to believe that D&D survived everything to become the well known and well beloved game that it is. (Also covered is the satanic panic, and that had minimal impact on TSR as a company - let alone D&D as a game - in comparison to the rest. It's fucking bonkers, and not just because businesspeople in the '80s thought they could do whatever the they wanted and get away with it.)
This is text is very dry, as it's clearly written to be something more like a reference text (it has over a hundred and fifty pages of listed sources and indexing) than a pop history or anything else meant for general audiences, and because of that I would only recommend it to those looking for such a work. To such individuals, Game Wizards would be an invaluable compilation and parsing of documentation (both TSR's internal documents and legal papers), angry claims, and spiteful rumors, of which there a lot.
October 12, 2022
The historical record of the first decade of TSR has long been damaged by the fact that it largely was built from Gary Gygax's interpretation of events. Though the truth of Dave Arneson's co-creation of D&D has largely come out, the Blumes and Lorraine Williams have remained villainous characters because of Gygax's decades of rhetoric.
Peterson's new book puts a major dent in Gygax's hagiography, giving a more balanced (and likely truthful) recollection not just of Arneson's disagreements with TSR, but also the story of the Blumes and Williams.
Peterson's new book puts a major dent in Gygax's hagiography, giving a more balanced (and likely truthful) recollection not just of Arneson's disagreements with TSR, but also the story of the Blumes and Williams.
July 12, 2022
A good book for those interested in the business history of D&D and TSR. I now know how GenCon and Origins started.
January 22, 2025
Dang I just love legal minutiae (unironic)
April 9, 2022
A business history of TSR during the tenure of Gary Gygax - from founding to takeover. Chapters as years played out in turns like a major game of Diplomacy, which is both humorous and a connection to the earliest forms of D&D (see Playing at the World: A History of Simulating Wars, People, and Fantastic Adventure from Chess to Role-Playing Games ).
This book is more accessible than that weighty tome, with less specifics of early D&D and more focus on the business of TSR and Gencon. It is apparent that a huge amount of research went into this - all well detailed in the end notes and index. Jon Peterson has provided an unbiased accounting of this epic battle. Unfortunately, neither of the principle characters is around to comment on this work.
It does have dry moments, whether business and banking or legalities and lawsuits (neither published by TSR). I wanted to know more about acquisition by Wizards of the Coast, or how Dragon and Dungeon eventually ended up with Paizo - but I suspect that is more of a book than a chapter, and it didn't involve Gygax or Arneson.
This was a fairly quick read, from the local library. Unlike Playing at the World, I've read this and enjoyed it, but have no desire to own it. Factor that into your own ratings as you will - I would say this is a solid 4 stars.
This book is more accessible than that weighty tome, with less specifics of early D&D and more focus on the business of TSR and Gencon. It is apparent that a huge amount of research went into this - all well detailed in the end notes and index. Jon Peterson has provided an unbiased accounting of this epic battle. Unfortunately, neither of the principle characters is around to comment on this work.
It does have dry moments, whether business and banking or legalities and lawsuits (neither published by TSR). I wanted to know more about acquisition by Wizards of the Coast, or how Dragon and Dungeon eventually ended up with Paizo - but I suspect that is more of a book than a chapter, and it didn't involve Gygax or Arneson.
This was a fairly quick read, from the local library. Unlike Playing at the World, I've read this and enjoyed it, but have no desire to own it. Factor that into your own ratings as you will - I would say this is a solid 4 stars.
October 28, 2021
If you grew up playing Dungeons & Dragons back in the 70s or 80s, this history of that veritable game is for you. Jon Peterson gives a very balanced approach; never does anyone feel like a clear villain, or an obvious hero. Many of the strange twists and turns made in the early versions of the game, and it’s original company TSR, begin to make sense here. But it’s also a maddening narrative as the co-founders—again and again—bumble from one mistake to the next. My appreciation for Dungeons & Dragons has greatly increased seeing what it had to go through to become the game that it is. Recommended for old school gamers interested in this nostalgic history.
July 2, 2025
Tikai turbonerdiem (man). Audible.
October 11, 2023
Great Man history comes to Dungeons & Dragons. The blurb on the cover claims that the book "sets straight the 'canon' of the tragic history of... Dungeons & Dragons." Well, how the fuck would Joe Manganiello know?
In any case the book does a lot to lionize Gygax but goes out of its way to take cheap shots at Arneson. A cartoon of some of the early TSR staff is shown and Arneson's illustration is described as 'rotund' but looks to me no more large than any of the other caricatured staff. Like, why the body shaming, Jon? It's weird.
