by Jon Peterson (author of Playing at the World)

“When we were children, we often played war. We had a fine collection of lead soldiers. My brothers would take different countries: Xavier had Italy; Pierre, Germany. Or they would swap around. Well, I, gentlemen, always had France.”

General de Gaulle

In December of 1943, three devastating years of German military occupation had reduced Paris to a shadow of its former self. Everything had long been rationed: meat, bread, wine, cheese, coffee, metal, leather, fuel, anything that might support the sprawling German garrison in France, then numbering more than a quarter million strong. The situation of Parisians ranged from dismal to desperate. Tens of thousands had been arrested and sent to a fate no one could yet imagine; many who remained toiled involuntarily in factories to produce vehicles and weapons for the Wehrmacht. The Allies had secured North Africa and invaded Italy, but were now mired behind the Winter Line southeast of Rome — the liberation of Paris seemed a very remote eventuality. To make matters worse, the Allies had begun bombing France to weaken its value to the German army. The BBC had a few weeks earlier warned the French people of imminent Allied attacks on industrial centers in the area, and before the end of December, a round of airstrikes on Paris would commence.

Seventy-five years ago today, in Paris, on December 15, 1943, at this extraordinary historical moment, three people executed a curious agreement. It concerned a handwritten document, of 56 numbered pages, which survives today in an antique binder labeled as an accounting ledger. But lift back the cover, and this booklet reveals itself to be Règlement de Kriegspiel, that is, “rules for wargames,” whose three authors give their names as P. Fouré, F. Dodeur, and P. Bondoux. Its pages describe a system for a tabletop wargame of the Napoleonic period played with toy soldiers. All three co-authors initialed each page of the document as read and approved, “lu et approuvé,” and swore that they would propose no modification to the rules before January 1, 1945.

As a historical artifact, the 1943 Règlement de Kriegspiel clamors for an explanation. Who were these three people, who, in the darkest hour of occupied Paris, entered into such a solemn compact about so trivial a thing as wargame rules? What did wargames mean to them in that time of danger and deprivation, and what happened to them over the eventful year that they promised to honor these rules? When you tug on a thread of history, you never know what it might reveal.

Soldats d’Etain

The Eiffel Tower was the tallest metal thing anyone had ever seen, when its spire rose to mark the entrance to a world’s fair, the Exposition universelle of Paris, in 1889. A few blocks down the Seine from the futuristic pavilions on those fairgrounds, at the Esplanade des Invalides, a reconstructed medieval gate with towers and a drawbridge marked the entrance to a display of antiques and memorabilia of the French army. It included many arrangements of posed mannequins dressed in restored uniforms of historical troops. When the Exposition closed, military history enthusiasts lobbied the government to house such treasures in a permanent museum. This interest group styled itself the Sabretache, a name for a type of satchel affixed to the scabbard of the saber worn by cavalry. This obscure technical term was a good shibboleth for a group very concerned about the minutest details of how such an item would be worn by a given soldier, and whose cypher would be embroidered on its side.

The eminent painter Ernest Meissonier, president of the fine arts jury at the Exposition universelle, put his name first among the many prominent artists and intellectuals who signed an 1887 letter protesting the construction of the radical Eiffel Tower. Modern art was not Meissonier’s thing: he was an elder statesman of the art world, renowned for his meticulous depictions of nineteenth-century soldiers, which required the most intimate knowledge of period uniforms and equipment. It is therefore unsurprising that Meissonier served as the first President of the Sabretache, and that his protégé Édourd Detaille, whose painting “The Passing Regiment” (1875) was shown at the Exposition to much acclaim, would be his successor. Their influence helped persuade the government to create an army museum at Les Invalides to showcase the treasures of the Exposition in perpetuity. By 1893, the Sabretache produced its own magazine detailing quirks of military history, especially those sought by illustrators hungry for accurate information about period military equipment. It accumulated enough contributions that an overlapping society dedicated more narrowly to the study and depiction of uniforms would begin its own journal, Le Passepoil, in 1920.

The expertise of these specialists would in 1925 be sought by the German manufacturers of some of the smallest metal things to be found in Europe: toy soldiers. But to call these figures “toys” belittles the best of them: serious collectors could rival, in miniature, the museum at Les Invalides. Metal soldiers cast just an inch or two high can rigorously copy arms and attire of historical troops, and the artists who painted them agonized over the slightest inaccuracies of color. Both German and French firms had mass-produced military miniature figures for more than a century by this point, though this industry — like much of Europe — rebuilt slowly after the ruinous conclusion of the First World War. Then the inexpensive flat tin figures popularized by German firms like the venerable Heinrichsen served as tiny metal canvases for painters eager to try their hand at Meissonier’s craft. German tin figure collectors banded together into a society called “Klio” in 1924: with the debut two years later of its monthly magazine Die Zinnfigur, the “Tin Soldier,” Klio furnished the first periodical dedicated to miniature collectors, and a key advertising platform for the many professionals and amateurs who manufactured figures themselves.

The pages of Die Zinnfigur had much to say on the subject of painting historical miniatures, but when it came to French uniforms, artists needed international cooperation with the experts in Paris who had long studied the original uniforms first hand. Collecting toy soldiers was not unknown as a hobby in France at the time: the editors of Le Passepoil quickly connected Klio with the celebrated French playwright Paul Armont, who had been amassing a miniature army for decades. Armont had previously commissioned a figure caster in Leipzig named Otto Gottstein to produce custom tin soldiers exclusively for his personal collection; Armont took great pride in peppering his hoard with figures cast from private molds, unique specimens that could not be bought in any store, distinguished from the commercial wares produced by French firms like Mignot. Armont canvassed Le Passepoil to encourage French enthusiasm for figures, especially the flat “soldats d’étain,” or tin soldiers, popular in Germany, referring interested parties to Die Zinnfigur.

In the spring of 1929, Armont organized a first exhibition of miniature soldiers in Paris, and provided a lengthy article for Le Passepoil on the virtues of his pastime. He cited two motivations for collecting miniatures: first, to enable the creation of dioramas depicting scenes of military history; and second, as he puts it, to excel at the game of war, the “jeu de la guerre ou ‘Kriegsspiel.’” Armont would use the Germanic “Kriegsspiel” because wargaming had Prussian roots, in elaborate simulations developed to train officers to command in times of war. In the early twentieth century, amateur hobby wargamers repurposed these wargaming techniques for entertainment, using toy soldiers as playing pieces to liven up games with their painstaking visualization of historical troops. So these scattered early wargamers naturally piggybacked onto the first societies that collected military miniature figures.

It is unsurprising that an author like Armont would gravitate towards the latter motive for collecting figures: a diorama of tin soldiers might aspire to faithfully depict Waterloo, but historical wargames let you pose counterfactuals, to ask, “What if?” If you could revisit Napoleon’s most notorious loss, how would you do better in his shoes? This is the sort of question dramatists like to explore — but where an author can just decide what happens, a wargame battle is refought under opposing commands, as a contest between intellects devising new plans or facing new contingencies. Armont was not the first writer whose creativity spilled over into conflict simulation: wargames and literature enjoyed an entanglement that captivated many authors of fiction, perhaps most famously Robert Louis Stevenson. H. G. Wells’s Little Wars (1913) cemented the practice of using toy soldiers to play wargames in the English speaking world, but it would be a mistake to see this as an Anglo-American invention, as Wells tapped into longstanding traditions in Europe when he put these principles into practice.

The success of American adaptations of Armont’s plays in the 1920s, like “The French Doll,” made him a figure of sufficient interest that reports about his unusual hobby made the papers overseas, even. Armont could leverage his celebrity for mainstream coverage of the collecting hobby, and in the last issue of the popular French magazine L’Illustration for 1928, there appeared a four-page pictorial about his collection. Another similar piece followed a year later, and along with the 1929 exhibition, these attracted enough attention that a new French society began to form, with Armont as its President: a group that would come to be known as the Société des Collectionneurs de Figurines Historiques (SCFH). A notice by the group’s Secretary Charles-Félix Keller in a 1931 issue of Le Passepoil reckons that members of this new society divided into three factions: students of historical uniforms, who saw miniature figures as a way to reify their knowledge; constructors of dioramas, who would recreate the scenes of famous battles or military parades; and finally, “les amateurs de Kriegspiel,” hobby wargamers, who, Keller tells us, “study the history of wars past and those to come by using their sometimes quite profound knowledge of the art of war.”

If wargames could indeed grant insight into wars to come, German students of Kriegsspiel were ahead of the game. A 1932 article in Die Zinnfigur recounted how far back the tradition of German wargames went into eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with a special emphasis on the 1830 game of Wilhelm von Aretin, a Bavarian soldier who explicitly integrated tin soldiers into wargames. His game used trays that could carry up to ten figures at a time, where each figure represented one hundred soldiers: as a force suffered losses numbering in the tens, those soldiers would be removed from their trays one by one. But his system was only one of many. If there is one constant in miniature wargaming over the years, it is that all players introduce their own innovations and variants. Die Zinnfigur in 1934 describes the Kriegsspiel activities of the Hamburg subgroup of Klio and complains, in light of the proliferation of conflicting wargame rules elsewhere in the country, that they should somehow be standardized. French authorities seemed unable to agree even on whether to spell the German word with one “s” or two.

The SCFH staged regular exhibitions of its miniatures, which attracted attention from civilians and the military alike, including local figures like General Mariux, who ran the army museum at Les Invalides, and even foreign officials. All of this shows us a diverse and harmonious European community collaborating towards a harmless hobby — but the historical wars that these collectors studied mostly revolved around the rivalry France and Germany. Perhaps French collectors took a particular interest in miniature figures of the Napoleonic period, when French armies conquered much of Germany, to say nothing of the remainder of Europe. And perhaps German collectors took a special interest in the Franco-Prussian War, when the armies of Wilhelm I settled that score by capturing Napoleon III, which led to the extraordinary spectacle of Wilhelm being crowned German Emperor (Kaiser) in the Hall of Mirrors at the French palace of Versailles. A second Kaiser Wilhelm brought the German armies to France again, leading to a costly German defeat and a peace that would grow increasingly fragile during the 1930s. Surely some who used wargames to study military history thought deeply about a potential war to come.

As the political climate in Germany shifted during the 1930s, so did the contents of Die Zinnfigur: by 1934, we can read about Nazi officials attending Klio’s diorama exhibitions and see articles that sign off with “Heil Hitler.” Otto Gottstein, the caster of custom miniatures for Paul Armont, fled his native Leipzig in the face of growing persecution of the Jewish people. Gottstein soon took up residence in England, where his tireless evangelizing for the collecting hobby helped to inspire the British Model Soldier Society in 1935 — he became that organization’s first Vice President. After Armont stepped down as President of the SCFH, and Charles-Félix Keller took his place, Keller would attend the first anniversary dinner of the British Model Soldier Society in London; the two clubs forged a longstanding alliance. In the grand scope of the events of Europe at the time, model figure collecting was a minuscule phenomenon — but we can see in it European society in miniature.

Le Kriegspiel

Although the SCFH was younger than its German cousin Klio, France boasted the larger club at the time. The SCFH had 278 members at the end of 1936, compared to 256 in Klio, and just 73 in the British Model Soldier Society. And as small as the figure collecting hobby was, hobby wargaming was just a tiny subset of its interest group: Kriegsspiel fanatics were a secret society embedded in another secret society. In French circles, they numbered little more than a handful.

The first issue of the SCFH Bulletin for 1936 listed wargame rules, “régles de Kriegspiel,” as one of the topics the periodical would cover. But it was not until the following year that two members made a concerted push to integrate wargaming into the SCFH. Jean Besnus and Jean-Daniel Gringoire solicited in the second Bulletin of 1937 for interest in publishing a set of wargame rules — they hoped to pool a bit of money for the project, an early attempt to crowdsource funding for game publication. Unfortunately, only six members of the SCFH responded positively, so they shelved the idea for the time being. One of the six who did express an interest in Kriegsspiel was Fred Dodeur, who had joined the SCFH early in 1936.

Dodeur would not let his curiosity about Kriegsspiel remain unsatisfied. By 1938, he had begun developing a wargame with Pierre Fouré, who had been in the SCFH since 1933. They consulted the German rules collected by Besnus and Gringoire, but they apparently drew more direct inspiration from a wargame system described in a work of fiction, the novel Axelle (1928) by Pierre Benoit. Like other writers before him, Benoit found in conflict simulation the inspiration for a story.

Benoit’s First World War romance was very popular at the time, though little known outside France today; the American film adaptation of Axelle as Surrender (1931), featuring a young Ralph Bellamy, is now a bit scarce. Something like the period flavor of Axelle can be found in a later French film: Grand Illusion (1937), Jean Renoir’s masterpiece, especially the sequence in which French soldiers are imprisoned in a fortress far to the east, where they enjoy the supercilious hospitality of an invalid German aristocrat. In Axelle, a French prisoner-of-war named Pierre Dumaine is shipped to East Prussia, on the coast north of modern-day Kaliningrad, to the dilapidated castle of the elderly General Reichendorf — who lives among his elaborate dioramas of lead soldiers depicting the great Prussian victories of his heyday, longing for a wargame opponent.

In Axelle, Reichendorf deploys his miniatures to relive the glory of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, especially the Battle of Borny in which he personally fought. Reichendorf’s family had been connected to the Prussian royals for generations, which gives some historical basis for his character to be keen on wargames. The real German Emperor Wilhelm I had learned the game in his youth, during the Napoleonic occupation, directly from the the great Prussian innovators in wargame design, the Reiswitz family. Wargames hold a special appeal for conquered people, who can use them to explore what might have been, or plot what may one day come to pass; the Prussian royals during their exile embraced the game as a family pursuit. Once Wilhelm took the Prussian throne in 1861, wargaming experienced a renaissance in his army, sparking fresh revisions which incorporated all sorts of modern innovations. So in the setting of Axelle, it is not a surprise that a rising officer in the 1870s like Reichendorf would be thoroughly acquainted with Kriegsspiel. Dumaine, a lowly French Sergeant, is first suffered in Reinchendorf castle only to install electric lights, but the general quickly dragoons him into playing the French part in ongoing battles.

As Fouré and Dodeur documented their approach to wargames in the first two issues of the SCFH Bulletin for 1939, their debt to Axelle is unmistakable. Benoit shows the Reichendorf game beginning with the commanders sitting on opposite sides of a room with their own copies of a regional map where they secretly marked the location of their forces with pins. As they maneuver troops into new sections of the map, they ask one another if they will encounter enemy resistance there: if so, a battle will ensue. Axelle explains that “the two maps would then we replaced by a single one, on a finer scale,” and pins from the two secret area maps would be transposed onto the corresponding locations on this more detailed map that both commanders can see. The game in Axelle was thus what we today call a strategy-tactical game, one where armies maneuver on a grand strategic map representing nations or even continents, but encounters between forces are played on a tactical map that magnifies the battleground. Fouré and Dodeur similarly have their opposing armies maneuver on a map of a large scale, 1:50,000, but when conflicting forces met, the action was transposed onto a tactical 1:2,000 scale area map which they mounted on a massive piece of plywood, two meters by one-and-a-half meters long. Unlike Reichendorf, however, they did not deploy pins on the tactical map, but instead used miniature figures such as the tin flats manufactured by Heinrichsen. They adopted a figure scale where a company of 120 soldiers would be represented on the board by three figurines; the formation and activity of the company could be signaled by the directions that individual figures in the cluster of three were pointed.

Reichendorf in Axelle mostly follows established Kriegsspiel practices that would be familiar to officers of his generation — though every wargamer tinkers with rules, and he does slyly boast to Dumaine that he has introduced “a few little improvements of my own invention.” Benoit wisely opts not to weary his readers by embedding a game manual into his romance, but from even his brief account we gather that the “méthode de Reichendorf” involves a way of using dice as emissaries of the god of Fortune, to reflect the influence of chance over battles. When forces meet in combat, each side rolls one die per unit: if six French units face off against four German ones, the French side rolls six dice, and the Germans four. Circumstantial modifiers might increase the die pool, if for example troops are fortified in a town, or positioned up a hill from the opposing forces. The mechanics in the novel are intentionally vague, but the side who rolls the greatest total with their die pool wins, and the losing force must withdraw on the board. Benoit’s vagueness afforded Fouré and Dodeur the opportunity to fill in the blanks as they wished: they developed a similar diced challenge to determine battle outcomes. Their tally of die rolls would be counted as losses against the strength of the opposing company. When a unit lost 40 men in the SCFH game, one of the three figures representing the company would be removed from the board, and its efficacy in battle would drop to half. At a loss of 80 men, the unit becomes entirely unusable. Fatigue and morale would also modify how units moved and attacked.

Perhaps the most striking feature of Fouré and Dodeur’s 1939 wargame is the division of their plywood board into hexagons. “As a square poses some difficulties resulting from the ratio of its diagonal to its side (the famous problem of squaring the circle),” their description reports, “we were led to change the shape of our zone of action: we painted hexagons on the terrain with a five centimeter diameter.” At the 1:2,000 scale, this made each hexagon represent one hundred meters of terrain, so the entire plywood board encompassed a space representing four kilometers by two kilometers. Each hexagon could hold only one company: effectively, the game functioned much like a board wargame from two decades in the future, where movement and missile fire ranges were given in hexes.

To any student of the history of wargames, Fouré and Dodeur’s 1939 description of their wargame in the SCFH Bulletin is in equal parts intriguing and frustrating. To see such an early game employ a system where you roll pools of dice to determine points of damage against miniature figures is significant enough, and then there is the small matter of the use of hexagons: earlier boardgames had used honeycomb cells, but to find them fused into hobby wargames decades before the first American games introduced them is practically revelatory. But that is also why we must be frustrated: we are reading just a tantalizing description, not a set of rules. Fouré and Dodeur allude to tables used to determine how many points of damage have been scored with various die rolls, but say only that they were an appendix to the rules.

