 Long ago, in the before times of 1971, a soft, squishy man named Ernest Gygax created a small battle simulation game based off of rules created by his local wargaming club, the Lake Geneva Tactical Studies Association, with the intent of creating a medieval battle system similar to one's founded convention created by him and his pals, the Lake Geneva Wargames Convention, which would later be shortened to just GenCon, because people don't have time for that many words anymore. The rules of this battle system were borrowed from a friend of Ernest's named Jeff Perrin and expanded upon to explore the aspects of medieval warfare, and it would go on to become one of the most important works of Ernest's life. Its name was Chainmail. This is the story of a different game entirely, Dungeons & Dragons. Dungeons & Dragons was created in 1974 by one E. Gary Gygax, and a man that he met at another GenCon meeting, Dave Arnson. For those of you sharp-eyed viewers, you may have caught on by now that E. Gary Gygax is, in actuality, Ernest Gygax, the very same man who made Chainmail just three years before. And while Ernie was developing his medieval wargame, he also created a weird one-off supplement that added elements of fantasy literature into an otherwise strictly realistic game. The idea was just to pay homage to the likes of Robert E. Howard and J.R.R. Tolkien, because Ernest was a huge nerd and he had the strange idea of playing games set in a world like those, but he wasn't sure about whether it would go over well with his crowd of historically-minded friends, so he included it in the back of the main rulebook for Chainmail as what were essentially optional, hey, look at this fun thing I made, rules. Despite his expectation that the joke rules wouldn't be taken seriously, the first edition of Chainmail was a huge success, and a large subsection of the game's new audience really resonated with the more jovial tone of the silly fantasy rules. One man in particular, the aforementioned Dave Arnson, got really hooked on the idea that you could play around with individual miniatures and act like you're going through fantasy stories like Dark Shadows. This would leave Davey Arnie to develop a game called Blackmoor, where players would take on the role of medieval characters within the barony of Blackmoor and go on quest for gold, battle monsters, and fight dragons within the dungeons of Castle Blackmoor. Arnson took the fantasy rules from Chainmail and added heavy roleplay elements to what had until that point been a totally accurate battle simulator, creating what we would probably consider today to be just a module, but at the time that was the whole game. Blackmoor was the beginning of what we can recognize as the modern tabletop role-playing genre. Dave brought this new idea to GenCon, and it caught the eye of Ernest, which gave the two of them an idea. What would happen if they took the basic structure of Chainmail's one-on-one combat system, played into the fantasy gimmick, and then changed the focus from simulated scrimches to a long-form campaign that tracked the progress of individual heroes' Fellowship of the Ring style? Thus, after many hours of playtesting and a naming process heavily vetted by Ernest's two-year-old daughter, Dungeons and Dragons was born, filling a niche that was hiding under the tabletop of war gaming and expanding out from that community into the broader community of over-imaginative geeks trying to find escapism in the judgmental world of the mid-seventies. In order to produce the new game, Ernest created tactical studies rules incorporated, along with Ernest's childhood friend, Don K, a man ultimately unimportant to the story, who died two years after the company was founded. But while he was alive, he and Ernest realized that their business skills weren't business-y enough, and more importantly, that they didn't have the money needed to pass out D&D books like they were cheap cigars. Dave Arneson, who also didn't have the money to fund production, wasn't really driving with the whole business of business, so he agreed to take a cut of the royalties from sales for his contribution to the game, and then he sort of just fades into the background from here on out. Ernest and Don decided that, in order to get the gold necessary to pass their loot out, they would have to bring in somebody new, and so they hired a man named Brian Bloom, represented here as Mr. Burns from The Simpsons, because this action will have consequences. But we'll get to that later. For now, Brian had the money, and production for the world's greatest role-playing game could start. The overall presentation of the inaugural copy of the first edition of Dungeons & Dragons was really bad, to say the least. Bloom only gave Ernest $2,000 to produce 1,000 copies of the game, and while 2,000 was more back then than it is now, only 100 of that was put aside for R, so the big E was only shelling out two to three dollars per illustration, and he conscripted anyone that he could find to make him a doodle, up to and including his own wife's sister. So the tradition of treating commissioned artists like shit within the TTRPG community goes all the way back to the source, and the end result was, well, it's good B-roll for my videos. That wasn't the only issue plaguing the double Ds when it first came out, either. Ernest G. Gygax was a wargamer at heart, and his rules stemmed from an understanding that you knew what wargaming was all about. If you were one of those people who saw a table full of metal soldier men and did not know what the hell was going on, D&D wasn't going to make a lot of sense to you at first. Also, the very fact that this was the first game of its kind, besides Blackmore, which wasn't as popular, led to a lot of growing pains outside of the nerd bubble, such as that people weren't used to taking four hours out of their day to sit around and hallucinate about magic men, only to be told that the game wasn't over at the end of that day, and that they would have to routinely come back and play the game over and over again to eventually get the resolution after about 20 total hours of game time. In a world that was just meeting D&D for the first time, that was kind of bonkers. That said, the fact that this was a game where you could do anything was a huge deal. And before you ask, the Satanic Panic wasn't in full swing back then, so Christian Mothers didn't really care about this weird paper game where you could play such exciting classes as Magic User, Elf, or Fighting Man. At least not yet. Eventually, the success of the game would lead to new releases of rules that expanded on the core premise, but were mostly just Ernest going, hey, look at this cool thing I had made, just like how he did with Chainmail. Unlike Chainmail, though, he didn't stop making rules, and by 1977, there was a bit of an