Gygax's numerous flaws go largely without commentary. He was fucking around in Hollywood seeking a fruitless film deal while TSR burned. He was still the chairman of the board. The closest we get is pointing out how Gygax's choice to ignore his partners' request to sell their stock set the stage for his loss of the company.
The book, to its credit, is less vitriolic toward Loraine Williams than Gary himself would be but that's largely a function of her barely being in it. She orchestrates the hostile takeover but it is inarguable that Gygax's inept management of the company led directly to it being pulled out from under him. There's a single paragraph devoted to Gygax's lack of aptitude in management and it's the closest we get to a serious indictment of Gygax. The book is trying to be neutral history but it seems to only do so for Gygax which creates a whole different kind of bias.
The question the book seems to mostly concern itself with is "Who actually created Dungeons & Dragons?" And the big answer is a giant shrug. Arneson ultimately claims to have originated the idea of roleplaying but Gygax probably did more to get the actual rules produced. But also roleplaying is hardly unique and the combination of game and theatre isn't actually all that new. But maybe that's a bigger discussion than the book can contain.
By also excising a lot of Gygax's foibles and trying to stay neutral about the Great Man, it also sanitizes a lot of the grosser parts of Gygax's personality. Stuff that's real trivial to google. Like him being a "biological determinist" and using it justify that ttrpgs just don't appeal to girls cuz they're wired different and will only care if there's dress up. Or the time he implied that the only reason a man would have for disagreeing with conservative commentator Ann Coulter would be that he was gay. It mentions Gygax rubbing elbows with fans on internet forums but leaves the disgusting things he left there unmentioned. It is perhaps beyond the scope of a book wanting to be the definitive history of a game's first decade-and-a-half but also seems important to understanding the hubris that led to Gygax having the game taken away from him. The book kind of skips over how Gygax wanted to keep a stranglehold on the creative development of D&D but let years go by with no new material for it something that almost certainly factored in to the rapid collapse of Gygax's TSR.
Arneson kind of fades out of the story after he takes a settlement with TSR. Some parallels are drawn when Gygax also fades out and spends the subsequent decade grumbling about how he was robbed. The book wants to be a tragedy of the Shakespearean kind but the more one knows about Gygax the more you find yourself with an unlikable protagonist. Gygax's tragic flaw was that he was hopelessly inept as a corporate CEO/President and enough of a dick that nobody felt all that bad about ousting him.
In any case the book does a lot to lionize Gygax but goes out of its way to take cheap shots at Arneson. A cartoon of some of the early TSR staff is shown and Arneson's illustration is described as 'rotund' but looks to me no more large than any of the other caricatured staff. Like, why the body shaming, Jon? It's weird.
Gygax's numerous flaws go largely without commentary. He was fucking around in Hollywood seeking a fruitless film deal while TSR burned. He was still the chairman of the board. The closest we get is pointing out how Gygax's choice to ignore his partners' request to sell their stock set the stage for his loss of the company.
The book, to its credit, is less vitriolic toward Loraine Williams than Gary himself would be but that's largely a function of her barely being in it. She orchestrates the hostile takeover but it is inarguable that Gygax's inept management of the company led directly to it being pulled out from under him. There's a single paragraph devoted to Gygax's lack of aptitude in management and it's the closest we get to a serious indictment of Gygax. The book is trying to be neutral history but it seems to only do so for Gygax which creates a whole different kind of bias.
The question the book seems to mostly concern itself with is "Who actually created Dungeons & Dragons?" And the big answer is a giant shrug. Arneson ultimately claims to have originated the idea of roleplaying but Gygax probably did more to get the actual rules produced. But also roleplaying is hardly unique and the combination of game and theatre isn't actually all that new. But maybe that's a bigger discussion than the book can contain.
By also excising a lot of Gygax's foibles and trying to stay neutral about the Great Man, it also sanitizes a lot of the grosser parts of Gygax's personality. Stuff that's real trivial to google. Like him being a "biological determinist" and using it justify that ttrpgs just don't appeal to girls cuz they're wired different and will only care if there's dress up. Or the time he implied that the only reason a man would have for disagreeing with conservative commentator Ann Coulter would be that he was gay. It mentions Gygax rubbing elbows with fans on internet forums but leaves the disgusting things he left there unmentioned. It is perhaps beyond the scope of a book wanting to be the definitive history of a game's first decade-and-a-half but also seems important to understanding the hubris that led to Gygax having the game taken away from him. The book kind of skips over how Gygax wanted to keep a stranglehold on the creative development of D&D but let years go by with no new material for it something that almost certainly factored in to the rapid collapse of Gygax's TSR.