So where were the rules? They might well have advertised their publication in the Bulletin the following year, but unfortunately, around when Fouré and Dodeur began documenting their wargame, the delicate political situation in Europe came to a head, and looming hostilities between the Allied and Axis powers suspended everyday activities. The SCFH and Klio had remained close cousins, despite the growing tension in Europe: collectors were an international community, and their national societies had no particular political leanings. An Italian military attaché attended a SCFH exposition at Les Invalides in 1938 at the very side of a French First World War hero, Maréchal Pétain. Even up to 1939, it was not uncommon to see listed among the membres correspondants of the SCFH persons then living in Germany.

But then Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, which caused France and the remainder of the Allied powers to declare war. The pages of Die Zinnfigur for October and November of that year led with a piece celebrating the Polish campaign, and even a memorial to a Klio member, Lieutenant Everhard Grochtmann, who had perished in the assault — his obituary is marked with an Iron Cross enclosing a swastika in its heart. The German success in Poland, and a tepid initial response from the Allies, led to the German invasion of France in 1940, which was followed by an Italian invasion, and then, as of June, the occupation under the terms of a punishing armistice.

Occupation

All of French society was upended by the occupation, and the SCFH can serve as a representative microcosm of the whole — provided we remember the membership was almost entirely male and had a decidedly military inclination. A list in the spring 1940 Bulletin — the last before the journal’s discontinuation — names no less than 42 members of the SCFH who were mobilized in response to the German invasion, out of a Society then numbering more than 300. Many would become prisoners of war in the course of the battles that followed, with some remaining in captivity for years after the armistice. Officers would be sent to an Offizierslager (abbreviated as “Oflag”) and lower-ranking troops to a Stammlager (or “Stalag”).

Life in these prison camps was grim, but soldiers captured during the German offensive in France were ostensibly treated under the terms of the Geneva Convention. Most of these camps were army barracks that had been repurposed to hold captives; some, like the infamous Oflag IV-C at Colditz, were enclosed within imposing German castles. The International Red Cross had regular access to inmates, who could send and receive mail, including packages of food and goods from France. Prisoners were encouraged to read, to play music, and even to stage plays. There is a famous scene in Grand Illusion where the prisoners put on a theatrical review, and when SCFH member Roger Boutterin arrived at Stalag IX-A, his knowledge of historical military dress helped to inform the costume design for a live show featuring musketeers and Renaissance swashbuckling. The treatment of prisoners then remained close to the picture painted in Axelle of German prison camps two decades before where, in one passage, an honorable guard captain takes particular care that his own troops not pilfer food sent to the French even when their own supplies had begun to dwindle.

Those who remained behind in France found themselves in another sort of prison. Adolf Hitler came to occupied Paris in June of 1940, triumphantly posing in front of the Eiffel Tower — a monument that had become iconic, defying Meissonier’s misgivings. The first communication members of the SCFH received after the armistice came in the form of a letter, dated September 1940, from Charles-Félix Keller, the Society’s President. Keller, who was Swiss, had fled to Lausanne, on the shores of Lake Geneva, and taken up residence at the Hotel Mirabeau. From there, he periodically shared news from SCFH members who were scattered across the Europe and the globe.

At first, Keller had to duplicate his personal letters for distribution. All French media at the time was officially controlled by the German propaganda machine. In the new political environment, it would be impossible for the SCFH to publish its Bulletin — but a few years into the occupation, the SCFH did manage to issue a regular Circulaire, a shorter, less polished newsletter which kept the membership abreast of current events. It originated from the zone libre, the area of France still under the nominal independent control of the puppet Vichy government led by Maréchal Pétain. While only two issues of the Circulaire came out in 1942, it appeared six times in 1943.

Amidst the terrifying anti-Semitic policies of the occupying power, as well as the forced labor and the rationing, the loss of property heaped further sorrow on the conquered French people. Famously, the German army seized much of the fine art remaining in Paris museums and private collections. But all sorts of private possessions were looted by the occupying forces, who were not above pilfering fine historical figurines. One SCFH member, Baron James Baeyens, remained overseas in the United States, but learned that his own collection had been seized, as even French citizens who fled the occupation, or just happened to be out of the country when it happened, were summarily stripped of any property rights. Surely numerous other acts of outright larceny parted SCFH members from their most prized possessions during the occupation.

The membership of the SCFH still in France nonetheless took care of their colleagues in the prison camps, with the limited resources at their disposal. Mauirce Lairiez collected donations from the club membership to send care packages to those long-term guests of the German state, including miniature figures, brushes, and tubes of paint. When Captain Maurice Bassac was released from Oflag X-B near the end of 1942, he reported to the SCFH that a small figure collecting group calling itself “Le Bouton de Guêtre,” or the “Gaiter’s Button,” had formed within the camp itself, holding its own workshops, conferences, even exhibitions. Christian Resnier de Labarrière, who received a citation for his courage at Saint-Valérien in the last stages of the French defense, just two days before Marechal Pétain called for French forces to stand down, also reported the creation of a small club of collectors in his own prison camp in 1943. Issues of the SCFH Circulaire even made it into the hands of captives.

News of the fate of prisoners was often unreliable, as they would frequently be shuffled between camps as facilities opened and closed, and sometimes reports of someone being released would later be retracted as premature. The third Circulaire announced Hugh de Krogh would be returning to France early in 1943, but by the end of the year, they had to issue a correction. Hugh de Krogh was shipped all the way to Stalag I-A, in East Prussia, to a facility that would have looked eerily familiar to Pierre Dumaine. Many prisoners found themselves transported farther to the east following the Allied invasions of North Africa at the end of 1942. At that time, Axis forces abandoned the charade that was the Vichy government, completing their occupation of the zone libre in southern France to prepare for an Allied assault.

In Paris, the SCFH still managed to hold regular meetings at 32 rue Charlot in the 3rd arrondissement, and the membership steadily grew over this period; almost every issue of the Circulaire named five or ten new members who had joined. Some Society members would not live to see Paris free again: Paul Armont, founding President of the Society, died there in May 1943. When the Allies used North Africa as a springboard to invade Italy in September, the situation grew more precarious. Allied bombings began on facilities like a Renault aircraft factory in the outskirts of Paris that supplied the war effort. The fight had come to the French capital at last. But it was far from certain what would follow. Would Allied forces race through Italy, and enter France from the southeast? Would an invasion force cross the Channel?

It was in this moment of agonizing uncertainty, in that bitter winter of December 1943, that Pierre Fouré and Fred Dodeur returned to their work on wargaming rules: their Règlement de Kriegspiel was born of it. War is the most uncertain of human endeavors, and games which show it as something that can be understood, even managed, have an inescapable appeal to people who live through wartime. Perhaps it is no accident that the Règlement focused on games of the Napoleonic era, a time when French forces trounced Germany and Italy alike.

Fouré and Dodeur then lacked any means to print the rules, when resources in Paris were so scarce, and what little there was, the Germans strictly controlled. Dodeur wrote out the text longhand. Their decision to commit these rules to a book labeled as an accounting ledger may have been a simple matter of using what was on hand — or an effort to conceal the volume’s contents. Worn writing on the spine of the book reads “Lettres de Voitures,” purporting to contain waybills that recorded shipping goods. Just a dull set of records on a shelf, nothing to attract the interest of authorities who might find wargaming a seditious activity.

Within the bindings of the ledger, the fifty-six pages are sparsely populated, some containing only a sentence or two under headings for the various articles of the rules. There are pages of charts familiar to wargame aficionados, quantifying fire and movement for different unit types, showing how many dice are rolled under particular conditions. A depiction of artillery range shows the hexagons alluded to in Fouré and Dodeur’s 1939 article in the Bulletin. There are passages on victory conditions, retreat and pursuit, on fighting in the open, in the woods, or in cities. Some topics were quite timely: like handling the evacuation of prisoners from one camp to another without risking their escape.

Fouré and Dodeur did not produce the Règlement alone: at the first SCFH meeting of 1944, they presented as a new member Paul Bondoux, a local restauranteur, who avowed his interest in Kriegspiel. With that, the three names credited as authors of the Règlement are all accounted for. In the spring, the SFCH formed an official “Section Kriegspiel,” a subgroup run by Fouré and Dodeur. Those who were interested could inquire at Fouré’s residence at 128 rue de Rennes in Paris. They made some further converts: a Henri Lauga, who had joined the SFCH just before the New Year, also signed the pledge to respect the Règlement de Kriegspiel and added his own initials, “HL,” to the chorus of “lu et approuvé” at the bottom of each page of the manuscript on February 2.

Outside the SCFH, other French people made very different pledges of affiliation. Pierre Benoit infamously lent his name to the Groupe Collaboration, a faction of prominent French intellectuals who openly courted better relations with the occupying power; he was frequently to be found dining at the German embassy during the occupation. We might wonder where his protagonist Pierre Dumaine would have thrown his lot. In Axelle, Dumaine never took to wargaming with quite the same glee as his captor, but the story ends before we learn much about his life in Paris after the war. Would he have seen Paul Armont’s miniatures on display in L’illustration and felt something like nostalgia? Had he only been real, might we have seen his signature on the Règlement de Kriegspiel as well, playing through the glory of French victories in the Napoleonic wars?

If wargamers in occupied Paris were truly a secret society within a secret society, they were not the only ones. Several members of the SCFH who remained in France provided clandestine assistance for the French Resistance, including Pierre and Georges Bretegnier, Albert-Jacques Bieber, and Christian-Gérard. In addition to being the general secretary of the SCFH, Christian-Gérard had been secretly working for the famous Musée de l’Homme Resistance group since 1940 as their Deputy Chief of Information Networks. The efforts of the Resistance within Paris intensified after the Allied landing at Normandy Beach on June 6. As the German war machine’s hold began to weaken, there were mass arrests for “gaulisme,” which refers as much to French patriotism as to the patriotic name of General de Gaulle himself, the leader of the Free French government-in-exile. Bieber, who had been awarded a Croix de Guerre in the First World War, was one of those detained. Pierre Bretegnier managed to escape when he was captured.

Another SCFH member who was arrested for gaulisme in the last days of the German occupation was Pierre Fouré. It turned out there was more going on at the Fouré residence at 128 rue de Rennes than just wargaming.

Libération

Pierre Fouré’s father Robert led a double life. A career soldier who joined the colonial army young and had fought in Southeast Asia before the outbreak of the First World War, Robert Fouré returned to Europe in time to participate in the Gallipoli Campaign as part of the French forces who landed at Kumkale, in Turkey, in April 1915. He came back with a metal plate in his skull and a promotion to captain. After the war, he served in the French occupation force in Germany, and then accepted a series of colonial appointments in French North Africa, where in 1938 he was promoted to colonel.

Colonel Fouré thus found himself in Tunisia in 1940 when the French government signed its armistice with Germany. Under the terms of the treaty, the French forces in North Africa now reported to the Wehrmacht. Nor was this a polite fiction: when Allied forces landed in Oran in 1942, French soldiers died fighting them, including a young member of the SCFH by the name of Jacques Vincent. Vincent was part of the 2nd Regiment of Chasseurs d’Afrique, whose commander had ties to the French Resistance and tried desperately to minimize loss of Allied life, perhaps at the cost of some of his own men.

Rather than serve under a German command, Robert Fouré — who was then approaching sixty years old — accepted early retirement late in 1941 and made his way to occupied Paris. There he sought out the patchwork of Resistance organizations that had begun to coalesce in the heart of France. The National Council of the Resistance, which formed in May of 1943, marked the first attempt to unify the eight leading Resistance movements of the time, which reflected a mix of constituents, strategies, and ideologies. Colonel Fouré became attached to Libération-Nord, one of those eight groups.

In the shadowy world of these Resistance groups, several members of the SCFH played notable roles. Louis Nouveau of Marseille is perhaps the most famous of these — and incidentally, Nouveau was another SCFH member who expressed interest in Kriegspiel in the Bulletin back in 1937. In a letter Keller sent to the SCFH in 1941, he reported Nouveau was innocently trying to forget the sadness of the present time by continuing to paint his tin soldiers. But it turns out that Nouveau and his wife Renée secretly formed part of the “Pat Line,” a network established by a Frenchman operating under the pseudonym “Patrick O’Leary” who helped smuggle Allied soldiers out of danger. The risks of these operations cannot be overstated. Early in February 1943, Nouveau was apprehended near Tours while trying to assist a group of American airmen escaping back to the United Kingdom. Nouveau was sent to Fresnes, a German-controlled prison south of Paris where political prisoners and Resistance members faced inhumane overcrowding and well-documented mistreatment by the guards.

The Germans were always just one step behind the Resistance. Of necessity, it was a time of shifting organizations and aliases, which makes the exact situation of Resistance fighters difficult to describe with certainty. Fouré, like many Resistance leaders, worked under more than one nom de guerre: sometimes as “Leroy,” or under the alias “le Targui,” a name for the Tuareg people of North Africa he would have known from his colonial posting. The Resistance could only be so bold — the German military government in Paris kept tens of thousands of hostages, and in retaliation for violence against a single German official, they would summarily execute prisoners by the dozens. What followed was therefore largely a campaign of sabotage, thwarting the German plan to leverage French industry for the war effort. As the various Resistance groups coalesced into a unified front, the Force Françaises de l’Intérieur (FFI), Robert Fouré became the chef d’état-major, the chief of staff, for the region surrounding Paris.

A high-profile role in the Resistance was a perilous responsibility, one that fell to Fouré after the apprehension of his predecessor. His son’s wargaming rules warn that “a general or an état-major can be disabled or captured in the course of combat,” an eventuality that may have special consequences. In April, the Gestapo came to the Fouré household at 128 Rue de Rennes in search of le Targui. At one point, Robert’s wife Alice managed to convince the Germans that it was in fact her brother they were looking for. Eventually le Targui could no longer elude his pursuers: he was arrested on May 17, 1944. Fouré had been a colonel in the French army, but once he took off that uniform and joined the Resistance, the Germans saw no obligation to treat him under the terms of the Geneva Convention. He would not be sent to an Offizierslager — instead he too was sent to Fresnes prison, joining Louis Nouveau and other political prisoners in a harsh facility that was now operating at ten times its designed capacity.

It was the darkest hour of the occupation. There is a crucial passage in Axelle where Reichendorf has sprung a trap on the French forces commanded by his wargame opponent Dumaine. That moment in the novel coincided with the finale of the spring 1918 German offensive, a time when they believed France’s defeat was imminent. By this point, Reichendorf and Dumaine had gamed through six variations of the Battle of Borny on the tabletop, and all but one had led to a decisive German victory. Reichendorf’s obsession with replaying this situation over and over seems to reflect a frustration with his inability to participate in the real war going on hundreds of miles to the west, as if the French would have been easily trounced if Reichendorf himself could still lend his military prowess to the German command. By defeating Dumaine, he was defeating France itself. In this scene of the novel, the opposing commands of Dumaine and Reichendorf met on the outskirts of Metz.

For this fictional battle within a fictional narrative, Dumaine entrenched a mix of infantry battalions and artillery in the town of Noiseville, which would grant him eleven die rolls, against twenty-seven from Reichendorf’s massive force. The old general cannot resist gloating over his imminent victory, taunting Dumaine that he is dans un joli guêpier, perhaps we might say a “in a can of worm.” They take turns rolling for their forces, passing the dice cup back and forth. But Dumaine keeps rolling sixes, and the general ones and twos. “Tonnerre de malédiction!” the general cries, betrayed by the dice he had himself introduced to the game, as discovers how fickle the god Fortune can be. Benoit is using this as a literary device, a sort of synchronicity, to foreshadow that elsewhere, on the Western front, against every German prediction of probability, Allied tanks were repelling the German advance, and the tide of war had shifted.

The failure of the German spring offensive was a turning point in the First World War, and a similar turning point awaited the Germans in 1944. On June 6, just three weeks after the arrest of Robert Fouré, Allied forces launched their assault on northwestern France. As they advanced across the country, Resistance efforts in Paris stepped up, and gaulisme was on the rise. Given everything else going on at 128 rue de Rennes, it is not surprising that Pierre Fouré was himself active in the FFI — nor that he would also be arrested by the Germans.

But it turns out Pierre Fouré was one of the lucky ones, who would be released rather than shipped across the Rhine. The worrisome prospect of the Allies liberating political prisoners in France prompted the Germans to send Robert Fouré and nearly 3,000 other Resistance fighters to the Büchenwald concentration camp in the middle of August. This included Louis Nouveau, who had now spent a year at Fresnes, as well as SCFH member Pierre Néraud. Robert Fouré stayed in Büchenwald only a month or so before he was transferred to the Dora-Mittelbau camp. Since these political prisoners had little means to communicate with the outside world, Fouré’s family then knew only that he had been deported.

By August 19, as an Allied army neared, the FFI and the people of Paris made a desperate stand against the occupying forces. There was a general strike, and posters went up around the city calling for insurrection; barricades were assembled, and indeed Pierre Fouré directed the building of one of them, at a major intersection just a few blocks from his house. Cars emblazoned with the initials of the FFI conveyed Parisians who fired what handguns and rifles they had at their oppressors. The fighting reached its most intense on August 22 and 23, the day before General Leclerc sent the first Free French troops into Paris. Hundred died, maybe more than a thousand, in an open war on the streets. And almost incredibly, the last of the SCFH members to sign the Réglement de Kriegspiel with an oath of “lu et approuvé” dated it August 23, 1944: Roger Triaureau, who had joined the Society a few months earlier.

What would a wargame, or indeed any hobby, have meant to the SCFH members in Paris on that day? It may have just promised a means of escape. The last Circulaire distributed before the tumultuous events of August 1944 printed an excerpt from a letter by one member who explained: “In these most painful moments we are living through, the arrival of the Circulaire brings great joy. The time spent reading it, the responses that it elicits, lets my thoughts escape all this for some few moments, and that is a great comfort.” But surely some other diversion, one unconnected to war — maybe tennis, or stamp collecting — could have transported one’s thoughts farther from the calamity of the time. Maybe what toy soldiers and wargames offered was not an escape from war, but a reinterpretation of it, a way to transform something huge and dangerous and uncontrollable into a plaything on a table. As it was for General Reichendorf, maybe wargame victories alleviated feelings of helplessness, substituting a decisive success for the agonizing uncertainty of real battle. Did they play a wargame then, on August 23, and if so, who were the combatants, who won or lost, and what were the true stakes?

