Greyhawk - Early Development

Early Development

In the late 1960s, Gary Gygax, a military history buff and pulp fantasy fan, started to add elements of fantasy into traditional tabletop medieval miniatures wargames at his games club in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. He sometimes replaced typical medieval weapons with magical spells, or used dragons and other fantastical monsters in place of soldiers. In 1971, as part of a rule set for tabletop battles called Chainmail that he was co-writing, he created supplementary rules for magical spells and monsters as well as one-on-one combat.

Around the same time, in Minneapolis–St. Paul, another tabletop wargamer, Dave Arneson, was also developing a new type of game. Arneson had been impressed by the Napoleonic tabletop "Braunstein" campaigns of fellow wargamer David Wesely that incorporated elements of what is now called role-playing, such as using a neutral referee or judge and having conversations between the players and imaginary characters to resolve diplomatic issues. However, Arneson soon grew tired of the Napoleonic setting, and one night when the gaming group assembled, he presented a plastic model of a castle in place of the usual battlefield, and told the players that instead of controlling regiments that night, they would each take one individual character into the castle of the Barony of Blackmoor to explore its dangerous dungeons. For combat resolution, he started by using rock-paper-scissors, but quickly moved to a combination of rules that combined Chainmail and a nautical wargame he had co-written with Gary Gygax and Mike Carr called Don't Give Up the Ship! What set Arneson's game apart from Wesely's tabletop wargaming was that the players could keep the same characters from session to session, and that the characters advanced by developing better abilities or powers over time.

Arneson's Minneapolis-St. Paul Napoleonic gaming group was in touch with Gygax's Lake Geneva group, and Arneson mentioned the dungeons of his Blackmoor game that the group was playing on alternate weekends. Gygax was interested, so during a visit to Lake Geneva in 1972, Arneson demonstrated his Blackmoor dungeons to Gygax. Gygax was immediately intrigued by the concept of individual characters exploring a dungeon setting, and believed that this was a game that could be marketed and sold. He and Arneson agreed to co-develop a set of rules based on Chainmail. In order to provide a playtesting environment in which to develop these rules, Gygax designed his own castle, Castle Greyhawk, and prepared the first level of a dungeon that lay beneath it. Two of his children, Ernie and Elise, were the first players, and during their first session, they fought and destroyed the first monsters of the Greyhawk dungeon; Gygax recalled them as being either giant centipedes or a nest of scorpions. During the same session, Ernie and Elise also found the first treasure, a chest of 3,000 copper coins which was too heavy to carry, much to the children's chagrin. After his children had gone to bed, Gygax immediately began working on a second level for the dungeon. At the next play session, Ernie and Elise were joined by Gygax's friends: Don Kaye, Rob Kuntz, and Terry Kuntz.

About a month after his first session, Gygax created the nearby city of Greyhawk, where the players' characters could sell their treasure and find a place to rest.