Of Dice and Men: The Story of Dungeons & Dragons and The People Who

by David M. Ewalt

By the end of 1972, he’d finished a fifty-page first draft. He called it the Fantasy Game. The first people to play it were Gygax’s eleven-year-old son, Ernie, and nine-year-old daughter, Elise. Gygax had created a counterpart to Arneson’s Blackmoor, which he called Castle Greyhawk, and designed a single level of its dungeons; one night after dinner, he invited the kids to roll up characters and start exploring. Ernie created a wizard and named him Tenser—an anagram for his full name, Ernest.3 Elise played a cleric called Ahlissa. They wrote down the details of their characters on index cards and entered the dungeon. In the very first room, they discovered and defeated a nest of scorpions; in the second, they fought a gang of kobolds—short subterranean lizard-men. They also found their first treasure, a chest full of copper coins, but it was too heavy to carry. The two adventurers pressed on until nine o’clock, when the Dungeon Master put them to bed. Fatherly duties completed, Gygax returned to his office and designed another level of the dungeons.