Arneson kind of fades out of the story after he takes a settlement with TSR. Some parallels are drawn when Gygax also fades out and spends the subsequent decade grumbling about how he was robbed. The book wants to be a tragedy of the Shakespearean kind but the more one knows about Gygax the more you find yourself with an unlikable protagonist. Gygax's tragic flaw was that he was hopelessly inept as a corporate CEO/President and enough of a dick that nobody felt all that bad about ousting him.
July 28, 2022
Perhaps I had misleading expectations for this book. It isn’t bad, but I was under the impression it was about the history of “D&D.” Instead it’s more about the management of the company that produces it, the more business side of things. The result is a lot of discussion about stock options, the minutiae of contracts, and other topics that made me wish I had a business degree.
For those readers who are looking for a history of D&D, I would recommend looking elsewhere.
For those readers who are looking for a history of D&D, I would recommend looking elsewhere.
May 8, 2025
Game Wizards might be subtitled "never meet your heroes". TTRPGs are one of my primary hobbies. D&D turned 50 in 2024, and both Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson are credited as inventive geniuses behind the hobby. Peterson's history reveals legal and corporate battles and every manner of personality flaw, as the battle between the 'founders' of D&D played out in courts and the hobbyist press.
In the early 1970s, Gygax and Arneson were both serious amateur gamers. Gygax had written a medieval wargame called Chainmail, and idly added some fantastic elements from sword and sorcery books and Lord of the Rings. Arneson used Chainmail to run the Dungeon of Blackmoor, an unconventional game where many participants each controlled a single unit against Arneson's traps and monsters. The two of them decided that they had something, and wrote up a little pamphlet called Dungeons and Dragons. Together with a local gamer and machinist, Brian Blume, they scraped together a few thousands dollars for a print run and began selling the game to the small but intense community of wargamers.
What they had was a spark that lit that community on fire. D&D expanded exponentially year over year, along with the company, TSR, that Gygax and Blume had founded to publish it. But the partnership fractured almost as quickly as it was founded. Arneson moved to the small town of Lake Geneva to help with the company, but wound up doing grunt labor in the shipping department rather than creative work (Arneson's creative work, or lack thereof, is another issue). The two 'cocreators' split up, and the hastily drafted royalty agreement between the two amateurs would provide fodder for a decade of lawsuits.
Arneson drifted around the community, promising and continuously failing to write multiple new games, and complaining that Gygax was stealing his credit and money to anyone that would listen. Meanwhile. Gygax was acting the big man, a star at gaming conventions who started breaking out into the mainstream as D&D became a fad in 1980s. TSR grew rapidly as well, employing hundreds of people and dozens of relatives of both Gygax and Blume. Gygax picked fights with every other company in the industry, liberally threatening lawsuits over unenforceable rules and arguing that if it wasn't TSR and official D&D, it was crap.
Gygax wasn't much of a manager by his own admission. But he also wasn't much of a creative. It's hard to say what words or ideas he contributed to the game after say, 1977. He spent most of the 1980s in California, trying without success to turn D&D into a movie. Meanwhile, he went from abject poverty to owning a 29 acre horse estate with a mansion, to a messy divorce. When TSR hit headwinds in 1984, the ramshackle corporate governance and uncontrolled spending turned into a hemorrhage. Gygax met Lorraine Williams, heir to the Buck Rogers IP, and she forced him out in a coup in 1985.
A secondary theme is the Satanic Panic. D&D was associated with the disappearance of a troubled MSU student, and was blamed by opportunistic Moral Majority types for corrupting the youth and teaching real witchcraft. Ironically, both Gygax and Arneson were devout Christians (well, Gygax was a Jehovah's Witness, but close enough.) There were some minor changes around divine and supernatural themes, but the controversy likely helped spread the game.
The story revealed in Game Wizards is of two men who had an odd idea, and who were consumed by their success. Neither ever didn't anything close to as significant as D&D. I'm unclear if Arneson did anything later in his life. Gygax's jealousy of other designers and fruitless obsession with a movie doesn't come off well either. But by the late 1990s, when D&D was purchased by Wizards of the Coast, enough time had passed that the two could be wheeled out as grand old men of the hobby.
