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, 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 roleplaying. 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 brought the game to show Gygax the following year, and the pair co-developed a set of rules that became Dungeons & Dragons (D&D). Gygax subsequently incorporated TSR to publish the game in 1974, and Arneson worked briefly for the company.
Arneson left TSR in 1976, and filed suit in 1979 to retain credits and royalties on the game. He continued to work as an independent game designer, briefly worked for TSR again in the 1980s, and continued to play games for his entire life. Arneson also did some work in computer gaming, and taught computer game design and game rules design at Full Sail University from the 1990s until shortly before his death in 2009.
Arneson's role-playing game design work grew from his interest in wargame when his parents bought him the board wargame Gettysburg by Avalon Hill in the early 1960s. After Arneson taught his friends how to play, the group began to design their own games, with Arneson especially fond of naval wargames, and trying out new ways to play games. Exposure to role-playing as a tool also influenced his later game designs. In college history classes he role-played historical events, and preferred deviating from the recorded history in a manner similar to "what if" scenarios recreated in wargames.
In the late 1960s Arneson joined the Midwest Military Simulation Association, which was a group of miniature wargamers and military figurine collectors in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area that included among its ranks future game designer David Wesely. Wesely asserts that it was during the Braunstein games he created and refereed, and in which other MMSA members participated, that Arneson helped develop the foundations of modern role-playing games on a 1:1 scale basis by focusing on non-combat objectives; a step away from wargaming towards the more individual play and varied challenges of later RPGs.
In 1969, Arneson was a history student at the University of Minnesota and working part time as a security guard. He attended the second (formal) Gen Con gaming convention in August 1969 (at which time wargaming was still the primary focus) and it was at this event that he met Gary Gygax who had founded the Castle & Crusade Society within the International Federation of Wargamers in the 1960s at Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, not far from Arneson's home in Minnesota. Arneson and Gygax also shared an interest in sailing ship games and they co-authored the Don't Give Up The Ship! naval battle rules, serialized from June 1971 and later published as a single volume in 1972 by Guidon Games with a revised edition by TSR, Inc. in 1975.
In the summer of 1970, Arneson began to create a game that involved medieval miniatures exploring the dungeons of a castle inhabited by fantastic monsters. Originally Arneson played his own mix of rules using rock, paper, scissors to resolve combat, but later adapted elements from his naval wargame rules which had an armor class system like that later used in D&D. The armor class system also appeared in the Chainmail rules, written by Gygax and Jeff Perren. However, also finding those lacking, Arneson wrote modified rules, applying those to his role-playing game scenarios. “I had spent the previous two days watching about five monster movies on channel 5’s ‘Creature Feature’ weekend, reading several Conan books (I cannot recall which ones, but I always thought they were all pretty much the same), and stuffing myself with popcorn, doodling on a piece of graph paper. At the time, I was quite tired of my Nappy (Napoleonic) campaign with all its rigid rules and was rebelling against it.”
The game that evolved from those modifications to Chainmail was the game Blackmoor, which modern players of D&D would describe more as a campaign setting rather than a "complete game." The gameplay would be recognizable to modern D&D players, featuring the use of fixed hit points, armor class, character development, and dungeon crawls. This setting was also fleshed out over time and has continued to be played to the present day. Arneson described Blackmoor as “roleplaying in a non-traditional medieval setting. I have such things as steam power, gunpowder, and submarines in limited numbers. There was even a tank running around for a while. The emphasis is on the story and the roleplaying." Details of Blackmoor and the original campaign, which was by then established on the map of the Castle & Crusade Society's "Great Kingdom", were first brought to print briefly in issue #13 of the Domesday Book, the newsletter of the Castle & Crusade Society in July 1972, and later in much-expanded form as The First Fantasy Campaign, published by Judges Guild in 1977.
Although much of what was later deemed to be "Tolkien-influenced" in D&D and the concept of adventuring in "dungeons" originated with Blackmoor, as a setting it was not purely fantasy-oriented, with recent history and science fiction elements also incorporated or linked in. These are visible much later in the DA module series published by TSR (particularly City of the Gods), but were also present from the early-mid 1970s in the original campaign and parallel and intertwined games run by John Snider, whose ruleset developed from these adventures and was intended for publication by TSR from 1974 as the first SF RPG.
Arneson thought that Gygax would be interested in role-playing since Gygax was already a game-maker with similar interests, so he took his game and a few friends to demonstrate to Gygax in late 1971. After collaboration by phone and mail, and playtesting carried out by their various groups and other contacts, Gygax and Arneson wanted to publish the game, later called "The Fantasy Game", but both Guidon Games and Avalon Hill rejected it and Arneson could not afford to invest in the venture.
The two men felt that there was a need to publish the game as soon as possible, since similar projects were being planned elsewhere, so rules were hastily put together and Arneson's own final draft was never used. Despite all this, Brian Blume eventually provided the funding required to publish the original Dungeons & Dragons set in 1974, with the initial print run of 1,000 selling out within a year and sales rapidly increasing in subsequent years. Further rules and a sample dungeon from Arneson's original campaign (the first published RPG scenario in a professional publication) were released in 1975 in the Blackmoor supplement for D&D, named after the campaign setting. The supplement offered little in the way of details from Arneson's actual campaign, however.