When General Leclerc ordered his troops into Paris, he did so in defiance of Allied command, out of a conviction that the uprising demanded military support. His forces joined the FFI’s battle and together, they triumphed. Henry Rol-Tanguy, Robert Fouré’s successor in the role of chef d’état-major in the Paris FFI, co-signed the German articles of surrender. General de Gaulle, in a triumphant speech days later, insisted that it was not some outside power that liberated Paris, it was the French people.

Victoire

The liberation of Paris did not mark the end of the war or the suffering it brought to the French people. The final push to rid France of the German army still claimed lives, including some of the membership of the SCFH. Raymond Balay had only joined the Society at the end of 1943; the next year he fought as a member of maquis, the Resistance fighters who took to the country and engaged in guerilla war with the Germans. On September 4, 1944, he died along with around fifty fellow maquisards assisting British SAS parachutists who were in a firefight with retreating German forces near Maçon. Even closer to the border, SCFH member Edouard “Teddy” Rasson lost his life on November 24, 1944, the day that the French army liberated Strasbourg and pushed the occupying forces back across the Rhine. He was shot by aircraft fire while riding in a jeep.

For every such sad ending, there were also stories of extraordinary perseverance. SCFH member Raymond Boverat had been a longtime prisoner in Germany who managed to escape to Sweden, from there crossing to Britain. In the summer of 1944, he parachuted into rural France, where he joined up with a maquis unit. Although he was wounded in the liberation effort, he recovered and then served as captain for a regiment of Parisian FFI members who had now been integrated into French regular army as they pushed on into Germany. After the war, his remarkable heroism would see him named a Chevalier in the Legion of Honor.

For the people who stayed in Paris, life returned to something as close to normalcy as it could while the campaign to topple the Nazi regime proceeded. Fresnes prison, restored to French control, now held those accused of collaborating with the Germans, including for a time one Pierre Benoit. General de Gaulle called upon the French people to marry and have babies, and many in the Society followed suit, taking part in a French Baby Boom. Pierre Fouré married in October — at the time, the fate of his father remained unknown. The SCFH Circulaire could only report that “Colonel Robert Fouré has unfortunately been deported” and express “hopes for the prompt return of Colonel Fouré.”

In these somber times, the SCFH found that even something as small as a toy soldier could play its part in restoring the French national spirit. In celebration of the holidays, Pierre Bretegnier installed at the Galeries Lafayettes — the poshest of Parisian shopping centers — a huge diorama depicting the entry of French forces under Napoleon into Berlin in 1809, a historical event that everyone hoped would soon recur. But the SCFH would make a grander gesture with their ninth society exhibition, this one staged at the Musée Cognacq-Jay, then located around the corner from the Opera in Paris. Entitled “Petits Soldats, Grandes Victoires,” it opened just months after the liberation of Paris, on November 3. The exhibition was originally intended to run into December, but it was extended until January 8, 1945, and then its close was pushed to February 11 as thousands flocked to see it — totaling more than 45,000. The SCFH had to make do with those materials that were on hand in the wreckage of Paris, but even with a few compromises, the results were still inspiring. One of the dioramas even showed the landing at Normandy Beach on D-Day, though there were only six German figures available to defend the beach. Might anyone who had fought on that shoreline have seen it, and fancied themselves miniaturized there in the Musée Cognacq-Jay?

The “Petits Soldats, Grandes Victoires” exhibition even made it into a contemporary newsreel that begins by showing the lamentable situation of the Museum of the Army at the Hôtel des Invalides, the permanent archive of military history that Meisonnier had championed a half century before. “Here as elsewhere,” the narrator reports, “the ex-occupant marked his passage.” Suits of armor, antique guns, and flags had all been looted by the Germans. The camera then moves to the Musée Cognacq-Jay, where the military history of France is being replenished in miniature. It reviews the various toy soldiers put up by the SCFH in their dioramas before fading to contemporary footage of the French army marching down the Champs-Elysées, preparing for the assault on Germany. “After lead soldiers comes an iron army,” the narration concludes. It was as if the very figures posed by the SCFH had abruptly grown to life size to avenge the French people.

It was only when the Allies invaded Germany in 1945 that the extent of the devastation visited on the people of Europe became clear. It is not the place of this cursory essay to convey the enormity of that tragedy, but just to show how it impacted the small community of miniature figure collectors of France. Pierre Néraud, an SCFH member, perished in Büchenwald on March 27 of that year. Just a few days earlier, a fellow collector and Resistance member, Jean Walther, died at nearby Plömnitz-Leau on his way to Büchenwald. Only Louis Nouveau, of the SCFH members deported to the concentration camps, would miraculously return alive to France. He survived a year in Fresnes, followed by a further fifteen months in Büchenwald, but came back to receive the George Medal from Britain for his service in participating in the “Pat Line” rescues of Allied troops; his wife Renée, who continued to support the war effort from London after Louis’s deportation, would be named a Member of the British Empire.

In the novel Axelle, General Reichendorf lost three of his sons to the First World War early on, and had but one surviving, a commandant named Dietrich who visited the ancestral manse in East Prussia on leave, before Germany’s fortunes in the war began to turn. His elderly father expressed impatience with the German strategy, as if he cannot fathom why a bold cavalry charge would not secure an immediate and lasting victory. His son Dietrich is eventually forced to explain that war in the 1870s simply was not comparable to the world of trenches, barbed wire, and poison gas that he has seen: “This war we are waging, it is a different war. A war, you see, of which you couldn’t have the slightest idea.” On this point Pierre Dumaine, who had seen action on the front, felt some kinship with Reichendorf’s surviving son. Nonetheless, as he descends into bedridden delirium, General Reichendorf still fancied Germany’s tactical problem to be solvable through the proper application of nineteenth-century Kriegsspiel.

As different as the Great War was from the conflicts of the nineteenth century, the concentration camps of the Second World War were unimaginable in the warfare of the past. Only the darkest rumors foretold what Allied forces would find when they reached the camps in Germany. Colonel Robert Fouré is believed to have died sometime after the Allied liberation of the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp, where he was last seen — many prisoners were hastily evacuated and mercilessly executed. His body was never found, and indeed many of the details of his service to the Paris Resistance were only discovered decades later, in files carefully hidden at the top of the elevator that went up to his Paris home. But his role in the Resistance has not been forgotten: in 2004, a plaque was placed at 128 rue de Rennes commemorating his service and his sacrifice.

Adolf Hitler took his own life not long after the disappearance of Colonel Fouré. As Allied forces took control of Germany, Pierre Fouré was one of several Society members who traveled to Germany in order to help sort out what happened and to hunt down plundered French belongings, including miniature figures and casting molds. He would spend much of the next three years there, even reporting back to the SCFH about which figure casters in Germany had withstood the war, and which had been permanently shuttered. Many had lost things that could never be replaced, but perhaps restoring toy soldiers to France provided something like closure — even if there was one soldier Pierre Fouré could not bring home.

Epilogue

When Fouré, Dodeur, and Bondoux promised, on December 15, 1943, to abide by their Règlement de Kriegspiel until January 1, 1945, they could not have imagined how much the world would change in the course of that year. It is a small miracle that the rulebook, to say nothing of its authors, survived the time. But game systems are by their nature constantly evolving as their exercise inspires players to explore new directions. In that accounting ledger we see all sorts of undated pencil corrections; the entire page 34 is scratched out and labeled “annulée.” For a wargame system, change is not a failing, but instead a sign of relevance, that it is still in use — games change as much as the people who play them.

The SCFH Bulletin resumed after the war, and its first issue carried an article by Fouré and Dodeur translating a piece in Die Zinnfigur about the history of wargames. In 1948, Pierre Fouré and his wife had a son, but Fouré never outgrew toy soldiers or wargames; he soon served as general secretary of the SCFH. In the decades following the war, interest in Kriegsspiel only became stronger in the Society’s ranks. Pierre Bretegnier had a couple of articles in the Bulletin about wargames in 1948, and by 1953, Jacques Laurent had begun his own series building on the prior work of Fouré. When the SCFH staged an exhibition in 1955 in the Palais de Chaillot, just across the Seine from the Eiffel Tower, Fouré created an unusual exhibit in a room which had been restored with period furniture to resemble a Second Empire salon, the sort that might have existed in France at the time when General Reichendorf first learned wargames. There, on a table covered with a hexagonal board, Fouré set figures representing Austrian and French forces in conflict, with a set of dice on hand ready to decide the next combat.

Fouré, Laurent, and their associates circulated a mimeograph revision of the Règlement de Kriegspiel in 1955, and supported it with a few articles in the Bulletin. Laurent stressed that they had made only a very limited run, of which he retained but a few spare copies available to ship for 400 francs within France and 450 internationally. Enthusiasm for the game spread from Paris to regional clubs, where no one could resist tweaking them: a group in Metz adapted the system from its Napoleonic origins to work for the Franco-Prussian War, and from there it spread to subgroups in Strasbourg and even Koblenz. Jean Besnus, who had lobbied for wargames in the SCFH two decades earlier, could report on running a five-person game in 1957 which he planned to straddle two or three evenings. By that point, the Bulletin had for some years been running reports about the miniature collecting communities in California, where Jack Scruby had begun organizing a secret society of his own, culminating with his War Game Digest, which finally gave the wargaming hobby its own voice.

In the early 1960s, Anglo-American fanzines like Donald Featherstone’s Wargamer’s Newsletter and Jack Scruby’s Table Top Talk made their way to Paris, and Featherstone’s 1962 book War Games happened to cross Fouré’s desk. Fouré viewed these rules as less strict than his own, and opined with some bemusement, in the January 1964 issue of the Bulletin, that the rules raised all sorts of problems that French wargames no longer encountered, thanks to their decades of development. He was nonetheless skeptical that the SCFH rules could be of much assistance to the English-speaking audience: “Unfortunately, the Anglo-American rules are completely different from ours, because they depart from basic principles that are totally different.”

His reservations notwithstanding, since Fouré had already taken the step of printing up a revised version under the name Le Kriegspiel in 1964, he decided to reach out to both Scruby and Featherstone, offering copies of the work to their respective readerships. Featherstone noted receiving his copy in Wargamer’s Newsletter #28, saying that “It was sent to me very kindly by Pierre Fouré… who mentions on his card that he can correspond in English.” Scruby as well mentions receipt of Fouré’s “well printed book of 32 pages” in the September 1964 issue of Table Top Talk.

Then, in May 1965, Scruby reported that a Maryland wargamer named Pat Condray had been working on a translation of Fouré’s rules, which he had now made available as an English translation under the title Le Kriegspiel, a 36 page mimeograph trading at $1.50 plus postage. At the time, very few comparable wargame products were on the American market: the year before, Scruby had printed his own Fire and Charge, and John Candler of the famous “Dayton Gang” was then selling his green binder of Miniature Wargames du temps de Napoléon, but neither game had roots anywhere near as long as Fouré’s.

When Fouré’s rules saw an English translation, hexagons had only recently become common in board wargames — Avalon Hill had converted its Gettysburg from a square board to a hexagonal one in 1961 — but of course Fouré had based his system on hexagons two decades before. Avalon Hill targeted its board games at young adults who grew up after the Second World War; some of their best customers were born in the Baby Boom, in an age of nuclear anxiety as far removed from conventional warfare as the Second World War would have been to Napoleon. By the time Fouré’s game reached America, Avalon Hill had trimmed the dread and horror of the World War II down into gameable scenes like D-Day (1961), Bismarck (1962), Stalingrad (1963), and Afrika Korps (1964). They made sense of those tumultuous events by translating them into the language of hexagons.

Pat Condray went on to start his own wargaming magazine in 1968 called the Armchair General. When he undertook a revision of his original translation of Le Kriegspiel, under the new title The Wargame, he offered it free to anyone who paid for a subscription. It would not be an exaggeration to say that these became the house rules of Condray’s zines, and his journal carried pictures of miniature wargames playing out on hexagons. Pierre Fouré himself even contributed an article to the Armchair General about the applicability of his rules to naval wargames. Among the readership of that magazine at the time was a fellow named Dave Arneson, who was avid about Napoleonic naval wargames, and who would go on to collaborate with Gary Gygax on a set of rules called Don’t Give Up the Ship — and then on a little game called Dungeons & Dragons.

At the close of the 1960s, the SCFH issued its final Bulletin. From that point forward, the Society folded its news into the Sabretache, which had with some interruptions survived since the days of Meissonier. In its pages, up through the 1980s, we can still find periodic contributions from Pierre Fouré. Many remember Fouré in the French gaming community as the “father of hexagons.” Once Dungeons & Dragons had taken over gaming, the French magazine Casus Belli covered fantastic adventures as well the wargaming scene — and its seventh issue, in March 1982, features a picture of Napoleonic miniature figurines in battle furnished by Fouré. By that point, the intense visualization that miniature figures brought to gamers earlier in the twentieth century had started to give way to the computer graphics favored by a new generation. Much had changed, but as we look across the gulf of time back to that bitter winter of December 1943, we can only wonder at how much endured.

Read more from Jon Peterson on Medium: The Ambush at Sheridan Springs, The First Female Gamers, Quagmire! The Making of a 1980s D&D Module

The Making of a 1980's D&D Module

Jon Peterson (author of Playing at the World)

From the mid-1970s onward, players of the game Dungeons & Dragons could purchase pre-written adventures called “modules” from the game’s publisher, TSR. As examples of proper dungeon design, or sources of inspiration, or simply as collectibles, these products rapidly grew into a lucrative business. Modules paved the way for computer role-playing games, some of which directly adapted these tabletop adventures.

Module design began with tournament play, following prominent examples like Gary Gygax’s famous “Tomb of Horrors” for the 1975 Origins convention tournament, which TSR would later package as a module coded “S1.” Later adventurers fighting giants (in modules G1-G3) or drow (in modules D1-D3) followed in the footsteps of tournament players in the summer of 1978. TSR also accepted freelance module submissions: they were impressed enough with Lawrence Schick’s “White Plume Mountain” to not only accept it for publication but also to hire its author as one of their earliest staff designers.

By 1982, TSR employed a growing stable of designers, and dreaming up new modules was among their core responsibilities. But while the module design process became standardized, the resulting bureaucracy could introduce stultifying delays. Tracing one detailed example of the in-house design and development behind these adventures reveals the strengths and limitations of TSR’s day-to-day operations at the height of its powers.

At the end of June 1982, the manager of TSR’s design department, Allen Hammack, sent out a memo to his staff requiring everyone to produce a number of “briefs” for new ideas across all of the major product lines. Each brief would consist of a single-page form pitching the name and description of a new product: going down the topic checklist, almost all were game adventure modules, with many slated for versions of Dungeons & Dragons.

The recipients of this memo included many prominent designers then working at TSR, the likes of Tracy Hickman (of Dragonlance fame), Zeb Cook (who would go on to lead the 2nd edition Dungeons & Dragons design), and Jeff Grubb (later author of the Manual of the Planes), to name just a few.

On the bottom middle in the picture above sits Merle Rasmussen. Merle had joined the design team a few weeks before Hammack’s memo circulated, but he was already noteworthy as the designer of an espionage role-playing game TSR previously published as a freelance submission: Top Secret (1980). Although not primarily a fantasy game designer, Merle produced the requisite briefs for Dungeons & Dragons modules, including two for the Expert game, which he delivered on July 23. One would eventually become a module—but only after two years in a process quagmire, affectionately divided below into nine levels of development hell.

Development Hell Level 1: Creative Approval

TSR went through several iterations of the one-page “brief” form in the 1980s. While most earlier briefs were written longhand, by the summer of 1982 many examples, like Merle’s two briefs for Expert modules shown below, were typed into TSR’s new HP3000 computer system, which would remain in use into the mid-1990s. The design staff then favored authoring with an HP text editor called EDIT2, though most internal reviewers still edited on printouts rather than accessing documents on the computer.

The first hurdle a brief had to pass was a review by the creative staff.

All briefs submitted through the process, such as this first example, the “Frozen Burial Mounds of the Southmarch,” were vetted personally by Gary Gygax: in pencil, at the top, Gary has written a noncommittal “Ok.” In red ink, to the right of Gary’s comment, Frank Mentzer recommends that the module be renamed, but also gives it an “Ok.” In blue ink, a third hand has complained “no hooks urgency” — this likely comes from Harold Johnson.

Gary and Frank were not at the time directly attached to the TSR design staff: in 1982, Gary was President of TSR Hobbies, and Frank worked for him directly under the rubric of “Special Projects,” while the design staff reported up through Brian Blume. Despite this arrangement, creative approval over new products still clearly began with Gary at this time. In other surviving briefs, we can see Gary providing expressions of enthusiasm (“Excellent!”), or doubt (“?” was often his only comment), or sometimes dismissal (“KO” for “knock out,” sometimes following an initial “?”).

The second brief Merle produced for Expert modules was titled “Quagmire of the Swamp King.” The premise has the Swamp King “searching for adventurers to chart his kingdom so safe navigation by ship can occur,” which Merle promises will help to teach players mapping skills. This photocopy kept by Merle does not preserve comments from Gary and Frank, but the proposal met with their approval and was scheduled for development.

Then the paper trail ends, for a time. With around a dozen designers each tasked to produce 36 briefs, it must have taken Gary and his staff some time to give all the submissions due consideration—surely this contributed to the brevity of Gary’s responses. But the fall of 1982 also marked an important transition point for TSR: Gary began phasing himself out of a central creative capacity at this point, as his interests turned towards media projects. Also, most of TSR staff, including the designers, relocated to the company’s new facility on Sheridan Springs road in Lake Geneva before the end of the year, the planning and execution of which must have slowed down work considerably.