In the early 1970s, Gygax and Arneson were both serious amateur gamers. Gygax had written a medieval wargame called Chainmail, and idly added some fantastic elements from sword and sorcery books and Lord of the Rings. Arneson used Chainmail to run the Dungeon of Blackmoor, an unconventional game where many participants each controlled a single unit against Arneson's traps and monsters. The two of them decided that they had something, and wrote up a little pamphlet called Dungeons and Dragons. Together with a local gamer and machinist, Brian Blume, they scraped together a few thousands dollars for a print run and began selling the game to the small but intense community of wargamers.
What they had was a spark that lit that community on fire. D&D expanded exponentially year over year, along with the company, TSR, that Gygax and Blume had founded to publish it. But the partnership fractured almost as quickly as it was founded. Arneson moved to the small town of Lake Geneva to help with the company, but wound up doing grunt labor in the shipping department rather than creative work (Arneson's creative work, or lack thereof, is another issue). The two 'cocreators' split up, and the hastily drafted royalty agreement between the two amateurs would provide fodder for a decade of lawsuits.
Arneson drifted around the community, promising and continuously failing to write multiple new games, and complaining that Gygax was stealing his credit and money to anyone that would listen. Meanwhile. Gygax was acting the big man, a star at gaming conventions who started breaking out into the mainstream as D&D became a fad in 1980s. TSR grew rapidly as well, employing hundreds of people and dozens of relatives of both Gygax and Blume. Gygax picked fights with every other company in the industry, liberally threatening lawsuits over unenforceable rules and arguing that if it wasn't TSR and official D&D, it was crap.
Gygax wasn't much of a manager by his own admission. But he also wasn't much of a creative. It's hard to say what words or ideas he contributed to the game after say, 1977. He spent most of the 1980s in California, trying without success to turn D&D into a movie. Meanwhile, he went from abject poverty to owning a 29 acre horse estate with a mansion, to a messy divorce. When TSR hit headwinds in 1984, the ramshackle corporate governance and uncontrolled spending turned into a hemorrhage. Gygax met Lorraine Williams, heir to the Buck Rogers IP, and she forced him out in a coup in 1985.
A secondary theme is the Satanic Panic. D&D was associated with the disappearance of a troubled MSU student, and was blamed by opportunistic Moral Majority types for corrupting the youth and teaching real witchcraft. Ironically, both Gygax and Arneson were devout Christians (well, Gygax was a Jehovah's Witness, but close enough.) There were some minor changes around divine and supernatural themes, but the controversy likely helped spread the game.
The story revealed in Game Wizards is of two men who had an odd idea, and who were consumed by their success. Neither ever didn't anything close to as significant as D&D. I'm unclear if Arneson did anything later in his life. Gygax's jealousy of other designers and fruitless obsession with a movie doesn't come off well either. But by the late 1990s, when D&D was purchased by Wizards of the Coast, enough time had passed that the two could be wheeled out as grand old men of the hobby.
November 23, 2025
In 2018, when I finished reading David Ewalt's Of Dice and Men, I stated, that while I enjoyed the historical portion of the book, I'd like a definitive history of Dungeons and Dragons. Since then there have been a number of books...and this happened to be the best reviewed of them.
And Peterson gives me most of what I wanted. This is a history of D&D and TSR from the time that the game was co-created, circa 1973 (with a reasonable bit of the history leading up to it) to the ouster of Gary Gygax from TSR in 1985. Peterson just hits on post Gygax TSR in a handful of pages at the end...and that's okay. While I certainly kept an eye on the industry, my major gaming phase came to an end when I went to college in 1986. And, as best I can tell, Peterson gives us a fairly unbiased look at the creation of D&D, on to the rise and near fall of TSR, and the folks involved. I say that's it seems unbiased because, quite frankly, almost none of the main players come across looking particularly good. Okay...maybe Don Kaye looks fine, but the poor guy died of a heart attack at age 36 in 1975. I'm really talking about the main forces behind the game and TSR, Gary Gygax, Dave Arneson and the brothers Blume.
While Peterson interviewed many of the players (hah!) in the saga much of the work is sourced from early internal documents of TSR and from numerous letters that were contemporaneous to the creation of Dungeons and Dragons the founding of TSR and it's subsequent management...and mismanagement. He also provides enough background to the antecedents of the game in board wargaming to provide the context needed to understand just how unlikely the success of D&D really was. Board wargaming was a very small hobby in the late 60s and early 70s and miniature wargaming was a niche within a niche. That Gygax, Arneson and company could come up with the phenomenon that D&D became in the early to mid 80s was lightning in a bottle...something that could be attested by the myriad role-playing games that attempted to repeat the feat...and mostly failed miserably.
