Dave Arneson facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Dave Arneson
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| Born | David Lance Arneson October 1, 1947 Hennepin County, Minnesota, U.S. |
| Died | April 7, 2009 (aged 61) Saint Paul, Minnesota, U.S. |
| Occupation | Game designer |
| Nationality | American |
| Genre | Role-playing games |
| Spouse |
Frankie Ann Morneau
(m. 1984) |
| Children | 1 |
David Lance Arneson (born October 1, 1947 – died April 7, 2009) was an American game designer. He is famous for helping to create Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) with Gary Gygax in the early 1970s. This was the very first published role-playing game (RPG).
Arneson's early ideas were very important for the RPG world. He helped create common RPG features, like players working together to tell a story instead of just trying to win alone. He also came up with the idea of exploring dungeons, towns, and wild areas. A neutral game master, called a "judge," would describe the world and speak for all characters except the players' own characters.
Arneson found out about wargames when he was a teenager in the 1960s. He started mixing these games with the idea of role-playing. He was a student at the University of Minnesota when he met Gygax at a gaming event called Gen Con. This meeting happened in the late 1960s. In 1971, Arneson created his own game and fantasy world called Blackmoor. He wrote his own rules for it, using ideas from medieval fantasy. Arneson showed his game to Gygax, who worked for a game publisher called Guidon Games. Together, they created the rules that became Dungeons & Dragons. Gygax later started a company called TSR, Inc. to publish the game in 1974.
Arneson worked for TSR in 1976 but left later that year. In 1979, he went to court to make sure he got credit and money from the game. He kept working as an independent game designer, even sending some ideas to TSR in the 1980s. Arneson played games his whole life. He also worked with computers and taught game design at Full Sail University from the 1990s until he passed away in 2009.
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How Dave Arneson Started with Wargames
Dave Arneson's work on role-playing games grew from his love for wargames. His parents bought him a board game called Gettysburg. After he taught his friends how to play, they started making their own games. They also found new ways to play the games they already had. Arneson especially liked naval wargames (games about ships fighting).
Playing different roles in college history classes also influenced his game ideas. He liked to change historical events, like playing "what if" scenarios in wargames.
In the late 1960s, Arneson joined a group called the Midwest Military Simulation Association (MMSA). This group was for people who played with miniature wargames and collected military figures. Another future game designer, David Wesely, was also in this group. Wesely created games called Braunstein. In these games, Arneson helped develop the early ideas of modern role-playing games. These games focused on goals other than just fighting, which was a big step away from traditional wargames.
Arneson took part in Wesely's wargame scenarios. As Arneson ran his own games, he started adding ideas from books like The Lord of the Rings and TV shows like Dark Shadows. Arneson took over the Braunstein games after Wesely joined the Army. He often set these games in different time periods and places.
In 1969, Arneson was a history student at the University of Minnesota. He also worked part-time as a security guard. He went to the second Gen Con gaming event in August 1969. At this event, he met Gary Gygax, who had started the Castle & Crusade Society. Arneson and Gygax both liked games about sailing ships. They worked together on rules for a naval battle game called Don't Give Up the Ship. These rules were first printed in parts in 1971 and then as a full book in 1972.
What Was Blackmoor?
After David Wesely left for the Army in 1970, Arneson and his friends in Minnesota started thinking of new settings for their "Braunstein" games. Arneson created a Braunstein game where players acted as fantasy versions of themselves. They were in a medieval land called the Barony of Blackmoor, which had fantasy monsters.
The game quickly grew, and characters developed. Arneson made up adventures where players would look for magic and gold. They would also protect trading groups, lead armies, and explore the dungeons under Castle Blackmoor. He used a model of Branzoll Castle to represent it. Arneson said he was inspired by watching monster movies, reading Conan books, and wanting a break from strict wargames.
Arneson used many fantasy ideas from the Chainmail rules, written by Gygax and Jeff Perren in 1971. But he also created his own rules, including ideas from his Civil War Ironclad game. The way Blackmoor was played would feel familiar to modern D&D players. It used hit points, armor class, character growth, and dungeon crawls (exploring dungeons). This game world grew over time and is still played today.
Many of the fantasy ideas for D&D, like adventuring in "dungeons," came from Blackmoor. It also included time travel and science fiction elements. These ideas later appeared in D&D books like the DA module series (especially City of the Gods). Arneson described Blackmoor as "roleplaying in a non-traditional medieval setting." He added, "I have such things as steam power, gunpowder, and submarines in limited numbers. There was even a tank running around for a while. The main focus is on the story and the roleplaying."