Development Hell Level 2: Marketing Approval

Scarcely a week after the designers moved to Sheridan Springs in early November, the head of marketing, TSR Executive Vice President Will Niebling, left the company. This undoubtedly compounded any delays, as marketing approval was required to move forward on the briefs. The resulting logjam would only be resolved after the New Year.

In March 1983, Allen Hammack returned to the design staff to explain how “the Product Managers had a marathon meeting with Kevin a few weeks ago to help clear up the backlog of briefs.” With the exit of Niebling as the head of marketing, it was then his former boss Kevin Blume who had to assess the commercial potential of each proposal. Dissatisfied with lack of hooks in the briefs, Kevin asked that the design staff “SELL the brief to him!”

The “Quagmire of the Swamp King” brief still had some traction internally. On April 14, marketing met with Harold Johnson and signed off on the project, though with some “to-do” notes for the designer. Merle Rasmussen dutifully returned to the brief, and within a month he produced a new version.

This time, rather than type up his brief on the computer, Merle wrote it by hand on a form. He first shortened the name to “Quagmire.” But more significantly, the purpose of the adventure is no longer cartographical improvements. Now there is urgency: the “rock of the Swamp King will sink into oblivion” shortly, “when the moon rises again.” Characters must help the kingdom’s people find dry land, or even better, civilization.

Under the name of “Quagmire” (though often listed on forms with the longer former title crossed out) the new proposal continued through TSR’s approval process. While other modules of the time underwent a detailed finance review with an analysis of potential profit, this proposal seems to have advanced without one—and thus it perhaps skipped a further level of development hell.

This worksheet served as the final documentation of internal approval within TSR. Gary had already given creative approval. The authorization signature at the bottom is the “B2" initials of Brian Blume dated June 21, and his brother Kevin (as “KBB”) has indicated his own approval in the margin. That was probably necessary because soon after Brian approved “Quagmire,” TSR underwent a series of significant organizational changes.

Development Hell Level 3: Reorganization Paralysis

It is surely no coincidence that Brian signed off on the “Quagmire” brief, as well as many others, only three days before TSR Hobbies, Inc. reorganized into four separate companies. As of June 1983, Gary was no longer President of TSR: he would run a new entertainment division. Brian headed a ventures division, and Kevin took over the core games business that now went by the name TSR, Inc. Probably Brian was tying up loose ends before the transition.

This upheaval resulted from the significant cash flow problems of the company, which had recently registered its first loss. Kevin needed to reduce corporate expenses drastically, and thus embarked on a grueling campaign of layoffs over the next year. The constant employee turnover and staff reductions took a heavy toll on development efforts, though the design department would remain largely unscathed until the following April. But creative staff did not work in a vacuum, and the pressures on the organization surely slowed ongoing design.

Development Hell Level 4: Scheduling

Design staff was not sitting idle waiting for executive approvals: in the summer of 1983, Merle was responsible for editing the Boot Hill module Range War (BH5). TSR did not like their design staff to write multiple projects in parallel: they very much preferred serializing short sprints of development. However, at the same time that Brian signed off on the “Quagmire” brief, he also approved a slew of others, including Merle’s proposal “Lathan’s Gold” (originally titled, “Land Ho!”) for an Expert Dungeons & Dragons solo module. Prioritization decisions thus needed to be made.

It turned out that “Lathan’s Gold” went first. Development on that module began in August, on a roughly three-month timeline which inevitably slipped by a few weeks in practice. As this memo shows, the process for developing a module involved far more than just the author: there were busy editors, illustrators, and layout staff whose availability had to be scheduled as well. Ultimately, Lathan’s Gold (XSOLO) would come out in 1984.

After Lathan’s Gold, Merle had another solo module in the pipeline: the Basic Dungeons & Dragons product Ghost of Lion Castle (BSOLO), for which he turned in a manuscript around December 8. “Quagmire” thus waited its turn behind these other projects for nearly six months.

Development Hell Level 5: Design Crunch Time

Once the Ghost of Lion Castle went to Frank Mentzer for consultation, the time for “Quagmire” had come. For all product design at this time, TSR tracked progress with a “Calendar of Work.”

This calendar shows development extending from mid-December to early February, with a week of vacation for Merle in January. Tim Kilpin is now attached as an editor, and Ruth Hoyer will lay the module out. Note that a product code “(X6?)” has tentatively been assigned. Every Thursday afternoon is set aside for a half-day of product playtesting. One quarter of the text is due on Monday January 16, and then another quarter that Wednesday.

The entire rough draft is slated for completion on February 3. 1984. For a group management design team meeting on Wednesday, December 28, Merle wrote up a description of the goals of the project.

Here we get our best insight to date into the actual content of the developing module. The ultimate objective remains to help the inhabitants of a sinking city find a new home, but we learn for the first time that “Quagmire” is intended to expand the “known world” of D&D (later “Mystara”). Where previously, the recommended adventurer levels had been given as 6–10, now they are listed as 4–10, and specific party constitutions are suggested.

Per the calendar, two important pieces of outline material were due the following week on January 4: the section breakdown and storyboard.

The section breakdown worksheet accompanies a plot summary: in it, we see more references to the known world, including the Isle of Dread (the subject of the first Expert module). The sections themselves are measured both by page count and by line count: the lines in question reflect the total number of lines in the HP3000 EDIT2 program. The values Merle filled in are projections—to the side, we can see some actual figures from the design process.

At this juncture, preliminary work on the layout also began. TSR modules produced in the early 1980s usually followed a standard 32-page design with a folding 3-panel outer cover. The “Quagmire” project called for one perforated panel on the cover which could be cut off as a handout for players. For every module, the first step in layout was a storyboard showing how those pages would eventually be filled; staff would iterate the storyboard repeatedly as section lengths and organization became clearer.

Development Hell Level 6: Maps and Illustrations

During the design process, naturally Merle needed draft maps to illustrate key locations. Maps and handouts are listed as due on January 20 on the calendar. As “Quagmire” neared publication, Diesel LaForce would redraw all the maps in the standard TSR style, but the first drafts come from Merle.

The key location in “Quagmire” is the Spiral City, the 13-level structure that is slowly sinking into the bog. In the storyboard above, it is given a full page (18) in the layout of the module, and is one of four map pages marked for use by the Dungeon Master only. Merle’s own illustration of the Spiral City on graph paper was transcribed faithful by Diesel, keeping the same water levels and retaining the designation that the Spiral City view is the fourth map. The spiral center staircase is clearer in the published version.

In addition to the maps intended for the Dungeon Master, there was also one “in-character” area map for the players accompanying a letter from the Swamp King. Merle drew it on a pair of index cards which he then taped together. A half-page placeholder for this map can be seen in the storyboard above, on the third panel of the inside cover.

For the published version, TSR removed the names of cities from the map, including familiar “known world” places like Ierendi, as well as some of the smaller islands. Even the pointer to the Spiral City of Quagmire itself is withheld from the players.

No Dungeons & Dragons module would be complete without dramatic interior art. Jeffrey Butler produced a number of large artworks for “Quagmire,” though their eventual locations in the module do not entirely match the early storyboard above. During development, the Ohio Graphic Arts Systems printed proofs of these illustrations in large format for review by TSR.

This illustration ultimately covered one third of page 28 of the published module.

Development Hell Level 7: Rough Draft Consultation

The product calendar aimed to complete the rough draft on February 3, and the draft that survives from the editing cycle bears dates ranging between Februrary 3 and 16—the product delivered more or less on schedule. Draft product text printed out from the HP3000 at TSR always shows the line numbers on the left hand, as these translated easily into lines of the eventual product. This cover page largely shows boilerplate text.

The most thorough review of the text came in the consultation from Frank Mentzer—at this stage, Gary Gygax played little role in everyday creative matters. As the current shepherd of Basic Dungeons & Dragons and its expansions (Expert, Companions, Masters, and Immortals, collectively “BECMI”), Frank held responsibility for making sure modules for these product lines exercised the system consistently and met with quality expectations.

Frank’s redline review of the “Quagmire” rough draft contains a number of minor recommended fixes as well as summary comments on the side, signed with his initial. He stresses that the draft contains some “neat places” and “good design ideas,” but he is concerned that the text is “obviously padded” and “extremely repetitive.” He can only wonder if there was a “time crunch?” He suggests that the text be revised before publication.

In places where Frank had concerns about points of system, he could provide far more detailed and blunt feedback to improve products—though his investment of significant effort was more likely a token of friendship than a sign of censure. In “Quagmire,” he was especially concerned about the pre-generated characters provided: all are drawn from the prior TSR product The Shady Dragon Inn, though with some discrepancies in presentation and description.

The proposed pregenerated party, Frank notes, actually has an “evil orientation” with 3 Chaotics. Harold Forkbeard’s “broadsword” is “not in system” for Expert, as Frank well knows. He complains that in character descriptions, “Dexterity” and “Constitution” are not given in the order they appear on character sheets. Constructions like “Patriarch Cleric” are redundant, he maintains, as in “female girl.” He makes numerous other small fixes and suggestions.

These corrections ultimately made it into the published module: Harold’s broadsword has vanished, and “Dexterity” appears in its proper order. Much of the detail which troubled Frank, including the saving throw notation and the flavor text, simply did not make the final cut. At the conclusion of the consultation process, Frank penned a quick executive summary which explains his overall position on the draft module.

It dates to February 22, a rapid turn-around on his review given when the draft was printed. He calls “Quagmire” a “paradox,” a mix of good and bad. It is clear from the tone of the note that Frank does not intended to block publication: he deems it is “technically OK, but needs work.” That his “consultation” resulted in significant changes illustrates how, despite the reorganization the year before that moved Gary and Frank out of TSR Inc., they continued to have meaningful oversight over its creative development.

Development Hell Level 8: The Proof

The final step before publication was the printing of a mock-up proof of the module to catch any final proofreading errors or typesetting problems. The layout conformed to the style guide set by product standards. Every TSR module had a product standards sheet which listed all of the styles, typesizes, margins and related layout decisions associated with the product.

The “Quagmire” product standards sheet still lists the code “(X6?)” tentatively. Per the storyboard, it calls for 4 half-page illustrations and a single quarter-page illustration, along with key art for chapter headings. Baskerville was then the typeface of choice for TSR. While the cover painting artist had not yet been selected, the product standards suggests a theme: a “swampy, misty, foggy, overhanging jungle surrounding a party of explorers.”

These instructions, along with the rough draft text, could now finally be implemented as a proof. The proof typically did not contain illustrations, or even the display fonts for key headers, it just trialed a typeset layout of the text which would slightly resemble the final version of the product.

This page of the proof, for example, crams in the text that appears on both the cover and the back of the published version of “Quagmire.” There are only a few lines of text on the front: the module’s code and the name of its author, as well as a few sentences of flavor text eventually to appear below the cover illustration. Not even the module name is given. On the back, we again note the lack of the title, though the bulk of the jacket text is final.

If the proof bore little resemblance to the final product, what was it good for? It provided a way to spot errors in the typesetting process before integration with the final layout.

For example, this “High Seas” passage appears in the final layout on page 13, not page 10, and Table 9 doesn’t show up until page 14. But this rendition allows the layout staff to identify errors in their typesetting that need to be fixed. In entry 5 of Table 9, the words “the characters” have lost the space between them. Entry 9 of that table also shows a place where a stray carriage return or an error in justification has prematurely truncated a line.

Once these problems were resolved, the illustrations and maps could be integrated in with the text for the final layout. This resulted in the published module.

Development Hell Level 9: The Release

After two years in development, Merle’s brief for the “Quagmire of the Swamp King” became Quagmire! (X6). Steve Peregrine painted the cover image for the module, and it does have many of the elements suggested by the product standards sheet, including how “vines and snakes hang from the trees,” though it omits any “glowing eyes” which peer at the adventurers through the “dark foliage.”

The cover of the finished product reveals some limitations of the proofing process. Note that the final sentence of the flavor text below Peregrine’s painting states, “But who are these creatures that want you to fall?” Above, in the proof, the same sentence more plausibly reads, “But who are these creatures that want you to fail?” The back cover drops the third paragraph shown in the proof, which references the “spiral cities” of the region.

Why should the release constitute another level of development hell, rather than a cause for celebration? Ironically, before Quagmire! came out, Merle Rasmussen was himself released from TSR in a mass layoff announced on April 3, 1984: a “day that will live in infamy” as Jim Ward deemed it and veterans of the time remember it. Merle had been on staff for just 22 months, and for virtually that entire time Quagmire! was in development.

By 1985, TSR had reduced payroll to less than one third of its 1983 peak. The elimination of much of the design staff opened the door to freelance module publications: Dungeons & Dragons co-creator Dave Arneson’s Blackmoor-based “DA” module series commenced at this time. Merle Rasmussen continued to publish modules as a freelancer: for example, he wrote the Savage Coast (X9) along with his wife Jackie. But as he knew from the development hell that preceded the publication of Top Secret in 1980, the freelance situation could also be a quagmire.

The author would like to thank Merle Rasmussen, Frank Mentzer and Jeff Grubb for their help with this piece. For more by Jon Peterson, see the Playing at the World blog, or his other pieces on Medium, including the “Ambush at Sheridan Springs” and the “First Female Gamers.”

Jon Peterson

(author of Playing at the World)

In the summer of 1974, a few obscure fanzines trickled out early reviews of a new game called Dungeons & Dragons. Jim Dapkus wrote one of these: he loved the game but expressed concern that it offered little by way of roles for female characters. He complained that a “witch or female counterpart to the magic user is not listed,” aside from the lone illustration in Men & Magic of a “Beautiful Witch.” This inspired Dapkus to contact the game’s publisher, Gary Gygax: “I asked Gary what women’s libbers think of the situation, and he told me that he will bend to their demands when a member of the opposite sex buys a copy of Dungeons & Dragons!”

Could it really have been so unthinkable to Gygax that a woman would purchase Dungeons & Dragons? His game went on to wild, unprecedented popularity, and women constituted no small part of its long-term audience. To appreciate the situation in 1974, we must understand the market Dungeons & Dragons entered, and the curious consumer group it targeted: gamers.

Yet surely the market for “gamers” included women? After all, women had played all manner of games since time immemorial, from chess to athletic sports to card games to hide-and-seek. But “gamer” meant something very narrow at the time: before the mid-1960s, you would be hard pressed to find anyone who self-identified as a “gamer.” Aside from seventeenth century archaic usages, a “gamer” only ever signified a hunter who killed “game,” according to the OED. The term was effectively absent from twentieth century American vernacular until it was rescued by a new community of “war gamers.” Initially, “gamer” was just a contraction of that label, but it evolved into a general name for fans of the many genres of games that drew on the innovations of wargaming: role-playing games, board games, collectible card games, and computer games.

“War gamers” play games that approximate the experience of command in times of war; these are almost always competitive games, where two or more commanders send their forces into conflict. Those forces are typically represented either with military miniatures on a tabletop or counters on a board. Wargames pioneered techniques for simulating time and space, as well as resolving combat through probability, which would have an enormous influence on games to this day. Originally, wargames were invented to teach the principles of military command — but from their inception in late eighteenth-century Germany, these games led a double life as a source of entertainment. The earliest wargamers to experience these games as chores or pastimes were soldiers, who were at the time exclusively men.

Within a hundred years, civilians had taken up wargaming for pleasure as a hobby. Oxford University students founded a scholarly but recreational wargames club in the 1880s — though bear in mind that women were not admitted as regular students at the time. The first commercial product that taught a simple wargame to the general public was H. G. Wells’s Little Wars (1913). The game was fought with toy soldiers, playthings at the time marketed exclusively to boys, but the forward-thinking Wells did not entirely discount the possibility of female players. Little Wars bills itself as “a game for boys… and for that more intelligent sort of girls who like boys’ games and books.” While this lukewarm concession is generous for its era, the text is less positive on the subject of female participation. Wells anecdotally describes a game that was disturbed “by a great rustle and chattering of lady visitors. They regarded the objects upon the floor with the empty disdain of their sex for all imaginative things.” Little Wars in its own estimation had little to offer women.

The outbreak of the First World War somewhat overshadowed the debut of Little Wars, and it would be decades before its principles would inspire an organized international fan community around wargames. There were however isolated pockets of hobbyists who pursued wargames in the intervening years, and the science-fiction author Fletcher Pratt’s famous naval wargame, played in Manhattan in the 1930s and 1940s, established that women could take to wargames. Pratt himself seemed surprised at the “sweethearts-and-wives influence” over his local gaming circle. The trend began when a woman who “appeared as a spectator of what was originally intended to be a purely stag game” was later “discovered flat on her stomach, aiming the guns of a cruiser and muttering something like ‘I’ll get the so-and-so this time.’” An illustration in the wargame’s rulebook, drawn by the author’s wife, shows such a female participant in the game. In 1943, Pratt wrote that “today there are nearly as many players of one sex as the other.” This constituted a sharp rebuke to Wells’s characterization of the “empty disdain” of women for game play — albeit only an anecdotal one, concerning a small group of New York intellectuals who might not be indicative of the general public.

In the 1950s, a wargaming industry and culture began to coalesce: there emerged then a group that self-identified as wargamers, bought products marketed to wargamers, and connected to one another through clubs, magazines, and conventions branded for wargamers. The first Avalon Hill board wargames entered the market at this time, though only at the very end of the decade would they begin to attract a broad and dedicated following. The earliest glimpses of a wargame community appear in 1957, in the pages of Jack Scruby’s War Game Digest, the first magazine dedicated exclusively to wargaming. Though short-lived and little circulated, its contributors’ descriptions of the hobby record the foundational relationship of women to gaming.

Jack Scruby first advertised the War Game Digest in the pages of the Bulletin of the British Model Soldier Society late in 1956. It would be no exaggeration to call that Society of toy soldier fanciers an “old boys’ club,” as its membership was near-universally male and contained far more retired soldiers than teenagers. Scruby solicited there for “war game generals” interested in a periodical focused on gaming in the tradition of Wells rather than merely collecting miniatures; in the foreword to the first issue of the Digest, he prominently characterizes such an enthusiast as a “war gamer.” Of the forty-five names in the subscriber list published in the second issue of the Digest, no recognizably female names appear. By December 1959, the magazine’s circulation had risen to 141, and three decidedly female names are present: there is a Virginia Esten of Hammond, Indiana; a Jane Sala of Bolton, Massachusetts; and a Jean Murray of Chicago.