As a faithful reader of Dragon Magazine I really only knew the Gygax line until years later when the internet began to fill in the gaps. This work really fills them in without the hagiography that tends to come up around both Gygax and Arneson from their separate sides. That, of course is simply to the creation of D&D, which really comes down to...they really were co-creators. It was clearly Arneson and the Minnesota group that brought about the role-playing aspect of D&D with his Blackmoor campaign. And without that...you just have Chainmail which was simply a variant wargame rules. But combined, with Gygax re-writing and synthesizing rules and adding the role-playing...it was magic. It becomes clear that Arneson was a horrendous procrastinator who was seldom able to follow through on any of his myriad planned games. And it became equally clear that Gygax's strength was reworking and improving someone else's base ideas.
It's also clear that TSR ran very well as long as it was a small concern that catered to its base of converted wargamers. But once it became a big fish in small pond and the money came rolling in (a lot of money to guys who were used to just barely getting by) it became very clear that you can't just role-play your way to success in a big business, especially when a ton of the members of the party are only there because they're family members.
And...oh lords...this is definitely a reminder that there was a lot of just incredibly stupid shit going on in the 80s. Satanic panic anyone? Please, don't come at me with that "everything was better back then" nostalgic myopia.
If you're an old-school fan of RPGs...this is a definite must read.
And Peterson gives me most of what I wanted. This is a history of D&D and TSR from the time that the game was co-created, circa 1973 (with a reasonable bit of the history leading up to it) to the ouster of Gary Gygax from TSR in 1985. Peterson just hits on post Gygax TSR in a handful of pages at the end...and that's okay. While I certainly kept an eye on the industry, my major gaming phase came to an end when I went to college in 1986. And, as best I can tell, Peterson gives us a fairly unbiased look at the creation of D&D, on to the rise and near fall of TSR, and the folks involved. I say that's it seems unbiased because, quite frankly, almost none of the main players come across looking particularly good. Okay...maybe Don Kaye looks fine, but the poor guy died of a heart attack at age 36 in 1975. I'm really talking about the main forces behind the game and TSR, Gary Gygax, Dave Arneson and the brothers Blume.
While Peterson interviewed many of the players (hah!) in the saga much of the work is sourced from early internal documents of TSR and from numerous letters that were contemporaneous to the creation of Dungeons and Dragons the founding of TSR and it's subsequent management...and mismanagement. He also provides enough background to the antecedents of the game in board wargaming to provide the context needed to understand just how unlikely the success of D&D really was. Board wargaming was a very small hobby in the late 60s and early 70s and miniature wargaming was a niche within a niche. That Gygax, Arneson and company could come up with the phenomenon that D&D became in the early to mid 80s was lightning in a bottle...something that could be attested by the myriad role-playing games that attempted to repeat the feat...and mostly failed miserably.
As a faithful reader of Dragon Magazine I really only knew the Gygax line until years later when the internet began to fill in the gaps. This work really fills them in without the hagiography that tends to come up around both Gygax and Arneson from their separate sides. That, of course is simply to the creation of D&D, which really comes down to...they really were co-creators. It was clearly Arneson and the Minnesota group that brought about the role-playing aspect of D&D with his Blackmoor campaign. And without that...you just have Chainmail which was simply a variant wargame rules. But combined, with Gygax re-writing and synthesizing rules and adding the role-playing...it was magic. It becomes clear that Arneson was a horrendous procrastinator who was seldom able to follow through on any of his myriad planned games. And it became equally clear that Gygax's strength was reworking and improving someone else's base ideas.
It's also clear that TSR ran very well as long as it was a small concern that catered to its base of converted wargamers. But once it became a big fish in small pond and the money came rolling in (a lot of money to guys who were used to just barely getting by) it became very clear that you can't just role-play your way to success in a big business, especially when a ton of the members of the party are only there because they're family members.
And...oh lords...this is definitely a reminder that there was a lot of just incredibly stupid shit going on in the 80s. Satanic panic anyone? Please, don't come at me with that "everything was better back then" nostalgic myopia.
If you're an old-school fan of RPGs...this is a definite must read.
September 14, 2021
Originally posted on my blog: Nonstop Reader.
Game Wizards: The Epic Battle for Dungeons & Dragons is the newest book in the Game Histories series, this volume written by Jon Peterson. Due out 12th Oct 2021 from MIT Press, it's 400 pages and will be available in paperback and ebook formats.
