The D&D War

An insider's account of the secret history of the attempt to scam Dave Arneson out of his due royalties.

This isn’t the old TSR creative building. It’s the building that replaced it after the old beast was torn down. The ground floor Dungeon Hobby Shop is now an ice cream parlor, with pretty good ice cream. My second floor office is now part of a fancy stairwell.

In 1980 I worked in the art department at TSR. Most of you have seen at least some of the illustrations I produced for modules and products associated with Dungeons & Dragons among other games.

Dave Arneson.

At that time Dave Arneson, co creator of D&D was suing TSR for unpaid royalties on many of their products. Dave’s argument was basically this (I paraphrase, obviously): “I helped create the game. I deserve royalties on all products that sprang from my co-creation.” TSR’s counter argument was basically this (still paraphrasing): “You only helped create Basic D&D, not Advanced D&D, which is its own unique creation, so you don’t get royalties on any Advanced D&D products.”

To bolster its argument, which was headed towards the courtroom in 1980, the bigwigs running TSR ordered up a new version of Basic D&D, which became the version of Basic D&D published in 1981, and then the Expert D&D set published a few years later. The orders came from the business (and warehouse) offices across town, to the creative offices which were still in the two floors above the ramshackle building that housed the Dungeon Hobby Shop.

The creative offices housed the editorial and development sections of the company, along with the art department and a few other creative odds and ends.

The order, which I recall as being delivered in person from company fixer (the guy who kicked ass and fired people) Will Niebling,¹ was thus (once again I paraphrase, but accurately): “Do everything you can to make Basic D&D as different as possible from Advanced D&D. Everything else is of a lower priority. We need this done yesterday. Use everyone in the creative offices. Make it different. Higher character levels are authorized. New spells and magic items are authorized. New monsters are authorized.”

These commands were delivered in person so as to avoid a paper trail that might have to be turned over to Arneson’s lawyers in the discovery parts of his lawsuit. And of course the ass-kicking, which Will excelled at, was always best done in person.

The new Basic D&D was going to be rolled out in three parts: The Basic D&D boxed set, edited by Tom Moldvay, the Expert D&D boxed set, edited by David “Zeb” Cook, and then the Master (or was it Masters?) D&D set, edited by no one in particular, not yet (but Tom more or less wrangled that one too), because it was never completed. It was going to be so amazingly different from Advanced D&D that no judge could ever rule they were the same game.

This part is just a rumor, so take it with a huge grain of salt. I seem to recall some vocal admissions from one or two of the suits, and maybe from VP of Production Lawrence Schick,² but memory is faulty, so who knows for sure? But the understanding was this: We can make Basic D&D as wild and off the rails as we want, because, once the court case was over, and Arneson was denied any piece of Advanced D&D, and limited only to royalties derived from Basic D&D, we can let that line die, starving him of his insidious “how dare he sue us” income.

Lawrence Schick. Or is it Lawrence Ellsworth?

For a couple of fevered weeks, instead of illustrating other products (more likely in addition to illustrating — we were much overworked in those weeks), we in the art department came up with spells and magic stuff and powers and monsters to take players all the way up to 36th level (between the three boxed sets). Throughout the building we competed with each other to come up with the weirdest possible stuff — which we would otherwise never be allowed to do, if we weren’t essentially creating a very expensive courtroom prop. There were spells to destroy entire towns and kingdoms. I recall contributing something inspired by a thing from Zelazny’s Amber books, loosely resembling Corwin’s cursed pattern making, that gradually reached out from a central point to befoul entire nations, and eventually whole worlds (if left unchecked), creating all sorts of damned creatures along the way.

When Paul Reiche pointed out that players reaching these levels will basically make them gods, Tom Moldvay said, “Fine! Let’s make gods!” To this day I believe that is what inspired Tom to create his RPG Lords of Creation — that and the game I was slowly writing which I called Lords of Light and Darkness (working title), in which players started out playing gods, and which was inspired far too much from the various works of Roger Zelazny. My game never got completed, but Tom, among others, did sit in on more than one playtest session.

That’s Tom Moldvay, the bearded guy. I’m pretty sure the fellow seated next to him is Michael Price, and that may be a much younger Lawrence Schick across the way. Harold Johnson is standing.

The lawsuit, which was filed in 1979, played out throughout 1980, and was finally settled out of court in 81. Arneson kept his royalties. By then, the first two arms of the new Basic D&D sets were well on their way enough that TSR couldn’t not publish them. They became widely popular, much to the chagrin of Gary Gygax (or so I’m told). The Master Set, which was to have contained some of my best creations (along with so much other truly bizarre things contributed by everyone else in the building), was never published. I’d love to find a manuscript of those unpublished rules. Like gunfighters of old, we outdid ourselves back then in reckless gaming bravado.

By Way of a Postscript…

This may have been interesting to some, but it’s old news. What relevance does it have today? Maybe none.

However, I can’t help but notice many big comic companies are feverishly making changes to old and venerable comics characters at about the same time some of the heirs of the men and women who created those characters are suing and have sued to get the copyrights to those characters back from the big companies who’ve locked them up for decades under the rubric of work-for-hire.

There’s almost no chance the big companies are going to lose control of these valuable characters — their perennial moneymakers. But what if it went all the way to court? I can’t help but wonder if, in addition to appeasing overly vocal fans who want radical changes made for some nebulous set of reasons under the heading of “representation,” what if it also includes a scheme to make these characters so bizarrely different from the originals that they count as new creations and can’t possibly lose them to the whims of a court?

Back in those old TSR days, those of us ordered to make radical changes to original D&D in order to fool a court, knew the scam wouldn’t work. The entire Basic D&D was a Frankensteinian mess cobbled together almost overnight, long after Arneson contributed his part to the creation of D&D. Did our bosses actually think they could pull this off?

More to the current point, do these big comic companies today actually think what they’re doing now is going to save them from having to pay out a relative pittance to the heirs of the creators? Or am I completely wrong about the motivations of a bunch of seemingly stupid moves? To misquote a discredited old line: “To save Superman, I had to destroy Superman.”

1. He was the designated villain in the company (boo, hiss), at least according to those of us in the creative building. Look at that goatee. He didn’t like us creatives, with our weird ideas and ways. He was the one who fired Evan Robinson and Paul Reiche (among others) during the great purge of 1981, and the one who killed the idea of TSR publishing a line of D&D based comics that Jeff Dee and I had proposed.

2. Lawrence went on to many jobs after his stint at TSR, including high-level positions at Coleco (remember them?), and whatever company it is that does the Elder Scrolls online multi-player game. Now, under the pen name Lawrence Ellsworth, he is translating the complete Musketeer novels of Dumas (several of which are out now and they’re quite worth buying), which have never gotten a good English translation, and he tends to dress like a swashbuckler.