issue. Ernest had made so many rule clarifications and updates and new options for players that the game was starting to get bloated, and the lack of high-speed internet meant that somebody could hear about a clarification for a rule in a supplement that they didn't even know about, but apparently came out a year ago. Thus, Ernie had two options. Create a uniform collection of D&D rules and present that as the true edition of Dungeons & Dragons, or continue to sell the current basic rules version of the game that could be more easily marketed towards Toys Tour owners and filthy casuals. Instead of choosing one option, he chose both, and thus was created Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. One of the things people ask me a lot is the placement of AD&D within the numerical editions. A lot of people assume that AD&D is considered the second edition because advanced implies that it comes after the normal one, and this really isn't the case. When AD&D came out, it wasn't considered a new edition of D&D as much as it was considered its own game that spawned off of D&D. Both Double D and Advanced D were given their own updates and expansions, and their rules often contradicted one another because they weren't meant to be compatible anymore. One was the casual experience, and one was the rules-heavy nerd jock experience, and they built themselves around their new identities. Both had their place in the nerd ecosystem, but the creation of AD&D did cause a big rift between Ernest and Dave Arneson. See, Dave agreed to take royalties on his co-creation, Dungeons & Dragons, and leave the business of tactical studies rules to Ernest. But now, TSR was selling a new thing that was still sort of called Dungeons & Dragons and still sort of used the rules of Dungeons & Dragons. But, TSR considered it so creatively removed from the original version of the game that they thought Arneson didn't deserve any of the money from it. This spawned a huge legal debate that ended in Dave getting 2.5% of the revenue from AD&D, which was a good amount of money, sure, but the rift between Ernest and Dave never healed. Aside from that legal sniff, the next decade was full of happiness, profit, and good vibes with AD&D's popularity soaring into the sun until the year of 1989, when Ernest's wax wings began to melt. What happens next in the AD&D timeline is undoubtedly the most influential thing to happen to the game, and for all the wrong reasons, but to talk about that, we have to talk business. As you know, AD&D was owned by a company called Tactical Studies Rules Incorporated, or TSR for short. A company created and owned by Ernie, the mostly superfluous Don Kay, and eventually, Brian Bloom, the man who had ultimately financed the game. Bebe Gun may have been a businessman, but it was his father who had the real money, and if I may paraphrase in an effort to condense multiple years of TSR politics and very dense business business into a single paragraph, Brian Bloom's father, Melvin, eventually took partial ownership of the company by way of absorbing Don Kay's shares when he died, then gave his partial ownership to Brian's brother, Kevin Bloom. At this point, Brian and Kevin, combined, owned a larger percentage of the company than Ernest did on his own, and it naturally caused some tension. Ernest was just a guy who wanted to make games and also have very unsettling views on women, and it was actually Don's idea to make a company in the first place, so now Ernest had to juggle his love for games and his newfound status of being what is effectively a figurehead for his own multi-million dollar company. To make matters worse, copycat games and unofficial bootleg expansions created by unlicensed publishers started growing in the shadow of D&D's popularity, and while Ernest saw it as a sign of a growing community and only wanted to slap down literal counterfeit copies, the Bloom brothers held the same opinion of Homebrew as I did two years ago, so they started trying to throw the legal book at people. It wasn't very effective. But despite that, D&D carried on with both its popularity and its ability to bring in the gold pieces to the point where Ernest had a chance to get away from the internal politics and focus on doing creative projects in the form of both D&D movies and cartoons, the latter of which is the greatest shit in the world, don't even at me on that. While Ernest was expanding on the brand, BB and KB were expanding on their brandy, which is to say that they were spending crazy amounts of company money on nonsense that didn't matter, including overstaffing, buying a shitload of company cars, and for some reason, uncovering a 19th century wreckage of a ship from the ocean. I don't know why they did this. No one knows why they did this. And it got to the point where one day, Ernest had to halt production of the D&D movie completely because one of his employees came to him and said, Mr. Gygax, our sales' quarter are better than ever. Why, that's fantastic. Now I can keep working on my movie and- Also, the Bloom brothers just put us $1.5 million in debt. And they're trying to sell the company. Ernest responded to this news with the reasonable response of firing them, to which they responded with the reasonable response of combining their percentage shares in the company into one large Franken share, and then handing that share to the worst person they could think of in a clear act of retaliation, the then general manager of TSR, Lorraine Williams. A little bit about Lorraine, she's a savvy businesswoman, she's a devout Christian, and the satanic panic is finally starting to roll in. She hates gamers and thinks that they're all basement-dwelling troglodytes who worship Satan and get the AIDS, and due to the combined percentage shares of the Bloom brothers being transferred to her, she now had complete control over the most profitable gaming company in the world. So, yeah, big oof. Ernest tried to fight things in legal court by telling the judge, hey, the Bloom brothers totally told me that they would give me their shares if I were ever to fire them for being crushingly stupid, so can I please have my business back? But the judge was not moved by this deception, and seeing the natural one on the wall, Ernest sold his ownership of the company and sailed off into the sunset as a mirage in the greater history of D&D, just like its other creator, Dave Arnson. Thus ends the tale of the men who created Dungeons and Dragons, and begins the tale of the woman who nearly destroyed it. But we'll get to that in part two. For now, you should definitely hit that subscribe button. Ring the bell to stay up to date on all of your davey news, and if this video appeases the algorithm gods, I might make deep dives into historical topics, a new facet of my channel. 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