This is a very well written book assembled from extant notes, legal documents, eyewitness accounts, and recollections about the rise, fall, rise, and pitched battles involved in the emergence and control of TSR and Dungeons & Dragons. I was working in a gaming & hobby shop in the late 70s and early 80s and I well remember our regular gaming group geeking out over the newest editions and modules from TSR. Our regular members were mostly tabletop wargamers, but the balance soon shifted as more and more of our members became more interested in D&D and later on, Warhammer.
There wasn't much behind-the-scenes information on display (this was pre-internet, and almost pre-BBS). Several members of my core group were very active in fandom at the time on a large scale (worldcon, etc), and even at that level, news was slow to be disseminated. This book answered quite a number of question from those days and I was fascinated to learn what went on outside the public purview.
This is a semi-scholarly book and the author writes authoritatively. Readers who are not especially fascinated by the subject matter might well find the style academic and dry. I found the writing precise and engaging. I also liked reading the chapter notes and readers who are interested in the minutiae will find many hours of further reading and reference hunting contained in the notes and sources mentioned throughout the text.
Four stars. Fascinating deep dive in early geekdom and the fallout from the clash of the titans which fractured D&D.
Disclosure: I received an ARC at no cost from the author/publisher for review purposes.
Game Wizards: The Epic Battle for Dungeons & Dragons is the newest book in the Game Histories series, this volume written by Jon Peterson. Due out 12th Oct 2021 from MIT Press, it's 400 pages and will be available in paperback and ebook formats.
This is a very well written book assembled from extant notes, legal documents, eyewitness accounts, and recollections about the rise, fall, rise, and pitched battles involved in the emergence and control of TSR and Dungeons & Dragons. I was working in a gaming & hobby shop in the late 70s and early 80s and I well remember our regular gaming group geeking out over the newest editions and modules from TSR. Our regular members were mostly tabletop wargamers, but the balance soon shifted as more and more of our members became more interested in D&D and later on, Warhammer.
There wasn't much behind-the-scenes information on display (this was pre-internet, and almost pre-BBS). Several members of my core group were very active in fandom at the time on a large scale (worldcon, etc), and even at that level, news was slow to be disseminated. This book answered quite a number of question from those days and I was fascinated to learn what went on outside the public purview.
This is a semi-scholarly book and the author writes authoritatively. Readers who are not especially fascinated by the subject matter might well find the style academic and dry. I found the writing precise and engaging. I also liked reading the chapter notes and readers who are interested in the minutiae will find many hours of further reading and reference hunting contained in the notes and sources mentioned throughout the text.
Four stars. Fascinating deep dive in early geekdom and the fallout from the clash of the titans which fractured D&D.
Disclosure: I received an ARC at no cost from the author/publisher for review purposes.
April 28, 2023
Not having been around back in the old days of TSR, I'd only heard scraps of this story here and there. This book collates a massive amount of research to paint a picture, not only of TSR, but tabletop roleplaying in general.
The first part of the book describes the gaming scene in the 60s, hobbyists creating rulesets and passing them around, and the early days of conventions like GenCon and Origins. Then it gets into the early days of TSR trying to monetize rules, then the massive and surprising popularity of D&D, bringing in so much money that the company was spending like drunken sailors. Then, inevitably, the collapse and corporate shenanigans then ended in its sale to Wizards of the Coast.
It's all supremely fascinating, nobody is a saint in any of this. All the same, it did make me a little sad to realize neither Gygax nor Arneson would live to see the incredible explosion in tabletop gaming since their deaths, and specifically that D&D 5th edition has allowed the game to break through into popular culture, making it bigger than it ever has been.
The reason I took off 1 star from my rating is that I wish there were more photos to give more flavour to the products and events described in the text.
In any case, if you're even mildly interested in the subject matter, I recommend this one.
The first part of the book describes the gaming scene in the 60s, hobbyists creating rulesets and passing them around, and the early days of conventions like GenCon and Origins. Then it gets into the early days of TSR trying to monetize rules, then the massive and surprising popularity of D&D, bringing in so much money that the company was spending like drunken sailors. Then, inevitably, the collapse and corporate shenanigans then ended in its sale to Wizards of the Coast.
It's all supremely fascinating, nobody is a saint in any of this. All the same, it did make me a little sad to realize neither Gygax nor Arneson would live to see the incredible explosion in tabletop gaming since their deaths, and specifically that D&D 5th edition has allowed the game to break through into popular culture, making it bigger than it ever has been.
