32 Facts About Dave Arneson

Dave Arneson discovered wargaming as a teenager in the 1960s, and he began combining these games with the concept of role-playing.

Dave Arneson was a University of Minnesota student when he met Gygax at the Gen Con gaming convention in the late 1960s.

In 1971, Dave Arneson created the game and fictional world that became Blackmoor, writing his own rules and basing the setting on medieval fantasy elements.

Dave Arneson moved to Lake Geneva, Wisconsin to work for TSR Hobbies in 1976, but left before the end of the year.

In 1979 Dave Arneson filed suit to retain credits and royalties on the game.

Dave Arneson continued to work as an independent game designer, including work submitted to TSR in the 1980s, and continued to play games for his entire life.

Dave Arneson did some work in computer programming, and he taught computer game design and game rules design at Full Sail University from the 1990s until shortly before his death in 2009.

Dave Arneson was a participant in Wesely's wargame scenarios and, as Dave Arneson continued to run his own scenarios, he eventually began to include ideas from sources such as The Lord of the Rings and Dark Shadows.

Dave Arneson took over the Braunsteins after Wesely was drafted into the Army, and he often ran these scenarios using different eras and settings.

Dave Arneson had become a member of the International Federation of Wargamers by this time.

In 1969 Dave Arneson was a history student attending the University of Minnesota and working part-time as a security guard.

Dave Arneson developed a Braunstein in which his players played fantasy versions of themselves in the medieval Barony of Blackmoor, a land inhabited in part by fantastic monsters.

Dave Arneson drew heavily upon the fantasy material in the Chainmail rules, written by Gygax and Jeff Perren and published in the spring of 1971, but after a short and unsatisfactory trial of the Fantasy Combat table found therein, he developed his own mix of rules, including adapted elements from his revision of Civil War Ironclad game.

Gygax and Dave Arneson wanted to have the game published, but Guidon Games and Avalon Hill rejected it.

Dave Arneson formally joined TSR as their Director of Research at the beginning of 1976, but left at the end of the year to pursue a career as an independent game-designer.

Dave Arneson wrote a new version of the Blackmoor setting for publication by Judges Guild in The First Fantasy Campaign.

Adventure Games was profitable, but Dave Arneson found the workload to be excessive and finally sold the company to Flying Buffalo.

Dave Arneson sold the rights to Adventure Games to Flying Buffalo in 1985; because Dave Arneson owned part of Flying Buffalo, he wanted to let them handle the rest of his company's stock and intellectual property after shutting down Adventure Games.

When Gygax was forced out of TSR, Dave Arneson's projects were dropped from the company before a planned fifth module could be published.

In 1988, Dave Arneson stated his belief that RPGs, whether paper or computer, were still "hack and slash" and did not teach novices how to play, and that games like Ultima IV "have stood pretty much alone as quirks instead of trend setters" as others did not follow their innovations.

Dave Arneson hoped that computer RPGs would teach newcomers how to role play while offering interesting campaigns and said that SSI's Gold Box games did not innovate on the genre as much as he had hoped.

Dave Arneson stepped into the computer industry and founded 4D Interactive Systems, a computer company in Minnesota that has since dissolved.

Dave Arneson did some computer programming and worked on several games.

Dave Arneson retired from the position on June 19,2008.

Dave Arneson wrote for Computer Gaming World magazine in the 1980s and early 1990s.

Dave Arneson wrote columns on his opinion of the role-playing game genre and reviews of computer games such as Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Zork Zero, Citadel: Adventure of the Crystal Keep, Uncharted Waters, and Renegade Legion: Interceptor.

Around 2000, Dave Arneson was working with videographer John Kentner on Dragons in the Basement, a video documentary on the early history of role-playing games.

Dave Arneson married Frankie Ann Morneau in 1984; they had one daughter, Malia, and two grandchildren.

Dave Arneson died on April 7,2009, after battling cancer for two years.

Dave Arneson was honored as a "famous game designer" by being featured on the king of hearts in Flying Buffalo's 2008 Famous Game Designers Playing Card Deck.

Since the release of the history of Braunstein in 2008 and Playing at the World in 2012, a scholarly work by Jon Petersen, the role of Dave Wesely and Dave Arneson was restored in the broad conversation on the origins of the tabletop role-playing games.

In 2019, the documentary The Secrets of Blackmoor presented interviews of the first players of Dave Arneson and acknowledged his innovations.