But would these women identify themselves as wargamers? The mere presence of a name on the War Game Digest subscriber’s list might not reflect that level of interest. For example, R. W. Dickeson of Chicago recorded at the time that Jean Murray was a “prospective wargamer” who owned “a fine collection” of wargaming figurines and “is now considering entry into war games.” Later lists of Chicago-area wargamers compiled by Dickeson do not contain her name, however, so perhaps her subscription to the Digest was only exploratory.

Most of the discussion of women and wargames in the War Game Digest concerns wives. Given the small number of wargame fans at the time, many enthusiasts had difficulty finding opponents, and would therefore enlist their wives to play. In the third issue of the Digest, a man from suburban Philadelphia describes his wife as his “opponent in war games on various occasions” given that “war game opponents are hard to find around here,” and in the fourth issue, the influential wargamer Tony Bath relates the necessity of “occasionally dragooning my wife into taking a hand” as he lacked other opponents in his hometown of Southampton, UK. Whereas in Pratt’s experience, “sweethearts-and-wives” seemed to have joined the game eagerly, if not defiantly, one gets the impression from the Digest that the wives in question participated only reluctantly.

Tony Bath’s wife Mary was the only female contributor to the War Game Digest. Her article “A Wife’s Point of View” begins, “Being the wife of a war-games enthusiast is really similar to that of an officer’s batman” — that is, a personal servant in the military. “You really only come into your own when there is any clearing up to do.” Even in order to pick up after a battle, Bath stresses the importance of knowing “a little of different types of regiments, armies,” and so on, though in conversation with your wargaming husband, if “you don’t know exactly what he is talking about, just pretend you do and you will get by.” She does seem to enjoy meeting her husband’s wargaming opponents, although “after a few words they disappear from view” and she only visits the game “to ascertain if tea, coffee, or biscuits are required.” Bath also expresses interest in the historical situations, and even authored a few historical pieces for later issues of the Digest, but she seems completely indifferent to the games themselves.

Although the War Game Digest folded in 1963, and never reached more than two hundred subscribers by that time, the community it created set the initial parameters of games fandom. Don Featherstone, who edited some issues of the Digest, founded the Wargamer’s Newsletter in April 1962, the primary magazine of miniature wargaming for the next decade. Even Charles S. Roberts, the founder of Avalon Hill, subscribed to the Digest and was then inspired to launch a glossy magazine specific to his products that would further cement the identity of gamers.

The miniature wargame play celebrated in the War Game Digest could reach only a limited audience because it required painstaking efforts from dedicated and artisanal adults. Avalon Hill’s board wargames, on the other hand, could reasonably aspire to reach the mass market. They built on the recognized tradition of juvenile board games, but with a complexity that attracted a more mature consumer — all without the expense and craftsmanship that miniatures entailed. Avalon Hill branded many of its wargames as famous American battles, with titles like Gettysburg or D-Day, which minimized the need for advertising or explanation. This introduced many thousands of young enthusiasts to the principles of wargaming. But once Avalon Hill opened a communication channel for their customers, something unexpected happened: a community that self-identified as gamers formed, and exhibited many characteristics that are familiar to us today.

It was Avalon Hill’s magazine The General that introduced the gaming community to itself. Like the War Game Digest, The General started small, with just seventy-two subscribers, though an intense promotion increased the tally to five hundred by the second issue, with steady gains following. The printed roster of subscribers in the first four issues of The General yields only three recognizably female names from a total well over six hundred: Mrs. E. H. Burford, Martha Finch, and then a co-subscription for Mr. and Mrs. James Lee Matthews. The initial audience for Avalon Hill’s games was overwhelming male and youthful, with an average age hovering around seventeen. Culturally, this was an era before the formation of what Dapkus called the “women’s libbers” groups in the late 1960s, a time most vividly depicted in popular culture today by the first few seasons of the television show Mad Men.

The character of the early gaming community surrounding The General is most readily demonstrated in the “Opponents Wanted” advertisements, classifieds that Avalon Hill ran free of charge for subscribers to help them participate in local or play-by-mail wargames. Mixed in with prosaic and earnest requests to locate nearby players were notices of a different character entirely. As this service printed text supplied by wargamers who hoped to both attract and intimidate rivals, it was a boisterous, boastful, and sometimes confrontational forum. An advertisement in the second issue of The General promises, “Will slaughter any opponents on any Avalon Hill game within reasonable distance of our home.” Another reads, “Have Army, will destroy you.” As many of Avalon Hill’s games featured actions in the Second World War involving Germany, some advertisers took on Nazi pseudonyms and personae — though in fairness, a submission from “Adolf Hitler, Jr.” could be found in the same column as one from “Gandalf.” It was in these “Opponents Wanted” blurbs that the community embraced the term “gamer” for itself: in only the third instance, there is a call for “Avalon Hill gamers,” and by the next we begin seeing constructions like, “many gamers have expressed a preference for the German side in the game Afrika Korps.”

Since the “Opponents Wanted” forum printed virtually anything it received, soon it published disputes over prior wargames as well as advertisements for future ones. Bitter players wrote in impersonating their past opponents with admissions of deception or even cheating. A certain amount of restraint on the part of contributors, perhaps with the occasional editorial tweak from Avalon Hill, kept vulgarity out of the “Opponents Wanted” column, but in other respects its discourse clearly prefigures the trash-talking that precedes, accompanies, and follows online competitive games. It was in this crucible that the first identity of gamers was forged.

The lack of female representation was obvious to this gamer community at the time. A letter printed in the third issue of The General signed by Nancy E. Shearer begins by asking, “all your ‘Editors’ are boys. Why? What’s wrong with girls?” The remainder of this missive strikes a less than egalitarian tone. “Since they say all’s fair in love and war I believe the two are very similar and a game via the male, oops, mail-ways as to how to catch a rich male would be just dandy for us girls on the look.” She concludes by offering, “I would like to visit your plant in order to see for myself just how that empire of men exists in a world free of all the sweet, soft, warm, lovable, bright, ever understanding but all too often in the way, girls.” The General responds, “Our Editorial Offices are open 9 – 4:30, Nancy, baby.” In retrospect, one may well ask if this entire exchange was a fabrication, but it expresses an attitude towards women and games that was, in this context, uncontroversial.

Even Avalon Hill did not maintain a pretense that they had a female fan base — they saw no evidence to that effect. When one woman inadvertently received The General in 1965, she wrote back the following: “It was nice of you to include me on your mailing list. Unfortunately, being a girl, I have no great interest in battle games.” Thus, when a purported wargames club at Villanova University sent a notice to The General in 1969 claiming to have seventeen female members and one male, Avalon Hill could only incredulously reply, “We don’t believe there’re even 17 females in the entire United States playing our games.”

Astonishingly, some young men nonetheless viewed the “Opponents Wanted” service of The General as a potential way to meet members of the opposite sex. In only the second instance of “Opponents Wanted,” we see a young man advertising: “Player wanted 16+, Hartford or Connecticut Area, I.Q. 120+, Female preferred.” A hopeful wargamer in New Jersey asks rhetorically, “What is more important than AH to any American Boy? Right! Girls!! Why not the best of two worlds? Any interested ‘Fem Fatales’ in Blitz, Bulge, AK…” as he lists some current wargaming titles. As late as 1970, we see an advertiser in Warwick, Rhode Island looking for information on “space games” but then asking, “Any girls out there? Will try to answer all letters.” Even men who were not seeking female companionship worried that advertising for an opponent might give the wrong impression: a twenty-seven-year-old in Norristown, Pennsylvania concludes his blurb with, “Girls also may answer, but I’m married and have a baby.”

As the originally-teenaged Avalon Hill gamers grew up and married, The General carried more references to wives. In 1969, James Crawford wrote to explain that his wife is a “surprisingly worthy opponent” even though “she had never played any wargames prior to our marriage six months ago.” Some were not so fortunate: Dave Slick complained two years later that his wife Cindy “is not intrigued at all by the prospects of wargaming” even though she had promised “that she would ‘learn’ at least three wargames ‘soon after’ our entrance into the blissful married state.” Others complained of various domestic pressures curtailing their gaming habit.

In the “Opponents Wanted” column of The General in the 1960s, there were however periodic signs of female engagement. The most important can be found in the September 1966 issue, in an advertisement for a club then called the Spartan Wargamers. It comes from Donna Powell, Vice President of the club, who advertises, “Adult Wargaming Club for Los Angeles! Face to Face action! Ages 17 up! Male or Female!” Other members of the Spartans extended similar invitations to women; two issues later we find Hans Kruger describing the group as “an adult club for the sole purpose of wargaming and that is composed of men and women.” Donna Powell should be counted among the pioneering female gamers; although her husband, Russell Powell, conceived and led the Spartans, a 1968 interview with her in The General makes it clear that they had played wargames together since 1964, and she strove to rescue the American wargaming hobby from its juvenile beginnings: “In short, may I say that my husband and I only wish to bring this hobby up to where it belongs. Equal to or above Masters Chess.” The inclusiveness of the Spartan wargaming club led to a smattering of visible female players: Carolyn Holmes tied for first place in the Spartan Western Conference 1972 Standings, and among the three winners of a naval miniature wargaming tournament at the Spartan East Coast Convention in 1973 was one woman, Patty Boyce.

Yet the presence of a handful of female gamers in the Spartans was not indicative of a broader transformation of the community. In the International Federation of Wargaming (IFW), a large club to which both the co-authors of Dungeons & Dragons belonged, even the slightest traces of female participation are difficult to find. One member wrote to a club newsletter in 1969, “Members of that delightful Opposite Sex have been known to participate in wargames, so how come an organization such as ours contains NO such members??” The final roster of almost six hundred IFW members, tallied in March of 1973, contains only one recognizably female name, that of Elizabeth A. Parnell.

By the end of the 1960s, Avalon Hill faced stiff competition from Jim Dunnigan’s wargames company Simulation Publication, Inc. (SPI), who published the widely-circulated magazine Strategy & Tactics. Dunnigan regularly sought feedback from his broad readership to tune the contents of his games and periodicals. It was not until 1971, however, that the feedback questionnaires in Strategy & Tactics began to inquire about gender. The first returns that summer (published in issue #28) indicated that 1% of those surveyed were female, though that number is perhaps inflated due to rounding. At the beginning of 1974, on the next iteration of the survey, Strategy & Tactics reported, “We asked how many female subscribers we have. The number is roughly one-half of 1%.” That article goes on to explain their survey methodology, which they believed reflected “over 10,000 different gamers,” a sum they credibly represented as the largest study group available to the industry.

That figure, that roughly one half of 1% of “gamers” were female, is borne out by other contemporary sources as well. The “Great Lakes Gamers Census” of January 1974, assembled by the Midwest Gaming Association, tabulates more than one thousand gamers in the Midwest. It contains five recognizably female names: Marie Cockrill, Anne Laumer, Denise Bonis, and then two couples: Mr. & Mrs. Linda Anderson, and Mr. and Mrs. Paul Pawlak. It was this overwhelmingly male community which was the target of contemporary periodicals branded for “gamers” like Gamers Guide. And it was this community of gamers which was the intended audience of Dungeons & Dragons.

When the first edition of Dungeons & Dragons appeared in 1974, it did not call itself a role-playing game — the cover identified it as wargaming rules. It would be years before anyone applied the genre label “role-playing game” to Dungeons & Dragons and its imitators. Thus TSR marketed Dungeons & Dragons to wargamers, advertised it in wargaming magazines and popularized it via wargaming conventions. This made sense as this was the community the principals of TSR knew: as Brian Blume, TSR Vice President, wrote in the second issue of the company’s newsletter, they were all “long-time gamers.” And the people they gamed with were male.

The two co-creators of Dungeons & Dragons, Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson, lived in small-town Wisconsin and the Twin Cities of Minnesota, respectively. Arneson’s gaming circle consisted largely of local university students. His famous Blackmoor campaign, which built on Gygax’s fantasy medieval wargame Chainmail, provided the playtesters for Dungeons & Dragons in his area. Contemporary records show them to be exclusively male, and as the game took after exuberant settings like Fritz Leiber’s Lankhmar and John Norman’s Gor, it contained play elements that might not have been explored in mixed company. For example, a surviving Blackmoor character sheet has an early attribute listing for “Sex,” but rather than indicating gender it is a numeric value that came into play under certain circumstances.

Gygax’s own circle in Lake Geneva was almost entirely composed of males: a mix of high school students and older men, Gygax himself then being in his mid-thirties. Among his Dungeons & Dragons playtesters, however, Gygax recorded the presence of one woman: Mary Dale, whose younger brother Bob gamed with many of the other local high schoolers. Another early playtester, Mike Mornard, recalls that Mary started playing before him, and had an established and powerful character by the time he joined the group.

Gygax suspected that he had an extraordinary game on his hands, something with a broad appeal: the foreword to Dungeons & Dragons predicted that, “There should be no want of players, for there is unquestionably a fascination in this fantasy game — evidenced even by those who could not by any stretch of the imagination be termed ardent wargamers.” But he apparently had little inkling it might appeal to women especially, and thus the original 1974 Dungeons & Dragons rules make no provisions for female players. Famously, the class that would later be called a “Fighter” was originally a “Fighting-man,” a term that appeared in much fantasy fiction, applied to characters like John Carter and Conan. The list of level titles also expresses a certain gender bias, with entries like Lord, Warlock, and strikingly Patriarch. All of the personal pronouns referring to players in the rulebook are masculine as well.

This likely was no conscious omission, but merely a reflection of the realities of gamer demographics at the time. TSR originally printed one thousand copies of Dungeons & Dragons in 1974. Statistically, if half of one percent of gamers were female, then in the event that every copy sold — not a sure thing by any means — TSR could expect to sell at most a handful of copies to women. As Gygax had good grounds to predict virtually no women would purchase the game, his quips about including roles for women “when a member of the opposite sex buys a copy of Dungeons & Dragons” are not entirely baseless. This sort of prediction can, however, quickly turn into a self-fulfilling prophecy: if the game excludes female participation, then women might have little incentive to purchase it.

Around this time, other parts of the gaming community were becoming increasingly preoccupied with its lack of diversity. From a business perspective, many industry leaders felt they could no longer afford to neglect huge swaths of the human race. In the beginning of 1975, SPI began asking the community about the causes of its gender composition and ways to make gaming more inclusive. “There are any number of reasons put forward as to why the composition of historical gamers is 99% male and 1% female. We would like to hear the viewpoint of the women gamers. We appreciate hearing from women gamers, either in writing or, if you’re in the New York area, in person. Since the subject matter of historical games affects all people, male and female, we would like to explore more ways in which we can make historical gaming more accessible to women.” The quest to court and cultivate “women gamers” had begun.

Some of our best insight into the attitude of the industry in the mid-1970s towards women comes from interviews conducted by Jack Greene, Jr. Greene spent much of July 1975 on an epic pilgrimage to visit, as he put it, the “Cathedrals of Wargaming,” the headquarters of the major games publishers of his time. At each of his stops, he inquired about the lack of women in gaming. TSR was then too small and marginal a company to warrant Greene’s attention, but he spoke to the principals at Game Designers Workshop (GDW), Avalon Hill and SPI.

When Greene posed the female question at GDW, Marc Miller, who would later be famous as the designer of the early science-fiction role-playing game Traveller, blamed cultural upbringing, as women were “socialized through dolls versus toy guns.” He further argued that the military dimension of wargames was too foreign to a woman’s experience — remember that due to American conscription in effect since 1969, it was not foreign to many men — and so “it is much easier for a man to relate to the numbers of a division from their previous army life.” This sentiment would be echoed later by his co-author Frank Chadwick, who believed “it is harder for a women to conceptualize what a wargame counter is,” though in that phrasing we may also detect an echo of Wells’s concern about the “empty disdain” of women for imaginary things.

During Greene’s visit to Avalon Hill, he spoke to Tom Shaw, a top designer and executive who also served as the original editor of The General. Shaw observed that the culture of the day did not “develop a competitive nature in women,” a circumstance that he felt could only be changed very gradually, on the order of centuries. While of course women played other games, such as the card game bridge, Shaw argued that they played for social reasons, rather than to win. Greene also interviewed another of Avalon Hill’s designers, Randy Reed, who professed that he had known only one woman wargamer. He claimed that most women participated in gaming “as a self defense thing” in order to spend time with their male love interests, whom might otherwise be absent for prolonged periods while wargaming. Reed insisted that “I wouldn’t want to play a woman,” meaning against a woman, as he felt it was inappropriate to compete aggressively with females.

On Greene’s next stop, Jim Dunnigan, who controlled SPI and its Strategy & Tactics magazine, stressed how American culture imposed narrow roles on women: he saw the situation as similar to the pressures which led to male domination of academic history departments. However, in Dunnigan’s own shop, views about women and gaming ran the gamut. Staff artist Redmond Simonsen opined that the “limited number of women in wargaming” arose because “where aggression is rewarded some women short-circuit.” Terry Hardy, Dunnigan’s chief of staff, bluntly said, “I have no interest in knowing why women aren’t in wargaming as I think to try to pursue it with the data on hand is fruitless.”

Greene also had the opportunity to speak to a staff designer at SPI named Linda Mosca — then the only woman in that position in the industry. Her first SPI design credit, an American Civil War game called the Battle of the Wilderness, was not yet complete at the time, but would soon make her the first commercially published female wargame designer. Mosca had recently authored a piece in SPI’s magazine Moves on the subject of “Women in Wargaming,” in which she explored the causes behind the lack of female gamers. She laid part of the blame on the media’s “association of simulation gaming with war itself, traditionally ‘man’s domain.’” But the most important factor, according to her, is the “cultural indoctrination” which dictates that women “direct their leisure time energies into other, less aggressive (less stimulating) activities.” She hesitates to dwell too deeply on “those male wargamers who are not over-anxious to accept women as opponents (we present a threat to the ‘male ego’),” but she identifies this as a reason why women were not invited to games by men.