The reason I took off 1 star from my rating is that I wish there were more photos to give more flavour to the products and events described in the text.
In any case, if you're even mildly interested in the subject matter, I recommend this one.
February 3, 2023
Initially, this looked like it was going to be a relatively dry history of D&D and the original publisher, TSR. Turns out to be a surprisingly well-researched* and well-paced accounting of the people and machinations around D&D from its antecedents in the wargaming community to the small publishers and the Satanic Panic.
The fact that the game went from a hobby of interest to a very small group of people to being widely available nationwide (distributed by Random House to KMart and Waldenbooks amongst others) in just a few years was incredible. The sad reality for Gygax and Arneson was that just because they created it, they weren’t the best people to run the business. TSR nearly didn’t make it out of the gates, and then it barely survived its own success.
I happened to play D&D (mostly AD&D) in the mid-80’s, but I didn’t have a particular interest in the shenanigans in the industry. I’ve heard bits and pieces, but this book really lays out details I wasn’t aware of.
* There are 30 pages of references in the back of the book!
The fact that the game went from a hobby of interest to a very small group of people to being widely available nationwide (distributed by Random House to KMart and Waldenbooks amongst others) in just a few years was incredible. The sad reality for Gygax and Arneson was that just because they created it, they weren’t the best people to run the business. TSR nearly didn’t make it out of the gates, and then it barely survived its own success.
I happened to play D&D (mostly AD&D) in the mid-80’s, but I didn’t have a particular interest in the shenanigans in the industry. I’ve heard bits and pieces, but this book really lays out details I wasn’t aware of.
* There are 30 pages of references in the back of the book!
July 28, 2024
I read this out of curiosity for the origins of D&D which my friends introduced me to in the early 80s along with several other tabletop RPGs well before computer RPGs came on to the scene. I had no idea until I read this book how modest TSR started out with publishing rules, but it should come as no surprise that its breakout success sowed the seeds of its own destruction. Disputes between co-creators and the rights to creative works dragged on the business, and it struggled from vast nepotism in the company leading to inefficiency and lowered morale. It was superbly written to layout the history with entertaining endnotes for each chapter and the fates of the evolving cast of characters.
July 3, 2025
A concise history of the rise and fall of the Gygax era at TSR, with a lens on the economics of the business as well as the broader industry.
As a nascent gamer during this era, blissfully unaware of the shenanigans in the background, it also answered a lot of questions I had at the time.
If I had a wish, it would be for one more chapter to expand on the epilogue, the gap before WotC/Hasbro acquired them.
As a nascent gamer during this era, blissfully unaware of the shenanigans in the background, it also answered a lot of questions I had at the time.
If I had a wish, it would be for one more chapter to expand on the epilogue, the gap before WotC/Hasbro acquired them.
December 14, 2021
With the popularity of the game today, it's hard to imagine a time before Dungeons & Dragons. The fact that the game ever gained a following to begin with is incredible. This book details the history of not only the men that helped to create the game, but the company that they formed. What started as a hobby grew to a tiny business with an expected worth of $300. Within a few years, through a lot of luck, the game took off to define a new segment in the hobby of games, growing to a company that employed hundreds and had revenues of tens of millions of dollars. There's an amazing story here, involving a lot of drama about the rights to the game, royalties, stock options, and a group of people who were gamers and were never really very good at business. As someone who came upon the game at a young age when much of this was going on behind the scenes, it was fascinating to read about. I highly recommend this for anyone who loves RPGs or wants to learn about some of the pitfalls of a hobby growing into a business faster than you can manage it.
February 21, 2022
As someone who was playing D&D at the time, this was an interesting and informative read.
August 22, 2024
Episch is een rekbaar begrip. De populariteit en de groei was wel fenomenaal.
August 10, 2025
Filled some holes in my understanding of a game that shaped my adolescence. An excessively detailed and meticulously researched telling of a petty, unfortunate history.
September 4, 2022
This was such a well thought out, thorough book. I honestly wanted it to keep going. The amount of detail, is simply amazing. I really appreciated how most of it was just a history, but the author took the time to write in some funny commentary.
Must read for D&D or TTRPG fans.
Must read for D&D or TTRPG fans.
November 25, 2022
An exhaustive and exhausting history of the early days of Gary Gygax, D&D, and TSR. Peterson revels in detailed descriptions of each year of small company growth, supported by memos and facsimiles. But honestly, as much as I love D&D and small business, about 9 chapters of this book could have been condensed into one, and we could have heard more about life after Gygax's exit from TSR, rather than a perfunctory epilogue.
