Dave Arneson

I mean, the Monster Manual was released first.

Basically, Gary Gygax was trying to get his hands around the IP of Dungeons & Dragons without dealing with Dave Arneson trying to take money away from it as well.

And so he helped sort of... redefined Dungeons & Dragons as Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, had Holmes do this box set in order to be like a jumping off point so that everything from that point on was all Gary's IP rather than sharing it with Arneson.

And so Advanced Dungeons & Dragons was very much just his way to keep...

I think really a lot of the video games industry has probably got D&D to thank for the foundations of what came after.

Well, you know, everybody in this business, I mean, 100 percent of people in this business should get on their knees every day, face north to Wisconsin, Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, and say a little prayer of thanks to Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson.

I mean, that's without those two guys.

we would not be here.

Gary Gygax, I think is how you say his name, G-Y-G-A-X, was born in Chicago, but he moved to Lake Geneva when he was a kid, and he loved war games, fantasy, history, and strategy games.

And during the 70s, he and some guy named Dave Arneson began developing a different kind of game.

Instead of controlling the entire army of a game, you had one character.

So, like, you and your sisters would get together, and you could be, like, different characters.

But it's interesting because when we look at early D&D...

There's a lot of, and probably because of Arneson, because we look at where he has the, what is it, the Temple of the Frog or whatever the frog adventure is he has in the Blackmore supplement for OD&D.

But there's a lot of sea creatures, a lot of sea races, species and things.

There's a lot of water stuff in D&D, in OD&D and AD&D.

And the appendix and reading list has actually had a real life going forward.

It's a list of authors and works that influenced Gary Gygax when with Dave Arneson, let's not forget him, he co-created D&D.

And like 75, 80% of it is serious sword and sorcery.

And of what isn't sword and sorcery, a good chunk of it is like H.P. Lovecraft, you know, another horror that is worth checking out as being very adjacent and overlapping with S&S.

Mm-hmm

... uh, people don't know what that is, so at the back of the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons rules, the first edition of it that was published way back in the, the 1970s, uh, he, he said, "Well, here's, here's the reading, h- here's the reading list if you want to understand what was on my mind when I designed this game," with Dave Arneson, I should say.

And it includes a lot of books.

Uh, it doesn't include these books.

Right.

He continued, even with third edition, he and Dave Arneson were brought on and they really weren't allowed back to reestablish their worlds or any of the work that they did.

I know that Luke had acquired a lot of Castle Greyhawk maps and unpublished maps from his father.

I know that his father had wished that Luke would be able to continue his work after he passed away, and Luke was about to publish them all independently.

Because Blackmoor is the first quote-unquote setting.

That was Dave Arneson's homebrew campaign that eventually was turned into a setting.

Then there's Greyhawk.

And then there's Forgotten Realms.