Gary Gygax

Ernest Gary Gygax (/ˈɡaɪɡæks/ GY-gaks) (July 27, 1938 – March 4, 2008) was an American game designer and author best known for co-creating with Dave Arneson the pioneering role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons (D&D). Gygax has been described as the father of D&D.

In the 1960s, Gygax created an organization of wargaming clubs and founded the Gen Con gaming convention. In 1971, he helped develop Chainmail, a miniatures wargame based on medieval warfare. He co-founded the company Tactical Studies Rules (TSR, Inc.) with childhood friend Don Kaye in 1973. The following year, he and Arneson created D&D, which expanded on Gygax's Chainmail and included elements of the fantasy stories he loved as a child. In the same year, he founded The Dragon, a magazine based around the new game. In 1977, Gygax began work on a more comprehensive version of the game, called Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. Gygax designed numerous manuals for the game system, as well as several pre-packaged adventures called "modules" that gave a person running a D&D game (the "Dungeon Master") a rough script and ideas on how to run a particular gaming scenario. In 1983, he worked to license the D&D product line into the successful D&D cartoon series.

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Dave Arneson

David Lance "Dave" Arneson (October 1, 1947 – April 7, 2009) was an American game designer best known for co-developing the first published role-playing game (RPG), Dungeons & Dragons, with Gary Gygax, in the early 1970s. Arneson's early work was fundamental to the development of the genre, developing the concept of the RPG using devices now considered to be archetypical, such as adventuring in "dungeons", using a neutral judge, and having conversations with imaginary characters to develop the storyline.

Arneson discovered wargaming as a teenager in the 1960s, and began combining these games with the concept of role-playing. He was a University of Minnesota student when he met Gygax at the Gen Con gaming convention in the late 1960s. In 1970 Arneson created the game and fictional world that became Blackmoor, writing his own rules and basing the setting on medieval fantasy elements. Arneson showed the game to Gygax the following year, and the pair co-developed a set of rules that became Dungeons & Dragons (D&D). Gygax subsequently founded TSR, Inc. to publish the game in 1974. Arneson worked briefly for the company.

Tim Kask

Timothy James Kask (born January 14, 1949) is an American editor and writer in the role-playing game industry. Kask became interested in board games in his childhood, and later turned to miniatures wargames. While attending university after a stint in the US Navy, he was part of a group that playtested an early version of the new role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) for game co-designer Gary Gygax. Gygax hired him as the first employee of TSR, Inc. in 1975. After editing some of TSR’s early D&D publications, Kask became editor of The Strategic Review, which later became The Dragon, and then Dragon Magazine.

Kask left TSR in 1980 to start Manzakk Publishing. He left the games industry in 1983, and spent some time as a freelance editor and speechwriter before becoming a teacher. In 2010 he returned to the games industry as one of the co-founders of Eldritch Enterprises.

Early life

Tim Kask was born and raised in Moline, Illinois. At age 11, he became interested in Avalon Hill's board wargame D-Day, and played it frequently for three years. During a four-year stint with the US Navy (1967–1971) during the Vietnam war, he often played 1914, another Avalon Hill game. He married his wife Cheryl in 1970, and they have a daughter, and a son.

Dungeons & Dragons

Dungeons & Dragons (abbreviated as D&D or DnD) is a fantasy tabletop role-playing game (RPG) originally designed by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson, and first published in 1974 by Tactical Studies Rules, Inc. (TSR). The game has been published by Wizards of the Coast (now a subsidiary of Hasbro) since 1997. It was derived from miniature wargames with a variation of the Chainmail game serving as the initial rule system.D&D's publication is commonly recognized as the beginning of modern role-playing games and the role-playing game industry.

D&D departs from traditional wargaming and assigns each player a specific character to play instead of a military formation. These characters embark upon imaginary adventures within a fantasy setting. A Dungeon Master serves as the game's referee and storyteller, while also maintaining the setting in which the adventures occur and playing the role of the inhabitants. The characters form a party that interacts with the setting's inhabitants (and each other). Together they solve dilemmas, engage in battles and gather treasure and knowledge. In the process the characters earn experience points to become increasingly powerful over a series of sessions.