[00:00:09] Speaker A: Welcome to PLSJ's podcast, where the Public library of Steubenville in Jefferson county shares with you our favorite quirky questions, finds out what leaders in our community are reading, interviews, local authors, and so much more.
This podcast is part of the Ask us series, where the reference librarian shares answers to some of our favorite questions from the past and provides information on topics you've pondered but didn't know who to ask. Now you do.
[00:00:41] Speaker B: Hello. It's me, JL, your reference librarian. And I'm here to talk about something near and dear to my heart, the game known as dungeons and dragons, or D and D. The game has been around for a while. There are a lot of us who grew up playing it, and there are people who are growing up playing it right now. Dungeons and Dragons is a fantasy role playing game. Fantasy as in Tolkien or CS Lewis, or even some of the other things, like the Dragonlands or Michael Moorcock or Fritz Liver, all of that. And Dungeons and Dragons takes a lot of influence from all of that. It involves players playing roles of fantasy characters within the world of dungeons and dragons. So how did all this get started? For a long time, there existed the very niche hobby of tabletop wargaming. This hobby involved people painting miniature figures of soldiers, moving them around a table, often a table filled with sand so that it can be moved around to simulate terrain, and then rolling dice to determine the result of guns and artillery and things like that. And it was mostly about strategy. This was even done by actual military leaders to kind of practice their strategy, but it also led into people who were doing it in their basements. And while it was the hobby had gone on for a while, kind of stayed fairly niche. In about the seventies, some people started to kind of experiment with it. And while a lot of the games were napoleonic and civil war and revolutionary War and other things like that in nature, they started doing medieval stuff and playing medieval games. Now we're starting to see the basis of what became D and D. But even before that, you had something called Braunstein. This was an individual got together with some people to do some napoleonic wargaming. But instead of controlling an army, he gave them individual characters to control. And so he set up a fantasy town, the make believe german town of Brunstein, and they became the baker or the cobbler, and they all had a set of goals, and they all had to figure out what to do with those gulps. Then, in the twin Cities area, Minnesota, man named Gary Gygax came up with a set of medieval rules called chainmail chainmail was medieval rules, but he had actually also included fantasy elements. So you could have a wizard in your army and he could throw fireballs which had the same effects as a catapult and things like that. And then another man named Dave Arneson started to do something that was referred to as a Bronstein site type scenario. With the chainmail roles, they were. Instead of exploring a fantasy german town, they were exploring the vast labyrinths of tunnels beneath the imaginary castle of Blackmoor, Dave Arneson's Blackmore campaign. Individual characters could be played rather than arvies. At that time, there were only three classes that were available. You could be a fighting man, a wizard, or a cleric. Gary Gygax took note of this and started his own campaign called Greyhawk. The idea of the Gray Hawk and Blackmore campaigns eventually kind of turned into something that Gary Gygax came up with a set of rules based on what Arneson was doing and called it the fantasy game. He then decided that some better names needed to be come up with for the fantasy game, and one that got suggested and was particularly liked by Gygax's daughter was dungeons and dragons. So Gary Gygax and a man named Brian Bloom, who provided the money, created a company called Tactical Studies rules, or TSR. They had to create this company because they went to the publishers of major wargame, and none of them thought that this was going to take off. And so they published it themselves in 1974, the first edition of Dungeons and Dragons, which was a box and some rules, three books of rules, and it sold out. This eventually led to a little more polished sets of rules and then supplement books named after Greyhawk and Blackmore, added to these rules and added more classes, the first notable one being called the Thief. But other classes, such as the Ranger, based on Tolkien, and the Paladin, the penultimate good guy, were added. The game started taking more of a shape. Eventually, some hardcover books called Advanced Dungeons and Dragons were published, while a basic set called Dungeons and Dragons or Basic D and D was also published. Dave Arneson was involved in some of the early days of TSR, starting out as creative director, but eventually being moved out of the company. And some say that the basic and advanced Dungeons and dragons were actually created so that advanced dungeons and dragons could be called a different game, allowing Arneson to not get as much the royalties as he needed. But the game has gone on. At first, it was thought of as a game that only nerds played in their mother's basement or college students would play in a quarter of the student union, but it was successful enough that it eventually had multiple editions. Each edition was based on the old game, but each added something different and was a little bit different. Everybody nowadays has their own version that they like. The edition that we are currently on is fifth edition, though there are already plans for a 6th. And the game persists until today. Now, if you've heard of D and D, you've probably heard of some of the controversies around the game. And yes, like anything that has become popular and especially something that became popular and kind of started as a niche activity, there have been more than its share of controversies. The first major controversy that needs to be talked about is Dave Arneson versus Gary Gygax. A lot of people who know about D and D will tend to think of Gary Gygax as the creator of the game. He's the one who got the credit. He was the one who was there to publish the first edition that people were actually buying. But it was really Dave Arneson's blackmore campaign