When Greene asked Mosca about her current favorite games, she didn’t list any SPI titles — but she did name Dungeons & Dragons. In her Moves article, Mosca had asserted that “wargaming has been attracting a steadily increasing female following,” but she wasn’t talking about SPI’s board games: she elaborated that “the largest concentration of women is [in] military miniatures simulations.” This might sound counterintuitive without her further explanation, “Perhaps the fact that this area deals more often and more explicitly with fantasy or perhaps the added visual effects attract more people previously unfamiliar with wargaming.” The fantasy miniatures wargaming she identifies here surely means Dungeons & Dragons.

Starting in 1975, the historical record begins to yield data points on the adoption of Dungeons & Dragons, and in keeping with Mosca’s observation, women took to it far more readily than prior wargames. One of the earliest campaigns to leave a substantial documentary record is the Ryth Chronicle, operated out of the Detroit area. The earliest player listing, from May 1975, shows three women as players out of twenty-six. All three of them, incidentally, share a last name with a male player, which may forcibly remind us of the “wives-and-sweethearts” contingent who joined Fletcher Pratt’s wargames.

Jack Greene happened to interview one of these women, Laurie Van De Graaf, at the first Origins wargaming convention in the summer of 1975. She confirmed that she got into wargames because of her husband, and while she mentions a few board wargames she enjoys, she singles out Dungeons & Dragons for special praise. When Greene asked her why wargames are not more popular with women, she answered that they are “not personal.” She also expressed distaste for the competitive aspect of wargames, lamenting that “men are always out to prove themselves.”

So why exactly did Dungeons & Dragons appeal to women like Van De Graaf more than earlier wargames? This cannot be reduced to a pat answer. If we review the hypotheses recorded in Greene’s interviews, we might identify a few contributing factors. Tom Shaw and Redmond Simonsen worried that society discouraged competition in women, but Dungeons & Dragons is not a game you play to win: it is largely a collaborative game, where a party works together to achieve objectives, and while the dungeon master represents antagonists, the role of the dungeon master is not inherently antagonistic. Van De Graaf’s distaste for masculine competitiveness seemingly corroborates this data point. And if, as Linda Mosca suspected and Randy Reed affirmed, men were reluctant to invite women to games because they didn’t want to compete with women, the collaborative nature of Dungeons & Dragons also removed any such discomfiture: it created an environment where men and women could game together without trying to best one another, as the game had no winner.

Van De Graaf also intimates that most wargames are “not personal” compared to her experiences with Dungeons & Dragons. If traditional wargames serve to approximate the experience of wartime command, then Dungeons & Dragons subverts that aim by centering the game on the actions of individuals, surrogates for the players, who might never order around troops. The most remarkable feature that differentiated Dungeons & Dragons from its predecessors was the way that players can drive the story of their characters in a direction that suits their own interests. No one other than the group sitting around a particular tabletop has to enjoy the system, setting, or narrative of the game for it to be valid. Dungeons & Dragons is “personal” in a way that no wargame before it had ever been.

Finally, where Marc Miller proposed that the military content of wargames alienated women, Dungeons & Dragons avoids guns, tanks, detachments and other military elements — replacing them instead with fantasy. Adding fantasy to wargames fundamentally changed gaming. The monumental popularity of fantasy at the time, fueled by widespread enthusiasm for Tolkien’s Middle-earth, promised that whole new demographics would become interested in wargames. Greene learned from his interviews in 1975 that Jim Dunnigan at SPI believed “games like Dungeons & Dragons will gain more people to the fold of the hobby,” and Tom Shaw at Avalon Hill volunteered that “Dungeons & Dragons as a concept will be built on within the hobby.” Another Avalon Hill staffer, Don Greenwood, saw that this was meaningful for women in particular: he predicted that “it would be some time before women really came to be included in wargaming, other than through such games as Dungeons & Dragons.”

The release of Dungeons & Dragons triggered a crucial intersection of two fandoms: wargames fandom and the group collectively known as science-fiction fandom, which included fantasy fans. This is significant because science-fiction fandom, while predominantly male, had far more gender diversity than wargames fandom. Exactly how much diversity has been a matter of some scholarly debate; a recent study suggests that as of 1960, science-fiction fandom was perhaps one-fifth female. Other data points show finer divisions: while subscribers to a hard science-fiction magazine like Analog might have been only one-tenth female, a survey of the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction — which published many of the fantasy stories that inspired the creators of Dungeons & Dragons — revealed that around a third of its readership was female as of 1966. Fans of that era, most notably Diana Paxson, invented the Society for Creative Anachronism, a medieval recreation group which offered dramatically segregated, yet appealing, roles for male and female participants. However we measure it, science-fiction fandom attracted far more women than wargaming.

Science-fiction fans had long since organized themselves into clubs, held conventions, and distributed fanzines: these enable us to trace the penetration of Dungeons & Dragons in detail. Naturally, science-fiction fandom and wargaming had some few members in common prior to 1974, and word of this novel gaming experience transited through this overlapping membership. For example, an International Federation of Wargaming member named Mark Swanson provided the first detailed account of Dungeons & Dragons to members of the Los Angeles Science Fiction Society late in 1974. However, it was not until two former Los Angeles residents who had relocated to the Bay Area returned for a visit that copies of the rules (photocopies, as originals were then scarce) and first-hand experience of the game became available to that region of science-fiction fans.

It was Owen and Hilda Hannifen who traveled from San Francisco with Dungeons & Dragons in hand to share their new passion with their old friends down south. Both had long been members of the Society for Creative Anachronism, and this as well as other activities primed the science-fiction community for assuming fantastic characters. In addition to tutoring the Los Angeles group in the play of the game, Hilda Hannifen produced a lengthy series of articles for the local fanzine, APA-L, describing her own experiences with Dungeons & Dragons. These “Mockturtle” stories, as she called them, provide one of the most detailed early play records of Dungeons & Dragons, and show Hannifen interacting with many luminaries associated with the game in the Bay Area and beyond. Her work showcased the use of Dungeons & Dragons to produce narrative play records which she elaborated in weekly installments.

Hilda Hannifen’s interest clearly went beyond the patient indulgence of “wives-and-sweethearts” who game to appease their spouses. And the reaction from women in the Los Angeles area, as recorded in APA-L in 1975, amply demonstrated its cross-gender appeal. June Moffatt responded, “I would love to see the rules of Dungeons & Dragons — sounds like any one of the games makes a good adventure story.” Bjo Trimble, a high-profile fan, reported that she “would like to try Dungeons & Dragons some day.” But the Hannifens won the most fervent converts in Lee and Barry Gold. With Hilda acting as dungeon master, the Golds ran through an adventure that Lee recorded in three pages of text in the February 6, 1975 issue of APA-L. It would trigger a fascination with the game that would last decades.

In short order, the pages of APA-L filled to the brim with tales of Dungeons & Dragons play in Los Angeles. Lee Gold then decided to start a new fanzine dedicated to Dungeons & Dragons content. She called it Alarums & Excursions, and from its first issue in June 1975, it became a centerpiece of the nascent role-playing games community, a place to propose new rule systems, to review commercial products, and to describe local best practices. In its pages we find male and female voices in proportions much closer to that of science-fiction fandom than of wargaming. Alarums & Excursions also attracted the interest of contributors like Gary Gygax, and when TSR published the first issue of its magazine The Dragon, Lee Gold had a byline within, for her article about languages in games.

And so, it was not lost on the hobby or the industry that women played Dungeons & Dragons — but how should the game reflect that? TSR itself indirectly endorsed female characters quite early, due a magic item in the Greyhawk supplement released in the spring of 1975: the “Girdle of Masculinity/Feminity.” This was one of many “bummer” items included in Greyhawk that are intended to mimic desirable magic items, but instead have a dangerous or comic effect. A male character who dons this garment hoping it to be the “Girdle of Giant Strength” will find himself suddenly and almost irreversibly female. But even before Greyhawk, there is evidence that male players had female characters and vice versa: as players built up large stables of active characters in various campaigns, inevitably they chose different classes, races, and genders for them.

As the gaming community put the rules to practice, it rapidly eroded the masculine-specific trappings of Dungeons & Dragons. Around the time that the first issue of Alarums came out, Mark Swanson submitted a play record to APA-L that discussed a character named Paula becoming an “Adeptress,” that is a second-level Magic-user, varying the masculine level title “Adept” given in Dungeons & Dragons. In Alarums #2, Swanson further proposed using “Matriarch” where appropriate in place of “Patriarch,” and in that same issue we see gender as an attribute listed on one of the earliest circulating character sheets in the fan community, years before TSR would include this field on any official product. Contributors to Alarums moreover ignored the construction “Fighting-man” in favor of “Fighter” — though in fairness, the terms were already used interchangeably in the original Dungeons & Dragons rules.

Science-fiction fandom had an open and collaborative creative culture, and thus unsurprisingly, as it embraced Dungeons & Dragons, it produced expansions, variations, and outright competitors to the original game. From Minneapolis fans in mid-1974 came the Rules to the Game of Dungeon recorded by Craig VanGrasstek, the first brief and primitive example of a variant, but it employs gender-neutral pronouns: its play example contains many instances of the construction “s/he” in place of “he.” Another early Dungeons & Dragons competitor came from fans in the Arizona-based Phoenix Cosmic Circle: a game called Tunnels & Trolls. The original 1975 text of the game states that, “Brave men and women arm themselves and venture within the tunnels at risk of body and soul to seek treasure and experience,” and the combat example includes a female character named Jiriel, but masculine pronouns remain the standard throughout the text.

The wargaming community contributed its share of Dungeons & Dragons extensions and variants, though given wargaming’s homogeneity, a lack of attention to gender would be expected. There were exceptions: a mid-1975 issue of the Spartan Simulation Gaming Journal — a magazine produced by the current incarnation of those same Spartans founded by Donna Powell and her husband in 1966 — ran an article called “Warlock: Or How to Play D&D Without Playing D&D.” Its rules included some provisions for female adventurers, specifically that they would weigh less, and be capable of carrying less, than their male counterparts — a system intended to increase the realism of gender in fantasy simulations by positioning females as slightly inferior at physical exertions.

The first serious backlash against perceived chauvinism in Dungeons & Dragons arose in 1976, after the publication of Lenard Lakofka’s article “Women & Magic,” which he distributed in the July 1976 issue of his obscure fanzine Liaisons Dangereuses. In October, the third issue of The Dragon reprinted the article and added the subtitle, “Bringing the Distaff Gamer into D&D.” In keeping with the wargaming tradition, Lakofka tries to specify a simulation of how women might measure up as adventurers. Virtually all of the level titles are changed: women Fighters, for example, may be “Battle Maidens” or “Valkyries.” He suggests that women “may progress to the level of men in the area of magic and, in some ways, surpass men as thieves,” though “only as fighters are women clearly behind men in all cases.” For Strength, Lakofka has women roll one d8 and one d6 (for a range of 2–14) instead of the traditional three d6; he furthermore grants women a “Beauty” attribute as a substitute for Charisma in baseline Dungeons & Dragons.

Most strikingly, Lakofka bestows to the characters of “Distaff Gamers” certain unique abilities that interact with the Beauty skill. Both female Thieves and Magic-users have access to the “Charm Man” and “Seduction” spells, which require certain Beauty scores to work against particular targets. The “Seduction” spell, for example, “may be used on living humanoid unharmed males only by women with the proper Beauty score.” Female magic-users of ninth level of higher earn the level title “Witch” and gain access to the “Horrid Beauty” ability: Witches with a very low Beauty score (“Grotesque Witches”) will scare victims when using this ability, in extreme cases causing instant death; whereas Witches with a high Beauty score will instantly seduce all (presumably male) targets.

The decision of The Dragon to publish Lakofka’s system was seen by the gaming community as endorsement from TSR, and thus it sparked outrage against not only Lakofka but also the company. The most iconic manifestation of the controversy was the inflammatory image published in Alarums #19 that showed a host of female characters lynching in effigy Lakofka, Gygax, and Tim Kask, editor of The Dragon. Admittedly, much of the outcry in Alarums came from men who played female characters, rather than from female players. Lee Gold, for her part, simply noted that “my female characters have higher Constitution than Strength, males the reverse. Thus inspection of characteristics rolled determines gender.” Another woman, Kay Jones, provided the following commentary:

A verse for Len Lakofka, who’s earned the name of nerd,

For rules changes both chauvinist and patently absurd

And Kask, the man who published it, why earn your way to fame,

By publicly insulting all the players of the game?

Tim Kask responded to the controversy by insisting that Lakofka’s article was not canonical, and affirming, “I will even agree that it is sexist and puts women down.” But he countered, “I challenge you to submit a better way to treat the topic.” Lakofka’s account of female characters was certainly not the only one to appear in 1976. An article in the pages of Paul Jaquays’s fanzine The Dungeoneer entitled “Those Lovely Ladies” reinvented the Fighting-man, Magic-user, and Cleric classes for women as “Valkyries,” “Circeans” and “Daughters of Delphi,” respectively. It retained the Charisma stat and awarded women a blanket Charisma bonus, though the Charisma of women suffered if their Strength was too high. This piece too received pushback from a female reader, Judith Preissle Goetz, who concedes that “women have higher charisma as far as men are generally concerned,” but observes, ”you have ignored the complementary phenomena that men have higher charisma as far as most women are concerned.” She also takes exception to the notion that high Strength would render a woman unattractive, noting that “female athletes are often more sought after than other women.”

The Dragon would go on to print other accounts of female characters: one explaining “Why Males are Stronger than Females” based on the earlier “Warlock” system appears in the October 1977 issue, though it probably did little to assuage any concerns about sexism inherent in the game. A submission in November 1978 revisits the idea of a “Witch” class, and a gloss by Kask at the start notes that “it provides a very viable character for ladies; be they sisters, girlfriends, lady gamers or other. D&D was one of the first games to appeal to females, and I for one, find it a better game because of that fact.”

By the time Kask wrote those words, “lady gamers” had already begun to receive their due in the core Dungeons & Dragons books. When Eric Holmes edited the first Basic Set, he stated the obvious proposition omitted by the 1974 rules, that “characters can be either male or female.” And by 1978, Gygax himself added some female-specific language to the Players Handbook of his new Advanced Dungeons & Dragons game. On the subject of level titles, he clarifies, “Although the masculine form of appellation is typically used when listing the level titles of the various types of characters, these names can easily be changed to the feminine if desired. This is fantasy — what’s in a name?”Thus, while the Cleric chart in the Players Handbook lists only the level title “Patriarch” for eighth level, descriptive text on the same page reads: “When a cleric achieves 8th level (Patriarch or Matriarch), he or she automatically attracts followers…”

Gygax also promised at the start of the Players Handbook that “you will find no pretentious dictums herein, no baseless limits arbitrarily placed on female strength or male charisma.” While he might argue the limits are not baseless, there are limits on the “maximum strength possible for a female human,” and in fact every fantastic race caps female strength slightly below males — except for half-orcs. This “realistic” restriction on female strength was nonetheless milder than many other systems on the market at the time: for example, Chivalry & Sorcery (1977) stated outright that, “Females are weaker than males. Strength factors must be reduced for females.” While Advanced Dungeons & Dragons did not represent the sexes as entirely equal, it improved greatly on the male-centric language of its predecessor, and the gaming community could, and did, ignore restrictions that cramped its playstyle.

Contrary to Gygax’s expectations, female gamers constituted a significant portion of the market for Dungeons & Dragons. How large, exactly? In 1979, Gygax stipulated that “at least 10% of the players are female.” This located women in a tiny minority — but a statistically significant one. That year, when TSR hired the first two employees for an internal design staff, one of them was a woman, Jean Wells, and she even wrote (uncredited) some text for the flagship Dungeon Masters Guide. She went on to module design and to a regular column, “Sage Advice,” in The Dragon.

But Wells was not the first female role-playing game designer. One of the earliest Dungeons & Dragons adventure modules, Palace of the Vampire Queen, was co-authored by Judy Kerestan back in 1976. Consider that from the publication of Charles S. Roberts’s Tactics in 1954, it took over twenty years for Linda Mosca to receive the first credit as a female wargame designer; it took only a bit more than twenty months after the release of Dungeons & Dragons for Judy Kerestan to get a billing for fantasy role-playing game design. Laurie Van Der Graaf, who Jack Greene had interviewed in 1975, went on to co-design the early module Quest for the Fazzlewood (1978), which was later revised as the TSR module The Gem and the Staff (1984).

Nor was female interest in Dungeons & Dragons merely an indication of rising female interest in gaming culture overall. SPI launched a slew of fantasy wargaming titles in its usual competitive vein in the mid-to-late 1970s, with Linda Mosca contributing to the design of some — but this did little to attract more women to their product line. When SPI’s Tolkien-based War of the Ring became their top seller in 1977, the last Strategy & Tactics of that year proudly announced an “all-time record” of female survey respondents, but it was an increase from the prior 0.5% up to 0.97%, far below the adoption curve of Dungeons & Dragons. Conversely, a role-playing element alone did not guarantee female uptake. When TSR published the non-fantasy role-playing game Top Secret in 1980, a survey of early adopters showed them to be 98.5% male.

Something unprecedented about Dungeons & Dragons rendered it more popular with women than prior titles marketed to “gamers.” Was it that it was a personal game, a fantasy game, a game that deemphasized competition? Whatever the reason, it converted many women into gamers at a critical juncture in history: the dawn of personal computer gaming. It was only in the late 1970s that companies began to sell game software to an existing base of personal computer owners. And many of those early computer efforts borrowed heavily from the innovations of Dungeons & Dragons — often not merely by adopting a fantastic setting, but simply by focusing the game on playing a character in a computer-generated world.