June 15, 2022
This was fascinating and sometimes painful to watch the 15 year tug of war about Dungeons & Dragons. All the wasted money, opportunities, and friendships driven by the unexpectedly vast sums of money this little, life-changing hobby produced in its early years. Jon Peterson is doing yeoman's work in the history of games and I now need to track down The Elusive Shift.
February 9, 2025
Not quite what I expected but the subject matter was interesting never the less. Game Wizards chronicles history of the business of TSR and the legal and financial peaks and valleys of that company. The content is a bit dry at times but considering the subject matter that's to be expected. If you want the definitive account of that era this is the book, Jon Peterson likely knows more about D&D than anyone else.
September 7, 2021
I started playing Dungeons & Dragons in 1990, and for as long as I can remember, I was aware of the controversy over its dual authorship. I can't remember how I picked this up, but judging from the contemporary sources Jon Peterson cites in his new book, the conflict over who deserves credit for creating D&D has been in the gamer zeitgeist pretty much since its inception.
In Peterson's first history of D&D, the thorough, revelatory (and, yes, sometimes exhausting :P) Playing At The World, he elided this conflict. It seemed like a smart move. Untangling truth from that knot would have been impossible. Everyone involved was too old, too bitter, too steeped in their own self-importance, too dead, or too reluctant to speak up to be a reliable source. Who could parse out what likely happened from decades of hearsay?
Peterson seems to have done it.
Focusing again on primary source documents and aided by court and financial records, Peterson has done his best to present an unbiased investigation into who did what, who owned what, and how they fought over it. No one comes off a saint in this story, but few come off as overtly villainous. In taking sides over the years, fans have allied themselves with the purity of Gary Gygax's vision or Dave Arneson's underdog status, or against the evil corporate shenanigans of Lorraine Williams, then head of TSR. But as it turns out, we didn't really know what we were talking about. People are petty and business is hard.
It bears mentioning that if you've read Peterson's 2014 article "The Ambush At Sheridan Springs" or Playing At The World, the introductory chapters of this book may feel redundant. After that initial hurdle however, Game Wizards focuses on new material and analysis-- albeit material that is sometimes dry or extremely dense. I assume the stock option stuff all makes sense, but I found the familial relations involved in this saga nigh impenetrable.
.There are a few missteps when Peterson deviates from his main topic-- rehashing the Satanic Panic adds nothing to the conflicts at hand-- but otherwise he's authored another invaluable work of actual scholarship to the hobby. And since he's seemingly done the impossible here, I have only one other impossible request. Where is my 1,000 page history about the heyday of AD&D 2nd Edition campaign settings?!? (These books keep ending right before my favorite part of the hobby, lol.)
Eagerly awaiting Jon Peterson's response, kthx.
In Peterson's first history of D&D, the thorough, revelatory (and, yes, sometimes exhausting :P) Playing At The World, he elided this conflict. It seemed like a smart move. Untangling truth from that knot would have been impossible. Everyone involved was too old, too bitter, too steeped in their own self-importance, too dead, or too reluctant to speak up to be a reliable source. Who could parse out what likely happened from decades of hearsay?
Peterson seems to have done it.
Focusing again on primary source documents and aided by court and financial records, Peterson has done his best to present an unbiased investigation into who did what, who owned what, and how they fought over it. No one comes off a saint in this story, but few come off as overtly villainous. In taking sides over the years, fans have allied themselves with the purity of Gary Gygax's vision or Dave Arneson's underdog status, or against the evil corporate shenanigans of Lorraine Williams, then head of TSR. But as it turns out, we didn't really know what we were talking about. People are petty and business is hard.
It bears mentioning that if you've read Peterson's 2014 article "The Ambush At Sheridan Springs" or Playing At The World, the introductory chapters of this book may feel redundant. After that initial hurdle however, Game Wizards focuses on new material and analysis-- albeit material that is sometimes dry or extremely dense. I assume the stock option stuff all makes sense, but I found the familial relations involved in this saga nigh impenetrable.
.There are a few missteps when Peterson deviates from his main topic-- rehashing the Satanic Panic adds nothing to the conflicts at hand-- but otherwise he's authored another invaluable work of actual scholarship to the hobby. And since he's seemingly done the impossible here, I have only one other impossible request. Where is my 1,000 page history about the heyday of AD&D 2nd Edition campaign settings?!? (These books keep ending right before my favorite part of the hobby, lol.)
Eagerly awaiting Jon Peterson's response, kthx.
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