that could be considered the first thing that people wouldn't recognize as D and D. As mentioned, Arneson started out as a creative director at TSR, but was soon kind of pushed out to the mail room, literally, and eventually left the company. And he always felt that he had been cheated out of his royalties. And there are a lot of articles and YouTube videos about this controversy. It continued to the point. Nowadays, both Arneson and Gygax have passed on. They were adults with children in 1974 when the game was first published. So all these years later, it's sad that they have passed on, but it was going to happen. The other major controversy in dungeons and dragons was the satanic panic. Well, if you've heard of the satanic panic, this was a time in the eighties and even into the nineties when everybody was pretty sure there were Satanists around every bush. People were coming up with lost memories of having been in a satanic cult as a five year old, and hidden tunnels beneath daycare centers. Satanic lyrics and rock music and dungeons and dragons, being a fantasy game with goblins, witches, and wizards, also included a lot of elements such as old world religions.
So you had the norse pantheon, you had the greek pantheon, you had some native american stuff, you had some indian stuff and a lot of other things. And you had demons, demons and devils. Now, they were not portrayed as good guys in the game generally. You had to fight against them in their machinations. In most D and D games that they appeared, but they were there, and that started setting people off. Then in 1979, a young man named James Egbert, who was attending college even at the age of 16 and by accounts had some psychological issues, disappeared on campus.
His parents hired a private detective. The private detective found out that James Egbert had been playing D and D and had heard rumors that some of the students had been playing live action versions of D and D in the steam tunnels below the college. And so this detective came to the conclusion that James Egbert had been playing in the steam tunnels, gotten lost, and had died somewhere in the steam tunnels beneath the college. This got out to the press, and of course, the press started telling everybody that the D and D players are doing horrible things under the steam tunnels. And a whole controversy got going. And even after the detective said, well, maybe that didn't happen, finally, James Zeigbert, who had gotten over stressed in college and had gone to stay with friends in Florida, found out about it, called his parents and said, hey, I'm down in Florida, and did not commit suicide. But the damage was done. And Egbert did eventually, unfortunately, commit suicide, but it had to do with some other issues that were going on in his life far more than anything in D and D. But the steam tuttles incident also led to a woman named Rhona Jaffe writing a book called Mazes and Monsters, where she did a fictionalized version of the steam tunnels, incidentally, where the main character does indeed take D and D too seriously, goes insane and ends up in an asylum. This was turned into a tv movie starring a young, little known actor by the name of Tom Hanks. And, of course, a lot of people finding that mazes and monsters was obviously based on D and D decided that D and D turns everybody into reality, challenged individuals who want to jump off of tall buildings cause they think they can fly. But again, the damage was done. The next major controversy was an individual by the name of Irving Pulling, who was going to college and had some serious issues. He was struggling with his own sexuality, among other things, and he again committed suicide. His mother, Patricia, decided that that had to be because of D and D. And so she created an organization called bothered about dnd bad and began a crusade against the horrors of D and D and how it causes children to commit suicide and lose touch with reality and become Satanists. And she put herself out as an expert and would testify in trials as an expert and caused a fair amount of controversy there. Eventually, science fiction author Michael Stackpole published the polling Report, which basically refuted most of her points somewhere between that, the tv show 60 minutes did an entire segment on how horrible D and D was and interviewed not only Patricia pulling, but Gary Gygax for 60 minutes. The piece was not particularly well researched, did not have any basis of facts, but it had everybody thinking D and D was going to cause all these problems. Psychologists have actually done studies on whether role playing games leave a person prone to suicide, and they've actually found that playing role playing games makes a person less susceptible to suicide. There are a lot of social aspects and a lot of friends to be made. The satanic panic and the controversy around D and D eventually petered out and it moved on. Other controversies began to arise, such as cultural appropriation because dungeons and dragons was using pantheons from various world mythologies, and some people didn't like their mythology being used in a fantasy game. There were copyright issues from the beginning. Originally, among the fantasy races was a race that is now called halflings that a paper characters could play. They were originally called hobbits. The Tolkien estate told them, you can't call them hobbits. We have that copyrighted the original book of mythology that characters could use and players could use include some source material from Michael Moorcock and his eternal Champion series, specifically outwork of Mel Nebone and the mythos of HP, Lovecraft, and Cthulhu. Well, it turned out where not only were those copyrighted, another game company was able to get license to publish games based on those, and so wasn't really happy with TSR trying to do the same. Eventually all of that kind of got sorted out in court and we have the game as it is today. So how does one play D and D? To start with, you need someone to tell the story in dungeons and dragons, that is the person called the Dungeon Master or DM. In other role playing games that will often be called the GM or game Master, but this is the one who creates the world in which the other players will be playing. He may come up with a mythology, or he may, as mentioned, borrow from old mythology.