Arneson formally joined TSR as their Director of Research at the beginning of 1976 but left at the end of the year to pursue a career as an independent game designer.
In 1977, despite the fact that he was no longer at TSR, Arneson published Dungeonmaster's Index, a 38-page booklet that indexed all of TSR's D&D properties to that point in time, including Chainmail, the original 3-book set of D&D, the five D&D supplements (Greyhawk; Blackmoor; Eldritch Wizardry; Gods, Demi-gods & Heroes; and Swords & Spells), and all seven issues of The Strategic Review.
TSR had agreed to pay Arneson royalties on all D&D products, but when the company came out with Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (AD&D) in 1977, it claimed that this was a significantly different product and did not pay him royalties. In response, Arneson filed the first of five lawsuits against Gygax and TSR in 1979. Two years later, in March 1981, as part of a confidential agreement, Arneson and Gygax resolved the suits out of court by agreeing that they would both be credited as "co-creators" on the packaging of D&D products from that point on, but this did not end the lingering tensions between them. (Twenty years later, Wizards of the Coast (WotC) bought TSR and wanted to drop the word "Advanced" from its planned third edition of D&D. WotC CEO Peter Adkison approached Arneson to resolve the two-decade-old issue and for an undisclosed sum of money, Arneson agreed to release all claims to D&D.)
In 1979, Arneson and Richard L. Snider, an original Blackmoor player, co-authored Adventures in Fantasy, a roleplaying game that attempted to recapture the "original spirit of the Role Playing Fantasy Game" that Arneson had envisioned in the early 1970s, instead of what D&D had become. In the early 1980s he established his own game company, Adventure Games, that produced the miniatures games Johnny Reb and Harpoon, as well as his own Adventures in Fantasy role-playing game. Adventure Games was profitable, but Arneson found the workload to be excessive and finally sold his company to Flying Buffalo.
While Gary Gygax was president of TSR in the mid 1980s, he and Arneson reconnected, and Arneson briefly relinked Blackmoor to D&D with the "DA" series of modules set in Blackmoor (1986—1987). The four modules, three of which were written by Arneson, detailed Arneson's campaign setting for the first time. When Gygax was forced out of TSR, Arneson was removed from the company before a planned fifth module could be published. Gygax and Arneson again went their separate ways. In 1986, Arneson wrote a new D&D module set in Blackmoor called "The Garbage Pits of Despair", which was published in two parts in Different Worlds magazine issues #42 and #43.
Arneson stepped into the computer industry and founded 4D Interactive Systems, a computer company in Minnesota that is still in business today. He also did some programming and worked on several games. He eventually found himself consulting with computer companies.
Living in California in the late 1980s, Arneson had a chance to work with special education children. Upon returning to Minnesota, he pursued teaching and began speaking at schools about educational uses of role-playing and using multi-sided dice to teach math. In the 1990s, he began working at Full Sail, a private university that teaches multimedia subjects, and continued there as a professor of computer game design until 2008.
Around 2000, Arneson was working with videographer John Kentner on Dragons in the Basement, a video documentary on the early history of role-playing games. Arneson describes the documentary: “Basically it is a series of interviews with original players (‘How did D&D affect your life?’) and original RPG designers like Marc Miller (Traveller) and M.A.R. Barker (Empire of the Petal Throne).” He also made a cameo appearance in the Dungeons & Dragons movie as one of many mages throwing fireballs at a dragon, although the scene was deleted from the completed movie. Arneson and Dustin Clingman founded Zeitgeist Games to produce an updated, d20 System version of the Blackmoor setting. Goodman Games published and distributed this new Blackmoor in 2004.
Arneson married Frankie Ann Morneau in 1984; they had one daughter, Malia, and two grandchildren.
Arneson continued to play games his entire life, including D&D, military miniatures, and an annual meeting to play the original Blackmoor in Minnesota. He taught the class "Rules of the Game" at Full Sail University, a school of graphic arts and game design, in which students learned how to accurately document and create balanced rules sets. He retired from the position on June 19, 2008.
Arneson died on April 7, 2009, after battling cancer for two years. According to his daughter, Malia Weinhagen, "The biggest thing about my dad's world is he wanted people to have fun in life ... I think we get distracted by the everyday things you have to do in life and we forget to enjoy life and have fun."
Arneson received numerous industry awards for his part in creating Dungeons & Dragons and role-playing games. In 1984 he was inducted into the Academy of Adventure Gaming Arts and Design's Hall of Fame and in 1999 was named by Pyramid magazine as one of The Millennium's Most Influential Persons, "at least in the realm of adventure gaming".
Three days after his death, Wizards of the Coast temporarily replaced the front page of the Dungeons & Dragons section of their web site with a tribute to Arneson. Other tributes in the gaming world included Order of the Stick #644, and Dork Tower for April 8, 2009.
Video game publisher Activision Blizzard posted a tribute to Arneson on their website and on April 14, 2009, released patch 3.1 of the online roleplaying game World of Warcraft, The Secrets of Ulduar, dedicated to Arneson.
Turbine's Dungeons and Dragons Online, now Dungeons and Dragons: Eberron Unlimited, added an in-game memorial altar to Arneson in the Ruins of Threnal's location in the game. They also created an in-game item named the 'Mantle of the Worldshaper' that is a reward for finishing the Threnal quest chain that is narrated by Arneson himself. The Mantle's description reads: "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'."