In November 1972, Dave Arneson and Dave Megarry went to Lake Geneva to meet Gary Gygax. They wanted to show him Blackmoor and another game called Dungeon!. At Gygax's house, Dave Arneson led the Lake Geneva players through their first Blackmoor game. Rob Kuntz, one of the players, said that Dave Arneson was the game master. The players included Gary Gygax, Ernie Gygax, Terry Kuntz, and himself. Kuntz said Dave Megarry was like the group's leader because he understood the Blackmoor game well. Rob Kuntz wrote about their first Blackmoor session:
Gary, myself and a few other local wargamers were the first "lucky" fellows from Lake Geneva to experience the rigors of Blackmoor. This idea caught on deeply with Gary after an exciting adventure in which our party of heroes fought a troll, were fireballed by a magic-user, then fled to the outdoors (being chased by the Magic-user and his minions), fought four (gulp!) Balrogs, followed a map to sixteen ogres and destroyed them with a wish from a sword we had procured from the hapless troll earlier.
Creating Dungeons & Dragons
After playing in Arneson's Blackmoor game, Gygax quickly started his own similar game, which he called "Greyhawk". He asked Arneson for a draft of his game rules. The two then worked together by phone and mail. Their groups and other friends tested the game. Gygax and Arneson wanted to publish the game, but Guidon Games and Avalon Hill said no. Arneson could not afford to put money into publishing it himself.
Gygax felt it was important to publish the game quickly because other similar projects were being planned. So, the rules were put together fast, and Arneson's final draft was never fully used. Even so, Brian Blume provided the money needed to publish the original Dungeons & Dragons set in 1974. The first 1,000 copies sold out within a year, and sales grew quickly after that. More rules and a sample dungeon from Arneson's original game were released in 1975. This was in the Blackmoor supplement for D&D, named after Arneson's game world. Blackmoor added new character classes like monks and assassins, new monsters, and "The Temple of the Frog." This was the first published role-playing adventure for other people to play.
Arneson officially joined TSR as their Director of Research in early 1976. However, he left at the end of the year to work as an independent game designer.
Dave Arneson After TSR
In 1977, even though he was no longer at TSR, Arneson published Dungeonmaster's Index. This booklet listed all of TSR's D&D products up to that time.
TSR had agreed to pay Arneson money from all D&D products. But when the company released Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (AD&D) in 1977, they said AD&D was very different. So, they did not pay him for it. Because of this, Arneson started lawsuits against Gygax and TSR in 1979. In March 1981, they settled the lawsuits outside of court. They agreed that both Arneson and Gygax would be called "co-creators" on D&D products from then on. Arneson would also get a small percentage of sales from all AD&D products. This gave him a good income for the next twenty years.
Continuing the Blackmoor Story
Arneson wrote a new version of the Blackmoor setting for a company called Judges Guild. It was published in The First Fantasy Campaign (1977). In 1979, Arneson and Richard Snider, one of the original Blackmoor players, wrote Adventures in Fantasy. This role-playing game tried to bring back the "original spirit" of fantasy role-playing that Arneson had first imagined.
In the early 1980s, he started his own game company called Adventure Games. This company published miniatures games like Harpoon (1981) and Johnny Reb (1983). They also released a new version of his Adventures in Fantasy role-playing game (1981). The company also published books related to Tékumel because Arneson was friends with the author, M. A. R. Barker. Adventure Games made money, but Arneson found the work too much. He eventually sold the company to Flying Buffalo in 1985.
While Gary Gygax was the president of TSR in the mid-1980s, he and Arneson reconnected. Arneson briefly linked Blackmoor back to D&D with the "DA" (Dave Arneson) series of modules. These were game adventures set in Blackmoor (1986–1987). There were four modules in the series, and Arneson wrote three of them. They described Arneson's game world for the first time. When Gygax left TSR, Arneson's projects were stopped before a fifth module could be published. Gygax and Arneson then went their separate ways again. In 1986, Arneson wrote a new D&D adventure set in Blackmoor called "The Garbage Pits of Despair." It was published in two parts in Different Worlds magazine.
Arneson and Dustin Clingman started Zeitgeist Games to create an updated version of the Blackmoor setting using the d20 System. Goodman Games published Dave Arneson's Blackmoor in 2004. They also published more Blackmoor products over the next year. Code Monkey Publishing released Dave Arneson's Blackmoor: The First Campaign (2009) for the 4th edition of D&D.