I've seen games where the world was based on fantasy versions of Europe or a fantasy version of Rome. There are pre published world settings.
PSR is famous for the one called the forgotten realms, and a couple farther out there, versions like Eberron, which is kind of a steampunk version of D and D, and Spelljammer, which is fantasy adventures in space. And the DM will take this world off and adapt it to his purposes. And then the characters played by the players are brought into the world. The characters are created by the players by rolling dice. You usually roll the physical characteristic of the characters as a set of random numbers. Strength, intelligence, wisdom, dexterity, charisma, and constitution. And each of these is determined. They will often determine other characteristics. Characters have hit points, which is how much damage they can take, and they also can gain more of these hit points by gaining levels, which also gives them other powers. They can pick from a number of fantasy races, such as elves, dwarves, halflings, which used to be called hobbits, and others, depending on the setting. And then of course the class, which is essentially the character's job. They could be a fighter, a wizard, a rogue. They could be magical musician called a bard. And then the DM sits them down and begins the story. A good DM has to think on their feet. Remember, the characters are all played by other people. Sometimes the dungeon master desperately wants them to talk to that guy in the tavern, but then much rather talk to the guy in the corner. Sometimes they're supposed to go into the woods, but they'd rather go check out what was happening in the sewers. Good improv skills, both coming up with improvisation as to what happens next, and theatrical improv in playing all of the non player characters. In other words, the characters not played by actual players is the mark of a good DM. And of course, there's a great deal of improv in role playing involved with the players. Other most of what happens are determined by rolling dice. The dice are what they call polyhedral dice, multi sided. Originally apparently used as tools for teaching math. It was the wargamers found out that you could also use them to determine not only numbers from one to six, like most people think of dice, but numbers from one to 200 to 101 to eight, one to twelve, and even one to four. Any good gamer owns their own set of dice. You also will buy and paint miniatures to move them around on the table to keep track of the combat or whatever you're moving around the dungeon or moving around the world. Collecting and painting these figures is actually a hobby in itself. For the longest time, dungeons and dragons was kind of considered a niche hobby itself. Nerds in their mother's basement as I mentioned before, these days it's gotten a little more popular. A lot of people found that you could play it online during the pandemic, which turned out to be a lot of fun, and it's moved into pop culture. It's been there for a while. There was a cartoon that was made back in, I believe, the eighties, and it was a Saturday morning cartoon about a bunch of kids who had become their D and D characters. There have been two movies, one of which was, and I'll make a judgment here, really bad, and a more recent one, which was a lot of fun. There are a group of voice actors who get together and play D and D, and they put this together in the form of a podcast and called critical role. This has become extremely popular to the point where one of the critical role campaigns actually became a cartoon of its own on Amazon. You can go watch it right now. The game is popular enough where during the satanic panic, all the people were hearing about it was through newspaper stories and 60 minutes. Is this weird thing that a bunch of nerds are doing now? Most people know what I'm talking about when I mention dungeons and dragons. In fact, it's become so popular that another place dungeons and dragons will find itself is your library. There are people at the Public library of Steubenville in Jefferson county putting together a campaign for dungeons and dragons that will be played by library patrons. It'll be a lot of fun, and nobody will be sorry that they asked.
[00:21:12] Speaker A: Thanks for listening to PLSJ's podcast. Visit us in person at your library branch or
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