Accordingly, female interest in such games carried over to the computer — despite the fact that computer usage at the time was, in a familiar pattern, overwhelming male. To take just one example, Dungeons & Dragons inspired the text games Adventure and Zork. The publisher of Zork and many other commercial text adventures of the 1980s, Infocom, later reported “sadly” that only around one-sixth of its players were female. They believed the figure was so low because “women have been underrepresented as computer and software users,” but it reflects a higher number than Dungeons & Dragons could claim in the 1970s. And these early games quickly inspired female designers, like one of the pioneers of adventure gaming, Roberta Williams of Sierra On-line, who discovered computer games through those text adventures.

While it did not set out to rectify the gender imbalance in gaming, Dungeons & Dragons opened the door just enough to let women gamers in. TSR’s early efforts to include women explicitly in its fantasy games sometimes did more harm than good, but the foremost rule of role-playing games is that gamers are free to innovate, to vary the system to suit their needs. Both men and women have since used these tools to invent and enjoy their own adventures, both through Dungeons & Dragons and the many games it influenced.

For more by Jon Peterson, see his other articles on Medium, including the “Ambush at Sheridan Springs: How Gary Gygax Lost Control of D&D” and “Quagmire: The Making of a 1980s D&D Module,” as well as the Playing at the World blog.

by Jon Peterson (author of Playing at the World)

In the fall of 1985, Gary Gygax was the most famous and powerful figure in hobby gaming. He was President and Chief Executive Officer of TSR, Inc., the company that published Dungeons & Dragons. Gygax had personally directed the development of the game for the last decade, most recently producing new titles for its Advanced Dungeons & Dragons line: earlier in 1985, he was the lead on Unearthed Arcana, and in the fall they were putting the finishing touches on his Oriental Adventures. He had been featured in People magazine, and appeared on national television. His name and his game seemed inseparable.

October 22 was a Tuesday, and Gygax was wrapping up another day at TSR corporate headquarters on Sheridan Springs Road in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. His last appointment was a board meeting just after close of business; with 1,371 shares of stock, he held controlling interest in the company, and thus chaired the board. The meeting started late, at quarter past five. Five of the company’s six directors were present: two of the independent directors, James Huber and Wesley Sommer, and then the three principal shareholders: Gygax, Brian Blume, and Kevin Blume. Gygax was surprised to find both of the Blume brothers in attendance. Though they held a substantial stake in the company—as a family, nearly one thousand shares total—they had lost their executive positions at TSR following a reorganization the previous year.

The board proceeded to review the company’s turbulent negotiations with the American National Bank before moving on to the ostensible purpose of the meeting, a discussion regarding TSR’s royalty payments to authors. In recent internal memos, Gygax had insisted that the company allow its employees, himself especially, to retain all copyrights, trademarks, and royalties for works authored rather than assigning them to TSR; in the eyes of other directors, this was in violation of existing contracts. During the course of this discussion, Gygax mused that since it seemed the board would find it easier to afford him these privileges if he were not an employee, perhaps he should just resign.

It was of course preposterous for a majority shareholder to suggest their own resignation, but Gygax found the room coldly receptive to this course of action. The presence of the Blumes worried him. He turned to the Board Secretary, Willard Martens, to ask if his personal stake relative to the other shareholders had changed recently. At first, Martens replied only that Lorraine Williams had exercised her option for 50 shares in TSR. Williams had joined the company in April as Vice President of Administration; her options alone could not endanger Gygax’s majority.

“Have there been any other changes?” Gygax further inquired.

Martens only then volunteered, “Brian Blume exercised his option for seven hundred shares.”

Realization set in. Gary Gygax said simply, “I see.”

What did Gygax see, in that moment? He saw enough shares in play that he stood to lose control of TSR, a company he had founded and transformed into a global brand. But he surely also saw something even more dear at stake: that he might lose control of Dungeons & Dragons.

Yet matters are never so black and white. Control of TSR was something that Gygax possessed but fleetingly in the decade-long history of the company. In fact, Gygax had only decisively acquired controlling interest as of March 1985, at a time of great upheaval in TSR’s business. Previously, TSR followed a consensual governance model, one that the industry celebrated during TSR’s ascent but disparaged after the company’s fortunes faltered. As Dungeons & Dragons took the world by storm, Gygax led by virtue of his design talent and his extraordinary community presence, rather than his financial stake in the company.

Control of Dungeons & Dragons depended on many contingencies of TSR’s founding. TSR Hobbies formally incorporated as a Wisconsin entity in July 1975—but that was eighteen months after the publication of Dungeons & Dragons. Previously, there existed the partnership of Tactical Studies Rules, which formed in October 1973 with two principals: Gygax and his childhood friend Donald Kaye. They lived blocks apart in Lake Geneva, and both were members of a local wargaming group called the Lake Geneva Tactical Studies Association, from which Tactical Studies Rules took its name.

At the time the partnership was formed, Gygax had not held a steady job in nearly three years. He repaired shoes in his basement for subsistence income, but dedicated his creative energies to game rules, for which he received little by way of royalties but widespread acclaim in the hobby games community. Thus Gygax was unable to make a capital investment in the Tactical Studies Rules partnership; it was Kaye who provided the initial $1,000. This was sufficient to publish a single slim wargaming title, but not to cover their planned flagship product: the three-volume boxed set of Dungeons & Dragons, authored by Gygax in conjunction with Twin Cities gamer David Arneson. That required a more substantial investment.

Gygax and Kaye therefore admitted to the partnership another member of the Lake Geneva Tactical Studies Association, Brian Blume, who contributed a further $2,000. The partnership lacked the means to employ any of its principals, however, so they worked on its administration after hours on a best-effort basis. Blume would later remark that he applied to join the partnership because “it seemed like a fun way to spend weekends and afternoons.” Kaye served as President of the partnership, Blume as Vice President, while Gygax held the title of Editor.

When Dungeons & Dragons first came to market in January 1974, no one yet thought to call it a role-playing game. TSR marketed it as a wargame, a game of conflict simulation: the legend on the box read “Rules for Fantastic Medieval Wargames Campaigns,” a construction that situated the game in a niche hobby market for such wargames that had existed since the 1950s. It was largely through his leadership in the wargaming community that Gygax initially popularized the game, which sold around one thousand copies its first year on the market. While this may sound like a paltry figure by mainstream standards, it was promising enough for a wargaming title to warrant a second printing early in 1975.

Tragedy intervened when Kaye died suddenly of a heart attack on January 31, 1975. As a result, Blume and Gygax entered into a new partnership agreement which named Kaye’s widow, Donna, as an equal partner. While the official TSR offices stayed at the Kaye residence on Sage Street in Lake Geneva, and Donna Kaye remained in charge of accounting and shipping through the spring, she had no interest in gaming and, especially as the business grew, little time for an enterprise that could not afford to employ her.

Gygax recognized that in the absence of salaries, only love of games could fuel the partnership. As a result, he committed TSR to a stark governing principle. He promised in a letter to David Megarry, designer of the Dungeon! board game, dated March 6, 1975: “We will never allow TSR to become a company which is run by any outside group. That is, we may take others in as partners eventually, but we will never seek any non-wargamer capitalization.”

Protecting control required a new corporate structure. Gygax and Blume had planned the creation of a separate “TSR Hobbies” company to handle mail order sales and possibly a retail store in Lake Geneva. When they incorporated TSR Hobbies, they decided to repurpose it to purchase the assets of the partnership and thereby relieve Donna Kaye of her ties to gaming. In crafting the governance structure of TSR Hobbies, they were understandably preoccupied with the possibility that a major shareholder would die suddenly, and thus they borrowed much language accounting for this eventuality from the stock agreement of a company run by Blume’s father Melvin, President of Wisconsin Tool and Stamping. The gist of this language was to guarantee that, should any shareholder die or seek to divest themselves from the firm, TSR Hobbies would reserve a right of first refusal to buy back their stock.

The original TSR Hobbies stock agreement, executed by Gygax and Blume on August 1, 1975, awarded Gygax 150 shares of stock and Blume 100. Thus, as the company was initially structured, Gygax held controlling interest. But Gygax could not have intended for this situation to last long. TSR Hobbies required capital to purchase the assets of the partnership. For that, it would need investment. The first two stock certificates, issued to Gygax and Blume as stipulated in the August 1 agreement, were given “in consideration of our being a part of that corporation,” as Gygax would later put it—not in exchange for money from either party.

The next two stock certificates issued reflect a substantial investment in the company’s future by the Blume family. Certificate #3, issued to Melvin Blume on September 1, 1975, was for 200 shares of stock, which he purchased at a price of $100 each. Certificate #4 designated that Brian Blume had simultaneously bought 140 shares at the same price. In total, then, the Blume family invested $34,000 into TSR Hobbies within the first month of its operation. These funds were crucial for the acquisition of the game products of the dissolving partnership, which TSR Hobbies formally purchased on September 26, and furthermore for the development and publication of new titles. But the sum probably looks larger than it actual was: due to Blume’s one-third stake in the partnership, some of this money must have effectively gone back into his family’s pocket.

The Blume capital infusion immediately rendered Gygax a minority shareholder, with his 150 shares now well below the total Blume family holdings of 440 shares—and he would remain a minority shareholder for the next decade. Thus, although Gygax enjoyed fleeting control over TSR Hobbies in 1975, it was only at a time that the company did not even own Dungeons & Dragons. But ownership did not translate into executive titles: Gygax retained the office of President of TSR Hobbies despite the reversal of control.

The steadily mounting popularity of Dungeons & Dragons enabled TSR Hobbies to bring Gygax and Blume on board as salaried staff. Further new hires drawn from the gaming community, including the immediate family of both Blume and Gygax, assisted with advertising, creative design, artwork, shipping, and manufacturing. Employees were given the opportunity to purchase small amounts of equity, though most shareholders possessed less than 20 shares at the end of 1975. Even Dungeons & Dragons co-creator Dave Arneson, who joined TSR around this time, only held about 30 shares; he was sidelined late in 1976, and although his famous resulting lawsuits against TSR ensured his presence at board meetings, he had little practical influence over company direction.

Gygax and Blume bolstered their own positions in the company as profits and investment increased, mostly thanks to a preemptive right to purchase new shares pro rata but also through various grants. Fatefully, in July 1976, TSR Hobbies issued both Gygax and Blume options to purchase up to 700 additional shares at a price of $100. Through gradual accumulation, Gygax’s stake rose to around a third of the company by the late 1970s; while Brian Blume always owned roughly 100 shares more than Gygax, his own holdings slid a few percentage points down from its peak over 40%. As Melvin acquired no further shares, his position declined precipitously, from around a third to just under a tenth of TSR. But, again, irrespective of ownership, it was clearly Gygax who ran the business; a 1976 issue of the Strategic Review shows pictures of both Gygax and Blume, the former identified as “TSR’s founder” and the latter as “TSR’s second banana.” Three years later in an interview, Gygax cast the situation more formally: “I am the President of TSR, and Brian Blume is V.P. and Secretary.”

By the end of 1977, there were 1,933 shares of common stock outstanding from an authorized 5,000, and the governance of the company was effectively stable: only 105 more shares would be issued in 1978, and after that, the number of shares outstanding would increase by just 23 over the next seven years. Sometime in 1978, the Blume family position in TSR Hobbies diluted below a 50% stake—no single party would own controlling interest in TSR again until 1985. As the 1970s wound to a close, TSR Hobbies still valued its shares near $100: when William Niebling joined the company as a Vice President in May 1979, he was offered an option to purchase 500 shares of TSR Hobbies stock at $125 each. But shortly thereafter, a turn of events would send TSR’s sales and valuation into the stratosphere, putting enormous pressure on the company’s management.

Up to the end of the 1970s, TSR Hobbies grew at a respectable but predictable rate. Gross sales of around $300,000 in 1976 doubled the following year, thanks in no small part to the release of the revised “Basic Set” of Dungeons & Dragons edited by Eric Holmes. It was also at this time that installments of the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons product line, a complete rewrite of the game, began to appear. While the Monster Manual (1977) came out too late in that year to impact fiscal reporting, it was joined the following summer by the Players Handbook (1978), and together they helped drive net sales in 1978 near the million-dollar mark, falling a bit short of doubling again. The release of the Dungeon Masters Guide (1979) twelve months later completed the core Advanced Dungeons & Dragons product set, and made the game available to the public in attractive hardbound volumes suitable for display in booksellers. Moreover, TSR had begun to flood the market with inexpensive modules, pre-packaged adventures that reduced the preparation needed to play.

What catapulted the game into the national mainstream, however, was an accident of history. In July 1979, a student named James Dallas Egbert III disappeared from a Michigan college. A private investigator hired to find him learned that Egbert played an obscure game called Dungeons & Dragons. This sleuth then developed and widely publicized a curious hypothesis: that, believing the game to be real, Egbert was wandering the steam tunnels beneath the school in search of monsters and treasure. It transpired that this hunch was incorrect—Egbert had absconded to Louisiana for unrelated reasons—but the media furor surrounding this sensational conjecture thrust Dungeons & Dragons onto the front page of newspapers and into the popular imagination.

The Egbert incident is probably the best place to mark the beginning of the Dungeons & Dragons fad, which lasted from mid-1979 into 1982. During this period of disruptive sales growth, TSR had to expand rapidly and develop the skills to succeed beyond the confines of a niche hobby community. Neither Gygax nor Blume had any business or management education—Gygax had not even graduated from high school. In early interviews, they frequently boasted that gaming and business required the same competencies. Gygax even compared the rise of TSR through 1980 to a Dungeons & Dragons campaign, with it starting out as “a low-level-character sort of company” but gaining “excellent experience” to advance towards the “really high-level game producers such as Milton Bradley and Parker Brothers.”

TSR’s accounting and fiscal reporting in this period were irregular, and sometimes problematic, but even within a considerable margin of uncertainty the company’s growth was unmistakable. TSR’s gross sales stood around $2M in 1979. By one internal account, sales the following year reached $16M, a 5,233% increase over just five years before—it was on the strength of this figure that Inc. Magazine awarded TSR sixth place in its 1981 list of the one hundred fastest-growing privately held companies. That eightfold leap in sales seems unlikely, however, as later TSR statements peg 1980 revenue at only half that, $8.7M, a number that conforms far better to the company’s overall growth curve. But that lower figure still reflects quadrupling revenue and a solid business: the Dungeons & Dragons Basic Set alone was selling 12,000 copies a month, and TSR payroll had risen to 120. TSR’s next annual financial return is complicated by a number of structural changes, including an abbreviated nine-month fiscal year 1981, but sales continued to increase: an October 1981 report pegs sales for the previous quarter alone at around $6M.

That quarterly figure comes to us via the TSR internal newsletter Random Events in an article written by Kevin Blume. Kevin had joined TSR Hobbies at his older brother Brian’s behest in late 1976 to help mind finances; he also oversaw hiring in the following years as the company began recruiting outside of its immediate circle of friends and family. After holding the titles of Controller and Treasurer, Kevin joined Brian and Gygax on TSR’s Board of Directors as of the November 4, 1980 shareholder meeting. Surely the Blume family stock holdings influenced that decision, and in September 1981, at the height of TSR’s boom, Melvin Blume transferred his 200 shares of stock to Kevin—previously Kevin held only 5 shares. This was a controversial transaction within TSR; William Niebling argued it should be blocked for violating the shareholder agreement, but over his objections Kevin was issued a certificate. He then became the third-largest shareholder, behind Gygax and his brother, who then acted as Chairman of the Board.

Kevin’s presence on the board led to some confusion about the governance of TSR. An article in the March 1982 Random Events briefly outlined that TSR Hobbies had a “President’s Office” which is “held by three individuals: Gary, Brian and Kevin… all decisions of the President’s Office or of the Board of Directors are unanimous—they agree or no decision is made. All votes are equal, no two can be a majority.” Those words were written by another member of the Blume family, Doug Blume. In the following issue of the newsletter, however, a front page article by Gary Gygax, accompanied by a foreboding portrait of him, qualifies the previous issue’s “explanation of how our corporation operates” as only “basically correct.” While conceding that “TSR is managed by its Directors, and the three of us do operate by consensus,” he bluntly insists that “decision making at the senior exec level is not by consensus, however. The Presidential Office [i.e. Gygax] is on top… Next is the office of Brian, the Senior Executive Officer. Then comes Kevin as Chief Operating Officer.”

After a reorganization implemented in July 1982, the pecking order was writ large in the org chart: the President of TSR Hobbies, Inc. (Gygax) has as direct reports the President of TSR Service Group (Kevin Blume) and the President of TSR Fun Group (Brian Blume). This short-lived arrangement is remembered by employees of the time as the “Year of Three Presidents.” Yet ambiguity about control remained: the President of TSR himself reported to the Board of Directors, which then consisted of Gygax and the two Blumes. It was unclear where power truly lay, probably even to the principals involved.

During TSR’s boom years of 1981 and 1982, it thrived under this ambiguous management structure, rapidly adding to staff and making prominent acquisitions. In the gaming space, TSR acquired the assets of wargames publisher Simulation Publications, Inc. (SPI) following a loan default, after a brief period where Kevin Blume served as President of that company. TSR also had a strong periodicals business by this time—circulation of its house organ The Dragon exceeded 100,000 by 1983—so it was unsurprising to see them purchase Amazing Stories, a seminal popular fiction magazine. A more curious acquisition was the Greenfield Needlewomen company, a craft firm that produced needleworking products. Gygax at the time justified the purchase internally by explaining that “we had been seeking likely acquisitions outside of gaming,” and that “crafts is a larger field than hobbies.” TSR predicted that the needlework company would contribute about a fifth of its gross income moving forward.

