Dungeons and Dragons

Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) is a tabletop Fantasy Role Playing game originally designed by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson, and first published in 1974.

The game has been published by Wizards of the Coast (now a subsidiary of Hasbro) since 1997. It was derived from miniature wargames with a variation of the Chainmail game serving as the initial rule system. The game play is led by a Dungeon Master (DM).

D&D’s publication is commonly recognized as the beginning of modern role-playing games and the role-playing game industry.

It had a large effect on fantasy, simultaneously adding huge numbers of new readers but also tuning that audience toward dreary potboiler quest fantasies turned out by the hundreds by publisher like TSR.

Nevertheless, a lot of fans played, and it drew quite a few people into fandom.

The 1979 disappearance of James Dallas Egbert III, supposedly in a LARP version of the game in the University of Michigan steam tunnels, made D&D notorious.

---

Miscellaneous

1974—

This is a miscellaneous page