Dave Arneson RIP

11.04.2009

Dave Arneson, born 1947, an American game designer, teacher, entrepreneur, and the co-creator of the seminal Dungeons & Dragons roleplaying game, passed away on Tuesday April 7th after a long battle with cancer. He is survived by his wife and daughter.

Arneson was introduced to table-top wargaming in the early '60s by his parents who purchased him a copy of Avalon Hill's Gettysburg game. In college at the University of Minnesota, he met other wargamers and began both modifying existing games and designing his own. He attended the second official Gencon and there met a similarly youthful Gary Gygax. Gygax had published a set of 1 to 1 scale miniatures rules called Chainmail which became the bare bones of an ongoing campaign that Arneson ran for friends called Blackmoor.

In 1974, Arneson and Gygax wrote up the rules they had evolved for their fantasy roleplaying campaigns, creating the game Dungeons & Dragons. After failing to get any mainstream publishers interested, they created a company, TSR, and published the book themselves using investment money provided by one of Gygax's friends. The book became a hit, first in the wargaming community and then in the mainstream. Dungeons & Dragons created not just a new type of gaming, roleplaying, but laid the foundation for the entire hobby gaming industry.

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