The interest in diversifying beyond the games business must have reflected worries about the potential for the continued growth of Dungeons & Dragons. All of TSR’s projections for the following two years, however, suggested that they believed there was plenty of games market left to claim. In a January 1982 interview, Niebling revealed that “we are expecting sales of close to $45 million this year.” The same month, in an internal statement, Gygax extrapolated this even further out: “A safe estimate for 1983 places TSR’s growth rate at 150% of the preceding year—let’s say $75,000,000,” though he stressed that “volume could grow beyond that,” even. In light of current revenue and these predictions, the board set a par value for TSR stock of $3,000 per share: thirty times higher than the price Brian Blume had paid in 1975.

With this amount of money and business expected, TSR understandably staffed up aggressively. TSR had filled sixty new positions in 1981, bringing the total payroll up to 180; as of August 1982, nearly 40% of all employees had been hired in the last twelve months. In January 1983, Gygax told the Wall Street Journal that TSR had immediate plans to hire 100–150 more employees: by April, TSR comprised a total of 312 workers. Staffers now sprawled across six buildings in Lake Geneva alone, to say nothing of a warehouse in New Jersey and a licensing office in New York.

In retrospect, one can only surmise that TSR’s frantic preparations for success blinded the company to shifts in the market. A contemporary survey conducted by the industry gossip magazine The Insider showed that total consumer spending on hobby games in 1982 increased only 12.6% over the previous year, a level barely above the inflation rate of 11.3%. If we grant, accounting for the irregularity in the fiscal year, that TSR pulled in $14–18M in 1981, their revenue over the following twelve months grew quite modestly when compared to the prior year-over-year doublings, increasing to only $21–22M in 1982, about half of the projected $45M. Inc. Magazine, which had earlier praised TSR’s expansion, now advised that its recent revenues “crept forward cautiously.” More troubling still, The Insider projected that sales of the Basic Set of Dungeons & Dragons had declined 16% over the previous year, and that Advanced Dungeons & Dragons book sales were down almost 25%. No doubt this partly reflected the lack of a new Advanced Dungeons & Dragons title in 1982, but it also foretold that the Dungeons & Dragons fad would someday come to an end.

By June 1983, it became clear that the business was not growing as expected: TSR would report revenue for that fiscal year of $26.7M, well short of the predicted $75M. April and May revenues especially alarmed the company’s managers. The purchase of Greenfield Needlewomen had failed to deliver its promised returns, so TSR was forced to write off the acquisition—and as a consequence, to post its first loss. In need of liquidity, TSR secured a $4M loan from the American National Bank in Chicago. Negotiating that deal became Kevin Blume’s responsibility, though TSR now entered unfamiliar waters: for such a task, as Kevin put it at the time, “I was the best there was in the company, but I wasn’t the right person.”

Yet for all its worries, TSR kept hiring: 25 employees joined the company in June alone. Drastic measures would be required to align the business with the market. Therefore, on June 24, TSR Hobbies reorganized into four separate companies: TSR Inc., which retained all games, toys, manufacturing, and marketing; TSR Entertainment Corporation, which controlled television and motion picture properties; TSR Ventures, which comprised licensing and research; and TSR Worldwide Ltd. which formed an umbrella corporation for international subsidiaries and sales. As it underwent this reorganization, TSR also began to shed workers, starting with an initial round of 40 cuts; the bank only agreed to its loan on the condition of a sizeable staff reduction.

While the four companies had effectively the same three-man board of directors—Gygax with Brian and Kevin Blume, where now Gygax served as Chairman rather than Brian—each had a designated President in charge. Brian became President of TSR Ventures, for example. Internal messaging at the time stressed the superiority of appointing only “one boss” for each company over the uneasy triumvirate of TSR Hobbies. Since games fell under the scope of TSR, Inc., one might well expect that Gygax would take its helm. Instead, that role went to Kevin. Gygax, for his part, became President of the TSR Entertainment Corporation. As the name of TSR’s flagship property enjoyed far greater brand recognition than the company itself, this subsidiary was soon rechristened the Dungeons & Dragons Entertainment Corporation.

Placing Gygax in charge of media over games merits further scrutiny. TSR believed that its potential growth through television and film was large enough to warrant Gygax’s undivided attention. By the fall of 1982, Gygax had already begun to delegate responsibility for the ongoing development of Dungeons & Dragons. “Most of you are not aware that soon I will retire from the position of ‘sole authority’ regarding the D&D game system,” he announced in September. “Frank Mentzer has ‘volunteered’ to assume a new trainee position where he will work directly with me.” While Gygax published a steady stream of additions to Dungeons & Dragons in his “Sorceror’s Scroll” column in the Dragon that year—much of which would later populate Unearthed Arcana—the articles petered out by the summer of 1983, as Gygax focused his energies elsewhere.

It was long in the works: Gygax had revealed that the board was “considering the formation of a new corporate division just to handle licensing and exploitation of our products in the entertainment media” as early as the January 1982 issue of Random Events. Gygax’s new company would pursue TSR’s long-held goal creating a Dungeons & Dragons feature film—the company pegged its hopes on a screenplay penned by veteran writer James Goldman. The enterprise scored an early success with the September 17, 1983 premier of a Dungeons & Dragons CBS Saturday morning cartoon produced by Marvel. Media drawing on TSR’s intellectual property would serve both as a source of licensing revenue and as a further marketing tool to draw new fans to Dungeons & Dragons.

And what did running the games business entail, at this point? Kevin Blume presided over TSR, Inc., hopelessly overstaffed and confronted with a contracting market. As such, he oversaw several rounds of acrimonious downsizing, cutting hundreds of employees in groups of thirty or forty at a time. As aggressive as the reductions were, they did not satisfy TSR’s creditors, who insisted on the addition of three outside directors to the board in 1984: James Huber, Robert Kidon, and Wesley Sommers. At the behest of these independents, Kevin Blume “removed himself” from executive duties, as TSR’s spokesman would put it, and Richard Koenings became acting President and CEO of TSR as of December 1984. Koenings implemented punishing salary deferments and wage reductions on the remaining staff effective December 10 in an attempt to balance the company’s teetering budget. In the coming year, sales of Dungeons & Dragons were projected to fall by a further 20%.

It was thus unsurprising that TSR pegged its hopes elsewhere: in Hollywood. But the prospect of a silver screen debut for Dungeons & Dragons remained tantalizingly out of reach. In October 1984, Gygax reported that, in addition to Goldman’s script, there was “a treatment (by Gygax and [Flint] Dille)” but “no studio has yet optioned either.” As he built media products, Gygax also developed contacts who might potentially take a position in TSR. He now split his time between Lake Geneva and the Hollywood Hills, though he found the travel wearisome and was grateful for the chance to spend most of the summer of 1984 in his home town. By early 1985, he had lined up a few investors interested in a deeper partnership with TSR. Rumors swirled after TSR public relations staff announced that a Beverly Hills investment group had filed a letter of intent to “acquire a major position” in TSR, Inc., though TSR concealed the identity of this bidder, the Forman group (FSRB). To satisfy these potential investors, the TSR board abolished the preemptive right of Gygax and Blume to purchase stock pro rata, thereby opening the door to an outside group gaining controlling interest. But abruptly, at the end of March, TSR announced that instead the company would be “restructuring itself financially” using current resources, and that “any negotiations with outside investment groups are void.”

This reflected the events of a board meeting on March 18, 1985, where Gygax announced that he had exercised his July 1976 option for 700 shares of TSR, Inc. stock. This raised his total holdings to 1,371 shares, which fell just slightly below half (49.6%) of outstanding TSR shares, then numbering 2,761. But the 40 shares owned by Gygax’s son Ernie, when combined with his father’s holdings, secured controlling interest (51.1%) in TSR. Immediately Gygax pushed to “nix” the Forman deal, according to the raw notes taken by the secretary at that meeting; he had found a path, he believed, that would keep control of TSR away from outsiders. By a vote on March 29, 1985, the board named Gygax President and Chief Executive Officer of TSR, Inc., in addition to his current position as Chairman of the Board. When Gygax returned to the post, downsizing had left only 95 employees at TSR.

There remained the lingering question of the Blumes and their ownership position. Though neither then held an operational role at TSR, they remained on the board of directors, and with a combined 990 shares of TSR stock they could not be ignored. Since their removal, the board attempted to negotiate a clear severance agreement with the Blumes, but they made acceptance of any such agreement contingent on the sale of their stock—otherwise, they reasoned, they must remain active in the company to protect their substantial investment. At the same board meeting that voted Gygax into the Presidency, the board also agreed to purchase the Blumes’ stock, including Brian’s unexercised option for 700 shares (minus the strike price), at a valuation of $340.87 per share, for a total of $506,070.30.

However, capital was scarce within TSR, and their bank was reluctant to release so large a sum at a time when creditors were urging the company to seek additional liquidity; at the end of the spring, TSR reportedly operated at a deficit of $750,000. Additionally, lenders behaved conservatively at the time, as the American financial industry suffered under the throes of the savings and loan crisis which toppled several prominent Midwestern banks in 1985. In a letter to Gygax dated April 9, the American National Bank judged “such a transaction inappropriate for TSR given its financial condition and consequently the Bank will not consent to the buy back.”

At the April 16 board meeting, the board informed the Blumes that the bank had blocked the transaction. As a result, the Blumes once again expressed reluctance about signing a severance agreement with TSR. What happened next is a matter of some dispute. During a recess in the meeting, Gygax met with Kevin and Brian Blume privately. Accordingly to the Blumes, they offered their shares to Gygax, who agreed to purchase them personally with his own funds. Gygax later refuted this claim, stating that he merely agreed to help “to find a consortium of individuals willing and able to purchase Blume-held shares at the price discussed” but insisted that “no offer or promise was ever made.” As the discussion happened behind closed doors, it is no simple matter to ascertain the truth either way.

On May 6, Brian and Kevin Blume did execute a severance agreement with TSR. When neither Gygax nor TSR made any further movement to acquire their position, they subsequently issued to TSR a “Notice of Intent to Sell and Offer to Sell” on July 22 which again declared their interest in selling their shares at $500 each, a price Gygax deemed unreasonable. Kevin Blume then sent a mail to TSR on August 25 which stressed that their severance package “was accepted based on E.G. Gygax’s offer to buy the Blume’s stock in TSR, Inc.’s stead.” He concludes by demanding directly, “When can we expect to receive E.G. Gygax’s offer?”

At the Sheridan Springs board meeting on the evening of October 22, 1985, Gygax must have immediately recognized that the exercise of the Blume option for 700 shares had diluted his own stake below 50% of the outstanding stock in the company. But who would control these newly-issued shares? Surely he also remembered receiving yet another notice of intent to sell from the Blumes on October 8, but this one far more specific, declaring their imminent intent to sell “all, but not less than all,” of their position in TSR, Inc. at $350 a share.

As these events played out in real time, he had little opportunity to reflect—Wesley Sommer then formally requested that Gygax tender his resignation. No doubt still grappling with his new circumstances, Gygax refused. Sommer therefore proposed the following to the TSR board for a vote: “Resolved that, in the best interests of the corporation, E. Gary Gygax be terminated as President and Chief Executive Officer and Chairman and that TSR and Mr. Gygax negotiate and seek to enter into an agreement whereby Mr. Gygax would continue to do creative work and the Company continue to utilize his creative talent.” This last clause no doubt related to the royalty issue previously under discussion. James Huber seconded this motion. The motion passed with three directors in favor, one opposed, and one abstaining.

While this stunning turn of events might seem momentous enough for one meeting, the board then turned its attention to the newly-created vacancies in TSR’s senior management. Immediately, the Blumes put forward Sommer to succeed Gygax as Chairman of the Board. This passed easily. But then Sommer advanced another, more surprising proposition: that Lorraine Williams should replace Gygax as President and CEO of TSR.

Blindsided, Gygax pushed back against this proposal—Williams had only worked at TSR for six months, and had no background in games. But Sommer championed Williams on the grounds that she previously had acted as President in Gygax’s absence; she would transition into the role with the least disruption to the company. Gygax counterproposed bestowing the position on Willard Martens, who, in addition to acting as secretary for the board, was a finance Vice President of TSR, but Martens declined, ostensibly due to his other responsibilities.

After a short discussion, the board approved the motion to appoint Lorraine Williams President and CEO, overriding Gygax’s strenuous objections. But Gygax probably would not have bothered to contest this appointment had he understood the true situation. Unbeknownst to him, everyone else in the room was privy to a critical piece of information that he lacked. Gygax had missed the warning signs: he overlooked how immediately prior to the board meeting, several of the other directors, including Sommer, Huber, and Kevin Blume, had congregated in Williams’s office. In that private conference, these parties agreed not to reveal the extent of the changes in shareholder positions to Gygax, and swore Martens into secrecy as well. What they all knew was that just one day before, TSR had issued stock certificate #107 to Williams for 1,690 shares. Williams was now the largest shareholder.

Those 1,690 shares represented the entire holdings of the Blume family: the 990 shares that they held prior to October, plus the 700 shares they had just exercised. In fact, the funds for that exercise came directly from Williams, in the form of a “down payment” of $70,000 on the total purchase, exactly enough money to exercise the 700 shares at $100 each. The Blumes and Williams had agreed to this exchange weeks ago, on October 8. The transaction valued TSR shares at $350, which required Williams to pay the Blumes a total of $591,500 for their position in TSR.

Given that neither Gygax personally nor TSR could raise the capital to purchase the Blume family stock, how was Williams, a new hire, in a position to do so? The answer is that Williams came from money, and that her hiring was actually contingent on her investment in the company in several respects. Gygax had first met Williams through her brother, Flint Dille, who worked with Gygax on several projects of the Dungeons & Dragons Entertainment Corporation in Los Angeles; their grandfather John F. Dille published the original Buck Rogers comics, and the Dille family owned the rights to the character and controlled a trust collecting the resulting royalties.

Thus, before Gygax invited Williams to join TSR as a Vice President, he had a number of discussions with her around February 1985 about investing in the company, including a proposal to acquire TSR stock valued at $150,000. Her offer letter, dated April 1, 1985, includes several stipulations relating to investment. For example, Williams’s employment agreement deferred a third of her salary of $90,000 per year into stock purchases. It furthermore required her to immediately purchase $50,000 worth of TSR stock upon accepting the agreement, and to buy a further $100,000 worth of stock in the 1986 calendar year. Given TSR’s precarious financial situation, this represented a significant cash infusion, but also a substantial risk to Williams as an investor. Gygax writes in the offer letter of her “commitment to TSR” as evidenced by her “determination to acquire a substantial holding in the corporation,” though the amount in question fell far short of a controlling interest—Williams, after all, was not a gamer, and Gygax had to be cautious about outsider control.

Gygax made hiring Williams a high priority: consider that the board voted him President and CEO on a Friday afternoon in March 1985, and her offer letter dates to the following Monday. Gygax believed at the time that she would make an excellent addition to the Board of Directors. The board granted her an option to purchase 50 shares at $300—she would quietly exercise those on October 16, a small but crucial addition to her holdings in advance of the October 22 meeting.

Why did Williams seek control of TSR? Shortly after she came on board back in April, the relationship between Gygax and Williams began to sour. The financial situation of the company continued to deteriorate, and Williams did not approve of the company’s handling of the Blumes. If she were going to invest further in TSR, it would have to empower her to make real changes in the way the company was operating. Therefore, in October 1985, she saw no need to give Gygax any advance notice of her deal with the Blumes. “Gygax and I were not talking very much during the time because we had very fundamental differences,” she remarked. Furthermore, informing Gygax that she intended to purchase the Blume family shares would be, as she put it, “an invitation for him to get in and just try to screw it up, and to once again try to thwart the ability of the Blumes to sell their stock and to get out and to go about their lives.”

So on October 22, Gary Gygax walked into an ambush. Ignorant of Williams’s newfound stake in TSR, he could only watch in amazement as the board stripped him of his job and appointed Williams his successor. As the final action of the meeting, the Board moved to grant Gygax a severance package “consistent with what has been done in the past,” presumably a reference to the package extended to the Blumes. Kevin Blume seconded this motion. The severance package was approved by the board, and the meeting adjourned at quarter of seven. In only ninety minutes, Gygax watched control of TSR transfer to a non-gamer.

In the weeks that followed, Gygax took forceful but ultimately futile steps to undo the damage—attempting a bit of retroactive continuity, as gamers would say. His most surprising move was sending Brian Blume an unsolicited cashier’s check for $113,750 on November 5, a 50% down payment to secure 650 of the Blume family’s shares. This sum would restore control of TSR to Gygax by a comfortable margin. But from the moment the Blumes had signed their agreement with Williams on October 8, their shares resided in escrow, so Brian was in no position to accept such an offer. So, since Gygax’s accompanying material invoked the conditions of the shareholder agreement intended to prevent outside parties from seizing control, the matter was destined for the courts.

The resulting legal battle stretched into the second half of 1986. The court reviewed TSR’s 1985 upheavals and concluded that the Blumes had satisfied the obligations of the shareholder agreement by providing TSR, and Gygax personally, with ample notice of their intention to sell, as well as numerous opportunities to purchase their shares. When neither stepped forward to buy, the Blumes were free to sell to an outsider. The court also considered the question of whether or not Gygax had promised to buy the Blume family position on April 16, and finally ruled on the basis of testimony from the independent board members that Gygax had “agreed to buy their stock, and the Blumes and [Gygax] reported that commitment… to the other directors.” The court upheld the sale to Williams.

Faced with the prospect of holding a minority stake in a TSR, Inc. run by Williams, Gygax elected to walk away from the company, resigning all positions in October 1986. As he put it in a farewell note to The Dragon, “The shape and direction of the Dungeons & Dragons game system… or that of the AD&D game system, are now entirely in the hands of others.” Although he no longer controlled Dungeons & Dragons, his name has remained intimately connected with the game ever since. Gygax tried his hand at many other ventures, but for the rest of his life, he shared much of his time with the many people whose lives had been transformed by Dungeons & Dragons. While the vagaries of business can strip fortune from an inventor, fame is a less fickle commodity, and Gygax’s fame will endure as long as his game.

The author would like to thank Matt Shoemaker, William Meinhardt and Frank Mentzer for their contributions to the research behind this piece. Read more about the history of gaming at the blog Playing at the World.