Dave Arneson Game Day (October 1st 2018)

I had in mind something to post today and then I saw the first and second parts of this essay by James Maliszewski over at Goodman Games and I decided to comment on it instead. I also see both parts one and two have been reposted in their entirety over on The Comeback Inn, apparently without permission or if permission to post the whole thing was obtained it is not noted. So I am not going to post the whole thing, but I do have some quotes to make of it.

Who in the World is Dave Arneson?

David Arneson, co-creator of Dungeons & Dragons, was born on October 1, 1947 and passed away in 2009. This year would mark his 71st birthday. In honor of his contributions to the hobby, we present this two-part essay. Here is the first part, and the second part will appear on October 1.

I think most of us have found ourselves in this boat trying to learn about Dave Arneson as he notes below. 

My quest to learn more about David L. Arneson was, in those days, only a limited success. I still had a lot of questions about his involvement in the creation of both Dungeons & Dragons and, more broadly, roleplaying games. I also remained intensely curious about why he had been, for so many years, a figure whose profile was so comparatively low. As I had learned, Arneson was, in a very real sense, one of the “founding fathers” of roleplaying games. Given that, why was he not more well known?

Learning from Dave Arneson’s Published Works 

While this background provides no real details about the Blackmoor setting itself, it does explain that the high priest of the Temple of the Frog, an individual known as Stephen the Rock, is “an intelligent humanoid from another world/dimension.” Furthermore, Stephen possesses several mysterious devices, such as an anti-gravity unit and an interstellar communicator. I found this information intriguing. I was of course already familiar with Gary Gygax’s Expedition to the Barrier Peaks, as well as the “Mutants & Magic” section of the AD&D Dungeon Masters Guide, which provide guidelines for mixing science fiction and fantasy. But Supplement II was published in 1975, before any of this, which suggested to me that perhaps Arneson was perhaps the originator of this kind of “mixed genre” gaming.

I think he is correct that Arneson was the originator of "mixed genre" gaming and to a greater extent than almost anyone else, although as several people have pointed out to me, Dave Hargrave of Arduin fame certainly gave him a run for his money. These two Dave's represent the two most creative people in old school gaming by a country mile or two.

Essentially, The First Fantasy Campaign is a collection of notes on the Blackmoor campaign but without any clear organizing principle – much like Supplement II. Thus, there are army lists, NPC descriptions, castle construction costs, snippets of history, Gypsy sayings, wilderness encounter tables, an alternate magic system, and a very rough outline of the dungeons beneath Castle Blackmoor – to name but some of its contents. Reading it, I was immediately struck by the scope of the Blackmoor campaign, as well as Arneson’s wild, even chaotic, inventiveness. He was clearly a referee with a lot of ideas and he wanted to try them all, which is only fitting given how new the very idea of roleplaying games was at the time. Bob Bledsaw was right to use the phrase “unpolished gem” in describing the contents of this book, as it was a seemingly random jumble of descriptions and rules with no central theme.

The First Fantasy Campaign has been rightly called by many people as the single best gaming resource ever published. 

Adventures in Fantasy, meanwhile, is a complete RPG, which Arneson co-wrote with Richard Snider, one of the original players in the Blackmoor campaign (whose primary character was a cleric known as the Flying Monk). Though intended as something wholly new, Adventures in Fantasy reads more like someone’s heavily house-ruled version of D&D, which “fixes” or emphasizes certain elements according to its creators’ interests – magic, for example, which is quite different than it is in Dungeons & Dragons. On some level, I don’t think that’s an inaccurate feeling, although I suspect that many of the game’s differences from D&D don’t so much fix D&D as precede them, which is to say, they’re reflective of the idiosyncrasies of Arneson’s own approach, much of which either didn’t make it into OD&D or were instead filtered through Gygax’s own ideas.

I think James is correct here that many, maybe even most, of the ideas in Adventures in Fantasy predate D&D. 

Taken together, though, these two writings served as a useful corrective to the impression of Dave Arneson I had formed from reading Supplement II and the TSR modules of the late 1980s. Previously, I had taken issue with the presence of science fiction elements in a fantasy setting, seeing this as an inappropriate “intrusion” rather than simply being reflective of a more expansive notion of what constitutes the fantasy genre. I began to wonder if this was one of the reasons why Dave Arneson was not as well known to me as he ought to have been: his approach both to gaming and to fantasy more generally ran counter to prevailing tastes, tastes that were, to a great degree, formed as a result of D&D‘s success.

Many of us have the same taste as Dave Arneson and have been poorly served by TSR/WotC and pretty much everyone else.

Based on the books he wrote or to which he contributed, it seems to me that Dave Arneson never fully adopted this new paradigm, preferring to stick to the older, broader “anything goes” conception of fantasy that no longer held as much sway in the market for RPGs.

Yeah, Dave surely did march to his own drummer and never did sell out to the main stream market for garbage. 

There are many reasons for this relative obscurity, some of them understandable in retrospect, some of them not. Now, though, there is no excuse not to celebrate Dave Arneson as the foundational figure in the history of roleplaying games that he truly was. We all owe him a debt of gratitude for his imagination and creativity. May he be long remembered!

'Nuff Said!!