Computer Work and Teaching
In 1988, Arneson believed that RPGs, whether played with paper or on a computer, were still mostly about fighting. He felt they didn't teach new players how to role-play. He hoped that computer RPGs would help new players learn while offering interesting adventures.
Arneson entered the computer industry and started 4D Interactive Systems, a computer company in Minnesota. He also did some computer programming and worked on several games. He ended up advising computer companies. Arneson wrote the 1989 adventure DNA / DOA, which was the first adventure published for the fantasy/cyberpunk game Shadowrun.
Living in California in the late 1980s, Arneson had a chance to work with children who had special learning needs. When he returned to Minnesota, he decided to teach. He started speaking at schools about how role-playing games could be used for education. He also taught how to use multi-sided dice to learn math.
In the 1990s, he began working at Full Sail University, a private university that teaches media subjects. He continued there as an instructor of computer game design until 2008. At Full Sail University, he taught a class called "Rules of the Game." In this class, students learned how to create balanced rules for games. He retired from this job on June 19, 2008.
Other RPG Activities
Arneson continued to play games his entire life. This included D&D and military miniature games. He regularly attended a yearly meeting to play the original Blackmoor in Minnesota.
Arneson wrote for Computer Gaming World magazine in the 1980s and early 1990s. He wrote articles sharing his thoughts on the role-playing game genre. He also reviewed computer games like Romance of the Three Kingdoms (1985), Zork Zero (1988), and Uncharted Waters (1990).
In the 1990s, he was invited to Brazil by Devir, a game publisher. He became friends with the owner of the company and gave him his D&D woodgrain box and some of his books as a gift.
In 1997, after Wizards of the Coast bought TSR, Peter Adkison paid Arneson money to end the royalty payments that were still owed to him. This allowed Wizards to change the name of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons to simply Dungeons & Dragons.
Around 2000, Arneson worked with videographer John Kentner on Dragons in the Basement. This was a video documentary about the early history of role-playing games. Arneson described the documentary as "a series of interviews with original players... and original RPG designers." He also made a small appearance in the Dungeons & Dragons movie. He was one of many mages throwing fireballs at a dragon, but this scene was removed from the final movie.
Dave Arneson's Family Life
Arneson married Frankie Ann Morneau in 1984. They had one daughter, Malia, and two grandchildren.
Arneson passed away on April 7, 2009, after fighting cancer for two years. His daughter, Malia Weinhagen, said, "The biggest thing about my dad's world is he wanted people to have fun in life."
Awards and Tributes
Arneson received many awards for creating Dungeons & Dragons and other role-playing games. In 1984, he was added to the Academy of Adventure Gaming Arts and Design's Hall of Fame. In 1999, Pyramid magazine named him one of The Millennium's Most Influential Persons in adventure gaming. He was honored as a "famous game designer" by being featured on the king of hearts in Flying Buffalo's 2008 Famous Game Designers Playing Card Deck.
Three days after he passed away, Wizards of the Coast changed the front page of the Dungeons & Dragons website to honor Arneson. Other tributes in the gaming world included Order of the Stick #644 and Dork Tower for April 8, 2009. Video game company Activision Blizzard also posted a tribute. On April 14, 2009, they released an update for the online role-playing game World of Warcraft, called The Secrets of Ulduar, which was dedicated to Arneson.
Turbine's Dungeons and Dragons Online added a special memorial altar for Arneson in the Ruins of Threnal area of the game. They also created an in-game item called the "Mantle of the Worldshaper." This item is a reward for finishing the Threnal quest chain, which is narrated by Arneson himself. The Mantle's description says: "A comforting and inspiring presence surrounds you as you hold this cloak. Arcane runes run along the edges of the fine cape, and masterfully drawn on the silken lining is an incredibly detailed map of a place named 'Blackmoor'."
On October 30, 2010, Full Sail University named its student game development studio "Dave Arneson's Blackmoor Studios" to honor him.
Since 2008, books and documentaries have helped show the important roles of Dave Wesely and Dave Arneson in creating tabletop role-playing games. In 2017, Robert Kuntz published Dave Arneson's True Genius, explaining how Arneson designed the gameplay for modern tabletop RPGs. In 2019, the documentary The Secrets of Blackmoor featured interviews with Dave Arneson's first players and recognized his new ideas.
See also
In Spanish: Dave Arneson para niños
